- The UK will begin leaving the EU on 29 March 2019. It will take 10 years to leave, 10 years for it to be evident to the whole country how stupid it was and 10 years to get back in, with none of our current special measures. (Hope this prediction doesn’t come to pass but fear it will).
- The only thing to make EU-positive lefty-liberals to have pause for thought will be the EU Elections in May which will result in big gains for the so-called populist right.
- No progress towards same-sex marriage in the Church of England, despite much clearer calls for it to happen.
- Significant concerns in many UK dioceses about the cost of bishops, and particularly their spouses, attending the Lambeth Conference in 2020. (Over £5000 each).
- Elizabeth Warren / Beto O’Rourke begin to emerge as the Democratic dream ticket.
- Stricter legislation in connection with drone operators.
- Steps towards legalisation of cannabis under serious consideration within SNP.
- No referendum on Independence.
- Cyber attacks merging with terrorist attacks
- One of Scotland’s daily newspapers ceases print publication.
9 responses to “The Lament Question”
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ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.
you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.
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the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.
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Its not just me though, and not just fours.
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I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)
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I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.
Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.
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Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.
I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.
And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.
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Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?
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Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.
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I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.
There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:
Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.
Previous Posts
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Cathedrals are growing. But so what?
I was interested, of course, to look through the press release this week about which churches are growing in the Church of England. One might have thought at a casual glance and by the way that the headlines were phrased that there was evidence that the Church of England was growing again but it isn’t…
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Back from hols and quick theatre reviews
I’m back to work at St Mary’s today after a post-Christmas (well, post-Epiphany) week off. I’m writing this at the point just before I go into work, say morning prayer and open up the emails that have come in to me whilst I was away. It has been a busy week. I managed to fit…
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The Equality Network Gets it Wrong
The Equality Network needs to be much more robust in condemning homophobic governments in Commonwealth countries during the Commonwealth Games
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Memo to Holyrood re School Chaplains
Dear Members of the Scottish Parliament Yesterday, one of Scotland’s schools sacked its school chaplain. It is a school very close to me and the reason that the Rev Donald MacInnes was sacked from the chaplaincy of Glasgow’s Gaelic School is close to me too. Mr MacInnes was sacked because parents in the school had…
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