Painting Fakes

In the third chapter of Genesis we read that one of the consequences of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is that Adam and Eve will have a life of hard toil. By the sweat of your brow     you will eat your food until you return to the ground,     since from it you were taken; for dust you are     and to dust you will return. After announcing this consequence, Yahweh banishes them from the Garden of Eden. And the Lord God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.’  So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.  After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. In my youth I was taught, or perhaps just allowed to bel...

It being summer I've been watching copious amounts of cricket and avoiding anything too intellectual or work-related.  As an additional aid to this vegetative process, I've been reading some of the cricket memoirs that have been released over the past few months.  There is Michael Clarke's My Story,  Chris Rogers' Bucking the Trend  and Mitchell Johnson's Resilient. I find the thought processes of elite athletes fascinating.  To succeed at their sport, they have to be really focused - not just when they are performing at the elite level, but on the way up.  They have to make sacrifices, as do those around them - their parents, siblings, partners and children.  They have to do this amidst a huge amount of uncertainty.  They might not make the grade.  An injury or an illness can end their career at a single stroke.  Their best may not be quite good enough. These three men travelled quite different pathways to the top.   Michael Cl...

One of the things I touched on briefly in previous posts is the collective impact of our illusion of immortality .  Individually we know we will die but we push that idea away and act as if we will live for ever.  This leads us to value the wrong things - to put possessions before people, to waste time on trivialities, to put off until tomorrow what we should be doing today.  At its extremes this illusion can lead us to abuse and exploit others in the belief that our power over them will go on forever. This same process also works for us as a community.  We see our current culture or "way of life" as something immutable and eternal which needs to be protected and preserved at all costs.  This illusion, and the actions that flow from it, have some very serious consequences for our society and the way we act in the wider world. We can see this in the way our community responds to three controversial questions facing our country at the moment - our response to ...

So, I've written about my own experience of death, about the Genesis account of death's origin, and about the processes of denial, anger and bargaining  that we use to try and deal with our mortality.  How do we get to the point of acceptance, and learn to live with the inevitability of our own death? Of course I'm not going to give you "the answer", and I don't want to try and convince you that I have this one under control.  I'm just as prone to the illusion of immortality as anyone, more than many.  I know I'm going to die but most of the time I live as though I'm not. However, I think the Bible has two answers for us.  The first is the answer I quoted in the last post, from the book of Ecclesiastes. There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? I think part of the reason we often find E...

When I was a young social work student we learnt about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's four stages of grieving - denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance.  I'm sure there are other models that work as well to help us understand the grieving process, but this is the most widely known and it has a kind of elegant simplicity to it.  Not that grief is elegant or simple.  We don't progress smoothly through these stages and pop out the other end calm and accepting.  We bounce around between them like rubber balls. James says we are "a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" but we're not easy in our minds about that fact.  Most of time, as I said in my last post , we just pretend it's not true and that we will live forever.  However, there comes a time when we can no longer do so.  Someone close to us dies, or comes close to death, or we ourselves feel death's wings brushing us and we can no longer ignore our own mortality.  What are we to do? ...

It's hardly surprising that the Bible introduces death right at the beginning of the story.  I think you'll be familiar with it.  Adam and Eve are placed in the garden, and told they can eat the fruit of any tree except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the eating of which will bring about their death.  However, the serpent convinces Eve to doubt the truth of this prohibition. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good an...

On September 28 I'm delivering a sermon at our evening service on Death.  Death is, of course, a huge subject and I've had a lot of time to think about it.  As a result I have a mental list of short meditations which eventually may come together, if the congregation is lucky, into a coherent message.  I thought that instead of asking everyone to get their heads around it all at once, I would put it out in bite sized chunks for people to chew over as the month progresses. Death is one of the few universal experiences of humanity.  If you live long enough (and it doesn't have to be that long) sooner or later someone close to you will die - a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a child, a close friend.  It happens to us all. About a decade ago I lost both my parents within a year of each other.  My Dad died of heart failure in 2004 after a slow decline.  Less than a year later, in early 2005, my Mum died of a brain tumour.  Mum's death was a shock ...