Urban Farming

Some intriguing and inspiring footage from a group of twenty or so families deliberately moving to an area of social deprivation in order to rebuild community, dignity and hope. It also happens to be not far from where some our extended family live. You can find out more about their activities here or on Facebook.

One thought we had about considering such a model in, say, Sydney or Edinburgh, is that since property prices have not crashed in the same way (yet?), then finding a suitable package of affordable land might be considerably more difficult. This hasn't stopped one group trying to do something somewhat similar in the Sydney CBD.
H/T John.

Dirty and dusty

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the season of preparation for Easter. From Ash Wednesday, there are forty days until Easter (excluding Sundays, which are always for celebrating the resurrection, not fasting).

In most liturgical services on this day, the sign of the cross using the ash from the previous year's Palm Sunday is made upon the foreheads of worshippers. It is called a sign of penitence and mortality. That is, it symbolises that we are both broken and dying, flawed and finite, fragmented and fragile, dirty and dusty.

As the mark is made, these words are spoken:

Remember, o man/woman/mortal, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Repent and believe the good news.

How to relate our mortality to our sinfulness is an important issue in Christian theology. Are we dying because we sin? Or do we sin because we are dying? Which is the more fundamental problem and how does the good news address each?

The Ash Wednesday quote above gives one way into this discussion. Notice that while both mortality and sinfulness are referenced, the appropriate response to each differs. We remember our mortality; we repent of our sins. Our mortality is not itself a fault, but part of our creaturely existence. We receive the breath of life, it is never ours to claim or secure, our life is always dependent upon a source beyond us. The call to remember this is the call to relinquish control over our deaths, to relinquish the demand that I must be kept alive at all costs, and so to discover the freedom that comes from giving space in my life to projects other than survival.

Yet we are to repent of our sins, to turn from our self-obsession and to discover joy (and pain) in meeting and loving others beyond the echo-chamber of the self. This repentance will make no sense unless it is accompanied, enabled and completed by believing the good news. Only the good news of the risen Jesus liberates us from the patterns of false behaviour that diminish our capacity for life and love. That is why the sign that is made in ash is that of a cross. The cross symbolises the good news of liberation: not liberation from being dust and ashes (the sign of the cross is itself made in ash and God's saving work amongst us in Christ was as dust and ashes), but freedom from guilt at our dirty lives, freedom from sin and its false dreams, freedom from despair and so freedom to be truly human.

On Ash Wednesday, Christians are marked as dirty and dusty, but the shame of the dirt and the frustration of the dust are placed within the hope of the cross.

Much more can be said on each of these topics, but let me finally introduce one further idea. While being exhorted to remember our mortality - that we will return to dust - we are also encouraged to remember our origin and identity- that we are dust. Like Adam, we are from and of the earth ('adamah in Hebrew). Being dusty means not only that our life is received as a gift, but that we exist as a member of the community of creation, in solidarity with the rest of the created order. Although we are often quick to lay claim to human uniqueness, part of lenten penitence is re-membering ourselves within this larger sphere. This is both dignity and frustration. Dignity because we too belong to the ordered material world over which God declared his blessing. Frustration because we share with all created things a present "bondage to decay". But our origin and destiny are bound together with the non-human world. Thus, to be smeared with cinders is to be humbled, and yet simultaneously to discover in that humility a properly human and creaturely glory.

Dying with dignity

Dying with dignity does not mean a pain-free death, or a quick death, or a death that is not a burden on others.

First, though suffering is a result of a broken world and ought to be minimised where possible, nevertheless, in God's redemptive grace even the darkest experiences can become reflections of his faithfulness and manifestations of his love. That is one of the many lessons of the cross.

Second, if it is not about the pain, the anxiety many of us feel about a slow death arises from knowing that I am dying. But a slow death with one's eyes open need not be more terrifying than a sudden one; our fear of death and dying is met by the word of the risen Lord: "peace be with you".

And third, the process of dying will most likely be a burden carried not only by me, but also by those I love. But this is one of those points at which we are to bear one another burdens, to share the experience of ill-health and dying so that the load is lightened in being shared. Indeed, to withhold this from those around you is not a blessing, but a missed opportunity to allow others to participate in your dying. Death is the ultimate exile, the final isolation, the conclusion of all relationships. But by sharing even our dying with one another, we express our hope in the God whose love is stronger than death.

Dying with dignity means a death in which one's identity is not destroyed; it means a death in which one's humanity is not shattered; it means dying without losing your self. The martyr dies with dignity because she refuses to conform to the dehumanising powers that demand a divided self. Christ died with dignity because he trusted his Father, even when it appeared he was abandoned. "Into your hands I commit my spirit": a bloody, brutal, nasty death, yet one that utterly failed to degrade the dignity of the obedient Son.

Calvin on loving the unlovely

"We are not to look to what men in themselves deserve, but to attend to the image of God, which exists in all, and to which we owe all honour and love. […] Therefore, whatever man you meet who needs your aid, you have no reason to refuse to help him. […] Say he is contemptible and worthless, but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he had deigned to give the beauty of his image. […] Say that he is unworthy of your least exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, is worthy of yourself and all your exertions. But if he not only merits no good, but has provoked you by injury and mischief, still this is no good reason why you should not embrace him in love, and visit him with offices of love. […] We are not to reflect on the wickedness of men, but look to the image of God in them, an image which, covering and obliterating their faults, should by its beauty and dignity allure us to love and embrace them."

– John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.vii.6.

This is a very interesting point Calvin makes: that the basis for loving my neighbour is not lost through my neighbour's unworthiness, or even active hostility towards me. I am to see in my neighbour the gift of God - that God has seen fit to make even my broken and destructive neighbour a means by which others might see something of the divine life.

Of course, none of this makes sense until we learn to see Christ as God's image, into whose likeness we are drawn by the Spirit. The ever-open possibility that my neighbour might conform more closely to Christ's grace and truth keeps open the door to treating her graciously and truthfully. None are beyond the transforming power of the Spirit of Christ. All are vulnerable to grace. I love, then, in order that my neighbour might become more fully herself by becoming more like Christ.

Bored yet?

Ben redeems boredom from being equated with sloth to a sign of our human dignity and even a possible site of cultural protest and resistance. You won't be.

The search for justice is a journey into joy

And very often Christians have somehow failed to get across any idea that ethics, whether individual ethics or social ethics, is about joy. Those two words which you may not habitually associate – ethics and joy; but that is a theological failure, because the search for justice is very profoundly a journey into joy. If it’s true that this is what the world is, if it’s true that the nature of our participation in the life of God is a participation in God’s self-forgetting bliss, then, our work for a society in which people have the freedom and the dignity to give themselves to each other in love, is as creative as any other act we undertake.

- Rowan Williams, Creation, Creativity and Creatureliness:
the Wisdom of Finite Existence.

This speech by Williams is worth reading in full (though the opening may be hard going if you're a little rusty on your Russian theologians) for its insights into the relationships between creation, creativity and creatureliness.

O'Donovan on wakefulness I: Waking

Waking
Last night I went to hear Oliver O'Donovan give the first of three lectures on Morally Awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith.

This first lecture was entitled Waking and he took as his starting point the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume's famous paragraph questioning the route from 'is' to 'ought': how do we engage in successful moral reasoning such that our descriptions of the world (what 'is')and ourselves lead us to practical outcomes (what we 'ought' to do)?

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary ways of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when all of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given; for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.

- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, book III, part I, section I.

This, he argued, was not an attempt to articulate what later became known as the fact/value distinction (between bare public facts and private selections of values), but was the first attempt to discuss the difference between the good and the right. What is good is something real about the world that we appreciate or admire; what is right is what we do as a result. We admire the good and resolve to do the right (hence the subtitle of the series; lecture 2 will be on Admiring and lecture 3 on Resolving).

Yet in order to trace a path from the good to the right, it is necessary to employ various metaphors or images: construction, insight, weighing up, making choices (O'Donovan, in keeping with his consistent anti-voluntarist agenda, was very critical of this last option). Although we may usually and casually switch images as suits the moment, at points, the metaphor we use is crucial. O'Donovan suggested that a key scriptural metaphor in this regard is wakefulness. Although in the Old Testament, the image is often used of God waking up and taking action, in the New, it is assumed that God is awake, he has acted. And so Jesus and the apostles frequently encourage believers to watch out or be alert (e.g. Matthew 24:42-43; Mark 13:37; 14:37-38; Luke 12:15, 38; 17:3; 21:36; Acts 20:28; Galatians 6:1; Philippians 3:1-3; 1 Timothy 4:16; 2 John 1:8). Although in Ephesians 5.14 waking is used of conversion, usually the image speaks of staying awake. We can't presume to be awake; we must be attentive to staying attentive.

And this attention is oriented in three directions: the world, the self and time.

First, we must be awake to the world, to the contextual framework that surrounds our existence, which precedes (and presumably postdates) our existence. It is possible to drift through the world inattentively, thinking it is a screen for my projections, and so fail to notice, or notice in only a fragmentary and fleeting manner. How we describe objects in our experience is itself part of moral deliberation: is a foetus a human being or a collection of tissue? To attend to the world responsibly means to avoid imposing our desires, assuming that how we want things to be is actually the way they are. This attention is not easy or straightforward. But failure to attend to how things are, to 'mistake' one thing for another (I thought you were an economic unit; little did I know that you were a human being with dignity and worth) is not innocent. Such inattention is culpable, and according to Augustine, is the basic human sin (the basic angelic sin is pride). Thus, the line between moral and theoretical reason does not lie between prescriptive versus descriptive language. To describe is already a moral act.

Second, we must be awake to ourselves. Although experimental disciplines practice a form of self-abnegation, this only makes sense within a larger self-awareness, a desire to avoid having myself as observer interfere with the object under observation. Attention is active, we need to look. And so to be aware of oneself as attentive is to be aware of oneself as active, as a force in the world, to find oneself as an agent in the world with distinct, albeit limited, responsibility. The failure to attend to ourselves as actors is the sin of sloth, the temptation to withdraw from the agentive self. This may arise from despair, or simply from a carelessness in which we sense ourselves as the suffer of the impositions of others: "Look what you made me do!"

Third, we must be aware of time, as well as the world and the self. I act now. I can reflect on the past and I can imagine the future, but I can only deliberate on the present. Of course memory and foresight are morally significant, but only as they impinge on the present. Moral thinking does not mean making predictions about the future; the moralist has no business with crystal balls. Even the Son doesn't know the day or the hour of that absolute future when the kingdom will come in fullness.

These three orientations help diagnose typical failures in moral deliberation. Attention to the world without attention to the self leads to the observational mode, in which ethics is replaced with social science. Attention to my own powers of agency without attention to the world leads to the technological imperative in which the ends serve the means. Attention to the self and to the world without attention to time leads to idealism, missing the good deeds for this time and place.

This trifold structure can also be related to a more familiar one. Love renews our consciousness of the world; faith renews our knowledge of the self; hope renews our awareness of time and possibility.

In question time O'Donovan was asked about the relationship between wakefulness and the past, prayer, conversion, decision-making, secular moral reasoning and sin. Perhaps the most interesting discussion was about decision-making. Often we understand moral deliberation as if we have an apple in one hand and a pear in the other and it's a toss up as to which we might bite into. Not so. According to O'Donovan, moral deliberation is a process of refining and clarifying in which we realise we have no other choice. The 'decision' is simply to recognise the outstanding candidate, not tossing a coin between two equal options.

The lectures will be are generously available for download in a few weeks now from the New College website.
Eight points for guessing the European city in the pic.
Series: I; IIa; IIb; IIIa; IIIb.

Do not go gentle

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas, 1952

This poem, one of my favourites, was composed by Thomas in May 1951 (published 1952) when his father was approaching blindness and death. The 'good night' is thus both the darkness at the end of vision and of life.

But why rage? Why not accept the inevitable with dignity and composure? Why desire life beyond one hundred, when vision dims, memory blurs, the body rebels and friends desert one by one?

Because life is a good gift. Because death is the final enemy of humanity and God.

The problem of theology

'It is simple, but true, to say that theology has only one, single problem: God. We are theologians for the sake of God; if we are not, then we ought not to call ourselves theologians at all. God is our dignity. God is our agony. God is our hope.'

Jürgen Moltmann, 'Theology in the Project of the Modern World' in A Passion for God's Reign, p. 1.