Listening to the stones

Extinction

There is a whole institute at Oxford University that has the sole purpose of working out when and what might cause human extinction. Seems quite a lonely job. They suggest that it is possibly going to be technology that will cause our extinction: nanotechnology, synthetic biology etc, things we don't yet know about and don't know their consequences. We'll let them grow and develop without ever getting a full handle on them and they will be our destruction.

There is a call in there to be more aware of the ethics and take time over the development of things. There are questions about what our guiding principles are and the mantra of technology for the sake of technology. These are all good questions that you need time to ask but I doubt we will be slowing down technology any time soon. As they say, you can't undo any of it.

There is another side to that however. Well, it's not another side of it but a parallel side (can you get that?). Being so focused on our destruction we forget to live. Ignatius always said: Go with the life, and so we should. It's a Christian principle: go with the life. Ends come and go, but it is the living that is done that marks us out; the quality of the lives we live and share with others.

The article makes comment that there were more academic reports published on snowboarding than human extinction. Thank goodness! It's about living.

Yet, thinking about extinction might put into perspective the lives we live and the chaos they might bring. Perhaps thinking about our demise might enable us and show us the way to live more fully, more richly with each other and more in balance with was we are able to cope with ethically.

Just when you thought it was safe...

Remember way back when everyone was looking for the Higgs Boson (I'm sure they could have found it in my room given the mess of it) there was concern that be searching for it a black hole could be created someone in Switzerland and swallow up the earth? Remember how we all laughed?

Apparently it doesn't seem very funny now. Now that we've discovered the Higgs Boson and you add that into various calculations that have been waiting for the Higgs Boson to come along to get done, then it seems that the universe will be replaced by another universe one day. It will start very small and then more at light speed to replace what we've got  ow with a new universe. It's all a bit cyclical. 

We're not so smart now, are we!Or is it just the nature of everything that we seem to be going round n a feedback loop, never quite learning enough to break from from our human condition? It feels better that that condition is wired into the state of the universe. But surely history doesn't have to keep repeating itself, itself, itself...

Might love be counter intuitive to that?

Snow fair

Guys, come to our bit of Scotland if you want to avoid the snow. There's nothing here and there doesn't look as if there will be anything other than cold. The 'feels like' temperature is about -9 centigrade tonight but we can cope with that.

In truth, strange things are happening as we're continually getting the better version of possible weather options here in the West Coast of Scotland. Where it used to be snowy, it's now just grey and cold. When it used to be sunny it is just, you know, grey and cold. Okay it's not quite as monochrome as that but certainly we don't feel we've got any extremes, just lots of mediocre.

So why not immigrate? There's a lot of haggis about at this time of year too which is a nice variation to the horse meat beefburgers sold by some supermarkets. No one has to pretend here: no one knows what's in haggis, it might be horse, or sassanach who knows!

A load of bananas

Do bananas make good chips? Do they go with Haggis and Neeps?

Not such daft questions given that as our climate is changing and in many places warming then traditional crops such as wheat and maize and potatoes will be replaced by more 'tropical' produce and bananas could become the stable diet for many in the world.

Whether they'll ever be grown in Scotland I don't know. Scotland is one of those blips in the global warming debate and is also a reason we don't and shouldn't talk of global warming but rather climate change. Anyway, Scotland is certainly going to become wetter with cooler summers and milder winters under one more for the future so we might manage to retain the potato but its an interesting way to engage with climate change: what recipes will become our traditional meals? Banoffee Pie? Baked Banana and chocolate?

The point is that climate is changing but then it always has. Climate change is not a new concept to in the deep time of Planet Earth. It's been a whole lot cooler (snowball earth) and it has been a whole lot warmer where much of the single continent that what the land mass of our planet 250 million years ago was desert. It's just that humans haven't been on the planet when it has had any significant change in temperature. We've built a lifestyle and economy and inventions that work when the temperature ranges seasonally as it does now, except the last couple of years where there have been annual climate volatility and extreme weather patterns and look what happened to food prices and insurance bills.

So go start inventing some banana recipes. Publish them here. We can try them out and be ahead of the crowd when bananas are the vogue stable in our diet.

Ancient Rites

Part of me wants to rediscover the ancient rites that affected people of past generations. One of these would be Hallowe'en, or better the traditional Celtic festival of Samhain which was at this time of year when the cattle wold be brought in, livestock slaughtered for the winter food and the end of harvest. It happened mid way between the summer equinox and winter solstice and I wonder about letting our faith become more alive to God's natural rhythms in creation, using the times of the year to rediscover and hear afresh the ancient promises of light as the darkness gathers.

There are other times of year too that we might be more atune to God's promises if we kept to the natural cycle of things. There is the winter solstice which really is about light and the turning of the year. This is a far clearer connection with God and the idea of renewal than what we have done to Christmas which is more about donkeys and stables than anything else.

Easter too at the spring equinox, where life it pulled in different directions: the chaos of tides and weather of the time, the letting go of winter and the trusting in the spring: physical examples in creation of what the creator does and how the creators promises are kept.

Of course the cry of paganism is shouted out but it is only pagan is we want it to be. Easter, Pentecost, and Christmas were all pagan festivals until we Christianised them. It strikes me it might be time to rediscover the more ancient promises of God in the cycles of creation, and let these dramatic and visual changes be the evidence we proclaim to a very spiritual though not Christian generation of a God whose love is very real around us.

Just a thought, but interested in yours too in this debate.

Aurora Borealis

Did anyone see the Northern Lights last night. They seemed to be all over the place except in my neck of the woods. Or was I just asleep at the time?

They are incredible.

It makes you realise once more that we are so small and major stuff goes on all around  us that is so much bigger than us. We understand how it works but it still reminds us that while we make ourselves out to be gods in so many ways, with our sense of importance and the effort we feel we need to put in to the institutions we invent to keep them going such as church, politics, economy and government, in truth all are a shadow compared to the more phenominal and beautiful things in his universe.

Draw breath every so often. It really is worth the moment.

Harvest

Harvest Festival this week for us in New Kilpatrick.

We;ll be singing the traditional hymns, some of them at least, which contain words such as 'all is safely gathered in'

Of course it isn't safely gathered in. There is still far more people in the world going hungry than not. And given our 'fields' are not the ones down the road but somewhere on another continent then the theology of 'all is safely gathered in' is even more dodgy because what we gather for ourselves from another's land, leaves the local people hungry.

Harvest is not a ou8t feeding everyone. It is about justice that makes sure everyone has enough to eat and no more. It's not about capitalism and profits but about taking what we need from the land, thanking it, and letting it recover rather than turn it into land slavery producing crops that it really can afford from its own resources and is then given all the drugs/fertilisers it needs to produce what we want without breathing space, without honour, without jubilee.

Harvest isn't an easy time. It is often a time of guilt. Dare we sing 'all is safely gathered in' until all are fed?

Looking back in time - do we see God better?

The Hubble has done it again with some extraordinary photos of space. The Hubble is the magnificent telescope that needed new lenses if I remember because they weren't quite exact but once it got those lenses it has taken us back further and further into time. The latest photo is of some 5000 galaxies about 460 million years after the big bang.

It is amazing to realise we can go backwards in time with a photograph. We knew we could do that, of course. There are plenty of photos in our house of our child growing up and it is always good to see them and brings back lots of warm fuzzy feelings. But this is something quite different as it takes us back before planet Earth was even a glint in the creators eye.

It makes me wonder about how we picture ourselves and the theology we have that is so anthropomorphic, so self-centred where humanity is the crowning glory of all this space. Can you imagine the universe 460 million years after the big bang? We're now 13.5 billion years after it but we can see that history in a photograph because it takes light so long to reach Earth this distance from the centre of the universe. What we see probably all disappeared, billions of years ago. So we're on this tiny lump of a planet on the outer wing of a galaxy spinning somewhere off the beaten track of history, so incredibly insignificant yet we think all creation centres ultimately on us. God is all about us. God probably is but not necessarily in the way we think!

What's the point of this post? I don't know. That's the point: sometimes you just don't know what to think about God and life and Jesus! The salvation story is written for us and imagines we're the centre of everything God has ever done and that includes God, Godself. With the Hubble extreme deep field image you have to see that that might not be true, not in the way it was first intended. How can we newly understand the story without it being all about us yet at the same time realise the far greater wonder that it actually might be true. It's all a bit scary.

Skating on Thin Ice

Arctic ice has never been so thin or cover so small an area. It's always been seen as one of the first and most dramatic indicators of climate change and at this time of year the ice sheet should be at its smallest, but it has never been quite so small. It is 50% smaller that it's average size between 1980 and 2000.

It means we are in uncharted territory. No one has experience of when the planet has has so little ice at its north pole. It changes the nature of currents and sea life which all has knock-on effects.

Of course so many people talk about doing something to save the planet when we see such dramatic evidence of climate change. The planet, however, is fine. It is a living thing and changes all the time. It's been a whole lot colder and it's been a whole lot warmer. It's just that there weren't any humans on it when it was like that. That's the point.

We've had a very stable 10,000 years in terms of climate. All our culture and sense of who we are and division of labour and land have all been worked out while the planet was in an unusually stable state. It may be we're moving out of that now and that means we will have this massive and growing population on a planet that is not so generous towards us any more. Changing climate means the land and sea will change in what it can provide and sustain and as it changes the question is how do we cope with something becoming unstable when the whole of humanity has always had it in a stable state. there have been blips of course, but climate change is possibly going to get a whole lot more exciting and out place on the planet a bit more uncertain.

Who wants to take a quite look over Genesis 1 & 2, or Psalm 8 or the end of Job? What stories of creation might we be writing now?

One small step

The Red Planet is in the news and so is the moon. The Mars Rover Curiosity has taken some stunning pictures of a place no one has ever been before, ever (probably). I don't know if the whole Mars expedition sends tingles up and down your spine or not but it does mine every so often. Yet I'm not sure if it is necessary or if it is worth the cost.

But talking of cost, humans on the moon is in another league. Neil Armstrong's death reminds us of those heady days, and indeed you can count them in days, just about 1000 of them because all the moon landings happened over about 3 years and since 1972 we haven't done it again. NASA didn't want to send a human to the moon in the first place but preferred robots (just like Mars) because they were more reliable and cheaper and could do more things.

It was the Idea that gave the 'man on the moon' project life.

The idea.

What did The Church do with the last person who had a new idea...?