marramgrass

Spotted in various shops around Belfast, laminated sheets of A4 with a phrase printed in a lengthy list of different languages.

The phrase? “Thieves will be prosecuted.”

Welcome to Belfast.

As I was catching up on my reading yesterday morning, Brodie’s post remembering the vice-principal of our Bible college popped up in my feed reader. It stopped me in my tracks.

Think of someone you know who has an overwhelming enthusiasm and knowledge of something they’re really into. That was Ted Herbert. He was a lecturer in Old Testament at ICC, and his classes — and the man himself — were easily the best thing about the college during my time there.

Ted took what could easily, and often does, become a very dry, uninteresting subject, and he made it dance and sing. He knew his stuff and he communicated it with the kind of joy that every teacher should have, however few actually do. He left me with a new love for the Old Testament that has only grown since.

More than that, though, Ted was a friend to many more students than to me. Often as not he’d be spending his lunchtime in the common room plating table tennis with the students, usually winning but always gracious.

At a retreat earlier this year, I was asked who has inspired me. It was my Old Testament lecturer. I hadn’t heard that he was sick until I read Brodie’s post — I have learned since that he was diagnosed with cancer only a month and a half before he died this week.

If you have a listen to his message to the students at ICC (on YouTube), you’ll learn a great deal about the man: grace, peace, but most of all, joy.

One of God’s best.

The interwebs are today alive with blogs and tweets observing the first of September. It’s a day that doesn’t mark any particular holiday here in the UK, made special simply by the end of August and the start of September taking children back to school.

Even though it’s a long time since the turning over from August into September carried any special significance for me — school is a long while past, my university life was non-typical with academic holidays meaning nothing, we have no children of our own to keep us watching these seasons — the rhythm learned in 14 years of school sticks with me, and seemingly with many others. There is no marked change in the weather from ‘summer’ to ‘autumn’, especially not this year, but as of today the summer is, I think, over.

This is the first year in a long time when my two months of summer haven’t been marked by some major event, be it at work (the Big Summer Youth Event™), or a life thing (new job, moving house, moving country). This summer has been rather nondescript, populated by happenings that came and went independent of time.

Still, according to the learned rhythm, I can feel my brain shifting up a gear. It’s partly external (now when I make a phone call there is more likely to be someone at the other end to pick up) and partly internal.

Seasons turn in more ways than one.

Last Sunday morning I was leading a service in a church in Edinburgh. The topic for the morning was how Christians relate to and interact with the world and the people around us (I’m afraid Mrs Robinson did get a mention).

After the service I was approached by a member of the congregation who said to me words to the effect of

I work with people with addictions, and that’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone say in church that that’s a good thing.

That made me sad.

Each morning, driving into Belfast (not so bad when the schools are on holiday), we listen to BBC Radio Ulster. It’s the only time in the day when I receive the news via a human voice rather than through the blue-on-white of Google Reader, but I’m getting fed up with it.

Take this morning as an example of why. Yesterday the Air Traffic Control radar at Dublin Airport fell over causing delays, diversions and cancellations to mess with the plans of many a holiday-maker. This morning a representative of one of the airlines was being interviewed on the radio. The first question he was asked: “Who is to blame?”

The was no acknowledgement that sometimes these things happen, and only a passing reference to the fact that the decision to take the system down was intended primarily to ensure the safety of flights in and out of the airport. The interviewer’s main concern seemed to be who would be held accountable for this terrible, awful, atrocious turn of events where no-one at all was injured.

I’m coming to despise that phrase, “held accountable”, and all the other variations that express the same idea: this was someone’s fault, and they shall pay.

It shows in the journalism, where interviewers seem to believe that their job is primarily to make their interviewee, whoever they may be, squirm as much as possible. Sometimes the desire to ask a tough and hard-nosed question is necessary, often it’s just silly and irrelevant. It shows in the phone calls, emails and text-messages from listeners, as the new, interactive BBC lets everyone throw in their two pen’orth. And you can see plenty of it — more, even! — online where the communication is oh-so-easy.

Of course society needs to ensure that everyone from government to grocer deals fairly, honestly and safely with each other, but I wish we could recover the shrug of the shoulder that recognises that sometimes stuff just happens, you know?

Again I think about something I’ve seen or heard, and I wonder about grace. When I encounter a mistake or an inconvenience, I do my best to remember to acknowledge no harm and let it go, but it’s tough when everything I listen to in the morning is focussed on assigning blame.

Do you think we could manage, as a society — especially in this little corner of the world where so much real harm and hurt still casts it shadow — to try for that grace?

(See the first, second and third posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

This series is exploring a bit more widely than I intended. It was conceived when I started wondering about how ‘the media’ (including those that operate mainly offline) and other commentators place such emphasis on the internet as a venue, a forum and a significant influence on society. I began to wonder if this was all just a little bit closed, a little self-important and short-sighted — especially as I am someone who has been fascinated by technology and by online goings-on for years.

Technology has allowed me to have contact and conversation with many people who I would otherwise never be in touch with. I have learned from them, laughed with them, shared in the little corners of life they choose to share, and I hope to continue to do so. However, by far the most meaningful contact I have had online has been with those with whom I have some form of relationship in the real world. Previously I posted about my infatuation with Twitter — it’s most fun with the folks I know in real life.

Beyond that, though, what connection has all this with ‘real life’?

Every now and then you’ll meet someone who goes all misty-eyed and smiles in an unnerving way when they talk about the internet and the good it can do. Maybe it can’t do much good in itself, but access to information is generally a good thing, and when it comes to making info accessible you generally can’t do much better than the internet. Ish.

The question is availability. Broadband uptake in Northern Ireland is high (Alan in Belfast recently provided a deal of analysis of this), but there are still plenty of folks who, if they have internet access at home at all, rely on dial-up. Even for those with a high-speed connection, cable covers a small area and DSL is a fragile technology that needs you to be pretty close to your telephone exchange. And it does cost money.

Theoretically the network of public libraries provides internet access for all, but even if we accept that then there is still the issue of capacity. Just because I’m completely comfortable using the web to find out what I need to know, communicating by email and IM, doesn’t mean my gran is.

Of course, this has changed (progressed?), is changing and will change, as long as no-one slips through the gaps.

Useful (powerful?) as technologically advanced communications are, perhaps it’s best to remember that they are as well as rather than instead of everything else we already had and relied upon. I wonder, generally as well as from my own experience, if more and more people will find it takes a conscious effort to write a letter, pick up the phone, drop by and say “Hi” rather than send an email or a tweet, or leave a message on a Facebook wall?

That’s at an individual level. For society, I doubt that there’s any going back. Commerce, government, entertainment… the change has happened, and corporately nothing is the same. Just remember that ‘society’ and ‘community’ aren’t necessarily the same thing, and what works on one level doesn’t always work on others.

Yesterday afternoon I paid £1.14 a litre to fill the petrol tank of my car. On a 55-litre fuel tank that takes me well past the sixty pound mark for a fill.

I’m not complaining about this because for now I know that we can afford it, but I also know that it’s a heavier problem for some.

I’ve been operating on the assumption that at least part of the reason for the hefty duty on fuel in the UK was an effort to discourage car use for environmental reasons. I may be wrong — the duty has been substantial for longer than the environment has really been on the radar, I think.

When we moved back to Northern Ireland (almost two years ago, now) we took what was for us a difficult decision. We bought a second car. This was a result of the nature of the work we both do: I move around a lot during the day, and not having to rely on public transport makes for less time spent traveling, plus I often am out and about in the evenings; my wife works on calls ‘from home’ and needs quick transport to the hospital to be immediately available; it’s impossible to co-ordinate these two factors.

That was our thinking, and most of the time I manage to convince myself that it’s not just an excuse. On occasion, though, I wonder if we’ve been seduced by a little taste of decadence, even if the second car only leaves the drive when we really need it to.

Sometime in the next few months, we’ll need to fill the oil tank for our central heating, too. That one I am a little concerned about. When it comes to it, though, we’ll rein in for a while and we’ll be able to pay the bill I fully expect to be in the region of £5-600. Again, we’re lucky (which is to say, privileged) — we’ll be able to do that. Others won’t.

What to do?

This is where I start to get a little uncomfortable, because ultimately I think it’s a cultural thing that is as much to do with me as anyone else, consuming everything.

I have convinced myself that we need two cars in our family, however uncomfortable I claim to be with that arrangement. We, a couple with no children yet, need a whole car each?

Maybe, for now, it’s true that we do. I still hope, though, that I’ll never stop asking myself that every time I look out at our drive and see them sitting there. When I stop, then I’ll need to worry.

I suppose that’s a solid principle: don’t get comfortable.

I’ve come to the end of the middle section of Wright’s book, and while there are a couple of points he makes that may be fairly controversial to some (or many), I think he has largely brought me with him. The problem is that when he writes about what happens immediately after death (in a chapter simply titled “Purgatory, paradise, hell”) — as he really has to, however tempting it might be to skip on by — Wright is addressing questions where we really don’t have much in the way of Scriptural witness to go on, and where tradition is mind-bogglingly difficult to sort through. However, he plainly recognises this fact, offering attempts at understanding rather than suggesting prescriptions.

Following on from this, the final movement of the book is where the author begins to answer the simple question of, in his own words, “so what?”

Surprised By Hope (2007), SPCK, p204:

The point of this final section of the book is that a proper grasp of the (surprising) future hope which is held out to us in jesus Christ leads directly and, to many people, equally surprisingly, to a vision of the present hope which is the basis of all Christian mission. To hope for a better future in this world — for the poor, the sick, the lonely and depressed, for the slaves, the refugees, the hungry and homeless, for the abused, the paranoid, the downtrodden and despairing, and in fact for the whole wide, wonderful and wounded world — is not something else, something extra, something tacked on to ‘the gospel’ as an afterthought. And to work for that intermediate hope, the surprising hope that comes forward from God’s ultimate future into God’s urgent present, is not a distraction from the task of ‘mission’ and ‘evangelism’ in the present. It is a central, essential, vital and life-giving part of it. Mostly, Jesus himself got a hearing from his contemporaries because of what he was doing. They saw him ‘saving’ people from sickness and death, and they heard him talk about a ‘salvation’, the message for which they had longed, which would go beyond the immediate into the ultimate future. But the two were not unrelated, the present one a mere ‘visual aid’ of the future one, or a trick to gain people’s attention. The whole point of what Jesus was up to was that he was doing, close up, in the present, what he was promising long-term, in the future.

There are a number of phrases in that portion (and the chapter it’s taken from) that I was tempted to highlight, but then I realised that I’d end up emphasising all but a few words. In so many of the conversations I have, day by day and week by week, this is what I’m trying to say. I’m now keen to see where Wright ends up…

(This post has been two-thirds written for a couple of weeks. I’ve just returned from a gathering and a conversation which has reminded me to progress it and publish it — see the first and second posts in this series for what I’m doing.)

Several years ago I began to wonder about online expressions of community. I was young(er) and full of fire, and I believed that it was real and it was good. I remember sitting in a bar having lunch with an older and wiser colleague, trying desperately to convince him of the potential in ‘online church’. I think the only thing I convinced him of was a slight softness in my head. That was then.

Now, with all these ‘online communities’ and ‘social’ sites springing up all over the web, I have to ask: is ‘community’ the correct word? Whereas once I would have shouted my ‘yes’, now I’m really not so sure.

While I am wary of overusing dictionary definitions in this kind of discussion, I’ll let dictionary.com provide the following perspectives:

A social group of any size where members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.

A social, religious, occupational or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (“the [...] community”).

the public; society.

A group of organisms or populations living and interacting with one another in a particular environment.

From those definitions, maybe not.

Given the constantly changing and developing nature of language, perhaps ‘community’ is becoming the right word, but for now I’m not really comfortable with using the same term I could easily apply to our family, our church, a street, a neighbourhood.

But since this technology facilitates communication, I suppose it could be moving us in that kind of direction.

What about that communication?

It’s an inherently different thing to sit and have a face to face conversation with a friend, perhaps over a good meal, than to talk on the telephone. The phone is a different experience again from a hand-written letter, which differs from a typed letter. All are some way from an email.

I’d suggest that at least some of the difference is down to decreasing levels of direct physical presence in/through the medium. At one end of the spectrum we can experience the full range of nuance and meaning, while at the other end there is nothing that is ever directly encountered by both parties — electrons are transmitted and translated until beams of light take over…

How often have you been party to a major misunderstanding of an email sent or received? It happens regularly, to me and to people I know.

Technology has given us myriad tools and venues for sharing and transmitting information, with increasing volume and efficiency. The one that has caught my eye recently is Twitter. I didn’t get it at first, but when I discovered a couple of friends were using it I decided to give it a try. I was quickly hooked. (You can maybe get some idea by browsing over my Twitter stream.) Based simply in keeping communication open between people, even in a micro-broadcasting or micro-blogging kind of way, it’s fun, entertaining, cute and very occasionally useful.

What Twitter isn’t, I think, is substantial or meaningful. It’s more of a “because I can” sort of thing, and a good example because of how it encourages quantity over quality of communication. In a world beset by measures and targets, it’s easy to forget that neither volume nor efficiency are necessarily the thing.

Community is formed out of relationships, which are in turn based on communication. The quality of each affects the others.

I’ll be returning to these twin questions of communication and community.

(See the first post in this series for what I’m doing.)

As I’ve been thinking about the interactions that take place online, in my mind they’ve fallen into two broad categories based on ‘venue’:

• Centralised, if not necessarily in a technological sense, where the interactions take place through a specific website, newsgroup, mailing list or similar.
• Decentralised, in the manner of separate blogs forming an organic network.

Within these groups I find that that there is variation as to what brings them together.

Centralised Venues.

Networks and groupings can form on the basis of:

• Shared interest or purpose, for example a discussion forum or mailing list focussed on a particular subject. I have participated in groups discussing technology of various flavours, youth ministry, theology, particular authors, photography and even the collection and use of fountain pens. This sort of group can be an excellent source of information.
• Shared experience, for example Friends Reunited, or the way many use Facebook — “we went to school together.”
• Shared presence — stumbling into people you have never and may never have otherwise met. In my short experience this is the way MySpace seemed largely to operate.

All these factors reflect processes that occur in the real world, where we physically meet different people in all kinds of different contexts.

Decentralised Venues.

Where I find it more difficult to draw a real-world parallel is in the ‘blogosphere‘.

Anyone (with the necessary resources) can publish a website, and can interact with what anyone else has published either through direct communication (public or private) or by responding back on their own site. Networks of individuals gather around particular conversations, but can also easily draw in others who have some other incidental interest or curiosity. It’s fascinating (to me at least) to click around various blogs and follow the lines of who links to who, and who participates where — and you can participate in the wider network to as large or as small a degree as you like.

There are strengths and weaknesses in each of these forms of network, and they all intermingle anyway, connecting and overlapping through the individuals involved. I suppose it’s called the ‘web’ for a reason :-) You probably could map it, but it would get very complicated very quickly.

So far I’ve deliberately avoided using the word ‘community’, even though it has threatened to roll out by itself. I’m wary of applying that name to what goes on online, but it’s a question that needs asked:

Is this ‘community’?

That’s for the next post in this series.