1 – The UK will lose its triple A credit rating.
2 – The Scottish Episcopal Church will have poor statistical returns this year prompting very quiet wailing and gnashing of teeth except in Argyll.
3 – At least one Church of England bishop (and maybe a pair) will be outed. (Only time I’ve retained a prediction from one year to the next).
4 – The Scottish Parliament will vote for new legislation allowing gay couples to get married. (But no such weddings this year). The details of the new category of “belief marriages” will be substantially changed and much more heavily regulated than is suggested in the recent consultation response from government.
5 – Sadly, I expect renewed campaigning for straight people to be able to enter Civil Partnerships with preparations being made for a legal challenge for 2014.
6 – The Coalition will have lower public opinion ratings by end of year due to public concerns as austerity measures bite. It will record one of the lowest public opinion rating of any UK govenment in modern times.
7 – The Church of Scotland will have a difficult General Assembly, but one characterised by fine speeches. They will approve a report which suggests having a theological study into blessing civil partnerships but not actual marriages of gay people. (This will please no-one who has any opinions about the matter and will thus be regarded as a success by those who don’t).
8 – The Church of England will be unable to agree a way forward on opening the Episcopate to Women.
9 – Justin Welby won’t put a foot wrong.
10 – The new Bishop of Durham will come from a relatively small congregation in London.
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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Film Festival
The opening movie in the Film Festival last night was Ae Fond Kiss – Ken Loache’s new inter-racial romance set in Glasgow. Having spent two days last week going backwards and forwards to Pollockshields, it was rather fun to see real life portrayed in a film. Arranged marriages, children not doing what their parents expect…
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Harvest Sermon – 3 October 2004
The interesting thing about harvest is that people have become more and more keen on celebrating it the further they have got from being the ones who gather in the crops in the fields. The harvest festival is a festival which most people think goes back into the mists of time. We imagine joyful peasants…
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Psephology
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Ordinations
Several people I know have been ordained this week. Inevitably, it makes me think about my own ordinations, first to the diaconate and then to the priesthood. Tomorrow I’m going to Glasgow to a first Eucharist. No doubt I’ll be thinking of my own first mass. It was outside in the open air, in the…
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