Feast of the Transfiguration: Thousands Face Death on the Mountain

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Mountains are somewhere apart from the mainstream of the world. They are often gorgeous, above the general fray of life, intensitying the beauty and hiding the ugly side of reality on the ground in the vistas they command. Approached wrongly, or in difficult conditions, they can be places of death.

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, when Christians remember the pilgrimage of Christ with Peter, James and John – up an unknown mountain, but probably Hermon or Tabor. The prophets Elijah and Moses appear to them, and Christ’s face and clothes are transformed, and begin to radiate light. God the Father’s disembodied voice pronounces Christ as his son, recapitulating his baptism in the Jordan, and the episode is often held to mark a turning point in Christ’s journey, where it begins to run towards its culmination in Jerusalem.

The mountains of Galilee, on one of which the incident took place, sit at one end of an arc from the mountains of Kurdistan. On a straight line, about 500 miles of flat Syrian desert separate them, desert which for three years, since the start of the Syrian Civil War, been one of the most violent battlefields on the planet.

Two months ago, Syria’s torment blew back across the border into Iraq with a vengeance. The self-styled “Islamic State” has proclaimed itself the resurrection of Sunni Islam’s Caliphate, in abeyance since the collapse of the Ottoman dynasty 90 years ago. In the past few weeks, ISIS has made a serious advance from the Sunni heartlands of West-Central Iraq into the ethnic and religious kaleidoscope of the Far North.

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Interesting posts: autism, WW1, threats to liberal democracy, Iran

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Some great writing around at the moment, too much to keep up with sometimes. Here’s some of the best.

The Kids Who Beat Autism – New York Times

I always worry about articles like this giving false hope to people. Some kids develop quite normally after autism in early childhood. But most don’t. We don’t understand autism very well, or even if it’s a condition or series of entirely unrelated conditions masquerading under shared syndrome name.

Which means I love the way this piece ended, with words from a parent whose son remains, in adulthood, severely impaired in terms of communications and who will never live independently.

“At some point,” she told me, “I realized he was never going to be normal. He’s his own normal. And I realized Matthew’s autism wasn’t the enemy; it’s what he is. I had to make peace with that. If Matthew was still unhappy, I’d still be fighting. But he’s happy. Frankly, he’s happier than a lot of typically developing kids his age. And we get a lot of joy from him. He’s very cuddly. He gives us endless kisses. I consider all that a victory.”

As somebody said, being normal is overrated. Being happy and giving love to the people who care about you most is the most useful thing any of us can do. Matthew clearly lives a life of great worth, however ‘unsuccessful’ it might be by worldly standards.

How The Great War Razed East Africa – Africa Research Institute

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Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square

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I attended the national demonstration on the persecution of Iraqi Christians in Parliament Square, London on Saturday 26 July. There was a large turnout of Iraqi and other Middle Eastern Christians, a healthy and welcome presence of Iraqi Muslims, a disappointingly small number of British Christians who looked like their ancestry was from these islands … Read more

Prisoners of Conscience on St John the Baptist’s Day

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gxMq7s0ELE

I always had a good appetite as a child, getting stuck into seconds and more whenever I had the chance. My mother, observing this, would often remark, “Son, you’d eat the head of John the Baptist.”

John the Baptist’s messy end is one of the best known of Bible stories. Like most Gospel stories, it is a short narrative and doesn’t go in for detailed descriptions of personalities and motives. As so often, much of the popular memory of the story doesn’t come from Scripture at all.

Oscar Wilde’s grotesquely brilliant play Salomé, later turned into the first true 20th Century opera by Richard Strauss and then into a Holywood epic by Columbia Pictures, has added much to the popular perception of John the Baptist’s death, even among those who have never seen any. Scripture does not record the nymphomaniac, borderline necrophiliac, Salomé of Wilde, Strauss, and Rita Heyworth, but instead a girl very much under the thumb of a ruthless mother with a personal grudge against John because of his uncompromising sexual moralism.

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Why is Cathedral Evensong Growing and What Does It Mean?

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This piece appeared in the May-June 2014 edition of Salisbury Cathedral News I’ve always preferred the intimate parish church community to a cathedral’s grandeur. I came to mature faith in Belfast’s city centre parish of St. George’s, walking past the door of the Cathedral to do so. Since arriving in Salisbury last summer, I’ve yet … Read more

The Good Samaritan Visits North Belfast

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And, behold, a certain pastor stood up, and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?

He said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou?

And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.

And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?

And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down the Whitewell Road, from Bellevue to Greencastle, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

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In response to Owen Jones: In Defence of the Establishment of the Church of England

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Owen Jones’ appeal for the separation of church and state showed a deep respect for Christianity in general and the Church of England in particular. But he failed to explain how and why disestablishment would be an improvement. Throughout the article, I only read one serious criticism of the status quo: that it is an ‘anachronism’.

Perhaps so – the relationship between Church and state in Britain is certainly illogical. The monarch swears in the Coronation Oath to maintain the “Protestant Reformed Religion established by law”, but Britain doesn’t have an established Church. England has one, and Scotland has a different one, more thoroughgoingly Protestant than the curious part-Catholic hybrid south of the border. No kirk celebrated Holy Week like we did at St Martin’s in Salisbury, with prostrations before the Blessed Sacrament and kissing of the cross. Wales, like Northern Ireland, gets by without an established church.

Indeed Northern Ireland argues against disestablishment as a means of promoting good relations between faith communities. The Church of Ireland was disestablished fifty years before Northern Ireland’s creation, and was in any case the minority Protestant tradition in the new state. That didn’t prevent a horrendous history of state-sanctioned anti-Catholic discrimination, nor a descent into thirty years of ethno-religious violence.

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So You Follow Jesus? Are You Sure?

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A common line in blogs and sermons these days is to call on people to be followers of Jesus and not just admirers of Jesus. There’s nothing wrong with that on one level. I like to think I do that sometimes myself; but I know just how flaky I am when the going gets tough. Following Christ is hard. Sometimes even being an admirer of Christ is hard; often it’s hardest even to like Jesus when one really has tried to follow Jesus to the Cross and ended up being crucified.

Some of those blogs make out that if you don’t follow Jesus, 100% of the time, right to the end, then you aren’t a real Christian. If that’s the case, then there are no real Christians. I wonder what image they have of themselves if they think they’re the real Christ followers, with the authority to lecture the poor benighted masses who just want an easy ride.

In Holy Week, Palm Sunday was when everybody got to admire Jesus; the night of Maundy Thursday was when following Jesus got really hard and everybody, and I do mean everybody, abandoned Him.

We’re all good at liking Jesus on Palm Sunday. We all love Jesus when He rides into Jerusalem in triumph, fulfilling the prophecies, and doing nothing to contradict our understanding of what a Messiah looks like. The Kingdom of God is at hand! Safe as one of a crowd of thousands, we know Jesus will soon show His power. As we’re good Christians, we know that will be good for everyone, and especially for us.

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Russia, China, Crimea, Xinjiang and Putin’s Risky Gambit

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Photo credit – www.kremlin.ru under Creative Commons licence.

Crossposted at Slugger O’Toole with a few amendments of no particular significance to improve the readability…

A friend on Facebook led me to this Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article in the Telegraph on the possible impact of Putin’s Crimea gambit on Sino-Russian relations. Pritchard has his own prejudices, of course, and the headline is terrible – there is no Sino-American diplomatic co-ordination to effect a ‘double pincer’ but – the article is worth reading. China’s failure to back Russia at the UN Security Council was significant, but not surprising.

It’s a useful corrective on a UK mainstream media narrative dominated by commentators telling us the West has miscalculated in doing anything other than patting Russia on the back over the past month, as it is claimed that Russia will simply reorient itself towards China in the event of any sanctions.

Let’s start with the idea that Russia will reorient towards China. China is, of course, a rapidly growing market for both energy and commodities. There is, however, no gas pipeline between Russia and China. China already sources a huge amount of energy from Central Asia and the Middle East (never forget that 90% of Gulf oil flows east). Why should China buy Russian gas and not Kazakh or Turkmen gas through an already existing pipe? Evans-Pritchard correctly points out that China is an assertive player in the New Great Game taking place in Central Asia over gas and much else.

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