What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Back from Retreat (all perky and ready to go)

    Just back from a week on retreat in a Jesuit house in sunny Spain.

    It is a while since I’ve made a retreat and four years since I went to this particular place. Like before, I’ve come back all perky and ready to go.

    I realise as I look back over the last few weeks that much of the blogging has been quite technical church synod stuff. Normal service begins again here.

    It has been interesting reflecting on my life here at St Mary’s recently. I didn’t particularly go on retreat to do this but inevitably, one thinks about where one is coming from and in conversation with other retreatants, you do find yourself thinking a lot about the life you have as you hear of the lives of others.

    This retreat wasn’t a silent one – it consisted of mostly imaginative Ignation exercises and group sharing in the morning, siesta/sun/snooze in the afternoon heat and then a Jesuit examine style of prayer in the evening before mass. Quieter in the mornings. Chatter later in the day. It was just what I needed and I’m very grateful to those who make this kind of thing happen. The theme, by the way, was Mentoring.

    No doubt I’ll have lots of emails and messages to deal with when I get back into the office this afternoon.

    I’ve just checked the cathedral website to realise that this Sunday is one of those bumper ones which make life around here so wonderful. It is the last blast of the West End Festival this week and so we’ve a special Choral Service in the morning (Darke in E) and then the extraordinary spectacle of an Orchestral Choral Evensong in the evening.

    Yes, you heard that right – Orchestral Choral Evensong. A very big choir and an orchestra and music that you know and love:

    Orchestral Choral Evensong
    sung by the Cathedral Choir and St Mary’s Festival Chorus,
    accompanied by St Mary’s Festival Orchestra
    Introit: I was glad – Parry
    Responses: Rose
    Psalm: The Lord is my shepherd – Howard Goodall
    Canticles: Stanford in A
    Anthem: Greater Love – Ireland

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15 responses to “The Trump of Judgement for Liberals”

  1. Guy Avatar
    Guy

    I heard someone talking on the radio who had looked at actual voting data (wherever such people get that from). Predictors of whether someone was a Trump voter, though by no means decisive ones, were whether someone earned more than $50000, had never gone to college or had done so but dropped out, was male, and over 44 years old. But there were people in those categories who had voted for Clinton as well. Even the much spoken of Hispanic vote was not as big a predictor of voting preference as thought and there were too many women who hated Hilary Clinton for misogyny to be the overarching factor.

    The stand out predictor which went across all categories was colour, whites going for Trump, up to %58.

    This vote was an anti-Obama backlash from people who couldn’t quite forgive the fact that an African-American had been running the show for eight years, whether the racism was of the vitriolic nasty sort or the more urbane sort that says that some of the other lot are probably ok, but only as long as we don’t have to actually mix with them and they’re somewhere else, it amounts to the same thing. The analyst speaking referred to a sort of nostalgia for when whites seemed to be in overall charge of everything.

    As to our response: as far as I can see the reason American politics is so vitriolic is because Liberals and Conservatives hate each other and also want to remake the other side in their own image.

    Love the other: well very gospel, but pretty darned hard when you struggle to even like xenophobic misogynistic lgbt-haters, let alone love them!

    Love might be the attitude that those of us who call ourselves Christians have to struggle towards, but I’m less sanguine than Kelvin is on this one and the verse that keeps going through my mind is the bit in Ecclesiastes about there being a time for this a time for that.

    Sometimes conflict is inevitable and has to be fought to a finish. You can’t react to the kind of person who shouted out at Trump’s victory speech “jail Obama” on the basis of well, six of one and half a dozen of the other. And such people aren’t exactly amenable to sweet reason.

    On the other hand sometimes people have just to be left alone. Forceably trying to remake the other in your own image just antagonises.

    I think our response has to be to discern the difference between the two situations. And to redouble our efforts to make sure that a Trump can’t become Prime Minister in the UK.

    Reply
  2. Eamonn Avatar
    Eamonn

    A prophetic and timely warning, Kelvin. What Trump represents is on the way to becoming a global phenomenon. The tone of his rallies, and the chanting of mindless slogans, is all too reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s. The fact that his election has been welcomed by Marine le Pen and other far-right leaders in Europe speaks volumes.

    Reply
  3. Guy Avatar
    Guy

    Something to think about: when it penetrates the general consciousness that the majority of white conservative evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, what if anything will be the fall out for Christianity as a whole?

    Reply

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