Borges imagines Cain and Abel eating by a fire:
When the flame illuminates Abel’s forehead, Cain sees “the mark of the stone.” He drops his bread, and asks for his brother’s forgiveness—but adds a question: “Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?”
Abel says that he could not remember, but “here we are, together, like before.” And Cain responds: “Now I know that you have truly forgiven me, because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”
My own deconstruction hasn’t been as radical as Annie’s, but this still spoke to me:
Now I don’t know anything! But I also don’t feel obligated to hate people. So that’s a good trade-off.
After a busy week and weekend at work, a welcome long hike.
Cuckoo calling by the River Rye this morning.
The corollary: if we change the policy environment, we can make these careless people – and their successors, who run other businesses we rely upon – care. They may never care about us, but we can make them care about what we might do to them if they give in to their carelessness.
It’s about tech but it applies in so many areas of public life. We can’t assume people will do the right thing, especially with vast sums of money on the table. We need publicly agreed values to be enforced.
I am grateful for the Iona Community‘s “fierce solidarity” with the trans community.
In a world of ecclesiastical fence sitting, the clarity of this statement is a balm to my soul.
Take a deep breath, and say out loud: I am not a machine, I am not meant to scale. You have a finite amount of energy, and a community of people around you who can use that energy. You can use that energy, to make it through the day, which is the most important thing. Waking up tomorrow is the name of the game.
Roseberry Topping from the Wainstones
Friday, April 25, 2025
Frank Sheed (via @eastbrad): God is not only a fact of religion: He is a fact. Not to see Him is to be wrong about everything, which includes being wrong about one’s self… Richard Beck: Get this first and most fundamental question wrong and everything downstream will go off track. Your life will never quite “fit” or “attune” with the cosmos. The melody of your existence will be discordant and off-pitch.
Martin Scott is helpfully provocative on the language of kingdom:
The time has come to bring an end to kingdom language. The time has come to listen carefully to the Gospel story, especially as John tells it (Jn 15:12-17), to find a real radical heart which places shared community rather than individual values at the centre.
What we need today is both an expression of Christian faith and a world order based on friends being in relationship (Jn 15:15) rather than servants of a glorious king; on community rather than kingdom; on justice, love and peace rather than kingdom, power and glory.
However, the first step is talking about this at all. A Christianity of individual salvation alone would not be recognised by its founder.
I love this icon of St Anne (via Emanuel Burke). Her finger is raised to her lips as a sign that she is a contemplative.
It is better to keep silence and to be than to talk and not to be. It is good to teach, if the speaker act. Now there was One Teacher, Who spake and it came to pass (Ps. 32/33.9). And the deeds which He has done in silence are worthy of the Father. He who is truly master of the spoken word of Jesus is able also to listen to His silence, that he may be perfect, and so may act by his speech, and be understood by his silence. Nothing is hidden from the Lord, but even our secrets are brought nigh unto Him. Let us therefore do all things in the assurance that He dwells within us, that we may be His shrines and He Himself may dwell in us as God. For this is indeed true and will be made manifest before our eyes by the services of love which as our bounden duty we render unto Him.
St Ignatius of Antioch, Epistle to the Ephesians
Niléane asks the question we need to hear at this time of crisis:
I must ask: have you never wondered if you should wrap your mounted disk drives in cozy iPod socks?
In case you need help answering that question, there are pictures:
Unimpressed? How about some googly eyes that follow your mouse?
Easter flowers.
I love a lot about this piece from Dana O’Driscoll:
The principle of living low is simple: living in a way that prioritizes time as the most valuable resource over money, prioritizing one’s wants and needs, and living in a way where one is providing as many of their own needs as possible. And remember- every step you take towards living low and collapsing gracefully is a step towards your own resilience and creating buffer zones between the collective insanity that is continuing to ramp up.
I do my civic duty, showing up, making calls to my representatives, and staying informed. But beyond that, I am not giving my energy or soul to this system. I am, instead, redirecting that energy to building a better world and making sure my family and friends are on the path of meeting their own needs too. And you know what? That also reduces my fear, it reduces my anxiety, and it gives me purpose.
However, I also want to say that living according to our values isn’t just about hammering on the door of politicians (though that’s important). Living out those values in my own community is its own form of activism.
Happy Easter.
Fr. Stephen De Young (via @ReaderJohn ):
God loves you. Jesus said so. St. John’s Gospel, the Father Himself loves you. He is not angry at you. He does not want to destroy you for your sins. There is no power of justice that commands Him to do so. No one commands Him to do anything. He loves you. He wants you to find salvation, but salvation is a thing you have to actually do. He wants you to do it. The Bible says so. God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. But you have to do it. He empowers you to do it. He forgives you when you mess up trying to do it. He heals you when you damage yourself trying to do it and failing. He is entirely on your side. The God who created the universe is entirely on your side and the saints are on your side and the church is on your side. Everyone is on your side. Christ is advocating for you. Everything is set up for us.
When Saint Paul says to us, “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” you don’t stop there like Kierkegaard did. Read the next verse because it is God who is working in you to will and to do according to His pleasure. We continue on and we work out our salvation because we know that God is on our side and empowering us to do it and loving us and loving other people through us. We need to pray about that. We need to pray it. We need to repeat it. … We need to say it out loud. We need to say it to each other. We need to say it to everyone who will listen right? That God loves you and wants you to find salvation, wants you to be healed, wants you to be set free from sin. He wants all these things for you. It doesn’t mean you have nothing to do. That doesn’t mean you’re fine just the way you are. You know you’re not fine just the way you are, right? But it means that he is there to help you to grow to be transformed into the person who you need to be and want to be. The person he created you to be for eternity. That’s the actual message of Christianity. Don’t accept any substitutes for that, ever at all, for any reason.
Maundy Thursday Eucharist in the tiny hamlet of Kirby Knowle. An excellent sermon and surprisingly good hymn singing by the congregation of three.
Above Boltby
Delightfully eccentric medieval stained glass at Shibden Hall yesterday.
Dougald Hine had me with this opening:
She said, “Didn’t you know, Dougald? I’m dying.” And just for a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of conversation we were about to have. Then I saw the edge of a smile on her lips, and she started to explain about this programme she’d joined called A Year to Live, where a group of you go through a whole twelve months, living as though this were the last year of your life.
He goes on:
In the summer of 2020, I heard this question from the Inuit poet Taqralik Partridge: “What if the pandemic is just a warning shot?” Not the big event that changes everything, but the first in a chain of crises. Some days I can picture them, lined up like storms on a satellite picture of the Atlantic in hurricane season, rolling in, one after the other, to make landfall along the coastline of the future.
People get broken all the time, there’s no art in that, but there is an art in making spaces where we can be broken open with a chance of healing. Encounters that leave us changed, with a chance of becoming the people we’d need to be to bring about those “presently unimaginable futures”. That feels like work worth doing, in a time when the world is on fire.