Some of my friends were on TV the other day- Beechgrove Garden came to Ardentinny to work on the lovely walled garden project. You can watch it all unfold on the i player, here.
We lived in Ardentinny when we first came to Scotland- a beautiful little village surrounded by lochs and mountains.
Here is the story on the Ardentinny website (where the picture above was borrowed from.)
History is littered with awkward difficult people who refused to conform. Their lives are often surrounded by conflict, particularly when their convictions confront the people in power. Think of all those Old Testament prophets.
What fuels this kind of dissent? It is often painted (by the after-the-event supporters of the dissenters at least) as a matter of conviction colliding with circumstance. I wonder however whether dissenters also are gifted/cursed with a particular kind of personality- a skew towards a simplistic world view, an arrogance even.
We can all think of people like this- they tend to be difficult to be around. Others shrink from the force of their opinion in groups, or retreat wounded from their harsh words and deeds. People I know who fit this category have often been an almost destructive force in the workplaces and groups I have been part of. They can often be far more focused on ‘the task’ than those whose task it is.
But, these people, for good and ill, are often those who we remember. They make milestones in our personal histories, and also in the history of mankind…
I came across one such man recently when I was doing some reading about those dark times of the reformation (see this post on the Covenanters for example.) I say ‘dark’ because despite the tradition I come from celebrating this as a kind of glorious outpouring of freedom and enlightenment, it often took place in the context of much pain, bloodshed and heartbreak. The question I find myself asking over and over again is whether we can regard something as ‘good’ when so much evil is done in the name of Jesus. Can the ends ever justify the means?
I offer you this story by way of example (If you want to know more of the historical context that he lived in check out the aforementioned post);
John Lilburne aka ‘Freeborn John,’ 1614 – 29 August 1657
John was from a line of dissenters. His father was the last man in England to demand to be allowed to settle a legal dispute via trial by combat. By the 1630’s John was apprenticed to radical opponents of the religious times and already forced to flee to Holland because of his involvement in radical pamphlets.
He was a man whose bravery verged on lunacy. Whilst being whipped, pillaried and imprisoned, he continued unabated in writing, arguing and protesting what he called his ‘Freeborn rights‘. His writings about these were so powerful that he is credited by being a major influence on the fifth amendment of the American Constitution.
The English Civil War saw John become a soldier, rising to the rank of Colonel, a fiend of Oliver Cromwell. However, dissenters do not do well in terms of military discipline and he fell out with his superiors, and then, in April 1645, He resigned from the Army, because he refused to sign the Presbyterian Solemn League and Covenant, on the grounds that the covenant deprived those who might swear it of freedom of religion. In a time of religious extremism, John argued that he had been fighting for this Liberty among others, and would have no part of it.
Alongside such principled stands, John continued falling out with everyone around him- fighting vindictive public spats against former friends and allies.
He then redoubled his efforts to campaign for the freeborn rights of men. His views grew out of the radical movement known as ‘the Levellers‘, but John was more of a leaver than a joiner, so he refused to describe himself in this way. He spent time in and out of prison, not just for his radical views, but also for his pursuit of former colleagues who he continued to attack in print.
And this became John’s life- fighting enemies to the left and right, raising high moral causes, in and out of jail, in and out of exile.
John began life as a Puritan, but ended it a Quaker. After all that violence, he had done with fighting, and came under the influence of a man of peace.
One epitaph written after his death was this one;
Is John departed, and is Lilburne gone!
Farewell to Lilburne, and farewell to John…
But lay John here, lay Lilburne here about,
For if they ever meet they will fall out.
Was this a great life? Certainly John did some great things but he seemed to be cast in the role of a stone-in-shoe for most of his life.
I am left pondering still the power of passion, faith and ideas, mediated through the mess that is humanity.
Thank God for dissenters.
And God save us from dissenters.
The measure of followers of Jesus, despite the context we are in, has to be the example that he set. He too was a dissenter, a table over-turner, a man who made no compromises to unjust ways of being.
But he was also a man who subordinated all things to love.
William is back at school today- the summer holidays are over up here in Scotland.
A bit of a shock really- but it has been such an amazing summer here, full of hot long sunny days. We have not had a family holiday this year as everyone has been so busy with other things, and money is rather tight, but what I will remember this year as ‘the year of cricket’. All this sunshine has given opportunities to be out playing the beautiful game like never before up here in Scotland- in fact (much to Emily’s disgust) it has almost taken over our lives for the past couple of months…
Last week was a case in point. William played games of cricket on Friday, Sunday, Monday (one in Ayr, one in Stirling,) Tuesday (Ayr again) and has another match this evening in Galsgow. The Ayr matches were for the under 15’s regional side, in which he got wickets against very high quality opposition.
The years, they all too soon turn sepia…
This blog has featured a lot of discussions about mental health. This is because I have served my time as one of societies psychiatric policeman- an Approved Social Worker in England, and a Mental Health Officer in Scotland.
I started out 25 years ago with a clear idea about mental illness- people who were ill did not always realise that they needed help. It was my job to try to make sure they got help. I had all sorts of different ideas about what this help should look like, and lots of frustrations with the psychiatric machine that I had to deal with, but fundamentally, the idea of mental illness itself was a stable reality within what I did.
Sure, we challenged the medical model (Illness-diagnosis-treatment (maintenance)) as this failed to take into account the social context in which some ones illness develops, but the dominant paradigm that affected work with people with ‘severe and enduring’ mental illness remained firmly medicalised. It was the only way to make sense of the psychic chaos we were faced with – hospitalise, medicate and sanitise it out of our immediate circle.
Increasingly I became a skeptic- not just of the machine, but the actual underlying concepts of ‘mental illness’.
It started many years ago when faced with young men and women who, once diagnosed with schizophrenia, were condemned to half-life at best. The medication we gave them to control their symptoms (particularly the ‘voices’) often did not work, and had such destructive side effects that everything would slowly slide downwards into a kind of suppressed humanity. Is this really the best that we could do?
Alongside this other movements were emerging. They were dangerous and threatening. One of these grew up in and around Manchester, where I was working, and was called ‘The Hearing Voices Network‘. It dared to suggest that hearing voices was a NORMAL human experience- not a symptom of ‘illness’. Rather it was a way of coping with trauma for the most part.
Rather than pushing the voices away, suppressing and chemicalising them, the HVN suggested we needed to embrace them, engage with them, understand them- even the destructive aggressive ones.
More recently we have has another movement- around the idea of ‘recovery’- living fully in the presence (or absence) of the ‘symptoms’ of mental illness.
None of these are easy concepts- they are really stories of life long journeys for people experiencing one of those ‘psychic civil wars’ that all of us go through to some extent.
What convinces me most about these revolutionary ideas in relation to mental health issues is the HOPE that they bring. The best that psychiatry can offer to many is ‘maintenance’. All the so called break-through s of the pharmacological machine that spend millions convincing doctors to use their new wonder drug have done little to change this. Suddenly however, people are saying clearly- The treatment you are offering me is NOT WORKING. I want something better for my life.
That is not to say that there are not people in the system who see it this way too. I heard this wonderful TED talk the other day. It is saturated with hope, and the raw joy of life…
Enjoy;
Check out this video, via the Moon Magazine.
I particularly liked this;
“…. the ‘I am right spirit’- self righteousness- and how this has to take a back seat…. If you just see Jesus in everybody, you are much better off…”
A friend pointed me to this clip- a speech made by a professor to young students. It resonated with me as in just a few short weeks my daughter is off to university. We sat and drank champagne last night to congratulate her on her exam results, and I wondered what lay ahead, and how we got here so quickly…
Here is the clip;
(There is a transcript here.)
A few years ago I wrote a post in which I suggested that kindness was perhaps the best measure we had of ‘spiritual maturity’. Let us hope that our children see it the same way…
What stories does a nation tell to one another whilst in exile? How do they understand their nationhood from the perspective of a refugee camp or even worse, a slave colony?
Much of the Old Testament emerges from this context- the people chosen of God, coming to terms with who they no longer are and dreaming of restoration, justice, peace; living in a land where the lion can lie down with the lamb. These dreams and hopes were often personified in the idea of Messiah- a great leader who would defeat the oppressors, and lead the people away from refugee status and establish a New Kingdom.
I mention this because the news has contained quite a bit about immigration of late. In the UK (and in Australia too it seems) the political landscape has shifted markedly to the right. The tabloids have thundered on for years about a so called tide of ‘others’ who are arriving on our shores, sucking our NHS dry, demanding benefits, taking all our jobs, filling our social housing estates etc etc. This has now become the agenda of government.
The general consensus even within the Left wing is that this is an issue that it is no longer possible to be ‘soft’ on. Labour has to be seen to be defending our borders from the seething mass of the outsiders who want to become our neighbours.
It is almost impossible to separate the social facts from the politics (or the politics from the economics) in all this thundering about immigration. I am tempted to try to discuss some of the figures, and what they might mean, but that is not the point of this piece. This is rather about the stories we tell one another.
The stories we currently tell in the UK are dominated by this kind of thing;
The government is experimenting with sending these vans around areas where lots of immigrants live, splashed with black backgrounds and pictures of handcuffs, offering to send people ‘home.’
The inference is obvious- you are not welcome here, we want you out and we are coming to get you. All this fits very well with a certain kind of story- the illegal immigrant as feckless and sneaky parasite, contaminating our country and its way of life with alien colour, religion and culture.
This story has been constructed from the mess of statistics surrounding immigration. Check out this article that dips its tows into this issue. A quote;
We know, for example, that the Office for Budget Responsibility thinks that immigration is good for the public finances in both the short and long run. We know that there is little evidence that immigration impacts negatively on jobs or wages; we know that immigrants are much less likely to claim benefits, and that they overall make less than proportionate use of public services like health. All of this research is based on government data on immigration and immigrants; the committee – and the government – would perhaps be better occupied highlighting the results and calling for further research in areas where we know less.
But I find myself desperate to hear other stories- ones that contain more grace, more humanity, even more plain intelligence. And for this, we can turn again to the stories of the Bible.
Stories of a proud nation, defeated by the rise of empire. Overwhelmed by global forces who have no interest in their God, their tribes, their history. Stories of people scattered, either by force or by economic necessity, to become the slaves and pawns of empire.
Then there are other stories, that tell the stories from the individual perspective. One of the most well known, if the most miss-interpreted, is this one;
Genesis 19
The Message (MSG)
19 1-2 The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening. Lot was sitting at the city gate. He saw them and got up to welcome them, bowing before them and said, “Please, my friends, come to my house and stay the night. Wash up. You can rise early and be on your way refreshed.”
They said, “No, we’ll sleep in the street.”
3 But he insisted, wouldn’t take no for an answer; and they relented and went home with him. Lot fixed a hot meal for them and they ate.
4-5 Before they went to bed men from all over the city of Sodom, young and old, descended on the house from all sides and boxed them in. They yelled to Lot, “Where are the men who are staying with you for the night? Bring them out so we can have our sport with them!”
6-8 Lot went out, barring the door behind him, and said, “Brothers, please, don’t be vile! Look, I have two daughters, virgins; let me bring them out; you can take your pleasure with them, but don’t touch these men—they’re my guests.”
9 They said, “Get lost! You drop in from nowhere and now you’re going to tell us how to run our lives. We’ll treat you worse than them!” And they charged past Lot to break down the door.
10-11 But the two men reached out and pulled Lot inside the house, locking the door. Then they struck blind the men who were trying to break down the door, both leaders and followers, leaving them groping in the dark.
12-13 The two men said to Lot, “Do you have any other family here? Sons, daughters—anybody in the city? Get them out of here, and now! We’re going to destroy this place. The outcries of victims here toGod are deafening; we’ve been sent to blast this place into oblivion.”
14 Lot went out and warned the fiancés of his daughters, “Evacuate this place; God is about to destroy this city!” But his daughters’ would-be husbands treated it as a joke.
15 At break of day, the angels pushed Lot to get going, “Hurry. Get your wife and two daughters out of here before it’s too late and you’re caught in the punishment of the city.”
16-17 Lot was dragging his feet. The men grabbed Lot’s arm, and the arms of his wife and daughters—God was so merciful to them!—and dragged them to safety outside the city. When they had them outside, Lot was told, “Now run for your life! Don’t look back! Don’t stop anywhere on the plain—run for the hills or you’ll be swept away.”
Sodom and Gomorrah, so often a phrase used to describe depravity- particularly of the homosexual kind.
You know the rest of the strange old story- how Lot pleaded for the city to be saved, but how in the end he and his family escaped, only for his wife to look back and be turned into a pillar of salt. It is a story that has all sorts of uncomfortable echoes as we tell it within our culture. How do we understand the sexual politics? The treatment of women? What is God condoning and what is God regarding as reprehensible?
But here I want to offer you this story as an image of how a people might abuse outsiders within our communities– how we might see them as less-than-human, how we might be able to demonise them to project our own fears of the unknown, or to meet our own baser fantasies.
Lot and his family (along with the two visiting angels) are the heroes of the story rather than the city dwellers themselves, and this changes everything.
Let us be suspicious of the politics of hate and fear, wherever we see it, and let us listen carefully to the stories of real people. Particularly people in exile.
For years, the view along the Clyde has been dominated by the chimney from Inverkip power station. It is (or was) the highest free standing man made structure in Scotland; 20,000 tonnes of concrete piled 237 meters high.
The power stations was built in 1970, to be powered by oil, just before the oil crisis sent prices sky rocketing. The only time it has ever been used was during the miners strike in 1985, when it was switched on as some kind of black-leg to break the power of the National Union of miners, at goodness knows what cost.
Finally they have decided it has to go- it has no place in a globally warmed world with its dwindling oil reserves. There have been several explosive demolitions on the site, but this one was the big one- the end of the huge chimney.
Down it went, leaving a ghost of itself in a kind of dusty effigy…
I took some dodgy video from one of the bed and breakfast rooms in our house. Here it is (with commentary by Emily, Netta and myself!)
A fantastic day playing away in Carradale. The sun shone, even if the cricketting skills did not. We were undone by a poor pitch and some poor shot selection…
William finished 20 not out, and outscored his father yet again!
this fragile tent 