Painting Fakes

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? On

I recently read a collection of  essays and journalistic pieces by William Gibson.  Unlike Gibson's fiction, which I love, his non-fiction wasn't that great.  However, he referred a number of times to the late Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and I was intrigued enough to check him out.  I sure am glad I did! Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died there in 1986.  He was a classic "man of letters" a person who, although he held various professorships and other positions, never really made his living as anything other than a writer. I have read other "philosophical" writers of fiction, authors like Camus, Eco, Calvino or Kafka who use fiction as a vehicle for philosophical speculation.  Yet no-one I've read is quite like Borges.  His stories, essays and parables open up fields of speculation, dizzying ways of viewing the world which seem at once plausible and fantastic. Naturally he wrote in Spanish, but he was fluent in a number of d

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 and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the t

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 - in January she was a

Billions have staked their futures on her But she is dying The death of a hundred billion cuts. Poisoned slowly in the wastes of her own entrails Roasted on a low fire Gasping for breath in an atmosphere of unknown gases While her killers bicker over what remains. Aeons of patient craft, slow shaping, intricate artistry Erased in the blinking of a geological eye. The stars look on, and weep. Elsewhere, another star is born.

I'd almost forgotten George Harrison's All Things Must Pass .  Years ago I had a pirate tape of it which I listened to so much it died.  I never got around to replacing it until about a month ago when I found the album posted in its entirety on Youtube while I was looking for something else.  I surrendered to the impulse, partly out of pure nostalgia, but more so because my recently acquired love for the 'Jesus is my Boyfriend' song and my admiration for the subtle Sufi devotion of Richard and Linda Thompson's best work made me want to listen once again to Harrison's songs of spiritual awakening. Harrison was the first of the Beatles to launch his solo career, with All Things Must Pass  hitting the stores in November 1970, a mere six months after the Beatles announced their split.  He didn't do it by halves, either.  The original release was a three LP set, with two LPs' worth of original songs and a third containing a series of bluesy jams with

So, 31 August 2014 is my next preaching gig.  As usual, someone else chose the readings but this time it was a parishioner called Audrey, who will be preaching on the same readings earlier in the day.  It will be interesting to see what she takes from them. The first of the readings comes from Psalm 139. For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed. How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you. This psalm celebrates God's deep knowledge of us, and his deep care