Will farming end with peak oil?

Read this challenging article by the ever provovcative and sobering George Monbiot, and draw your own conclusions.

That camel guy and Charlie have a baby!

That camel guy, aka Sahel Steve, aka Steve Davies has had a baby, well more accurately Charlie had the baby, but Steve got involved! Welcome to the world Liberty Rose.

Brilliant news, so pleased for you, least you’ll have some good stories to read to her!

 

 

Tobias Jones sets up a commune

One of the people whose name was mentioned a few times during the research for my book on New Monasticism in the Uk, was Tobias Jones whose book Utopian Dreams told of his journey around a number of communes, including Pilsdon in the south of England, which is one of the communities I look at too.

Tobias, it must be said, is a far better writer than me, and his book is very much worth reading if you are interested in community living of any sort.

Interesting to note by the way that he links Pilsdon directly to Little Gidding, which is a key place in the story of New Monasticism in the UK, I hope to meet up with James Stacey from the Jesus Army there in the new year.

Anyway, Tobias is now in the process of setting up his own woodland community, which sounds brilliant, you can read about it here. He is taking a very sensitive and pragmatic approach to it, which is to heartily reccomended. I wish him every success and blessing. Go for it!!

 

Letter from Mumbai

So I’m currently in India, where for the last couple of days I’ve been immersed in the world of garment manufacture, and trying to solve a nagging production issue, which has now been resolved – hurrah!

However, the world of business means that I’ve been living a very ‘unreal’ Indian existance, being picked up from one air-conditioned location and carried in an air-con car to another similar place. Even the factories are clean and well presented, with air-con meeting rooms and bottled drinks for ‘important’ western buyers like me.

It all feels really weird living like this, even the way I dress is required to demonstrate my separation from the poor and lowest parts of society, I must appear smart and well groomed in order that the factory bosses take me and my business seriously. I must deliberately differentiate myself from the urban poor, demonstrating my ability to be ‘worth something’ to them.

This afternoon I had a rare, and far too short opportunity to escape the clutches of business colleagues and anxious hotel staff and to get out for a change amongst the smells and dust of Mumbai.

One of the great joys for me in this kind of place is to travel by rickshaw, something I’m not often able to do as a business traveller, so I grabbed the chance this afternoon, and without realising it, scored a double whammy.

Not only did I get the rickshaw ride I wanted, but I got a driver with attitude and humour, not only was his ride ‘pimped’ with a large pop culture sticker which almost completely obscured the windscreen, but he also had a large brass hooter for a horn, something which is rather impractical but a lot of fun.

As if this wasn’t quite enough, he turned to me as we got in and said: ‘Magic?’

‘Magic??’ I replied, wondering what he was on about.

‘Magic!!’ he declared, before putting on the loudest music in the road, so off we went in his pimped out rickshaw, music blasting. Highly entertaining.

However, the reality of the separation between me and the people around me is not altered by one short rickshaw ride. From the fourth floor window of my hotel room, I look down on a collection of slum dwellings, where people are living in circumstances which for me are unimaginable. Kids walk blithely along huge concrete pipes, between which a stagnant sewer steeps.

Ragged homes are built of reclaimed junk, and men sit for hours sorting through piles of plastic litter, presumably looking for items which are worth reclaiming or have some other resale value.

This is India in the 21st century, beautiful hotels in which the priveliged can dwell in air-conditioned luxury, right next to abject poverty. Apparently I’m stuck in one camp, wanting to make a difference to the other, unsure as to how well I am managing it.

Homobonus, patron saint of sweatshop workers

First prize in the silly sounding names for saints list goes to dear old Homobonus, whose name literally means ‘good man’.

But on his feast day (November 13th) we should remember the people he is supposed to be patron of.

Homobonus was a medieval tailor and merchant, a man who believed the wealth he had inherited and earned was there for him to look after others with, and he maintained scrupulously honest accounts and gave generously to the poor.

Today we are all rich over here in the UK, very, very few of us live on anything like $2 per day, but all around the world there are thousands, millions even, of others who do. People who are quite literally slaves to our lifestyles, working in conditions which are unacceptable and for wages which keep them just out of starvation but a long way from comfort.

Our determination to buy cheap clothing from unscrupulous retailers who think that signing the ETI is enough to give them ‘ethical’ status shows that we as a society have forgotten the ways of Homobonus, and have become a collective Homomalus, trampling on the impoverished producers of our clothing.

If you want to buy clothing today (or any other day), please act responsibly and avoid the attractions of cheap disposable clothing which is made by people enslaved to our whims. The best thing to do is to buy second hand clothing, if you have to buy new, then seek out good quality clothing which will last, is made of environmentally responsible materials, and which is made by people whom you can trust to look after their workers.

 

Off to India again

I am personally using up the carbon allowance of a small town at the moment, with my second factory visit trip to India within six months on the cards for next week.

Although I dont buy into the carbon off setting thing, I am wondering about how I could pay back my grevious use of jet fuel, although as my brother pointed out, the fact that I am paying for one allotment to lie fallow at the moment is probably making me carbon neutral

Cheeky beggar.

So off to India on Monday, back on Friday, may get a blog post in while I’m there, may not… in the meantime there’s another patron saint to come, this time patron saint of sweatshop workers… but can you guess his name?

Saint Martin of Tours, patron saint of soldiers and conscientious objectors?

Saint Martin of Tours, whose feast day is November 11th (tomorrow) in the West, as well as being something of a big noise in France, is also officially the patron saint of soldiers, but might I reckon  just as well be the patron saint of conscientious objectors.

He was around in the fourth century AD, and was a real European, born in Hungary, growing up in Italy and ending up in France.

Martin, a forced conscript at the age of 15 into the Roman army in which his father had served as an officer, was hardly a model soldier.In fact there was not much that Martin of Tours modelled which had anything to be said for it in worldly terms.

Martin of Tours was a youngster when he decided that against the ways of his family, he wanted to join the Christian church. He secretly became a believer, and when in his mid teens he was conscripted into the legion, he apparently had to be chained up before he would take the oath.

Once taken though, Martin felt he must uphold his oath, and faitfully carried out his mainly ceremonial duties as a soldier, albeit an unconventional one.

One of the most famous stories concerning Martin’s unusual behaviour is from his time as a soldier, it has the young officer riding out on his horse when he saw a beggar half frozen in the street. Instead of ignoring the man and riding on like his fellow officers, Martin jumped down and slashed his own cloak in half, giving one half to the poor man, and keeping the other half for himself. It seems as if this was a turning point for him, he is said to have dreamed that night that he had given the cloak to Jesus, in a stark reminder of the words of Jesus…

I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.

It was about two years after this time that Martin was finally sent out to war, when nomads invaded and he was called up to fight in the front line. His previous determination to fulfill the oath he had made seemed to have waned and become replaced with a determination to follow Jesus’ ways, and rather than fight he said:

“Put me in the front of the army, without weapons or armor; but I will not draw sword again. I am become the soldier of Christ.”

It was with these words that he became for me, the patron saint of the conscientious objector. Not a coward, not a desertor, just someone who refused to fight.

He went on to become a sack-cloth clad monk, and to live his life in a way that should stand as an example to all of us, eventually being buried in a paupers grave despite his family’s social standing.

Among other things he can be credited with is the establishment of monasticism in Gaul (France) and a missionary career marked by going to meet people in their homes, rather than demanding they come to him in a church or temple.

Martin of Tours was faithful to his beliefs, famously he got things wrong and wasnt always well recieved, but he was faithful and carried on anyway.

All of which reminds me of a prayer which Mark Berry posted the other day, written by another soldier of Christ, Thomas Merton, which neatly sums up the attitude which I think we each should take to this life of Jesus following:

My Lord God I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.
And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you always
though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for you are ever with me,
and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

(Thoughts in Solitude.  Thomas Merton)

Visit either of these two sites for more of a biography of Martin of Tours.

If you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with

Or the strange fascination God’s people have with the world they’re in.

Stephen Stills was a great songwriter, and there’s no doubt ‘Love the one you’re with’ is a catchy song, which accounts for the fact that it’s been covered by gazillions of artists since Stills released it in the early 1970s.

But for me I find the amoral nature of the lyric fairly nauseating:

And if you can’t be with the one you love
Love the one you’re with
Love the one you’re with
Turn your heartache right into joy
She’s a girl, you’re a boy,
Get it together make it nice
Ain’t gonna need anymore advice.

It’s just more of that crappy hedonism that was and is preached by the kings of cool and which has proven to be oh so great for all of us.

But my problem with this notion goes further than a bit of a grumble about a pop song, after all many of my favourite tunes have morally ambiguous lyrics if I’m honest.

My real gripe is that this very sentiment is being played out each day by people who claim to follow Jesus, and from time to time, more often perhaps than I’d like to admit, by me too.

Somehow because of the nature of God, being all invisible and difficult to focus upon, and the very hyper-reality of the world we live in, we choose to forsake the apparently absent one we (say we) love, and instead have an affair, or at least a fling, with the one we’re with.

Perhaps it’s as Stills says:

…you’re down and confused
And you don’t remember who you’re talkin’ to
Concentration slip away…

…There’s a girl right next to you
And she’s just waiting for something you do.

There’s a real need for us to remember who we are talking to, to remind ourselves of the reality of our situation. Not to be so distracted by our surroundings that we forsake the one we love, for the one we’re with.

How can that be done? There’s a real question of discipline here, which again I’ll be the first to say I have not got a good enough hold of. But perhaps there was a good reason that the Jews and the early Christians chose to pray seven times a day, perhaps the Muslims have a point in their ritual daily observances!

Perhaps we have lost something by rejecting the Sabbath and letting the ways of the world in to our day of rest and ritual observance. Perhaps our choice to forsake the telling and retelling of stories of God and his people in preference to weak sermons and flashy multimedia presentations has had unforeseen consequences.

Perhaps we’ve mucked up by abandoning fasting as a regular part of our life, and allowing our every desire to be sated in a whirlwind of consumer culture. Maybe our unwillingness to take on the challenge of meditation in a world where information flies around at the speed of light is a bigger loss than we thought, as it has the potential to connect us to the unknown and unseen and remove us from the realm of the immediate.

Maybe the monastics really do have something to teach us in all this… I guess you know I think they do.

I suppose this is a mournful call for a return to spiritual discipline, in the knowledge that we walk only by grace any how, but in the sincere hope that with a renewed focus on the reality of the closeness of God, comes a greater faithfulness to him.

Robert Crumb’s Genesis – a review

I recently got a copy of Robert Crumb’s illustrated book of Genesis for review. I’m not going to print my whole review here, it’s going elsewhere, but I am going to give a quick/short form review as I know lots of people will be interested in the book.

Of course Crumb is a justly famous artist, his mastery of pencil and pen is amazing, and the artwork in this version of the Genesis text is incredible.

Moreover he doesnt take any liberties with the text, it’s basically ‘as is’ (albeit with the mandatory additions of chapters, and the occasional Crumb footnote).

It’s a beautifully illustrated book, and the illustration is very well researched, adding a new dimension to the text in places.

My only grumble with the book is that in my opinion Crumb has over-sexualised some of the female characters. I think he does this to try and emphasise their power and importance, but I think the pneumatic breasts and rounded buttocks which appear clothed and unclothed as the the stories demand, are at times unneccesarily exagerated.

Textual literalists may also complain that while Crumb doesnt add or subtract from the words, he does add some new layers of meaning (although well researched of course) via facial expressions and background contexts in certain scenes.

In all, an excellent book, really beautifully drawn. There are issues surrounding sexualisation, and in my opinion this is a consistent issue with Crumb, but if you can ignore that, then there is the real possibility that this will open up the ancient and awesome book of Genesis in a new way for the reader, and that is always welcome.

Parental advisory: contains sexual and violent content.

Book Progress

So the book is progressing, which is kind of exciting. Because it is now out of my hands I dont really feel like its a real entity at the moment, except for brief flashes of excitement now and then, like today when I was sent a bunch of potential covers to have a look at, actually I thought there were about four really good options in the bunch, but one stood out as my favourite, and the same one was picked out by a couple of others I asked, so I now think I have an idea what the book will look like.

Nice.

Publishing date is still the same, looks like May 2010 barring any set backs, I was thinking of asking the Pope for a foreword… worth a try?

For anyone who doesnt know by the way, and cares, because you need to care and not know to want to read this next sentence… The book is called New Monasticism UK, and its about the themes of new monasticism, in terms of rules, rhythms, community and so on, and it is mainly made up of interviews with people living in what I consider to be new monastic ways. I would think it would make a really perfect gift for anyone fom the age of 5 upwards… oh darn I forgot to include colouring pages!