Apparently, according to BBC radio, today in the House of Commons one MP, I think Gordon Brown, stood up and as part of what he said told members (and presumably the public) who they should vote to be evicted from the Big Brother House.

In 100 years time, someone will be reading Hansard and, rightly, wonder if we had really and trully lost the plot.

I have not watched the programme this time (never did watch the celebrity versions anyway) but it is a sad endictment on our culture when it seems blatant racism makes prime time TV and the government feels the way to handle it is to tell us who to vote out, thereby boosting someone's profits.  Meanwhile issues of justice, peace and truth don't even make the leader columns in the press.  Ah me. 

Not about arriving before the start of something rather than after it has begun, though anyone who knows me also knows that being late is something I dread, often arriving way too early 'just in case.'  No, really this is 'about' time, or more specifically our concept thereof.

One of the books I've been reading on historical method asserts that the way that time is understood underwent a radical shift with Newton (et al) and that this is something that we in the west are so accustomed to, we cannot imagine it otherwise.  I think there are essentially two strands to this, one being a shift from seeing time as being the period between 'Genesis and Revelation' (or creation and the eschaton), a sort of God-centred-time and the other being the emergence of the concept of time as a 'commodity' - something that became important with increasing industrialisation.

If this is a correct understanding of what was being said, or even if it isn't, it has been whirling around my subconscious for a week or so now, along with other weird and wonderful thoughts on time and history etc.

Time is generally seen as one-dimensional and uni-directional, hence our fascination by the idea of time travel.  I appreciate that clever physicists like Einstein can adjust this view, but it seems a reasonable expression of 'everyday time.'  Historians divide this linear time into chunks based on various assumptions - e.g. periods such as pre-history, dark ages, middle ages, etc; e.g. dynasties and monarch's 'houses'; e.g. uniform chunks called centuries; even BC/AD (or BCE/CE if you prefer). The concept of epochs and eras seem to predate Newton and professionalised history; recording ages and durations goes back to Biblical times so I'm not altogether sure it's really an 'Enlightenment' or 'modern' development to do this.  The shift is more about a 'secularised' view of time, such that the 'kronos' element is all important and 'kairos' idea becomes marginalised, nowadays largley relegated to personal spiritual 'God moments.'

Time as a commodity - that can be bought and sold - is a concept that I find more intriguing to ponder, maybe because it has more relevance to my life and work.  December 25th 2006 one of my brothers was paid £100+ an hour to work on railway signals, whilst my other brother as a police officer was paid his flat rate and I, as a minister of religion would not dare to estimate an hourly rate, because that isn't how it's meant to be viewed.  Somehow or other, an hour of a experienced signalling technican on a bank holiday is very expensive because it is a rare commodity; an hour of a police officer or a minister is cheap, not because there are endless supplies of them, but because it is assumed that they are available.

It is hard to imagine a time before time was a commodity - and this is what the book was trying to say - an era when people took as long as it took to do things, when there were no university deadlines of 4 p.m. on 18th July (or whatever it is) and the concept of an hourly rate (or annual rate if you're a minister) did not exist.  As society became more industrialised we obviously needed order and predictability - train timetables were not always a work of fiction and start/finish times for factories and schools are necessary if they are to achieve their aims.

Time as a commodity is something that is relevant in our postmodern age, and especially for churches, since people have to chose 'how much time to spend' (note the financial language) in different areas of their lives.  Present day 'stewardship campaigns' in churches usually focus on 'time', 'talent' and 'treasure', and I well remember offering a tithing approach to use of time the last time we had such a series.  To consciously assign 16.8 hours a week (of which a third could be sleeping!) to Godward intent would be consistent with giving 10% of income to Godly causes.  Whilst I don't find sacred/secular divides helpful, especially in relation to time, it seemed a way of encouraging people to think how they apportion the commodity they have called 'time.'  I'm not entirely sure I still hold that view, as I can see its flaws all too clearly, but when I struggle to get people to get involved in projects we have committed to because they 'don't have time,' a commodity approach seems to be the only language I have.

I'd love to waffle on for ages - to think about how it sometimes feels that time goes faster or slower, and whether we could actually ever know if it did; to play with the existential (?) question of whether or not yesterday really happened or if it is just something embedded by a creator in the mind of a person who is made NOW - but my commodity of time is limited and I need to do other things this day.

If you have read this far, thank you for bearing with me.  If you have understood a word I've said, I'm impressed.  If you can move my thinking along, I'd love to know.

Having completed reading Spirituality and Theology, which was a generally good experience, I am now reading The Undoing of Death by the delightfully named Fleming Rutledge, which is a book of sermons.

I have read the first two and I'm not sure.  Not sure, that is, about reading rather than hearing sermons.  They are well crafted and I'm sure have been editted to some extent for publication.  They are competent (meeting most of my criteria for good preaching) but reading them is not the same as hearing them would be.  The whole 'shape' and 'feel' of an act of worship is lost, the ebb and flow of (loosely used in my case) liturgy is missing and even though I have experienced the style of worship in which she preaches, something is missing.

Maybe I'm not the typical reader of the book - I am not dipping in to it, nor am I seeking ideas to pinch for sermons of my own, rather I am systematically using it as devotional resource.  I will stick at it, not simply becuase I'm stubborn like that, but because I'm sure that there are pearls to be discovered along the way.

After this (or even as an interruption to it) it will time to read this year's Archbishop's Lent book, which I've just ordered from dear old Amazon.  Samuel Wells Power and Passion is reviewed thus on the St Andrew's Press website: -

Samuel Wells vividly paints the stories surrounding Jesus’ cross and resurrection. We see the weakness of Pontius Pilate and Barabbas, and the compromised character of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. We discover the subtle power of Pilate’s wife. And in Peter and Mary Magdalene we find the true power of resurrection, bringing forgiveness and ending the stranglehold of death, thus transforming all human passion. Through close readings of the gospel texts, Wells demonstrates the significance of these characters for faith and life today. In this book, structured with one chapter for each week of Lent, Wells guides us from the deathly power that put Jesus on the cross to the new power brought by Jesus’ resurrection. The book offers opportunities at the end of each chapter for prayer and discussion. The Archbishop of Canterbury has selected Power and Passion as his Lent book for 2007.

 

Sounds good and definitely meets the 'improving book' requirements!!

Is this a conspiracy to stop me working?  Just about a foot from my PC (the other side of a single brick wall) a man in a hi viz jacket is using a pneumatic drill to dig down to the gas suplies to (finally) disconnect the church building from the mains.

Meanwhile opposite the manse there is no footpath but instead a deep hole left by the electricity supply company (overseen by a woman in a hi viz jacket; very inclusive!) when they dug it up last week to replace a defective supply cable.

Just so long as the water company or telecom or cable don't decide to join in...

At this rate soon I will be living on an island.

And not getting any work done.

I have always tended to my 'active thinking' by writing - when I had a 'real' job my files were always among the fattest in the office because I wrote reams and reams of stuff, including daft messages to myself.  This had the advantage that tracing back through development of work was easy but does mean that somewhere recorded for posterity are some of my more inane comments.  I also do a lot of 'passive thinking' where I go off and do something else leaving my subconscious to mull over things, which is fine except when it wakes me up in the wee small hours to tell me the answer- which I then have to remember until such time as I can write it down (I am too lazy to switch on lights and scribble at 3 a.m.!).

This is an example of the former and constitutes today's study hour.  I'm not sure it exactly relates to what I'm meant to be thinking about, but it comes out of my reading and I wanted to explore/record it before I forget it again.

Appleby et al in Telling the Truth About History speak of a 'melting pot' revisionist approach to rewriting American history and note that an alternative would be a 'colourful patchwork quilt.'  I wonder if there are other possiblilities? Either a woven fabric or a child's kaleidoscope?

The melting pot (which inevtiably sends a certain 1960's (?) song through my brain) basically seems to suggest that if you take all the various perspectives - white/black, rich/poor, male/female etc. and melt them all down you emerge with a kind of homogeneous history.  This assumes that there is 'one overall history' - a western, post-Enlightenment view of time and a broad sense that 'later is better' (i.e. the idea that progress is always forward in time).  It is an attractive idea but one that is easy to critique - it assumes that the various constituents can all be melted and that they will form at worst an amalgum and preferrably an alloy (I always knew my scientific background was essential!) with, presumably, minimal dross or that it can readily be burned/skimmed off.  It also seems to assume that there is one single mould into which the resultant melt is poured and allowed to harden.  Of course, the advantage of this model is that if you decide the mould you have chosen is 'wrong' you can melt it all down again and pour it into a new mould - changing a castle into a rabbit or some such!  And presumably as more raw material comes along (new events, ideas etc) the whole thing needs periodic remelting and moulding (in a 'bigger' mould?) and each process will lose a small amount of what has gone before.  Whilst I have some sympathy with this image - and a sense that at some level there is an overarching and growing 'commodity' of 'history' I am not sure that trying to consolidate it into one neat block is necessarily helpful, if indeed possible.

The patchwork quilt is a very American image, and probably a feminine one at that.  What it is basically saying is that if you piece all the bits together as they stand, you emerge with something that is colourful and has a surprising beauty.  The individual colours and patterns are still discernible within the whole.  It is again an image that is appealing but limited.  My own experience of patchworking was of carefully selecting colours that would 'go' reasonably well together and then cutting prices to some pre-determined shape - hexagons or 'log cabin' rectangles being those I recall.  Eventually the quilt (or other item) reaches the size you desire and you add a border to contain the whole.  Piecing together histories isn't that neat - the colours/designs may not 'go', the pieces vary in shape and size, and the edges are far from tidy.  A 'good' patchwork needs to be created with some sense of structure/order - how are the pieces of history arranged in the patchwork to form a coherent and meaningful result?  Who decides what goes where and how it is trimmed to fit?  What are the boundaries.  In extremis, such a view could be taken to a level of total individualism where each person's history is distinct and simply laid alongside those of others - the sense of 'interconnectedness' is lost, with ideas/experiences simply set alongside each other.  In common with the melting pot there is a sense of a finite (if growing) body of history, the difference is that there is no attempt to synthesise a single view, other than the view that says it's a patchwork.

So is there an alternative?  I'm sure there are many, but the two that came to mind immediately were of a woven fabric and of a child's kaleidoscope.  Neither is perfect but each offers some thoughts on how to approach the polyvocality of history in a way that acknowledges boundaries and finitude without becoming either the single monochrome steel or jelly of the melting pot or the potentially individualistic patchwork.

The woven fabric (not the 'tapestry' of a 1970's (?) song) is a well established image and one which can be readily critiqued - what is chosen as the weft and warp, who decides etc. - but which seems to me to combine some of the better attributes of both the melting pot and patchwork quilt ideas.  Like the melting pot, it endeavours to take all the bits and combine them into one new thing.  As the strands are woven together the resulting fabric has texture and colour, some sort of design influenced by the weaver (think of checks, plaids, houndstooth etc) but the individual colours and strands can still be distinquished and, if desired, removed.  I like the old Islamic story of the Persian carpet-maker who makes a design and then makes a deliberate error because only Allah can create perfection; the craftsperson then labours to work the error into the whole so that only an expert can detect it ever existed.  Creating a historical fabric includes deliberate errors, concealed by powerful or influential writers, but that doesn't stop the overall exercise being worthwhile and helpful.  More likely is accidental errors or omissions that need to be repaired if the fabric is to be as good as possible.  Images of Asian carpet makers who only see the back of the carpet are now familiar; English weavers sat at the foot of a giagantic loom and could only see a small protion of what they were creating: both images remind me that the writer of history cannot see the whole 'big picture' but works on the part they can see to the best of their ability.

The kaliedoscope is an image/metphor I first encountered in looking at models/images of church (Kinnear?)  This way of looking at history is more like the patchwork model but does not need to be quite so tidy.  Although there are clear boundaries within which the chips of coloured glass may be rearranged, there are no rules on how they are arranged.  Further the chips are not just diffent colours but different sizes and shapes; as the child (or adult!) twists and turns the toy, the chips move to form different patterns.  This is a very postmodern image!  In extremis, of course, it means that any way of mixing and matching history is valid, and that may well not be true, since there are n! ways of combining n 'ideas', discounting orientation and other factors (just showing off a bit of maths there!).

What all of the images/models do is try to find a way of accommodating all (? some) different 'histories' within a framework that might be conceivable or workable.  Each has some strengths and weaknesses and I'm not sure that any is necessarily superior or inferior.  The 'melting pot' assumes that some homogeneous world history is possible, and instinctively at some 'high' or 'overall' level I feel this is valid.  The patchwork quilt reminds us that the homogenisation process loses the sharp relief and keen insights that are found by retaining cultrual, racial, gendered etc, distinctives but runs the risk of promoting a very individualised approach.  The woven fabric seems to combine the strengths of each of these - albeit with its own weaknesses - affirming the place of particular distinctives within an overall whole.  The kaliedesope shows how a less rigid 'shape' approach can be helpful but also adds a note of caution about simply combining things indifferent ways - they may be beautiful or attractive, but are they helpful?

Not sure this advances the understanding of anything, but has taken an hour to type and helps me to think a bit more about what I've been reading.