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I meant to blog something about this after it aired, but didn’t get round to it. So when Leah needed a quick review I thought I’d write something on it:
Review: Torchwood – Children of Earth
This five part miniseries, shown on consecutive nights over the course of a week, was a new format for Torchwood, the Dr Who spin-off series, bringing it to BBC1 and prime-time viewing for the first time after 2 seasons of relative obscurity in the listings. The teaser trailer pulled in large numbers of viewers for a slice of well-scripted, intelligent sci-fi written for the Spooks generation, where half the battle is fought against your own government.
The series really delivered, however, on the premise behind Torchwood as a series – this was Sci-fi for adults, with a decidedly different tone from Dr Who’s more family-friendly happy endings. As the series progressed it became clear that simple heroism wasn’t going to be enough to save the day, and the characters were left to make the second-best and last-resort choices that this sort of story usually doesn’t show people making. John Barrowman’s Captain Jack has never seemed more morally ambiguous, and the story went to extreme lengths to demonstrate that a man who cannot die can, in consequence, suffer a good deal more than any normal human being should. Gratifyingly, however, his suffering was not allowed to exonerate him from blame for the horrific choices he came to make.
Ultimately, as the subtitle suggests, this was a story about children. How we protect them, what value we place upon them, the things we sacrifice for them and the reasons we might make a sacrifice of them. The biggest underlying question was whether it is ever right to treat them as objects (whether that be drugs, ‘units’, or transmitters). Any TV series, Sci-fi or otherwise, that starts seriously exploring those issues is worth watching. The more so if, admirably, it refuses to close them with a ‘happy ever after’.
We’ve been doing an occasional film & discussion group at church, and we did Da Vinci code recently, which was fun, and gave me an excuse to get history nerdy and point out where things went far adrift of reality. Anyway, as A & D was just being released in the cinema we took a group to go and see it. I’ve been reading the book too. Well, the film was fun (and actually hangs together better than Da Vinci Code – once again the preposterous plot is ably assisted on its way by a very capable supporting cast) but I’m now unsure whether it’s worth meeting up for a discussion of it. There just doesn’t seem to be much to discuss from the film. As presented, the whole science & religion thing is distinctly downplayed, the Illuminati are a bit of a red herring, and the Catholic church do kind of what you’d expect them to do in the circumstances (with the exception of one character, the weirdness of whom is fairly central to the story). All in all, the church come fairly well out of it – given the feather-ruffling caused by Da Vinci Code Brown presents a suprisingly humane and sympathetic church here.
So, a bit of fun with not much real food for thought. That’s what I thought, however, until I finished reading the book. Now, I’m not a huge Dan Brown fan, and I feel at this point obliged to have a rant about his novels, so you may find it easiest to skip to the next paragraph when I’ve got this off my chest. He does just enough research to make the inaccuracies he includes very plausible to the innocent reader, and as a natural sensationaliser of history he tends towards the most entertaining and shocking interpretations of events. And (especially in the case of TDVC) the images he is presenting will linger long in people’s minds. The blue-tinted ‘history’ images from that film, depicting events that never happened will have an impact on the popular imagination that will not easily be undone. Just when Pagans were starting to concede that the myth of the Burning Times was exactly that, Dan Brown firmly underlines it in people’s minds. He’s also not the greatest writer. Robert Langdon has more than a touch of Mary Sue about him. He’s a good-looking sophisticated, witty, wealthy, Harvard professor with a world-wide reputation, seems to attract sexy smart women, and is also incredibly physically fit and a former champion swimmer… Then there’s the fact that Brown appears to only have one plot: academic is murdered with arcane symbols on his body, leaving a smart and sexy orphaned daughter to accompany Robert Langdon in following a series of clues in which they are hampered by a policeman who looks like a bad guy but turns out to be a good guy, and helped by a guardian angel who looks like a good guy but turns out to be the bad guy who has manipulated the whole thing. Oh, and they dodge some really weird psycho assassin on the way. I can only guess that it was to avoid making the overlap too obvious that Hollywood chose not to make the love interest the victim’s daughter this time, and made the assassin a conventional hitman for hire rather than a sadistic descendant of the cult of Hassassins (that and the fact that no-one wants to add a murderous muslim character just for ‘colour’ these days).
Anyway, I wasn’t overly impressed by the book as a piece of writing, but I did find the handling of the science/religion thing a lot more interesting than they chose to present it on screen. Although the villain is clearly nuts, he has a definite grasp of some interesting tensions between the church and modernity, understood in a more subtle form than is normally the case. The science/religion debate is often presented as being simply a clash between competing world-views, between rationality and superstition or faith and godlessness depending on your position. Commendably, Brown steers clear of this. He makes much of the fact that the two have never been entirely separate. Vetra is priest and scientist, seeking to prove God’s existence with science. And Janus is not a stereotypical advocate of religion alone. He embraces technology and progress. His issues are more subtle (though disturbingly he still feels drawn to take extreme measures to fight for them): the rate of scientific progress being allowed to outstrip growth in moral reflection, and a scientific mindset that encourages a search for answers even when reverent appreciation of mystery may be more appropriate. His problem is actually one of pace: the sense that the rate of scientific progress is pushing human beings beyond their ability to morally develop, that we are literally rushing in where angels fear to tread. This is a not uncommon feeling. Setting aside the trappings of the thriller (not many people feeling like this decide the answer is to provoke a war between science and religion by killing a few cardinals and threatening to blow up the Vatican), this is something well worth exploring.
It is certainly true that the pace of scientific and technological progress is accelerating. Moral codes and legal frameworks struggle to keep pace with scientific development that sometimes raises genuinely new questions: eg what is the moral status of life created from human genetic material but which is not in itself capable of becoming human life? It is likewise true that as a species we seem to find inventing ways to destroy easier than inventing ways to heal or create. Environmental issues as well as the legacy of warfare have left us very aware of the consequences of immoral and thoughtless applications of science in our world. In many ways the whole ‘modern world slipping further away from morality’ idea rings true. But there are some hidden assumptions in this line of argument, however congenial it may seem. Not least of these is that science is not permanently wedded to the idea that there is a single comprehensible answer to everything.
So, there’s probably something to discuss, but only if people have read the book, and to be honest I’m not sure I could in all conscience force people to do it…
I’m clearly on a roll here. Thought I’d jot down a few reflections on a brilliant two part documentary on BBC2 I managed to catch most of: The trouble with working women. Managed to pull off the neat trick of wading into hugely controversial waters, remaining light and entertaining, and raising really important thought-provoking issues, even if ultimately I’m not sure they were the ones the programme makers thought they were raising. It turns out that the trouble is less with working women, and more with working mothers. To conclude, as they did, by reflecting on whether women can ‘have it all’ and concluding it was all about women multi-tasking where men focused just on career seemed a step back from the level of reflection they’d actually achieved during the documentary, where one of the most acute questions posed was why female surgeons seemed to rise to the top of their profession at the expense of a family life, whereas the top male surgeon they interviewed spoke candidly about the anti-social hours he worked yet had a large family. The unspoken answer to the question seemed to be ‘yes, you can have it all, as long as your wife is prepared to run around like a headless chicken keeping all the balls in the air while you do it’.
The whole thing was full of suprising convention-challenging moments. The things that stayed with me were one of the founders of Spare Rib noting that they got it badly wrong because none of them had children; the suprisingly reactionary founder of the women’s refuge movement asking why we’re obsessed with senior executive posts when trying to evaluate whether we have equality in society or not; and the female executive of a small business stating tat she wouldn’t hire women of childbearing age because they’re inherently risky- likely to disappear on maternity leave, and that business would fight paternity leave provision tooth and nail because they need men of that age to continue to be predictable at being in work irrespective of having a family.
I was left wondering if the real issue was parenthood and why it is that women are socially conditioned to be the ones left holding the baby when the music stops. Can things change? Yes, with enlightened employers like the one they showcased, which basically takes the line that their staff are their prime resource and selling point to the customer, so staff retention is a high priority. On that basis they offer 9 months paid maternity leave, encourage flexible working, reduction of hours to work around childcare commitments, and do all of this with no negative impact on promotion prospects. The female executive they spoke to said when she was promoted to her current post she was pregnant and working part-time. Now if only we could encourage the church to put it’s money where it’s mouth is and follow best industry practice…
And as with the fight for equality for women within the church, I suspect focusing on top jobs and glass ceilings really misses the point. The issues that effect most women are bullying and harrasment and institutional issues connected with maternity leave and childcare. Counting how many women bishops there aren’t misses the point.
Mark
Well, Leah has finally bitten the bullet and started running, so I thought I ought to try and blog a bit more. And here’s my first offering: my first sermon in Heath Hayes, preached on Sunday, reproduced here by popular demand (well, Rosie asked for it anyway).
A couple of explanatory notes first:
I preach from headings rather than full text, so I’m not going to attempt to give a full text version here. I’ll hopefully expand the headings enough that it makes sense what I was saying. It also means that what goes down here is not necessarily exactly what anyone in church on Sunday heard. My sermons tend to evolve a bit depending on the setting.
And I’m experimenting with a new style here. For a while now I’ve been intruiged by the sort of structure used in stand up comedy, in particular Eddie Izzard’s routines, which I love to bits. He uses a structure where he appears to have no obvious progression of thought and be continually lurching off into bizarre and unanticipated flights of fancy yet the same characters or thoughts or ideas get woven into them. And each time a thought gets re-introduced into a new context, enabling it to be seen in a new light, it gets a bigger laugh. I wanted to try this sort of thing in a sermon: building the structure not around a logical progression of thought (as I normally do) but around a single idea, placed in different contexts. This sort of structure is well suited to John anyway, because he thinks like that, and I try to preach in a way that gives integrity to what’s there.
So, without further ado, on to the sermon: John 15:9-17 – Abiding in Jesus’ love.
A story (probably apocryphal): there was once a minister somewhere in scotland who had the habit, when he visited his parishoners, of sitting and listening to them, doing all the normal things you’d expect. But at the door on his way out, he’d turn and quote a verse of scripture at them. And then he’d say “Stick that under yer tongue and suck it like a sweetie”.
John’s gospel takes a bit of time to get your heard around, because John doesn’t think in straight lines. He thinks in spirals. He circles round and round ideas, seeing them from different angles. It’s like sucking on a sweet, a hard-boiled one, that you keep in your mouth and let it move around and around, tasting as more of the flavour emerges.
I think what John is saying in this passage is all about abiding in Jesus’ love. He’s circling around these words of Jesus “abide in my love”, seeing them from different angles. Abide, live in it, make your home in it. And I think what he’s saying about it is this: to abide is to obey, to obey is to love, to love is to abide.
To abide is to obey
The places we live shape us in different ways. My parents house is a semi with thin walls. So I learnt to play music quietly. My mother was a librarian. So I learnt to mark my place with a bookmark. My abiding had a shape. It’s not that there were a set of ‘house rules’ I had to follow or I’d be chucked out. Rather, I became a certain sort of person because of the place I lived. Abiding in Jesus’ love makes us Jesus’ love-shaped. Not ‘now you’re a Christian you’d better behave’ but ‘you’re a Christian, and that will shape you and your behaviour, like it or not’.
To abide is to love, to love is to obey, to obey is to abide.
To obey is to love
Very easy to hear John’s words ‘love your friends’ and think he’s got it wrong. We’re used to hearing about the challenge to love our neighbours, our enemies, to go beyond just loving our friends (don’t even the pagans do this? as Jesus asks in another gospel). But in some ways, loving our friends is harder than loving our enemies. Our friends, the people we have lived with, know us too well. They know the things we don’t like people to know about us. We know the things they don’t like people to know about them. Intimacy is a great challenge to love. There’s a saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt’. There’s a lot of contempt in families. There’s a lot of contempt in churches. Love your friends. There’s a challenge. Not a challenge to have a love that is wide enough to reach out to the stranger, but a challenge to have a love that is deep enough to go beyond our contempt. Abiding in Jesus’ love creates a family, people committed to loving each other despite themselves, self-sacrificially.
To abide is to obey, to obey is to love, to love is to abide.
To love is to abide
We are more used to the idea of living with people than we are to the idea of living with ideas. But we do, we live with ideas, we let them feed our hopes and dreams, eventually our thoughts and actions, and finally they come to birth – they bring change in the world around us. When Barak Obama was elected president, the first Black president of the United States, many people looked back to Martin Luther King and his speech ‘I have a dream’. That was an idea people lived with, a dream people lived with, that changed them, and changed the world. Jesus says we are his friends, not his servants, because he shares his plans with us. He doesn’t want blind obedience from us, he wants us to share his hopes, share his dreams, share in the idea of the Kingdom of God. To live with that idea until it changes us and changes the world.
As far as John is concerned, love is the very essence of that idea. We may struggle with the idea that love is what being a Christian is all about – we probably know many people who are genuinely loving yet would not describe themselves as Christian – but for John, love is so central to what God’s plans are about that he would likely tell us that love is love, and if you truly love you may not live at the address you think you do. John says love is the idea that Jesus calls us to abide in – live with it, inhabit it, let it change you and change the world around you.
To abide is to obey, to obey is to love, to love is to abide.
Jesus says ‘abide in my love’.
John says ‘to abide is to obey, to obey is to love, to love is to abide’.
The Scottish minister says ‘Stick it under your tongue and suck it like a sweetie’.
I’ve been trying to write an article on superheroes for a while now. When I first started it Spiderman had just come out and Smallville was being shown over here. I made references to the forthcoming Hulk and so on. It didn’t happen. But superheroes don’t seem to have gone away. X men and Spiderman have turned into successful franchises, Superman and Batman have been re-invented, and we’re now delving into the murkier depths of the Marvel stable, with Iron Man about to make an appearance, and a Captain America movie in the offing. And there’s Heroes.
Now I’m a big fan of superheroes, but that’s not what prompted me to write something. It’s more what they seem to stand for. The theme music for Smallville called for ’somebody to save me’. Superman Returns played on the Messianic overtones of everyone’s favourite Kryptonian. So are Superheroes expressing a yearning for god? A desire for some divine power to sweep in and save us? The little boy who asked his mom where Spiderman was when the twin towers were destroyed has been well-documented, and the Heroes series is coyly based on the premise that we live in a world that needs superheroes to save it (and specifically to save it from a disaster in New York). It’s worth mentioning here that seeing superheroes as semi-divine beings is not as far-fetched as it might seem. Marvel adopted various deities into it’s canon (Thor, Hercules) and in a sense this was just acknowledging that these sorts of stories have been with us for a long time, and when they first appeared, people had no difficulty in frankly acknowledging that they were stories about divine intervention. It’s a peculiarly modern phenomenon to employ pseudo-science to make the powers ’super’ rather than ‘divine’.
The thing is that the desire for someone to save us is only part of the appeal of superheroes. Part of it is the desire to be a hero ourselves. Spiderman is the obvious example here – a very ordinary guy, very similar to his readers (a bit of a nerdy teenager), who happens to have super powers. Heroes the series again is based on the premise that these are ordinary people – people like us. The superhero is an example of what we could be – something to aspire to – if we remember the simple lessons, that ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. The superhero is in a sense simply a straightfoward hero, whose superpowers simply elevate their struggles to an epic level. We can emulate them on our own more mundane level. And by seeing our own mundane struggles through the lens of their epic story we gain a sense of significance that might otherwise be missing. The question then becomes – what sort of stories are these? And are they really ones that ennoble our existence, that help us to be more than we could be otherwise? Or do they just appeal to our least mature and uplifting impulses – the desire to be bigger and stronger than everyone else so that we can get our own way?
Mark
So far I think I’ve been suprised how easily we’ve adapted to having a third. The change from have no kids to one kid is huge, as is the change from having one kid to two (friends of ours once memorable described it as ‘having one child is like having a pet, having two is like running a zoo’). Two to three doesn’t seem such a big leap so far. By and large we’re all just taking it in our stride. I’m also finding that things become far less of a big deal with successive children. When you have your first baby it seems inconceivable that you could go back to life as normal (which is true, you can’t, because ‘life as normal’ was ‘life without kids’) but we were heading out with Elias to do some shopping and eat out within a day or so of his being born. When you’re used to dealing with a stroppy toddler or two, then a baby that is sleeping most of the time and can be put in a seat or under a playgym and you know they’ll still be there when you next look is a breeze!
Mark
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