meeting the mien

This long post is a half of a conversation, subjective observations, open questions and approximations, it would benefit hugely from a Mien blogger's second thoughts. This exercise in design threatens to exacerbate problems facing mission in this context by inappropriate solutions based on a superficial diagnosis derived from sight-seeing approach to community engagement. A whirlwind tour to survey the site, consult various stakeholders and grasp the scope for local materials and vernacular sufficient to design by was thrilling, fascinating and rewarding for me, old and familiar news perhaps to those with a longer relationship with these villages. The fruit it will bear will unfold in the next few months, just now I am nursing a Thai caught cold in the blessed calm of Singapore's CNY long weekend. My error-prone research-shallow observations below are not the views of any organisation or church I might have some claim to represent, and any corrections or contributions or extensions would be hugely appreciated.

North Thailand
The towns we saw like Chiang Rai and onwards were very much as I remembered Kota Bharu of 13 years ago, drier perhaps, but the same shape of long linear car-dominated settlements, bright coloured roofing, golden royal birthday welcome arches over roads, bougainvillea down the centre division, building yards with massive concrete storm drain piping stacked out front, big cabling wheels, the stained and streaked concrete of ageing medium-rise, an unrestrained cacophony of signage out of all proportion to adjacent urban scales, black and white striped kerb edges, banana trees lining padi fields edges, overloaded motorbikes, pickups with purple windows, abandonned and quickly overgrown plots, roadside fruit and miscellany stalls.

Stopping to eat, stopping at builders merchants, MSG is added liberally and asbestos profiled roofing of every colour lies in tall piles all about, letting it be known we are a long way from hypochondria of Singapore.

East and out of town, has the up and down of the Cameron Highlands, with the steep sided wiggles, steeper perhaps with limestone lumps, but so much drier, that much more deforested and dusty, smoky from the burning of this season's harvested rice fields. A bigger temperature range than the Camerons, cool at night and a dry direct heat in the day. New fresh black roads, flanked by over loaded pylons leaning under many tangled cables. Then the villages, reminiscent of Orang Asli settlements, where bamboo, hardwood and corrugated tin form clusters of shelters. Their landscape is not long deforested, the villages appear occasionally profligate and extravagant in their standing as teak clad islands surrounded by a sea of scrub and denuded red soil given a hastily constructed cover of lychee plantation. These teak encampments offer a sombre tribute to a time, even recently, when timber logged illegally was that much more abundant.

We were east and out beyond the reach of mobiles and wifi, but not beyond the reach of Tesco's, another blog post deserves to delight in the various ways brands are bent, borrowed, broken or translated here. See also Redemption Hill Church, and Spectacle Hut, and the international language of Ikea's crockery.

On our way these yellow stickers half way up telegraph poles were pointed out and translated, the work of a mysterious character, who anonymously has made it his mission to vex the authorities and use these virally to speak good news into rural places.

Observing the Mien
It was interesting to travel with two Chinese Singaporeans and to pass time on windy roads with them and hear their stories. The Mien are of Chinese origin and their presence in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam dates from a period of acute famine in China in the last century, it was at this time that a large number of Singapore's Chinese came to Singapore, the same diligent, self-sacrificing, Buddhist and Daoist young people, sent forth to earn and send money home, even selling themselves to ships to then buy their freedom on arrival at employment in a foreign port somewhere on the rim of the South China Sea, if indeed they survived what by their accounts was a dangerous journey. By dint of fate, those who ended up in Singapore, went on to dominate a powerful city state, those who made their flight over land, or couldn't manage the boat ride all the way came to Thailand, where they have been an excluded minority consigned to the poverty of difficult hill-farming in the far rural north. And I think a sense of unsure entitlement is felt by many in Singapore.

And something of this history contributes to the frustrating, inoffensive, answer-is-always-yes consultations. The Mien are accommodated on government land, they do not have ownership in that sense, and a strange bind, which once said, if you clear jungle you can keep the land to farm on, now states, if you ever cease farming the land you lose any claim to tenancy, and it returns to the government. The progression from not owning land, to a learned helplessness and to a loss of any conviction sufficient to plan, preach and build by is a crucial one. Second and third generation fatalists whose imaginations have never been given the breath or platform to venture, “I would like a house like..” or to plan, “If we collectivise Cashew farming now, in a few years we could...” It is a gift we take for granted, having a language that accommodates Dreams and Visions.

The relatively young understanding of theology still for many considers Christianity to be an updated ancestor worship, a new form of ritual in exchange for healing. In this village they count a quarter of their 400 to be Christian, half of that quarter attend church and of those literacy and understanding are limited. Their difficulty is labelled by the missionaries as nominalism, which seems unkind, perhaps because I tend to use the term pejoratively for willed and escapist irresponsibility rather than a nominalism of ignorance.

So this is to say, that this strange and long-term-temporary nature of their situation disempowers them from taking responsibility for building or belief, finding Home in make-shift structures and nominal faith. This is short term tenures in London, this is Israelites in Babylon, and they would all benefit from Jeremiah's intentionality who would have us Build houses and Live in them. Good news for them would be to seek a self-sufficiency as a community, in the hope that from that basis they might seek the good of the city, economically and religiously.

Statistics
There is a statistic which estimates less than 1% Thai are Christian compared to greater than 5% among tribal minorities and the growth of Christianity is 4% among the Thai compared to 8% among the tribal minorities. A statistic which presents the strategic nature of these open people groups, and the value of the investment of cultivating leaders, evangelists and culture-makers among them. If by training people willing to stand as structural members in the face of rural decline, if by equipping young people to invest their talents in their rural community towards a sustainable life there, rather than the quicker, more glamorous wealth of work in Bangkok, then, at a time when avenues such as Manorum have closed, there is a possible mode for catalysing rural economic revival and medium for displaying joy in spite of circumstance sufficient to draw the unhappy rich to Christ and a suffering sufficient to effect the genuine environmental healing much needed. That sentence was too long, I'm trying to express the bound up nature of an economic and spiritual gospel, that sustainable church and sustainable community are both the content of and conduit for good news. I am stating the obvious, what is less clear is the way forward, the sorts of micro-financing, collective farming things which thrive when predicated on Christian-derived presuppositions and which would provide the basis of good rural employment sufficient to sustain the relational gospel-communities from which to send their own evangelists, there is a need for consultant missionaries better versed in the ways these things work, their specifics, costs and benefits. Anyone?

Language
So, we saw the freshly printed copies of the Mien bible, a translation completed in the last year, in its three separate formats, transcribed in Thai script, Roman script and a Chinese script. And we sang songs, translated, Come Thou Fount in Mien etc. As the world and the East anglocises and internationalises, why not? As memories become myths of former indigenuity what profits the Christian cause or the Mien to hope to keep alive a fading language and musical tradition? I recorded such singing and some Mien pipe playing which would be happily here embedded if I knew how. Anyone?

On the point of language and continuity, D expressed that the received wisdom is that a generation must be left fallow, to reject the carvings, alcohol, wood chimes.. before they are re-appropriated for another message, a Christian message. As for example the elaborate gable ends and roof trimmings designed to scare away evil spirits that define the Thai vernacular, and could be, and should be redeemed, reimagined, remessaged. As Christmas trimmings and their pagan origins. There is a powerful temptation to diminish the importance of ornament and music, to consign them to after-thoughts, skills which can be re-learnt, I would argue the impulse for urgency and the impulse for cultural thoroughness should not be set against one another. Meh.

Interestingly the Thai government is changing, having tried and failed to forcibly relanguage the Mien by a method of immersion, taking kids as young as they begin school and putting them into fully Thai education. This former method has tended to result in significant difficulties, typically putting those students two years behind others and this and other discouragement leads to a high drop out rate. This correlates with extensive studies in the States and by UNESCO relating to second language kids, that in fact if children are given early education in their mother tongue they far more easily adapt to a second and third language as they progress. So the possibility for a Mien kindergarten opens up, and we will see, just as English villages survive or fall by the closure of the local school ~ see Sleep Furiously.

On translation
Tangentially, I had a fascinating conversation with a translator from the Bible Society over lunch on the first day of CNY. The task of a translation is epic, candidates must have 10years post-doc experience, must know Greek/Hebrew, the language of the translation and a vehicle/intermediate language typically English/French etc and they must give themselves entirely to a culture for as long as it takes, typically another 10years, and must manage a small team of informed locals to corroborate the translations/approximations ventured, that for example the Papuans read bread broken most easily as coconut.

But our conversation centred on all that we can learn from illiterate societies, how is it that their engagement with Story is so much more emotional that ours? What is lost in our privileging abstractions over nuanced specifics? What are these cultures' practical disciplines, habits, rituals, manners of meeting, that give to their epistemology the humility that does not leap to the conclusion of a story by force of precedent and abstraction, but that allows the mystery of each unique Story to affect the emotions? Why did CSL's Hrossa burn their poetry?

He expressed the admiration he had for those who can come as a child and enter in fully to a story without presuming its outcome. In this way, translators have found it more successful to translate beginning chronologically with Genesis then unfolding, rather than to descend in supposed heirarchy of importance, Gospels, Epistles, Pentatuke ..etc. Sat on the coast with a local he had asked if they had ever been to an island which they could see some little way out to sea. He hadn't but he wondered, maybe, if they were to visit there, if they might be able to look back and see the place where they were standing now. Ignorance or humility to not presume beyond one's experience?

Economy
Other observations. Poverty engenders community by necessity, and perhaps engenders a better awareness of the gift nature of reality, and certainly, observably they have developed a pattern of hospitality that puts us to shame. These hill tribes, who have so little, trapped outside an economic system which for reasons racist and historical significantly exclude them, are warm, welcoming, self-deprecating and aboundingly generous. We ate well to the point of embarrassment, unshowy but homegrown rice and pork and chicken and bamboo.. Clearly they made it an occasion with all the meat, but clearly also within their limited means - a single wood stove - they have found a way to cultivate delicious food basics in the everyday as well as for special occasions. It was unique rice, in the best possible way, amazing, and there is no organic labelling on plastic wrapped rice packs, no microchips in their blackened pan rice cooker. Not to idealise poverty, but we have allowed ourselves by impatience's trumpcard to believe that good food is expensive food, hightech food and foodmiles varied food. I would say I took on trust what we ate, I did see a kid on a motorbike with a rifle and three squirrels tucked into his belt, and I think AM was unimpressed that I had not been served anything so challenging as an exoskeleton.

Of their wider economic situation, there is a low grade but savage corruption, where two years ago they got 8.5baht for a kilo of maize they now get 6.5baht, over a period when such commodity prices have gone up at the customer's end. Local governors are reported to have been shot when they turn a critical eye to the middlemen who set these prices. Or perhaps they were recollecting the Philippines, either way, the challenges of economic justice are perilous and need confront the vested interests of the many and the powerful.

Observing architecture
So, I would turn then to perhaps the more specific area of observation for the trip, we coming as architects rather than consultants in any more theological or agricultural, linguistic or economic role. And to a certain extent I am following D, and or making it up as I go along.

Categories of observation might be begin thus:
- The practical challenges of climate and geography their built structures resist within this locality.
- The practical constraints, available materials, available contractors.
- The shape of a day in the life and social life of a Mien. Points of contact, relation to public space.
- The way their buildings are relevant by speaking of a history. Habits, mementos, non-functional additions to give a sense of belonging.
- The way buildings embody their aspirations, where does the good life come from, what is the apex of aspiration and how is it attained or how is it approximated? Concrete, AC, Upper storeys etc.

And then to the ways this project will interrupt the existing conversation of a given circumstances built forms and criteria towards which conditions might be modified:
- Distinct objectives of this mission. Passions particular of those involved.
- The symbolic function of this particular project.
- The scope of the process of designing and building to teaching new patterns of construction to the community, to enrich their range of possible forms and methods.

A Mien village architecture
One startling theme is that of kitsch (I risk appearing, nay being, patronising, I want to gesticulate a defensive apology, I cannot find another more sympathetic expression to this strange observation), the kitsch is particularly evident because it stands stark beside their own exquisite embroideries and is notable also for the cost of some of these mass-produced pieces. D thought the tile patterns terrible, comparing them to 1930s vinyl designs and perhaps this is it, that they, as we then, are making first generation entrances into industrially produced possibilities for decoration. That transfer of qualifications for that which is admirable is transferred much more directly, more linearly. Wood to faux wood, hand-carved to cast reliefs, painted to printed pictures and so on, a transfer of value accorded at a visual level ignorant of the means of production.

Presentation Rooms. Whatever the reason, there is a lack of subtlety, concealing or irony in their expressions of that which they would highly esteem. And within this, but also corresponding to a tradition in many cultures, some have reserved a room for presentation. This was in the one house, I could not apply to all but here, as in some corners of other houses, the plastic wrapping is left on the faux-polished metal-effect plastic handles to their wood-effect furniture. I'd love to know what the roots of this protective preciousness are.

Plastic Flora. Just as I was amazed by the proliferation of fake plastic flowers in Malaysia 2005, again here, in a land flowing with natural flora it seems baffling. Similar to this, in the house we stayed comfortably in our host had reinterpretted a popular form which uses tree trunks whole as supporting columns, in concrete had cast with crude grooves of bark and knots and painted over brown.

False Ceilings. Of other unexplained cultural memes, false ceilings in Mien churches. The neon-lit space is made claustrophobic and the ventilation is stifled by the addition of a grid of floral profiled ceiling panels, and D adds that this is a common request by the Mien for their churches, strange but these are their inherited images of what a church ought to look like.

So these things jarred with me, they jarred because they offend some lingering ideal of honesty to materials, but they jar more because these people are clearly adept at construction and talented at their own native decoration. I am sure that ways that I have bought into the dreams sold by modernity, parading foolishly with my digital camera, would be the more obvious to others than they appear to me as I examine myself. Further it is clear that the palette of material options is limited, having explored possible other tile varieties in local shops, they could have done worse, with Disney or pornographic tiling designs.

Glass. So these are ways we out-work our worldview by the fashions we subscribe to, I risk being simplistic, but I will plough on. Another strange and fairly rare aspiration would appear to be glazing, which would correspond to an airconditioned internal environment, yet without airconditioning. Without AC, the most obvious opening is a mosquito-screened opening with shutters. Perhaps this correlates with an embarrassment at the environment and a looking towards the city for models to emulate.

Enclosure. The houses' construction is sturdy, heavy timber beams clad with substantial board on board timber walling make for lightless spaces, enclosed but porous to mosquitoes, gloomy but still traps for heat. I want to explain the weight of construction by a protection from a dangerous environment, which perhaps I take too lightly. It wasn't mentioned, although at harvest time they do kill some big wild pigs who come out of the jungle at that time of year. Equally though a blocking out of the specifics of their locality, opting instead for a televised reality received through enormous satellite dishes perched on each and even bamboo roofs.

Rubbish Bins! A consistent feature, which had a deeply satisfying simplicity and elegance were these recycled tyre rubbish bins found in all of the villages we visited. I should love to know their history and design story. Tyres as a universal waste product, such a pressing need, such a simple design, such a simple mode of production, and a handsome form. And so unashamedly a former tyre as to beg the imagination to consider the story of that particular tyre, the miles it travelled before retiring to a life as a rubbish bin, and so unashamedly a former tyre as to provoke the imagination to to explore what other waste might be so dignifiedly re-purposed. Little other recycling goes on, as plastic in the stream and the smouldering mound behind the rice stores reflects, which is strange, for it is not for lack of willing to perform seemingly low grade manual tasks. One industry the Mien have excelled in is the production of those grassy strands for brooms which are collected from the hills, laid on the roadside to dry, painstakingly individually pruned, bunched, tied and transported for manufacture. If like Curitiba's subsidies for such, or somehow by more specific use of individual waste materials we could find a slim profit from their use, there is an opportunity here for one with the imagination to pursue it. If, like Rural Studio's tyre constructions, they could become building materials without transport to and from a tertiary processing plant more the better.

Tertiary Materials. In conversation about recycling and such we spoke briefly about a common point of reference, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a recurring reference in these conversations, if you haven't seen it, do, it is a subtle and humourous exploration of technology and waste, amongst other themes. Within this quandary one could equally question those government buildings, the school in the centre of the village, where Thai teachers com up daily to teach in Thai, or don't in the rainy season. These imperial and alien forms, roofed in alien steel frames stand aloof and unfeeling, an island of tertiary technology, unbelonging and irreparable. What do we do? How would Schumacher discern what appropriate intermediate technology would best serve this situation? Dignity and with it sustainability will be squeezed out unless a way of owning the task is given to the village.

Fuel. Their fuel is mostly wood, so gathering and storage accounts for some small part of their time and built fabric. The cooking for the most part is done under cover, perhaps to use the smoke as a mosquito deterent, perhaps for need in the wetter seasons. Some families burnt spent husks and cobs of maize and gathered round a pot over them. Sometimes burning other bits, rubber and such. One elaborate construction at a later village had formed a duct for smoke out of sheet metal and was cooking off a gas cylinder hob. They reported that there had been no significant fires in their village, which I want to believe, dry as the air was and gable to gable as the houses were.

Hardwood. Be it on our conscience, at their legal risk, and at someone's potentially considerable cost, if we use the timber that makes itself available at roadside yards. Managed forests exist but this is not a job that has resources for a supply chain manager. Anyone?

Split Bamboo. Reinventing split bamboo which is so pleasingly used in their rice barns was told squarely no. Would it be nice? No. Could we preserve it chemically? No. Even with the right bamboo? No. There was more going on than they would let us know, but that was about the most emphatic thing they expressed. No bamboo, no, not even if you romantic westerners think it looks nice.

Stools. I can't believe I haven't managed a clear photograph of these. All we sat on were the Asian standard pressed plastic chair and then stools, woven, or wired, bamboo or other. And that is how they spend great periods of the days, under the eaves that reach towards the street from their front door, in busy but sociable activity, arranging these broom things and doing embroidery.

Embroidery. It would be sad to be told this was kept alive only for the tourist dollar, and with the grannies and the locals still wearing them, one hopes, and those 'pants' or lui houx can take a year to complete a craft website tells me. There is a skill in so perfectly doing the stitching that the fabric is reversible, delightful from both sides, they are never worn reversibly, but that seems to be the mark of tidiness they were able to communicate. In town I saw possibly the loveliest trousers I have ever seen, different in pattern from the Mien, this Hmong embroidered piece exuded a joy in pattern alien to the noodle bar they found themselves in. Largely the crafters are the grannies, contented, peering over spectacles, who do it for habit, for joy, for money, but perhaps it will fade in the urban drifting generation. I'm so frustrated by my lack of language, I want to sit without translator and glean their motivating force and their worldview that gives this ornament meaning.

Clothes on outdoor racks. Why? For show, for moths, for superstition, for space? We visited in the dry season, how does this change seasonally?

Overhanging first floor. As the Tudors excelled in, there is a mode of timber construction which counterbalances the live loads on the beams internal by reaching the ends of the beams out beyond a pivot of the ground floor wall. The has the added benefit of offering some measure of rain and sun protection from lower floor timber and windows. It is a not unsophisticated pattern and one which economises timber.

So sum the way the Mien popularly build right now perhaps it could be generalised thus: Flimsy grade concrete blockwork up to window sill level between concrete foundation pillars scarf jointed to a timber frame, timber roof joists supporting colour asbestos roofing or tin. Some on conrete slab, some on earth, some eventually tiled.

Other bits: Ramped thresholds and motorbikes kept indoors. Padlocked bamboo doors. Neon lighting, strips at night in the street. Chicken prints on concrete roads

Other bits not from the village:

Multiple roofs stacked, tiered, in pleasing cascades of hat-like forms above the head and face of the building. This is a language of metaphor they have read and may yet comprehend, and while respecting the Royal and Temple resevations, there is an avenue of metaphor to communicate by.

Bright colours, not in village so much, although in school, acutely at temples, generally on businesses, painted with an eye to the environment where an abundance of Bougainvillea and Ratchaphruek trees set a bold and explosive colour precedent. And colour in their embroidery is layered with meaning beyond me.

Water towers, here is fun geometry.

Needs, Collaborations, Enquiries
- Powerful Cheap Passive cooling
- Economic Justice, Mien Kindergarten, Employment
~Theological, Cultural and Economic Self-sufficiency,
- Cashew Project, Collective, Perma-culture or other
- Reforesting - subsidies or none
- Terracing – a pattern of reinforcement to make their steep sided landscape more fruitful

The project is interesting, and if it goes as planned I may get to lay honest bricks in August time, and perhaps spend some slower time with a dear and fascinating people. The hope is to introduce patterns to make rural life viable, a cashew collective, a mien language kindergarten, a mode or terracing rice production, of utilising government reforestation subsidies. Previous projects of D's have inspired other villages to adopt design elements.

Conclusion
So it was an interesting and frequently happy time, with warm people, operating imaginatively within a often bleak situation. I feel helpless, callous and over-privileged. Have you ever prayed that peak oil would come tomorrow, the lights would go out and that we might make things with our hands again? Such is the fall out from hyper-modernisation, such is the dazed impotence of we who scrabble about dotting between the centres of power and the cultural waste at the fringes. I have really been impacted by a sense in my time here of the cultural toll that our generation's super-urbanisation is taking on Asia's social and relational fabric, and in that I am moved to urgently hope that the church might offer practical and long-term geographic even agricultural alternative frameworks, within its preaching of the gospel, before this urban model multiplies as one irreversible, human and environmental calamity. Too big a prayer?

sabbathing?

I sabbath so lightly, if I can make the verb qualitative. For lack of structure to fit it in, for want of sabbath precedent practices or existing rhythms of art and eating to join. Sabbath is hard to take a stand on, hard to confidently practice, popularly branded as time for nothingness, a lonely void in the schedule suitable for spring cleaning or overeating. Sabbath practised under individualism collapses by weight of boredom and those who would object to a deeper delving by stronger covenanting into sabbath's possibilities will find Jesus furnishes their quiver well for the debate against my easily pharisaical cause. And yet, and yet there is so much to gain, and not by legalism. Sabbath is not me time, it is we time, it draws us together, it is a force for justice, a standard for equality, it moderates excess in all of life, it is the reigns of patience, it is a structure of order which sets us free.

What if on sabbath..
..there were no shopping?
That there might not be the injustice of an underclass of weekend shift shop assistants, apparently undeserving of family time, no more of their hidden tertiary services, anonymously watering, cleaning, powering a city's tick on another business day. No market economy for a whole day, no pricing of the priceless, time.

..there were no 'church' and no preaching?
How else might we shift church to the everyday every day and affirm that all of life done together is Church. 'Sunday Christian' culture will only be subverted this way. I can be taught any day, preachers should demonstrate rest, and rest well, with their family, with their church, at the same time as them.

..there was no electricity, no gas, no water, no services?
Oil would be given rest and its workers. That day's worship might be acoustic and necessarily participatory, the touch of dance rather than the distance of video, sung volume by expression not amplification, lunch would be prepared earlier, the dishes can wait, and on that evening the city from their streets might watch the stars come out unpolluted. A weekly New York black out, an Earth Hour every hour for 24. Sunset would be seasonal, temperature unmoderated. This would change our architecture. No more could we predicate a form on constantly heated, constantly cooled interiors, assuming power. If no one in a society is working on any one chosen day, to make the electricity to make its services run, then their form changes. Architecture enfleshes presuppositions held, and sabbath is one of our most saving presuppositions. All of life must be coloured by the implications of a God who is there and who rested (anyone on that perfect tense?).

..no internet, no phones, no flights,
No placeless wandering, no itching to be here and remain there, no racing to a sooner future. What an inconvenience, what a liberation. In a global age, when at any one hour your sabbath is another's Monday morning, the sabbath is made the more imperative if we are to travel withwards as a community and effect local coherence and embodiment?

..there was no public transport, no driving?
A quiet city would wake to bird song and walk to meet one another. They would walk to a pedestrian sized congregation of locals, celebrating salvation their way. An urbanism anticipating a walkable seventh. Oh that sabbath is our technology's seatbelt, the exhale to keep us from hyperinflating, a Placed homing call to keep us from getting lost, a time of stillness and locality, of family and music all available free and unbranded and imperfect, if we trust to pause together.

(but, as with the slow food movement someone has to answer the slow ambulances question)
..there were no hospitals, no ambulances, no life support?
No idolising life over Life, no injustice of those who by force of wealth can turn technology to extend their biology, no on-call, no intensive care at the expense of extensive care, no more taking for granted the luxury of healthcare, no outsized superhospitals, no more care than the walkable care of relationship. This again would moderate our urban fabric, our sub-nuclear families and our rush to professionalise care.

He argues hypothetically, to the end of asking of christians in the 21st century, if they got what they prayed for, a 'christian' society, how would we then live? What are the Sundays we hope for? How far is it within our power to play these out?

So, after as wide a church survey as I could bear, I have, conscious of the irony, settled with RHCSG, dubbed by its detractors as the facebook church, they read the announcements from their iphones. They are small enough to fit me, they are young enough to set in place rhythms now, they love the bible and they give themselves away.

cracks

Accidentally apt in a recent trickle of films on this bleak theme. I promise to stop talking about Hell soon, and stop branding any glimmer of dystopia as yet another burning layer of sheol..

Here as Jordan Scott arrives in the cliquey world of film, heir to the Scott reputation, she is unreasonably savaged (see Time Out) for a film that I found subtle and rewarding. Offering a striking parallel to her Spanish aristocrat protagonist who likewise arrives to be unduly abused on account of supposed favouritism.

The film addresses the popular narrative device of an isolated, self-contained reality, a boarding school on an island, which might offer a control test for the human condition but invariably catalyses vice by reducing the feedback delay of the consequences of unrestrained Desire and by stagnating the pool, closing it's gift economy to inlets of possible forgiveness. As a construction in common with psychological space drama, crime on an orient express, horror in a snow bound cabin, what accounts for our fascination by which this vehicle has become a cliché? I want, at a leap, to suggest from this theme that our suburban castles (the source and the fruit of our fascination with isolation I would argue) might be more socially porous and by that derive quite reasonable, if self-serving, impetus for a hospitality imperative?

The recurring notion of homesickness in Cracks also bears some meditation, it is supposed to be something we grow out of, and yet at what cost given the damaging ways it is grown out of here? Miss G collapses any sense of objective home and allows myth, fiction and the memoirs of others to write over her own pain and by them vicariously to imagine herself elsewhere, as the product of another, happier story. Di, whose pained sense of her inevitable and indefinite homelessness leaves her to derive Homeness and its security from unstable sources. It is Fiamma whose memory of home is sufficiently fresh, and most persistently anticipated to allow her the confidence to share her stuff, and it is she who in death the Bri would christen the Christ figure of this piece.

The film luxuriates in a wealth of photography, an edit that some might find too slow. There is a sense of inevitability or at least unsurprise at this little princess drawing to a Lord of the Flies conclusion. There are some powerful moments in its character study although the evolution of the characters leapt over explanation rendering Miss G's later madness less satisfying. In all, rewarding but not unmissable.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1183665/

love lost

love lost, displaced, forlorn,
now rent from whence was born.
was i meant for so much more
than plent and glut and porn?

friends don't let friends

I'm hypermobile, I have hypermobile friends
We confect needs and we blur our means and ends
We empathise addictions and reckless ways we bend
Nature to our comfort, placeness to our whims.
Facebook lets us leave and never make a mends
To the ground we tore flying to our hypermobile friends.

on wine

The intersection of readers here and the gathered on a Sunday evening is likely nil, either way here are my thoughts ahead of Sunday, more than their 15minutes will permit. Posting allows for a sort of protospective feedback, a sort of wiki-preaching by committee – so a prize to anyone who can email the nine main points alliteratively or acrostically. I wrestle with the conviction that in sermon writing the impulse to pen something clever, or worse, something novel, is as irresistible as it is counter-productive and unedifying.. and there is that haunting fear that bad preaching has limitless potential to be poisonous.


- A Wedding Feast - John 2:1-11-
150 gallons of wine. If your Christian friends are not in the regular habit of hosting parties of the sort that 150 gallons of wine need be called upon, then speak gently to them, but they may have missed a conspicuous and central priority of the faith they profess. This is a passage much preached on and one still challenging in its implications. There is a lot of good news here, the first and possibly biggest challenge here is believing it, of taking it in by our tiny eyes, submitting to the glory of it.

1. News is Good News.
So, lest we take news for granted. The atheist bus campaign goes something like this “There probably isn't God, so just muddle along and have a nice day..” That is not good news essentially because it is not news, it is speculation. It is not positive observation, it's word play. I want to know the answer to painful questions: Does this story end well? Is all I do for nothing? And while agnosticism is a valid position, no one should pretend it is worth preaching, just as the channel tunnel is a valid route to France, no one pretends the tunnel to be a nice spot to pitch a tent in; it is dark, damp and boring.

Not only is speculation insufficient, it can be wielded woundingly: “My friend has just been hit by a car, is there a hospital nearby?” “Maybe... maybe not.” Not helpful, callous even. We are waiting for news, someone who knows the area, someone who can offer us an account we can wrestle with, an eyewitness testimony, news, data, someone who has found a hospital. John here has no time for ponderous bus campaigns; he claims to have seen God in the flesh, doing God stuff. So, Christianity is story, the story relating what it looked like when God came into flesh 2000 years ago, and Christianity is the story relating what it looked like when God came into my flesh 2000 years later.

2. God can be known through the senses and he is glorified in our satisfaction.
“Good” wine (v10)

In the beginning God created light and it was good, sky and it was good, land and it was good, vegetation and it was good... In Cana a man came, claiming to be God, this man created wine and it was declared by the master of the banquet to be? Good. Do you declare the Goodness of the things you see? God only does good; God is working all things for the good. In declaring goodness, you are observing God at work. The alternative is to say: things happen, coincidences occur, flavour is no more that primary appeals to basic survival instincts of biology.

In declaring 'good' wine, you are entering into a relationship with God which recognises his provision. This provision, this giftness of the gift nature of all of reality is good news. The alternative to gift is a debt unpayable for the undeserved privilege of that sunset, the wonder of that snow, the sheer sensory beauty that offers itself to us every morning. Few appreciate this with the clarity of the deep end of the Deep Ecology movement who venture that the Earth would be better without humans, such is the beauty of creation and our inability to pay for our tenancy. God wants us to let him provide for us, when God became a man this is how he wanted to be known, as our all-providing bridegroom.

And this is the experience of God, this is the manifestation of his glory (v11). I am willing to concede a certain mystery in the distinction between God and his gifts, but the Psalms encourage us to Taste and See that the Lord is good (Ps34:8). Do you talk in such experiential language about God? We should be encouraged knowing that the news about God is intellectually credible, but this scene in Cana wants more than that, here we are presented with an account of a God who would be existentially satisfying. Even existentially overwhelming, this is no meagre topping up of half-full bottles. If someone brought that much wine to a party at mine I’d have to think of options for bottling the vinegar.

3. God meets us in our shame.
“They have no wine...” (v3)

At a wedding like this it was the bridegroom's responsibility to supply the wine, at a wedding like this in those days, everyone was there, the whole community from miles around the village, for several days. And to compound this, in the ancient near east, in eastern societies now, they have a far deeper and more clearly articulated culture of shame and honour than perhaps we are familiar with.

So, have you let people down? Have you failed to live up to your own low standards? Have you aimed and fallen short? We know shame, we inherit cultural notions of what an adequate human being should at least manage, and then in our weakness don't come close. We are forgetful, we get sick, we get distracted, we find ourselves trapped juggling too many things, and cracks appear and the mask slips. Jesus offers a manifesto for us, for those who have let the wine run out, “Blessed are you, Blessed are the poor in Spirit..” He comes to our failing wedding party, crumbling marriage, fraught degree and announces, it is going to be alright, this story is going to end well, I am with you, I am on your side.

He meets us in our shame, when we've run out of wine, when we've let the world down. He lets us know he is working this out for the good. If I know that, Know that, then I can face anything.

? [(On shame and cultures of shame. I find the expression 'a shame-based culture' fascinating and foreign. Presumably we, in 21st century secular Britain, are just as likely to fail our ideals, just as weak to fulfil our aspirations, and I want to venture that this notion of a culture of shame is foreign because it is predicated on a quality of community now absent, or at least a proximity and longevity of relationship. So if shame is bound up with identity in community, we have saved ourselves from a ' 'culture of shame' in part because technology makes our identity more fluid and individual affluence has allowed us to move, to escape those people who would shame us and our past failures which would shame us. Christians should not be blind to this, the privatisation of shame.. we must put ourselves in the way of failure and allow ourselves to be known. Anyone?)]

4. God does not want us to be religious.
“...six stone water jars there for Jewish rites of purification” (v6)

So, these stone water jars, heavy jars daily carried down to the well lowered in, heaved up, heaved home. There are still such labour intensive rituals that we pin our hopes on, these fruitless, exhausting, cosmetic things we do to feel like we're OK. We are so desperate to cover our own brokenness, we perform elaborate, largely superstitious, displays of self-mortification, driving your fair-trade wine bottles to the recycling in that hemp bag on the back seat of your Prius. And all the armour we put on before a party like this, the names we drop, the tidy house we present, labouring that we might look like we're got it together. So too the Jews at this wedding, by scrubbing between their toes, making sure they didn't dirty themselves by touching gentiles, making sure they tithed their mint and dill, hoped that they might be thought a good person, holy and acceptable to God. This is religion, this is behaviour modification, and it is completely futile. Either you succeed and end up proud that you managed to make your feet a shade cleaner than Bob's, but pride a sin so you're back to the beginning. Or after forty years of scrubbing, your feet are no cleaner, you've scrubbed to the bone and the bones dirty, and you have only despair. [(Perhaps it is stretching the metaphor to say that the reason your feet are dirty after all this time because you had to be walking back and forth to the well filling the stone jars when they got empty..?)] Pride and despair are the two quantities religion trades in, religion only makes the problem worse. (Rom5v20?)

So if Jesus turns this water into wine how is the game changed? That which was done outwardly under the old covenant, those things we and the Jews do to fix things were a limited picture of what Christ would go on to do, finally, conclusively and prefectly when his 'time' came, on the cross. No longer are we cleaning ourselves to get up to him, he is come down that we might savour him as wine here.

5. God is jealous for the goodness Creation, his concern to restore is a picture of Heaven in-breaking.
“...you have kept the good wine until now” (v10)

There is good news in this passage because of what wine represents. Wine in OT prophecy is a sign of Shalom. Jesus here, with a precise intentionality, chooses a wine-less wedding to make wine his first miracle, aware of the meaning this held and prophecies it fulfilled, as there presumably had been other opportunities to start out his road to Calvary, miraculously turning wood shavings into coffee or clay pigeons into living birds at any point previous in 33 silent years.. To say that Jesus found himself accidentally at a wine-less wedding and decided then to begin a ministry would be to have things in reverse. Jesus is on a mission to proclaim a Kingdom which fulfils some of these prophecies which are anticipating the Messiah:

Isaiah25:6 - Jeremiah31:12 - Joel3:18 - Amos9:13-14

All of them, looking from a place where everything, the very creation, seems broken, all of them looking towards the coming Shalom, towards the coming New Creation, where a Messiah will come and everything will be rebuilt, redeemed, restored, renewed in those times, new wine will flow. Jesus is saying loudly and clearly: this is happening now, here is the new wine now, here I am the beginning of a restoring work of all creation.

Note in these prophecies, just like the wine they use as a picture, the new creation is earthy, it is being reborn out of the soil this creation (Rom 8:22?).

Wine is interestingly apt, it can be seen as representing both the ecstatic sensation of the Kingdom and the grace-filled and abundant economics of the Kingdom.

[(Note also John's parallels with the creation narrative, 1:1 in the beginning…, 1:3 names God as creator, then in 2:10 it is declared good just as in Gen1.)] [(“..until now.” There is temptation to look back, and to say oh things back then.. What does it mean of the new creation that ‘good’ is used as sufficient adjective on its own to set it apart from the old?)]

6. God has written a Bible we can trust
For me there is a reassurance in having a book which, while sometimes complex, again and again offers a robust internal coherence of anticipating things prophesied and then observing its fulfilment.

Are you comforted, excited by that? It is easy to take for granted. We live under that arch of promises that have been made, anticipating their fulfilment. Given their fulfilment in John's account we should have license to a reckless confidence of obedience now.

[(Further, there is something reassuringly unspectacular and domestic about this miracle, 'Social Embarrassment Avoided at Wedding' is not selling me your newspaper. If fictional or embellished, a mythologized Jesus ideally ought to grab my attention with a something bigger, or at least more humanitarian, political and useful. That text doesn't give us that is because, conceivably, this awkward miracle really was.)]

7. God is concerned for the peripheral, God is present in the nowhere places.
“at Cana in Galilee..” (v1)

So, there they were, broken under Roman rule, holding out for a hero. Just as we now hope some messianic politician would stand up at COP15 and fix pollution, that Bono would sing some world shifting song at Live Aid and fix poverty, because that is where change happens, the sort of big change we need, the sort of change that we can believe in.

Where are you looking for your rebuilding, renewing, restoring to come from? Where are justice and the good life going to come from for you? Lobbying central government? A new flat in next best postcode? A career in London? Cana is a nowhere place, the sort of place you have to spell out on the phone to the bank, Bethlehem and Nazareth were fairly peripheral, Cana was a satellite of Nazareth, archaeologists aren't sure where Cana was any more precisely than that. Yet, and yet everything we have in the new Testament, then the Jesus movement and its worldwide consequences up to and including our standing here now was catalysed in that obscurity, and from there to the Jerusalems and Romes of that world, from there. This is good news for every forgotten and unimportant square inch of earth, God is there restoring and rebuilding.

8. God is not a tribal deity, He will not be coerced.
When Jesus addresses his mother as 'Woman'(v4), his tone is brusque. (I love the word brusque). While not disrespectful, there is a hint of rebuke in this, we can understand Jesus here, as elsewhere in lk11:27-28 and mk3:32-33, as straining earnestly to confront the assumption of the day, that Yahweh was their tribal God, a private saviour, a politicking side-taker. Nothing could be further from grace.

What is your evangelical pedigree? Do you struggle with your family's faith? Just as God doesn't privilege the geographies we consider important, neither are we privileged into or ruled out of his goodness by dint of biology. Whatever your family upbringing. So, the good news we take with us is that Christianity is not a western thing, not a Jackson thing, its not a middle class middle England thing, the message of the saving grace of Jesus Christ is true truth for every man, woman and child who opens themselves to receive it, drink it in, and dance under it.

9. God is not a pragmatist. Extravagant worship and extravagant evangelism are appropriate for an infinitely good God.
Jesus here is intentional and explicit about the details as well as the symbolism of his actions. He does what he does here because he had a message to proclaim and a message to embody. So do we. There is something offensively unpragmatic about 150 gallons of wine, just as there was in the spilling of perfume lk7:36-50. What is the message that Jesus is embodying? How do we, in the small things in our own lives, point to the wedding feast the Jesus has initiated? We should allow ourselves to be challenged by the application of these.

I believe Jesus wants to save us from our narrow definitions of utility. Some of the commentaries cite weddings in the 1st century where guests might sue the host if the wine ran out, which may well be have been an issue here, and the temptation, quietly, is to reduce this ridiculous miracle into one of fiscal utility.

[(Please picture yourself, family gathering over Christmas, Uncle B is a bit late, rings to ask if there's anything he can pick up on his way over, “Oh yes, we're running out of drink could you grab some.” Half an hour later he's there with a trailer full of champagne, the good stuff, from the top shelf, with the security tags on. “Thanks, things were getting a bit awkward in there..” or even “Thanks, you saved me the petrol of popping out to Sains myself.” Don't be silly. Don't miss the glorious absurdity of Cana.)]

In applying this I would caution against thinking in terms of expense, an acutely post-industrial temptation. Rather think of the breadth of talents you have. If I spent a few days carving a sculpture to give as a gift for she that I love, if she then were to ask how much it was worth, it would be to miss the point entirely.

I should keep myself from applying this for you, as I will only work myself up into rant about stone and stained glass but these would be two points it seems not unbiblical to consider:

9.1 A rule of sevenths and Sabbath. Which is in this passage: this wedding happens on the seventh day of John's account of Jesus ministry, in the only passage where John makes a numbering of days [(counting with Carson who reasonably assumes 1:40 begins a new day, as Jesus spends the day with the Baptist's disciples before Andrew brings Peter the day after.)] We submit our calendars to God who has said that we only need work 6 days of the week and that he will provide for the seventh. On that day we should play, thrive and Be, be at Rest, rest in Wonder. It is possible even for an extended period to burn the candle at both ends, to work seven days out of seven, and it is profitable – it advantages your career, Eric Liddell could have run and presumably won his Sunday heats. But there is a bigger story going on, life in all its Lifeness is not found in making things faster, in reaching the top sooner. So, just as we can submit our calendars to God, we can submit everything else to God, and by Sabbathing those demonstrate His provision. Does your architecture, do your weekends, does your dining table offer pauses, ornament, candles, flowers, embellishment celebrating simply Being? Are they one seventh redundant? Are they one seventh playful?

9.2 A rule of craft and soil. Jesus chooses wine to do his miracle through, significantly because it fulfils a slew of OT prophecies and by those it draws on a cultural association of wine with Shalom. It is worthwhile to ponder why wine, and what does wine represent and practically involve even still now. To those who have taken the time to learn wine a single glass speaks of what grapes in what soil in what season, the wine betrays the tradition of the craft specific to that region, the oak of the barrel, the weather of that year and the age of that bottle. Wine is a superlative celebration of dominion done well, of that subtle relationship between man and nature, and the tacit knowledge of an ancient craft. What better way to epitomise Shalom. Now, just as then, do we affirm craft, excellence and agriculture in our community?

Miscellaneous Applications~
1. Pray
See how Mary speaks her situation to Jesus (v3) and asks Jesus for help. She does this because she knows his power and because she knows his character. On this basis we can be bold enough to pray. Contained within the act of prayer is obedience (v5), by which we are made conduits for the power we petitioned for.

2. Live symbolically
If Jesus is our model we should consider the extensive ways he worked to make clear and to embody the metaphors by which he defines his true nature and the nature of reality. This whole wedding scene so weighted with the poetic as to prompt some commentators to suggest it was in fact a parable. It is our prerogative to demonstrate otherwise, to do so intentionally.

3. Celebrate
We are to take responsibility for our joy, even, some have constructed, to initiate a 'Discipline of Celebration'. Christianity is not a glum deism it is a wedding feast, if we are not celebrating it is not for lack of good news.

(image:sxc)

a community in ideals

“What is your community dream? Can you write it down and email me? I want the ideals at this stage – what does that look like for you? Hope you're doing well. a”

What is my community dream. I was this week challenged to consider my ambitions.. I guess this is a second prompting. On this theme of things hoped for, of which community occupies a central junction, I am looking for a hope of a mode of direction, a force of purpose that has all of a zest for life in its specificity without committing itself to the tidy bounds of my imagination and my present blindnesses of circumstance, I'm looking for a hope measurable without being modernist, observable without a suppression of mystery, hopeful without resorting to a loose canon naiveté.

The question is not unlike my own favourite, “What home are you hoping for?” I will try not to write my own question over yours, however indivisible the two notions are.

What is my community dream?

I think at the end I want my life, relationships and education, home, resources and energy to have born fruit of Place, ornament, and adventure. A community I hope in will entail a relentless commitment to hospitality and intergenerationality and learning and Sabbath. I want to see a household so ordered as to catalyse healing, a body quietly committed to the knowledge that there is a God whose will it is that dead people come alive.

With knowing reservations about the term 'ideal' I use it as it was in the question, but hope it will not induce notions of Platonic form or utopian dreams.

An ideal of agriculture, or redeeming soil, of knowing the freedom, if one of poverty, that comes in being submitted to the weather, rather than the oil economy. Not a paranoid self-sufficiency, religiously fair-trade, pathologically localist, neurotically organic, but rather a happy abandon and on going pursuit of the possibilities of imperfect foods nurtured by friends from their patch of Earth towards a gradually more completely integrated, relational, gift sort of diet..

An ideal of art, music and poetry. The pleasure of participation in imperfect art, providing space for the expression of story, legitimising ornament. Yes to an artist in residence, yes to film nights and formal occasions, but above and beyond that, slow space in the everyday for impromptu collaboration, I'm not sure how to aim for this without it being contrived. A precedent needs to be set that legitimises the frivolous, and affirms excellence, and laughs at silly things made along the way. This is a fruit we will know community by rather than the blueprint of some 'ideal' wrought by force of will, conformed by the discipline of the unwilling. To allow a community to be organically creative, it seems to me, needs to be freed from whatever it is that so suffocates the larger part of the world that settles for a blandly-culture-consuming, one-dimensionally-pragmatic, brutally-elitist or religious-prohibitionist approach to art and delight.

An ideal of intergenerationality. I think fleeting gaggles of dinky twenty and thirty somethings can do a pretty good run at playing community, burning the candle at both ends, hindered by no weaker parties, no kids, no aged relations. And within the limits of a project, phenomenal good can be effected, poor served, hungry fed, schools built. There is a better use for these the most energetic years of life, indeed a better arena in which to dream and effect those same saving, school building dreams. I believe that if we have kids and parents on board, with the baggage that entails, and if we submit ourselves to the inconveniences of place over time, we lay the foundations for such joy, wisdom and efficacy. I do not want to die the long death of the demographic ghetto, of cruise ships and bridge clubs and wasted old age, but I will unless I earn the right to serve within an intergenerational community now. Further I do not want to see my kids for but an hour a day and a few holiday weeks of the year, these are the death of wisdom for the young and the theft of all that Fox and Amie offer to our view of the world, all the refreshing colour, surprise and imagination. So, the ideal of intergenerational community so to set in motion something which at least has the potential to live breathe and grow in perpetuity.

An ideal of growth. Unbranded but infectious, unselfconscious but purposive. Growth is a tainted word, for me evoking number bashing church growth types hoping to calculate the world into the kingdom. Growth should imply life, and importantly it should celebrate that a consistent DNA is at work and effective regardless of size, and by this give hope that here in the mustard seed knot of two or three of us gathered is the beginning of something. So growth is to say that size categorically doesn't matter. Perhaps this leans on the hospitality imperative.

An ideal of industry, craft, the provision of work. So to prevent the creation of a dormitory ghetto that retreats and serves only itself and relies on an economy beyond. An ideal of a provocative economy. Any household is an economic identity, a tool for conducting dominion through, a order for managing resources through, and here in Oval we are not doing anything radical, we are in all fairly self-serving, but people are startled at what I pay to be here. It is good, because it allows me to volunteer in Singapore next year, and it is good because it allows me to imagine the possibilities that exist in the given fabric of London.

An ideal of learning. I would have bookcases for walls. This may be my own delight rather than a theme applicable to a whole community. I love the thoughts of thinkers. I love the feel of books. I am concerned at the disembodied head space of academia. I want for a mode of knowledge that is meaningful and every day.

An ideal of leadership and accountability. I'm not sure about this. The management of a body, the degree of submission, a line before cultdom, the role of belief, the nature of democracy.. There needs to be a cause beyond the comfort of the parties involved, both/and God and something geographic.. Not sure.

How are these, are they making sense as a whole? I want a big front door which is never locked, a long dining table, gathered strangers about the piano, high chairs and wheel chairs and miscellaneous reclaimed chairs, a workshop out back beyond a long allotment garden, a bike rack hallway, semi-autonomous cells fused under a shared architecture in wood and stone, every colour joinery, murals we made, space to work from, rest under and play between..