Gambling one’s time away

Yesterday evening, V went very reluctantly with some friends to play bingo. The reason is that they are rehearsing a play which is set in a bingo hall, and they wanted to acquire some familiarity with what went on.

The experience was pretty appalling. Several hundred people at least, probably more, playing with the bingo books, and, in between games, using slot machines fitted into the tables. The noise of coins going in was deafening: a cascade of several hundred pounds at once. As if this were not enough, the entrance hall was chock-a-block with fruit machines.

I fear for our society if it is so culturally impoverished that this is all people want to do with their spare time. I fear even more if it has to do with a kind of fatalism, a feeling that we have so little control over our lives that we might as well leave everything to chance: the millions spent on lottery tickets and scratch-cards, and the growth of online gambling would suggest this.

Yes, I know various organisations benefit from lottery money, but gambling verging on the addictive is a high price to pay for supporting charities. It’s a colossal waste of human creativity and resources.

Reconciliation or equivocation?

I’m as anxious as anyone to see real peace in Northern Ireland, but I don’t think the proposal in the Eames/Bradley report to give a ‘recognition payment’ of £12,000 to anyone who had a relative killed in the troubles is the right way to go about it. It sends entirely the wrong signals to anyone who lost a loved one at the hands of one or other of the paramilitaries, or the family of an innocent civilian killed by the security forces (yes, there were several, over and above those shot by the paras in Derry in 1972). There is simply no equivalence between this category of victim and those paramilitaries who met death in shoot-outs with the security forces, or who blew themselves up when planting bombs in public places.

Having said that, the proposals for a legacy commission and a reconciliation forum are promising. In optimal circumstances, they could turn into something akin to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But I fear that the good bits will be obscured by the controversial notion of the payments.

Involvement vs detachment

Attended a funeral today of someone I didn’t really know. At certain moments the minister was clearly struggling with tears, and I found myself affected by his grief.

How much professional detachment can clergy sustain when personal feelings are involved? Is it a help to have a set form of service?

A lovely couple

Barack and Michelle: tall, stylish, confident, brave. Who can do other than rejoice and wish them well?

Yet at the risk of seeming to strike a curmudgeonly note (and that’s not in my nature, as you well know), I have always had a question about the description ‘First Lady’. It does not denote a public office, and nobody can cast any votes for Michelle, or Jackie, or Lady Bird or Laura. The President’s wife (and so far, it has always been a wife) can have enormous influence, but to whom is she accountable?

Another thing: the phrase is eloquent of the fact that people expect the President and his consort to be a symbol of the traditional nuclear family, which is fine as far as it goes. But while we celebrate the progress which has brought a person of mixed parentage to the White House, let’s also look for the day when the President will be one or more of:

non-white
single
female
gay
atheist

or any other category you want to mention.

Courage and hope

This is not to be missed.

There probably is a God – I think

I find myself smiling wryly when I hear about the atheist (?) campaign to put slogans on buses saying, ‘There probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life.’ Why ‘probably’? Are they afraid that unless they hedge their bets and concede that they might be wrong, they will find themselves face to face with a terrifying presence booming out the words, ‘Weel, ye ken noo!’

Of course, the churches are much to blame for the image of religion that is projected to the general public, which makes it all too easy to suppose that faith has to do with repression, fear, punishment and denial of one’s humanity. My heart goes out to decent atheists and agnostics who have been so alienated by this grim negativity that they miss out on the joy and liberation of committing themselves to the God whose service is perfect freedom.

The inclusion of that ‘probably’ suggests a vestigial fear of the God whose existence they deny; but it also places them on ground that many of us believers are happy to occupy. If only they realised that people of faith don’t have to be literalists, and that faith and doubt can, for many believers, coexist comfortably, then we might be able to talk to each other. Then we would all, together, not only enjoy our lives, but know the peace that passes understanding.

Blessed leisure!

A week off church duties. Not entirely idle, but they say a change is as good as a rest. I’ll be going back to the old game, writing an article for a festschrift, and vetting a contribution to a symposium of essays on nineteenth-century Hispanic studies. Spent the morning browsing books that I haven’t looked at for at least five years, including one handsome half-calf volume of correspondence, warm and solid to the touch. Bliss!

Walk p.m. with BH in frosty bright sunshine. A good day.

The deadly virtues 2: Patience

Road rage, air rage, trolley rage, diss rage (read knifings). Ron Ferguson had a quip once about a woman who was furious with her hairdresser when the colour ran in the rain: ‘Rage, rage against the lightening of the dye’.

A little patience would make life a lot more pleasant and a lot safer. And yet, we keep being patient with all the wrong things. Landless Latin American peasants who wanted to change the oppressive political and economic structures under which they lived had patience preached to them by the Church for too long.

‘…with the Lord one day is like a thousand years’ (2 Peter, 3.8, quoting Ps. 90.4). Indeed, we have to wait for God’s purposes to be worked out; but I pray, ‘God give me impatience’ and a holy rage against

• injustice
• cruelty
• the oppression of minorities (racial, religious, sexual, linguistic, cultural)
• discrimination against women
• the complacency and arrogance of power in Church and state
• the trade in lethal weapons
• the despoliation of the planet
• greed for profit, which has left us in a mess.

You’ll have your own list, but that’s probably enough for now.

La cuesta de enero

It means literally ‘the hill of January’ in Spanish. You could render it as ‘the uphill slog/trudge of January’. The excitement of Christmas is over, we’re all tired, the yearly bills come in this month, the worst of the winter is still to come, and we’ve got to get back to work.

Nevertheless, some of my memories of January are of occasional balmy days (‘false spring’, it’s sometimes called), and a different quality in the light as the days begin to lengthen (not so you’d notice, at least not for a while).

It can’t be winter for ever.

So, a happy New Year to both our readers.