St George and the Egg Yolk

One of my hobbies is mushroom hunting. There are plenty of St George's Mushrooms around campus at the moment (they are named after St George's Day around which they appear). They were very tasty fried in butter. Now they've been out for about a fortnight and the heavy rain and maggots have got to them.




I also found a surprising little luminous yellow mushroom which goes, unsurprisingly when you see it, as 'Egg Yolk Fungus' (Bolbitius vitellinus - a nice Australian version here from which the second photo comes). But not edible.

One always has to be very careful what one eats. I was very pleased to find that the superb Roger Phillips guide is now free on line and even includes recipes.

Grey water and kids fun

We've just fitted a grey water pump to syphon off out bath/shower water and recycle it for the garden. It's proving a great way to encourage our eldest child to wash!

The Lives of Others

Thanks to my colleague, Sabine, for lending me her copy of the beautiful The Lives of Others, a treatment of how the life of one person can be changed for the best, by witnessing the lives of others - even as a spy (wiki here).

Rather disturbingly the lead actor who plays the Stasi spy looks rather like my bishop...

A love of stones

Just finished Tobias Hill's enchanting historical thriller, The Love of Stones. Perhaps a little slow to start, but I was soon sucked in by the remarkable details of the jem business and the unfolding story of the addiction to the relentless pursuit of an acquisitive goal.

Curiously a key turning point in the novel picks up the epic of Gilgamesh, quoting a very moving passage about the loneliness of Gilgamesh's journey (through death?) in search of immorality. I'll post it some time....

Poem: Lizard and Cloud

(Poem written on student retreat at Douai abbey drawing on imagery from Isaiah 35).

King of this dessicated wasteland,

parched brittle, cactus dry,

wreathed in ill-whispering wind,

the cracked-skinned lizard's slow blinking of one eye

perceives the cloud.

From first scarce whisps

she slowly grows, swelling, darkening,

bellying generously until one fat

drop forms and

falls, and then another, wet-thudding life

into the dust. The earth gasps.

Whole-healing seeds and takes.

Shocked fingers shoot green

and spread forth grateful hands of colour

to the sky.

Lizard flicks it's tail and flees

this return of Eden.

these are the days

Just getting back into 10,000 Maniacs.
'These are the Days' is a great track - moving listening as I watch young undergrads come up to their graduation, looking back over the 15? years since leaving University myself and remembering how good life can be at that age...

Listen & watch here.

These are the days you'll remember.
Never before and never since, I promise, will the whole world be warm as this.
And as you feel it, you'll know it's true that you are blessed and lucky.
It's true that you are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.

These are the days you'll remember.
When May is rushing over you with desire to be part of the miracles you see in every hour. You'll know it's true that you are blessed and lucky.
It's true that you are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.

These are the days you might fill with laughter until you break.
These days you might feel a shaft of light make its way across your face.
And when you do you'll know how it was meant to be.
See the signs and know their meaning.
It's true, you'll know how it was meant to be.
Hear the signs and know they're speaking to you, to you.

The Heresy of the State

Just begun reading the superbly invigorating Theopolitical Imagination by W.T. Cavanaugh.

In it he exposes the heretical theology at the heart of the nation state.

This false theology holds that the state 'saves' us as individuals from our violent 'nature' - a nature displayed in our presumed innate tendency to competitively vie for autonomous control over the limited resources of the world. The state subdues such competition and creates a false unity by monopolising violence and placing it the hands of the sovereign.

By contrast Christian theology begins with a different vision of human nature: comprising an interpersonal society made in the image of the interpersonal Trinity. The marring of that image through the erroneous belief in individual autonomy is rectified in the Christ event.

This alternative theology therefore concludes with a story of genuine social peace (salvation) being established through the recreation of a society based upon the principle of the giving of self-for-other. This is achieved in the free self-giving of Christ to the Father, in our participation in that self-giving via the Eucharist, and in our self-giving to others.

The Church is thus intended to be a true interpersonal society based on mutual self-giving, whilst the State merely offers a pale reflection of this based on atomised individuals.

As Cavanaugh puts it himself:

"In exposing some of the false theological imaginings of modern politics, I hope to give hope to the reader that the iron cage of modernity does not inevitably hold us in its grip. I focus on the Eucharist as an alternative imagining of space and time which builds up a body of resistance to violence, the body of Christ. This is a body that is wounded, broken by the powers and principalities and poured out in blood offering upon this stricken earth. But this is also a body crossed by the resurrection, a sign of the startling irruption of the Kingdom into historical time and the disruptive presence of Christ the King to the politics of the world."