// mustard seeds and new conspirators

This is just a quick one to flag up the community that Tom and Christine Sine have got going on over at Mustard Seed Associates, with particular reference to this month’s community post entitled “Writing as Spiritual Discipline“. If you’re looking for a range of new blogs, picking up on the links here is a great place to start, and Tom and Christine are real, original visionaries.

I’m especially keen on Tim Mathis’s excellent article “Surprised by Community“, written about the culture of blogging, which is well worth a look if you’ve got a spare five minutes, regardless of your theological viewpoint.

On another note, sorry that i’ve gone quiet recently; life is busy, especially with holiday jobs, but i’m trying to round up some guest contributors for the next few weeks and normal service will resume in September, i promise…

// lifelong learning

My sister, who is coming to the end of her first year studying psychology at Lancaster, rang me up on Wednesday, the day after I wrote the final essay of my degree. “Do you know what I learned today?” she asked, reeling off a psychology fact that i’ve already forgotten (it was something to do with the brain, I think).

My reply?

“Do you know what I learned today? Nothing.”

It’s a reply that I thought would have evoked more joy when I said it – and seriously, don’t get me wrong, where i am now, this post-exam state, this is an awesome state to be in. It’s the first time in about three years that I can truthfully say that I don’t feel guilty at the fact that I’m not learning new things. But it’s also a slightly sad place to be at the same time: because, to be honest, I spent my first day of freedom doing very little apart than playing on the Xbox for about six hours. And for all the strain and stress of the past few years, there’s something exciting about consistently learning new things, and not letting brain, heart, body and soul atrophy…

I met up with a friend last night who told me he had run out of money as he’s been buying theology books; he’s currently working in a temp job, but he spends his evenings reading John Stott and Alistair McGrath as he gets bored in the middle of the day and needs something else to think about. He’s another Oxford graduate, which might explain it, but he also serves as an inspiration: a reminder that this opportunity is something to be prized, because this sort of space to expand your knowledge and your mind is pretty rare, and it’s something pretty valuable when you get it.

I’m the same, really: sooner or later I’m going to need to make a decision as to whether these next few weeks are going to be weeks spent in my lounge playing Fallout 3, or weeks in which I make the most of the time I have left in this university, and that’s a decision that has its wider consequences. In the long run, that comes down to a decision of who to be in the world beyond Oxford University – whether to be somebody who keeps pursuing things, taking risks and stepping out into different areas of life, or somebody who settles for the easy option. And don’t get me wrong, that ‘easy option’ isn’t half appealing.

That’s not meant to be a proposal for a life with no peace, of never learning to rest or sitting in silence. That’s not the point at all, and of course, sometimes there is a place for simply stopping and letting yourself be refreshed. But it would be too easy to switch off at this point, and accept that the ‘learning’ part of this life is over; to stop looking at things with wonder and stop pursuing those new experiences, those things that take your breath away. And that doesn’t have to be in books; for example, I doubt that I’ll be reading anything written before 1997 for a few months, at the very least. But I fully intend to investigate the joys of listening to Modest Mouse and Richard Hawley, to finally get around to watching Mad Men and The Wire and all those other shows that are on my ‘to-do’ list, to listen to those sermon podcasts from John Piper and Pete Greig and others that my Itunes keeps downloading for me…

And I need you to keep me in check on that, too. I didn’t write this blog on Wednesday, because I thought that I had nothing more to say, no thoughts left. I nearly didn’t write it today, because the draw of the Xbox sitting in my lounge was too great. That’s dangerous, a pattern that it is worth fighting. I’m fairly sure that it was New Labour that came up with the term “lifelong learning”, and much as it pains me to use that kind of twee, politically-devised terminology, that’s actually pretty good.

My response to my sister yesterday wasn’t wholly truthful. After speaking to her, I ended up at Hungry, a monthly prayer gathering at my church, and spent a couple of hours around a group of people passionate for God, seeking His will and His intervention in a variety of ways – people who were unwilling to let themselves get stale, unwilling to disengage from the world and take the easy option instead. That’s our story, eventually; that nothing really stands still, even when it’s apparently doing just that. Even inaction is a kind of action, and not necessarily a good kind. Last night was a fitting reminder of that fact, and a much-needed one – the exams may be over, but the learning has really only just begun.

If you’re reading this in the midst of exams, I get that this post probably sounds like a sick joke, and I don’t mean it that way. But bear that in mind when this is all over: relaxation is one thing, but atrophy is another thing entirely.

Now if I can just resist the temptation to spend the rest of the afternoon playing on the Xbox…

// Roberto Bolano and chocolate eggs

A few weeks back i bought Roberto Bolano’s “The Savage Detectives” on the recommendation of a friend of mine. It’s a beautifully written book, witty and melancholy, the opening section describing the initiation of a young writer in a group who are known as the “visceral realists”. It’s also a book that describes, in brutal and frank detail, the dramatic (and frequently disastrous) sexual encounters of that young writer.

I gave up on it about seventy-five pages in.

Don’t get the impression that i’m squeamish about this stuff. Truth be told, studying an English degree i’ve had to read a lot of it over the past three years. But it’s also corrosive. So much of my degree has been focused on descriptions of ‘bad sex’ and flawed relationships, on making those mistakes so that you can know what you’re eventually looking for, and sure, it points back to an ideal, to the way things should be, but it gets inside your head. That focus on the desolation and emptiness of all our experiences in the face of eventual death makes it look ridiculous to imagine that an ideal for life, or love, is ever attainable, and even more ridiculous to hold out for that ideal. It makes experiences paramount, but it simultaneously makes them trivial. It comes down, at absolute base level, to nothing more than the frankness of bad sex that Roberto Bolano details – a world that is eventually about physicality, not transcendence, as none of us are getting out of here alive.

To “conform no longer to the pattern of this world”, as Paul put it in his letter to the Romans, means leaving behind that kind of cynicism and emptiness, and i can’t tell if that makes me a less exciting person. Certainly it makes me a happier person, although my heart is breaking in a million other ways, but being a Christian surely doesn’t mean disengaging from the culture altogether, just fighting that corrosiveness that strips away at happiness, love and hope. It means fighting the attitude that only sees the meaningless of the present moment in order to see things differently – to see this moment, this day, this life, as a gift of God’s grace; to see the vibrancy of the world that He has created; to see that life doesn’t necessarily need dramatic, Bolano-esque mistakes to make it of any value, as Christ’s death on that cross proves that you are already valuable enough to be worth dying for. The truth is that the desolation and the bleakness isn’t the only hope, and it’s not as though dreaming of something different makes you an idealist or someone who’s living in perpetual unreality. The task is working out how to live this life the way it’s supposed to be lived – that bizarre, surreal, seat-of-your-pants way of living that makes the brightest lives stand out.

To accept that living life God’s way sucks out all the vibrancy and joy of life is, in fact, conforming to the pattern of this world. Today is Easter Sunday, the day of resurrection, when death is revealed as being something other than just the end of all this and transcendence is again possible. That desolation, bleakness, emptiness – “the pattern of this world” – that they don’t win. That which was inevitably, unavoidably dead, is no longer so. Jesus is risen, and salvation is here, now, and suddenly, in a moment, everything has changed. All that you thought you knew, looked at in the light of what happened today, needs confronting and rethinking.

This is not just a transactional view of salvation, that says that what Jesus did was simply pay a price on a cross so that we can go to Heaven when we die – although yes, that is true, and that is a vital dimension of what happened. But it is also a sense that a new, transformed life, a ‘resurrection-life’, starts now. When the fear of death is removed, when the possibility of truly relishing the present moment is suddenly not ridiculous anymore. A lot of Christians, me included, aren’t always good at that, living in any kind of present moment at all. But it doesn’t have to be like that – we may have lost sight of it, but Easter Sunday reminds us that there is more going on here than we initially thought…

I gave up chocolate for Lent, and being able to break into an Easter egg this morning was a real joy. I had to smash it off my table – it was a Green & Black’s Easter egg, and it was ridiculously thick-shelled. It took four hits, to be precise. I have never given anything up for Lent before, and it was a hard thing to do – especially with chocolate. But coming back to it this morning was fantastic. It reminded me why I loved it in the first place, caused me to eat with a new relish, that i’d forgotten over the years… Whether it’s a fair comparison to say that the same is true of Easter remains to be seen, but i know what i think. That today encourages me to see the world with new eyes, to praise the God who created it and relish it apart from the stench of decay – to see this world, His creation, and His sacrifice, for just how incredible they truly are…

He is risen. Hallelujah indeed.