My title phrase was coined by a researcher into the life of bacteria within the human body. I grew up thinking of bacteria as enemies which had to be defeated by washing my hands before eating and after using the lavatory. But modern research has shown that the total number of genes in the human genome – 23, 000- is vastly outnumbered by the millions of bacterial genes in our bodies. The human gut alone contains 40,000 bacterial species and 100 trillion microbial cells. 

Most of these cause us no harm, while a substantial proportion are beneficial. Research has also shown that bacteria provide maybe a quarter of the earth’s biomass, and occupy some of the most hostile of its environments. Because they are able to share their genes with one another, they can exchange information easily and adapt to change speedily, as we have seen in the emergence of bacteria resistant to antibiotics. Because these creatures are so small we have neglected until recently to study them and their relationship with their environment, including ourselves.

Of course, human beings have reacted to the new wave of bacterial research by latching on to its commercial possibilities. Think of all the so-called probiotic foods which are on sale, especially in the yoghurt aisle of the supermarket, promising with a load of pseudo – scientific gobbledygook to improve the bacterial balance of our guts. It would be a pity however if their exaggerations and misunderstandings put us off considering the results of genuine research.

The role of micro-organisms in the evolution of life is central. First of all they came into being and colonised the very unfriendly environment of the young planet. They did so by cooperation with each other, sharing their different abilities for the common cause of survival. Eventually the sharing cells seem to have joined together in one new kind of the cell named eukaryotic, which is the basis of all multicellular life including homo sapiens.

These clever creatures share my life, or maybe I share theirs. Being human includes being a bacterial zoo.

This is a revelation not provided by the first biblical account of creation, in which God’s creation of human beings in his own likeness is separated from the creation of all other life. We can see that account as a theological diagram rather than a description of how God did the job. The second account in Genenis is less exalted: God fashions some dust into a shape and breathes his life into it. Perhaps we can see this dust, a gramme of which contains millions of bacteria, as the source of bacterial life in humans.

The two accounts are not mutually exclusive: the first depicts the making of human beings as similar to the making of stone “likenesses” of themselves by contemporary rulers, to represent their presence in their distant territories; humans are meant to be images of God’s rule on the earth. The second depicts the actual origin of human beings, as of all beings, from the dust, the fertile dust of the planet, reminding men and women of all they share with the planet and its other life. Indeed the Genesis story tells how germane this reminder is, as it shows how human arrogance leads to expulsion from God’s garden into the familiar harshness of the world we inhabit, and threatens to make it uninhabitable.

Although I have responsibility to represent the rule  of God in the world, along with a range of skills which enable me to do so, I am also a composite creature, made of the soil of earth, sharing the life of innumerable tiny creatures. The latest science joins the Bible in directing me to a wise humility ( Latin: humus =dust), to realise the intimate ecology of my existence: I  am a shared life, whose continued health depends on my partners. I cannot simply be or do anything I want without an understanding of my place in the web of life. And the life I share is not only inside me, it does not end at my fingertips: my very breath is an exchange with the planet, and if I pollute it, I pollute myself.

This “dustiness” does not negate the revelation that I am made in the image of God, for God is the life which humbly shares itself with all creation; nor does it exempt me from the duty of representing God’s rule, which persuades all creation towards the perfection of shared goodnesss. Me and my microbes are called to cooperate.

 

 

I have just spent a couple of days reading avidly, as I used to when much younger, devouring books like others devour chocolate. I completed three books: Havergey by John Burnside, The Schooldays of Jesus by  J.M. Coetzee and Of all that Ends, by Gunter Grass. These are all books which deal with what theologians call eschatology, teaching about The End. In the case of the Grass book which has been published after his death, the ending in question is mainly the end of his life, but there is also the end of an era in which the second world war stood as a warning even to the worst politicians. Coetzee’s novel is a sequel to “The Childhood of Jesus” and like it is situated in a time and place to which its characters have been transported from their previous lives, which however have been wiped from their memories. Burnside’s parable is set in the future after a catastrophic series of disasters have decimated human civilization.

Grass and Coetzee are two of the great masters of contemporary writing, while Burnside is a very fine Scottish poet, novelist, and teacher.

Grass faces the imminence of his own death with a characteristic mixture of gusto, wit and inventiveness. “Of All That Ends” is a collection of short meditations, poems and drawings from the perspective of one who knows he’s leaving the scene pretty soon. This gives him the opportunity for some elegiac evocations of what he has enjoyed, like sex or the writings of Rabelais, some acerbic commentary on current politics,  and some exploration of the fact of death. There is a story for example of how he and his wife order their coffins from a skilled wood worker, and enjoy trying them out for size; and how these are stolen from their house, and mysteriously returned with the addition of a pair of dead mice. There is a confession that the only phrase he can remember in one of his native tongues, Kashubian, is that of a local man asking him in his youth, “What’s new in politics today?” Even a dead language poses a question to which contemporary politics cannot provide an answer. For Grass, the end confirms the value of human life, while questioning its capacity to solve the problems it creates.

Burnside imagines a future in which nature has taken its overdue revenge on human beings in the form of devastating plagues which have depopulated most of the world. On a mysterious Scottish island there is a community of anarchist nature-lovers who explain their history and beliefs to a newcomer. Their most important conviction is that no human method can ever be superior to nature’s method. The fact that human beings with their ingenuity are part of nature seems not to have occurred to the author. Although there are a few indications of how these people have transformed their lives, the story simply assumes that this has happened. This means that within the narrative there is no test of the realism or efficacy of the community’s philosophy and lifestyle. It is described and assumed to be admirable. The agony of the ending of one era and the birth of a new is bypassed, leaving the reader with shallow aphorisms, unsubstantiated judgements, and inflated hopes. Easy targets, like Donald Trump are clumsily assailed, but survive without serious damage. The author has failed the challenge of eschatology, namely, to represent the way in which an imminent end questions every aspect of the present, and only through such an examination offers a future – if there is to be a future. (In Norse eschatology, there is no future beyond the death of the gods.) This reader at any rate wants to be supportive of the author’s vision but it remains fuzzy and a little peevish.

Coetzee tells the story of how his peculiar family -precocious child, adoptive mother and adoptive father (who are not partners to each other) – manage the education of a five year old child of great ability and arrogance. The details of family and school interactions are  vividly if soberly recounted, nearly always from the point of view of the adoptive father, although the child’s passionate engagement with the world is fully expressed.

All the people in the narrative have come from elsewhere but with their memories wiped clean. Everyone can therefore make a new start, but for their future to be good or better than the present requires knowledge of  the world and the self, which is not simply  given but is gained through learning. And the learning happens through attention to one’s own action and suffering as well as the action and suffering of others. Learning can be blocked by wilfulness on the one hand or lack of initiative on the other. The kindness or knowldge of others may confer grace, but one has to be willing to receive it. Cruelty may also be offered and one has to be willing to resist it. It is, in other words, a world where goodness can happen now, but it must be done by people who have learned how to do it. An old world has ended, but the new world has to be created.

I think that for Coetzee the name Jesus does not designate any particular character in the story, but this process of moral education. This is a very rich fiction of which I have only given a brief glimpse here.

 

 

The other day The US Airforce dropped a huge bomb on a set of tunnels in Afghanistan inhabited by IS jihadis, 36 of whom were reportedly killed. There were no civilian deaths. Publicly no one regretted the deaths, but many voices criticised the action as trigger-happy and unwisely threatening to the USA’s other enemies. Along with the destruction of a Syrian Airbase earlier last week, the bombing been widely interpreted as a warning to North Korea, which has replied by parading its own weapons and making suitably hysterical threats.

Most British commentary has focused on the incoherence of Trump’s foreign policy while Chinese voices have warned him to be much more cautious.

For myself, I considered the Syrian attack proportionate and perhaps effective as a deterrent, and the big bomb in Afghanistan as no more than a strategic initiative. The aggressors of this world require restraint,  and their victims need support; the case for international police action is obvious in such situations. But that’s just the point: if actions like these are to be seen as just, that they must actually be international, that is, of the United Nations preferably, and if that is not possible, of a as large a coalition as can be obtained. The USA made only a token effort to get UN action against Assad, and none at all in the case of the Afghan attack, where they relied on a small existing coalition. In fact, in both instances, the USA seemed to pride itself on acting alone.

That cannot be right. Nobody has elected the USA as the world’s default policeman. When it acts as it has done this week it reinforces the suspicion that it believes it has the right to do as it pleases in any part of the world, by claiming that anything counter to its interest anywhere can be considered an attack on its territory, so that actions on the other side of the globe can be justified as “defensive.” None of this is new, and is certainly not an invention of President Trump. The much-admired President Obama held just as firmly to this policy of defending US borders at a distance. Indeed Mr Trump had promised a welcome departure from unilateral intervention by the USA.

Psalm 60 in the Christian bible confronts a situation in which nations surrounding Israel are crowing over a recent Israeli defeat. The psalmist imagines God rallying his people by reassuring them of his power over all nations. Of two of the nearest of these, God says, “Moab is my washpot and over Edom I have cast my shoe” using the picture of a traveller washing his feet by pouring water over them into a basin, after throwing his shoes into a corner. The nations of Moab and Edom are treated as negligible before the might of God.

The weapon used in Afghanistan this week was called MOAB, that is, Massive Ordnance Air Blast or more popularly, Mother Of All Bombs. It is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used in war. Perhaps President Trump and his generals should listen to the book they frequently claim to cherish, and learn humility before the justice of God, which in secular terms means that humility is always wise, while arrogance is always stupid, sometimes terminally so. This MOAB is also God’s washpot.

 

P: ….so what do you think you know about me?

Me: Not a lot. Only what appears in the four gospels, plus one or two bits of information in the historian Josephus….oh and the legend that you were born in Scotland….

P: The legend may be more accurate than some of what you read in the gospels. Ask yourself who witnessed the various conversations I’m supposed to have had with your Jesus, not to mention the fact that the gospels each tell different stories.

Me: Different in detail, yes, but basically they agree that you didn’t want to crucify Jesus because you thought he was innocent, but gave in to agitation by a Jewish crowd, which was set up by The Jewish religious leaders.

P: Yes, yes, but you should ask yourself why they take that line…

M: What d’you mean?

P: I mean, my little Christian, that after we had destroyed the jewish Jihadis who rebelled in 70 CE, even Christians knew it might be very dangerous if they depicted their saviour as a man justly condemned by a Roman governor. Far better to throw the blame on his own people.

Me: So you thought Jesus was guilty….on the evidence of the priests and Pharisees?

P: Of course not. How could a Roman accept the evidence of manipulative barbarians? I had my own spies with the Nazarene prophet from his early days in Galilee.

Me: And what did they tell you?

P: That he was a decent man, doing tiny miracles for tiny people in a tiny corner of the land….

Me: And that made him dangerous to Rome!

P: ….listen, Christian, listen! They told me that he was popular, so popular that some people considered him a Messiah. Zeus spare me, I spent years hearing about divinely inspired Messiahs annointed by God to murder Romans and turn the world into God’s Kalifate.

Me: But Jesus wasn’t like that, he wasn’t political!

Pontius: I don’t want to be rude,  but as you’ve never been in government, especially imperial govenment, you would have difficulty in telling your political arse from your political elbow. Any man who can gather 5000 men around him in the desert, or stage a mockery of a Roman Triumph as he entered Jesusalem, is political. Any Jewish man talking about the Kalifate of God and allowing his followers to call him Messiah, is dangerously political….

Me: But he never intended…

P: How do you know what he intended? In any case,  a governor cannot waste time guessing intentions when he has facts before him. If a man acts like a jihadi, if he promotes a story about God’s Kalifate, and radicalises young men, then he must be treated as a jihadi whatever his intentions. Public order must be protected.

Me: Jesus never recommended violence against Rome or anyone!

P: Even your own gospels have to admit he staged a violent pantomime in the Temple and was personally violent to blameless small businessmen.

Me: But that was against Jewish people, not Romans, and for religious reasons not political ones.

P: Truly faith is harmful to the intelligence! The motives behind public disorder are of no importance; it simply must be stopped. As for your carelessness about harming Jews, isn’t that of a piece with the nauseating anti- Jewishness of your church down the centuries? But a Roman Governor has to protect all citizens, even barbarians. The man had to go.

Me: But even if I admit you may have had some justification for finding Jesus guilty, I can still point to the unnecessary death penalty you imposed.

P: Ah, now you are moving to another area of your expertise: criminal justice! So perhaps you think I could have put him in prison?

Me: It would have been more merciful….

P: I have to remind you that unlike your own filthy system of justice, Roman justice never used prison as a punishment, not even for slaves or barbarians. We never kept a living man in prison except when awaiting trial or execution. Restitution, fines, forfeit of property, exile, enslavement, and death were the punishments which made our justice the envy of the world.

Me: People tortured by beatings followed by a prolonged death on a stake, that’s the image of what you call justice?

P: The part of our justice reserved for rebellious slaves and jihadis. It was designed to cause fear if not respect, and I may say was quite successful in doing so. You may think I am pained when I hear your creed being repeated, ‘ suffered under Pontius Pilate, ‘ time and time again. But no, I feel a modest pride in having done my duty.

Me: And you’ve no regrets at what you did to Jesus?

P: None like the feelings ascribed to me in your gospels.  But yes, I did regret what I had to do with Jesus of Nazareth. He was a decent man, intelligent, honest and brave,  but with an unfortunate belief that he had been chosen by God to establish his rule in the world. Yes, I’m sure he thought this rule would be kindly, except maybe in respect of people like me. God would have to get rid of me.  But as you can see, He hasn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this entertaining chat, my fellow Caledonian. But look, dawn is imminent and I have to get back before first light, I have to get back to…eh, I have to get back.

There are activities of Jesus which can be assigned to particular days in the last week of his earthly life, such as his entry into Jerusalem (Sunday) , clearing the Temple (Monday) the Last Supper (Thursday) and his crucifixion (Friday) but although he is said to have done other things, they cannot be attached to specific days. This opens up the possibility that he might have a day off in the middle of the week, without showing any concern at all for the poor people who would have to construct Holy Week liturgies!

The idea that he might have spent time with friends or gone shopping sheds a curious light on how we think of him. I mean, he was here to do and say significant things that his church could remember, so he’d have been dodging the column a bit if he did take some personal time out! That kind of thought should remind us that we tend to package Jesus for church consumption, and in that we are only continuing a tactic which was begun by the gospel writers and their predecessors. The gospels themselves package Jesus for church use, by assigning events to the one day, the next day, during a festival, or throughout a week. In all probability the stories about Jesus passed on by word of mouth, contained no timeline into which events could be placed, leaving the writers to construct their own. Most bible scholars think that they did so to highlight the meaning of the events rather than to reflect historical facts. John’s gospel for example places Jesus clearing of the temple at the start of his ministry rather than the end, as in the other three gospels. This is not to do with historical fact but because he wants the issue of God’s holy place to frame his entire Gospel.

If this is true of time it is also true of place. The geography of the gospels is related to the meaning of incidents. Matthew puts Jesus’ sermon on a mountain because he wants to compare Jesus with Moses; Luke puts him on a plain because he wants to emphasise the humility and earthliness of Jesus’ ministry. Most gospel stories involving voyages reflect the Hebrew notion of the great deep which only the creator can control.

We may guess that the gospels are right in placing the culminating events of Jesus’ life in Jerusalem,  but we should have some doubt as to whether they took place within one week. The gospel timescale is constructed deliberately to fit into a week, so that churches could remember them more easily and celebrate them day by day. So what’s wrong with that? Nothing, but the interpretation of Jesus’ prophecy that the Son of Man would be raised on the “third day”  – which in truth just means ” the day when everything changes” – is turned by the gospels into a weekend which generations of believers have taken as historical fact. Would it dismay us to discover that the third day was in fact a year or so later as Jesus’ followers began to trust his aliveness?

I am not at all sceptical about Jesus’ resurrection, but the gospel stories of it are again told to  bring out key truths about Jesus’ aliveness, rather than to present an historical account. In most eras of its existence the Christian church saw the gospels as a set of stories with meanings rather than as factual history. Indeed the assumption that they are factual is quite modern and has only been prominent for 150 years. Doubtless there is some factual history in the gospels, but the very notion of historical accuracy would have been utterly foreign to their authors, who were in effect, preaching the good news rhrough stories.

This view  of scripture allows us to listen to what they want to tell us about Jesus rather than imposing our own demand for scientific history on them. It gives us space for interpretation of the biblical writings according to what we know of their  author’s methods without forcing them to walk in our shoes. This method in no way reduces my trust in Jesus Messiah, Son of God, my rescuer, crucified and risen. But it does lead me to hope that as he faced his almost certain death in Jerusalem he had time for a  quiet chat with his mother or for sharing a flask of wine with a friend.

 

 

The world has been delighted with the story of Ms. Rohan Beyts who this week sued the management of the Donald Trump golf course near Aberdeen for taking photographs of her URINATING in the long grass as she crossed the course towards the sea. Ceratinly she had protested publicly against building this golf-course but she stated that her action was only related to a CALL OF NATURE and was not in any way a protest by different means. Her fellow Scots believe her because they consider that the owner of the course and his management are not worth even a millelitre of Scottish URINE.

Evidence showed that at least two male security operative sprang into surveillance mode when they saw the petite figure of the dangerous agitator making for the sand dunes.

“Uh-uh, buddy, guess we got a problem here….”

“Yeah, looks like this dame’s gonna PEE-PEE…..you think we should intervene..?

“No, she’s movin’ too fast, it’s too late to stop this atrocity…..

“She’s gonna SPRINKLE HER TINKLE all over the sacred surface on which the Great Leader has trod…. we gotta…

“We gotta act with supreme courage….. and video this crime….

“Good thinking buddy, yeah, just switching on now, and wow, we get this horrendous crime by a member of ideologically- motivated elite having a JIMMY RIDDLE where honest good golfers might land a ball….”

“Sure could be sabotage as well as public insult…like uh once she’s gone, some unsuspecting golfer lands a ball where she’s been DRAINING THE RADIATOR….

“And then maybe he picks up the infected ball and you never know what disgusting disease he gets – we gotta think of attempted homicide here….”

“Just keep the camera on this dame. she’s got no respect, no rescpect at all, shamelessly TAKING A WHIZZ in front of these cameras..”

“Sure is one long TROGGLE, soon be dinner time…”

“Boss man´s not gonna like seeing this video, what with it being a dame HOSING THE LAWN, uh, like the boss knows how to deal with dames, uh, like he said…..”

” Look Buddy, she´s movin´on now she´s MADE HER BLADDER GLADDER, we gonna confront her with the evidence?”

“No way, bro’, uh-uh, boss doesn’t pay enough for us to risk our lives with a terrorist like her, like a woman who could do this to a golf-course, just think what she could do to a human being-”

“So I need to go to the cops with evidence of this jihadi “POWDERING HER NOSE” while you phone the White House to update the boss…”

(Later)

” So what’s the word from the boss, bro’?”

“Uh, well, uh, he asked if we were ……..TAKING THE PISS!”

“Strange, buddy, that’s the exact same expression the Police Sergeant used….”

Ms Beyts, now celebrated in Scots legend as THE URINATOR (to match the man who fought the Glasgow Airport terrorists, John Smeaton THE SMEATONATOR), falied to win her case but celebrated nevertheless and said ( honest!) that she was RELIEVED it was all over.

 

 

 

 

Every now and again, something happens to wake me out the routine of religious duty in which by choice I live, to remind me that I have another life focused on words, on their meaning and beauty in the works of great writers of many languages, especially perhaps, in poetry. This is a life which I share with my wife who has an incomparable memory for such words, and with my late best friend, Bob Cummings, whose knowledge of the history of literature was the envy of other great scholars. To some of my readers this may seem a kind of life which is a bit precious and privileged, at some distance from the “real world.” But no, for me it has always helped my engagement with mundane reality that there is another dimension where words are neither banal nor ugly but come dancing with precision, rhythm, melody and meaning. If verbal langauge is one of the defining abilities of humanity, then surely its good use is one of our defining glories. Sometimes the great words may be profound like the opening of George Herbert’s poem:

“Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back

guilty of dust and sin”

or they may look quite ordinary. When Hugh McDiarmid was asked for his favourite line of poetry, he surprised the questioner by answering:

“ye arena  Mary Morrison”

yet I agree that it memorably expresses the vexed particularity of romantic love.

Belonging to this world of words means that one’s everyday existence is accompanied and occasionally pierced through, with words from other times or places that make it harder to live superficially. I am not claiming some virtue here; I like superficiality as much as the next man or woman, but my heritage of great language is also intrusive.

These reflections are inspired by two experiences this week. One was pausing at the end of my almost daily run on the beach to look at the sea on a bright spring morning, only to have come into my head, Shakespeare’s lovely platitude,

“Like as the waves do make towards the pebbled shore

so do our minutes hasten to their end;”

Did I want reminded of that at my age? No, but the words stayed with me long enough to set me thinking about my dear dead ones, and more selfishly, about a bucket list of desired experiences before I snuff it.

The other was reading an obituary of the poet Derek Walcott, whose work I have enjoyed over many years. Shortly afterwards I came across a review of his latest published book, “Morning, Paramin” a collection of poems written to accompany an equal number of paintings by Scottish- born artist, Peter Doig, which I ordered immediately and received yesterday. It is one of the most beautfiful books I have seen, with each painting answered by a short poem on the facing page. Peter Doig is a figurative painter who focuses on people and places. These paintings are mainly inages from Trinidad where he lives. Walcott is a renowned poet, who is capable of great simplicity, wit and melody, in the same poem, as in the one about his dead wife which begins:

“To me the waking day is Margaret:”

It is a privilege to possess such a book and to have the meanness of my own perceptions challenged by the colourful generosity of its authors’. I guess that’s the heart of my citizenship of this other world: through good words it allows me to particpate in lives that are more vibrant than my own; to enlarge my experience by entering into the deeper experiences of others. When Virgil wrote:

“Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”

literally, There are the tears of things and mortalities touch the mind,

he was not just expressing the sorrow of existence in great words, but also reacting to the great words of his predecessors.

In fact of course this human ability to enter, through words, into the lives of others, is also central to my religious life, since it is by that same ability that I can make contact with the life of Jesus of Nazareth. For how does that passionate, wise, humorous, courageous, loving first century Jew burst into my twenty first century existence if not through his astonishing words recorded in the gospels:

You have heard that it was said by them of old times, ” You shall love your neigjbour and hate your enemy, but now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and sends rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.”

The words are such a refusal of all normal human consciousness and conduct, such an explosion of alien intelligence into our world, that it’s no wonder my tradition tells me I cannot enter into them without the help of the alien intelligence it calls the Holy Spirit. If nevertheless, I have entered into them, they give me access to what my tradition has called the humanity of God.

“Oh the Lion of Judah shall break every chain

and give us the victory again and again”

Bass drum and kettle drum and brass cornet

backed by the Salvation Army choir, black, few and scrawny

at Chisel Street corner seventy years ago. It breaks

my heart quietly every time I hear it.

( A Lion is in the streets. Morning, Paramin, Derek Walcott and Peter Doig, Faber &Faber)

Images by Peter Doig

The suicide killer leaves his story to be told by others. In the case of the man who killed four people in London this week, and seriously injured many others, his story has already been appropriated by IS, with little justification, and will doubtless be pieced together by the British security agencies in time. We tend to think that acts of suicidal killing demand an explanatory story, as they are otherwise incomprehensible.

Before I speculate on the possible back story of the London killer, it’s good to put this killing in context. More people will have been killed this week in Britain by bad driving, than by him; and more will be killed next week. This week also has seen at least a hundred civilians killed in Mosul by the coalition of which we and the USA are part. Probably most British citzens along with the British Press will be far more aware of the London killings, than the others mentioned here. They have nevertheless their own stories of which it is worth reminding ourselves.

We sell motor vehicles by telling a story about power and speed. Yes, comfort, efficiency and reliability have also a place, but the dominant car story is the promise of greater power and speed than someone else. Given this aggressive story it’s not surprising that many people drive aggressively, and in some cases without much concern for the lives of others. This story also governs the reaction of our society to the usual killings on the road: we accept it as a normal aspect of our life-style, and are only seriuously condemnatory when the killing is especially blameworthy through drink or drugs or rage. These are our kind of killers.

The same is true of the “accidental” killing of civilians in war. We dismiss some as inevitable accompaniments of war, others as the kind of mistake which is all too easily made by people under great pressure. We understand that at times, our armed forces will break the Geneva Convention, because they are themselves traumatised by persistent violence, as in the case of a the successful appeal of a British soldier last week against his conviction for murder. We tell a story about our duty to intervene in troubled parts of the world to bring peace and good government, and view the service men and women we send into these places as heroic police rather than as killers. Thus the killing of a wounded enemy with the words, “shuffle off this mortal coil you cunt” was seen as proof of trauma rather than brutality. All such killings are part of the British story of moral intervention in an evil world, rather than a more truthful story of protecting what we regard as our national interest by violence in distant places. These too are our kind of killers.

Suicidal killers, especially if they are apparently Muslim, are not our kind of killer, because we see them as “radicalised” by a story told by fundamentalist groups of how Britain has been part of a long-term war on Islamic peoples, against which the only protection is jihad which offers its martyrs the immediate reward of heaven. Certainly the theology of IS includes this story.

In all these cases however we can see that a persuasive story intersects with individual character in a way which leads to, if it does not always justify, violence. The army commander who wants to minimise casualties to his own troops while furthering his career, may with the help of a story of our heroic intervention for the sake of humanity, decide that totally destructive bombardment of premises which probably shelter civilians, is justified.  The young driver may already feel annoyed to be overtaken, but the macho motor car story that tells him he is a wimp if he doesn’t respond may make carnage more likely. The black man who feels the pain of racial prejudice in Britain, may be emboldened by the narrative of Islamic jihad, to enjoy brutal violence to his fellow citizens, and even to relish his own death.

Notice that the effect of the story is to persuade the actor that violence towards another human being is not only not wrong but in fact positively virtuous. The violent competetiveness of the driver, the callousness of the soldier, the the bitter resentment of someone who has been the object of prejudice, these exist anyway; they are not called into being by the story. Rather, the story directs and justifies their expression. The specific mood of the stories is entitlement: the actor is assured that he is entitled to be violent. Something that might have been a bad but containable impulse, becomes a course of action that can be defended.

I make no apology for contrasting people who use violence to others, with the gentle people, the “meek” blessed by Jesus as those who will inherit the holy land rather than the Jewish jihadists of Jesus’ day. They are also given a story; in this case one which encourages them to trust God and to walk softly. It is a story about a fatherly God who makes his sun rise on the just and the unjust and sends his rain on the good and the bad alike. To be a true child of such a God involves treating other people as his children too and rejecting the persuasive narratives of hatred or indifference. Indeed the Gospel story of the leader who endures brutality without hatred, is a powerful encouragement to the decent, small, gentle people who are the salt of the earth. They are not wimps but have learned to channel their aggression into the arts of peace.

We may celebrate the conversion of a person from violence to such arts, as in the case of St Paul or the late Martin McGuinness, but we may guess that in both cases they were turned from  violence as much by the quiet, enduring, courageous gentleness of some of their victims, as by the attractions of peace. The stories of such victims, along with that of Jesus, are the ones we need to tell, as publicly as possible. The human experiences which lead to violent impulses will always be present in people, but with the help of good stories rather than bad, they may sometimes be contained and used to fuel the struggle for justice and peace.

 

 

I love the bible more than most people,  because I love it as it really is, with all its faults, rather than the magically purified version some believers read. Or perhaps in fact they don’t read it, they just read little text boxes from it; for in truth only a large degree of ignorance of its contents, can convince people that the bible is holy. It is a magnificent mixture of myth, legend, history, theology, morality, folk tales, liturgy, law, poetry, philosophy and propaganda; it laughs and weeps and howls with rage; it has a terrible beauty, but holy it is not, nor inerrant, nor always even right.

One of the ways it’s not right is its racism, which is not at all peripheral to its message  but central: God has chosen the Jewish people as his own, and therefore he treats other races as disposable. The promised land originally belonged to various other peoples, some semitic, some asian, some indo-european, who must have had their good points, but the Bible regards them as so much trash to be ethnically cleansed from Canaan so that God’s people can take it over. At times the Lord gets so annoyed at the continued survival of some of these tribes that he punishes his own people for not killing them off with sufficient thoroughness.

Now scholars tell us that it didn’t happen that way, that the Jewish settlement of  Cannaan was gradual and mainly peaceful, but that’s not the point: the Bible tells a story of brutal conquest and ethnic cleansing, and tells it with approval, attributing a greater degree of racism to God than to his humans. Fact. Certainly within the Hebrew Bible there are counterblasts to this racism, such as the many laws commanding care of the stranger and the foreigner, as well as the books of Ruth and Jonah which tackle racism head on; but it is nevertheless integral to the main story of that  Bible, which is of God’s unconditional love for Israel, and his relative unconcern for other peoples.

The New Testament presents a very different picture. The earliest writings which are the letters of Paul, show a mission devoted to the inclusion of Gentiles along with Jews in the Assemblies of Jesus, and a theology which regards the rejection of Messiah Jesus by his own people as God’s way of opening up his sphere of favour to the Gentiles. Paul spends a lot of time teasing out the issues which arise in the life of a multi- ethnic community, and he is adamant that Jewish Torah rules should have no place in the life of God’s new people.

By the time when John’s Gospel was written, say 100 CE, a further change has taken place, in that there is real animosity between followers of Jesus and Torah -observant Jews, so much so that it repeatedly refers to the opposition to Jesus, as “The Jews” using rhe usual Greek word for Jews, “Iudaioi”.

This would be so blatant an instance of racism, that I translate it as “Judeans” instead, which gives the author the benefit of the doubt, that he may be referring to Jews of a particular sect, rather than the whole race. On the face of it however, we have, right in the heart of Christian scripture, a gross prejudice which has been used down the centuries as an excuse for persecuting Jewish people. In one of the tragic turns of history a race whose ideology set it above all other races, became a race that could be persecuted by Christendom for the crime of deicide, the murder of God. Paul’s multi- ethnic community which welcomed all-comers became, and remained for much of history, a church in whose scheme of salvation the hatred of Jews was well-embedded.

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan,  visited Scotland last week, to give a speech at the Scottish Labour Party conference, in which he likened the national movement Scotland to racism, because both create separation between human beings on the grounds of their origin. The was a monumnetal stupidity even for a conference in which stupidies abounded. For a start the National party, the SNP includes people of all ethnic origins, including many English who live in Scotland. Its policy explicitly promotes a multicultural society and welcomes immigration and the free movement of labour within the EU.

But Khan’s error is also stupid in his view of nationalism as always exclusive, and likely to drift towards persecution on the  grounds of race. Yes, the Nazis were racist as well as nationalist. Yes, the Serbian nationalists who massacred Bosnians were also racist. But there is no good reason for imagining that all nationalisms are contamninated with arrogant exclusivity. The generous nationalisms of 19th century Greece and Italy were fired by a desire to create open and democratic societies.

The contamination of the Bible by racism is evidence that there is a deep-seated human impulse to fear the stranger, which can be corrupted into arrogance, exclusivity and hatred. If followers of Jesus are to oppose racism in their own societies and beyond, they must begin by confessing the racism in their holy book. But more, they should study the evidence of inclusiveness, multiracialism and equality in the writing of St Paul and in the communities of Jesus Messiah which he established. By any standards the man who argued that in his Messiah there was neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female, slave nor free, deserves attention at a time when varieties of populism succeed by blaming the woes caused by capitalism on people of other race or nationality. If Christian churches could translate Paul’s inclusiveness into contemporary words and actions, they could redeem their own traditions and help build a humane alternative to the aggressive ghettos of Wilders, Farage, Trump and their like.

 

 

Even the tabloid press had the pictures of the star system with  no less than seven earth -sized, earth-type planets all within the optimal distance of their star for habitability. For reasons unknown to me, the system, which is 40 light years from earth, has been christiened “Trappist 1.” If this is on the assumption that it maintains silence, it may turn out to be seriously mistaken. With hundreds of exoplanets now known to exist, and our capacity to spot them increasing all the time, there is perhaps a chance that I’ll live to see the first contact between life on earth and life on another planet, whether that contact is in the form of confirmation that some sort of life exists elsewhere, or of a message from another civilisation, or much less likely, the arrival in the earth of beings from space. 

The distances are against personal visits, except by people who have solved the problem of travelling at the speed of light, or have discovered short-cuts in the fabric of spacetime. On the other hand a message from Tappist 1 would take only 40 years to get here, and it may have been sent some time ago.

For the purposes of this blog, let’s  assume that the Trappists have sent us an unmistakable message with extensive information and video about their planet and their very advanced civilisation, and that all the efforts of govenments to hide this information have  been unsuccessful. What difference would this make to our lives?

My guess is that it would lead in some quarters to a loss of confidence: not only are we not unique, we are not the most advanced form of life in the universe. Doubtless we might hope to learn from the Trappists, but if they are as wise as they are advanced, would they be willing to tell us any of their secrets? Quite a range of human thinking and acting has been based on the assumption that we are the the most intelligent creature known to us. If, as we think, knowldege is power, does the contact from the Trappists not also mean that we are less powerful than we imagined?   I think that although we have often enough envisaged such contact in our fictions, its actuality would be a profound shock to every aspect of our sciences, philosophies cultures….and religions.

Unlike our sciences, most of our religions and their sacred texts come from a pre-scientific age, and contain statements and assumptions that are already contested by our own best knowledge. The Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in particular, have assumed that God is mainly concerned with earthlings, even if he is also the god of the universe. In particukar, God has communicated his absolute truth to earthlings, via selected or uniquely engendered male messengers. How will these powerful traditions cope with being revealed as local rather than universal, time-bound, rather than eternal? How would biblical and Qur’anic fundamentalists cope with with evidnce that their sacred texts have not revealed the whole truth?

Doubtless we would want to hear from the Trappists whether they have any equivalent  of our religions or whether their responses to the mystery of the universe and the purpose of life, are solely scientific, aesthetic or  ethical. As a follower of Jesus I would not expect to hear that they believed in a human son of God. Given that they are more like our bacteria than any other earth creatures and identify themselves as networks of billions of single cell organisms, their notion of a perfect creature is likely to be very different from ours. They have told us that their mode of learning, like that of bacteria, is based on the exchange and mutation of cells rather than the electrical coding of information accomplished by the human brain. They have ahown us images of creatures on their planet that are a little like human beings with muscled bodies, eyes, and the ability to stand upright, but these are  used by the Trappists as mobile homes for networks of their own species.

They congratulate us that our sciences are universal in scope, and suggest, to the annoyance of our scientists that they must have learned this crucial truth from our religions. They commend the universal scope of both our sciences and our religions as crucial growth points for our civilisation.

I would want to tell them the story of Jesus, but perhaps because as networks of replaceable cells they never die, they may have no stories of their own. Stories, having a beginning, middle and end, may only be produced by intelligent creatures who die.  They might not be able to understand the death of Jesus.  Where might I begin a dialogue that touched their fundamental concerns as well as mine?

1. Because they are aware of the universe, we could share our understanding and appreciation of its processes.

2. Because they are self-concious intelligent living beings, they will appreciate the intricacy and value of all life, SO

a) I can communicate my dislike of everything which degrades or destroys life and

b) my love of everything that nurtures life and enables it to flourish

I can hope that even if they do not completely share these feelings, that they will understand them and have equivalents in their own souls and culture. If so, we will be able to have a dialogue which is based nothing more than our common existence as intelligent life in the same universe.  We will moreover be talking about the fundamental issues with which our religions deal. In learning about how they protect life from destructive forces and how they nurture their own life and the living beings of their planet, I would be ready to hear of nurturing events which happen amongst them but are said to come also from beyond them, that is, theor experience of a “beyond” in the midst of life, which is for me the experience of God.

I think that although our sciences and cultures might be so far apart that no equal  exchange could take place but only their instruction of us, our appreciation of the same universe, of good and evil and of God, could be a true conversation of equal partners: of life forms committed to the common miracle of life.