In this episode we returned to one of the central questions of theology: is it right to pray for a parking space? As I say in the programme, I believe in an interventionist God, but I’m not sure he intervenes in quite the way we think. I was also really touched this week by an email from someone who, in the middle of a sad and difficult time, experienced a moment of mindfulness and grace.
This talk by Cabel Sasser is not just heartwarming and inspirational, it is, technically, a great piece of storytelling. Stay for the end and obey the instructions he gives.
I’ve been reading Making a Literary Life, by Carolyn See. You might think, having been a freelance writer for nearly 30 years I would have got this covered, but it’s nice to check out some other advice. (I think the term is ‘life-long learning’. Or it might be status anxiety.) Anyway, it’s a wise, humane and funny book.
I don’t know her or her novels at all, but she sounds lovely. She died in 2016 and I read a couple of blog posts about her. One had this great quote:
The only bad thing that will happen to us is that we’re going to die, and that’s not immediate, so let’s just see if we can have the nicest time possible.1
I needed that, this week.
This week Joe interviews an old college friend, Shaun Lambert, about mindfulness, wonder, and the need to ’re-perceive' God. It’s a really great interview, connecting mindfulness with spirituality in a very profound and helpful way. A lot of it is about the need to pay attention to ourselves and the moment we’re in. Attention is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In fact I led a retreat on the subject the week before lock down happened – an event which caused us all to pay greater attention in a whole new way!
This is a remarkable interview, about the power of music, and how the devastation of grief and loss is what truly shapes us.
There is a devastation that we all experience that turns us from being a half-formed person into a fully formed or fully realized human being… I don’t mean to be sort of the prophet of doom, but this is sort of coming for everybody at some point. If you’re loved and you love , this is all this is part of the deal I think.
Well, it’s been a pretty rubbish couple of weeks, but amidst the anxiety there are some good things. This week Joe and I chat a bit about comfort. My thoughts were inspired by giving a talk on Sunday on 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 which really describes how we are comforted by God (largely through each other) and how we then have to pass that comfort on. So we live in this virtuous circle of giving and receiving comfort.
Great take on Generative AI and its contempt for the disciplines involved in real creativity.
GenAI, the way it is being sold to us today, is a dead end. They know. They know it’s devastating to the environment. They know it devalues actual human creativity. They know it churns out lies and fabrications. They know it’s being used for massive disinformation campaigns, to build phishing platforms, social networking bots, to inflate news stories, to flood publishers with worthless submissions. But, today, it makes money. Today, it makes a prompt engineer feel like an artist.’
Crikey. We’ve done three hundred episodes of this podcast. Who’d have thought it? Anyway, this week, Joe and I talk about some of the things we’ve learned along the way and, indeed, are still learning. This is my list… What have I learned? That there are a lot of people out there who are in this situation. We're still going and the audience is still growing. So there are a lot more people out there who identify with mid-faith crisis than we imagined.
This is the oldest wooden church in the world and the oldest timber building in Europe. The wooden walls were made of split tree trunks, rammed into the ground, like a palisade. Fifty-one of the original oak ‘planks’ survive. It was probably built about the year 1013 as a resting place for the remains of the martyred King Edmund, and, although the church itself has been altered and adapted over the centuries, the walls of the nave are still the original timbers, charred and weathered with the passage of time.
One of the things Joe and I discussed on this week’s show was redeeming the word ‘religion’, helped by a listener who wrote in that ‘I’ve actually started to use the word ‘religion’ again… At its best, religion and religious communities can teach and empower us to become truly human and leave behind our selfish survival traits.’ I think this is absolutely true. ‘Religion’ is a tarnished word, stained by centuries of abuse, hypocrisy and cruelty.