Friday 27 January 2017

Only he who speaks out for the Jews can sing Gregorian chant"
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

ttps://youtu.be/pSOB4Oqe-bs

Thursday 26 January 2017

"The use of torture is dishonourable. It corrupts and degrades the state which uses it and the legal system which accepts it. When judicial torture was routine all over Europe, its rejection by the common law was a source of national pride and the admiration of enlightened foreign writers such as Voltaire and Beccaria. In our own century,  many in the United States have felt their country dishonoured by its use of torture outside the jurisdiction and its practice of extra-legal 'rendition' of suspects to countries where they would be tortured. The rejection of torture ... has a special iconic importance as the touchstone of a humane and civilised legal system."

Lord Hoffman, British House of Lords (now the Supreme Court)  judgement (2005)
A (FC) and others (FC) (Appellants) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent) (2004)A and others (Appellants) (FC) and others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent) (Conjoined Appeals)

Wednesday 25 January 2017

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

'Mending Wall'   
Robert Frost from North of Boston (1914) 

Tuesday 24 January 2017

For everything there is a season ...

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; 
a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away ..."

For many people, last year, 2016, was a sobering time of discernment, a time of dangerous shocks and upheavals, and also a time of the breaking of already fragile friendships and alliances, both in the body politic and the ecclesial body of which, (for good or ill, who knows?) I am a member. That process seems to be continuing into a new year without any obvious signs of a let up.
Contributing to a blog has to be the most ephemeral means of communicating known to humankind (with the obvious and notoriously topical exception of 'Twitter') and it is never easy to achieve anything like a satisfactory balance between the easily manufactured outrage of the moment, and a more balanced, saner, view of what is really important in the often hysterical movement of the world's (and the Church's) 24 hour news cycle. 
My gut feeling is that it's high time to call it a day, but if, as some people are encouraging me to do, this blog is to continue in some way, inevitably it will be different, as the times themselves are different, and as the defence of a particular tradition of freedom of thought and belief calls for a more considered approach to discerning the signs of the times.