If I am an expert in anything (both professionally and personally) it is "making a start". This week I started the process of ISO14001 certification for my firm. This is a very worthy management system that certifies that your business is keeping a big green eye on things. If it is left wholly up to me, the process will cost thousands and simply result in a lever arch folder full of documents in an archive and nothing else. Luckily, I have people to help me (for which read: "people to see it through"). The allotment is my magnum opus really, because it allows me to start hundreds of different things and not complete any of them. Any kind of fruition literally happens despite my ministrations.
Today is Easter Sunday and another thing I should do is go to church. But I wriggled out of that by stating that the allotment needs attention. One good thing about having a lot to do is that you can trade the demands of various tasks off against one another in order to sum to zero. You can actually be very busy doing nothing.
Tempting as it is to take a photograph of the half painted fence as a visual form of confession, I can't because the cat has killed a pigeon in the garden, right next to the fence. The bloody carcass and strewn feathers of the pigeon confront me. I will have to bury the pigeon. That means I need to go to the allotment to get the spade. I was going to go to the allotment whilst the wife and kids were at church. I already know I am likely to forget to bring the spade home. I also need to mow the lawn. I have a half thought that perhaps I could just mow over the pigeon and somehow distribute it fairly evenly and have no need to dig it a grave. This might even be good for the lawn. It might not be a good thing for the kids though. I recall being traumatised by much less at the same age.
I went to see a comedy gig the other night - Richard Herring topped the bill for a combined Oxfam and Sue Ryder Charity "Eggstravaganza" (and he made an excellent joke about the two rival charity camps having a death match for the proceeds). The wacky title should have warned me that there might be some am-dram smuggled in (those drama students who could not do hysterical and unfunny routines in front of you were the ones roaring encouragement to their peers from behind you - we were in a banshee sandwich at one point). The compere of the show, Rob Rouse, had a number of quite physical routines (including bumbling about the stage in an ill-fitting rabbit costume and imitating a dog fellating itself vigourously to the point of asphyxia). As part of his physical comedy he also indicated how horrified he was by the crucifixhe saw in his mother-in-laws house. He acted this by stretching out his arms and screaming. What Rouse did was to highlight the incongruity of having such horror on display in a family home (he contrasted this with the allegation that you still cannot see an erect male member on television).
I was struck by this because abject horror isn't a characteristic I have ever seen in a crucifix myself (maybe there's something wrong with me). To my mind, in those icons, Christ is always forlorn and broken. In fact Catholicism seems to revel in just how defeated or dead they can make him appear. Crucixion would have been agonising, but being confronted with a fight for life, by someone holding on to vitality, by grim determination despite horrific injury might indicate that Jesus had not wanted to die; that he had not so willingly sacrificed himself as it would appear. There would be no humility to behold and the church wants at least your humility, or, if not, for you to witness a paragon of humility and feel shame. Despite my belief in a Christian God, I have never wanted to idolise the image of the crucified Christ. Why has his resurrection never been rendered symbolically when that's the most important bit?
Persistence is a trait I would dearly love to have. I admire it in others - the fighting on, the struggle over the odds. It's the essence of humanity. I remember a story from The Falklands War where a squaddie describes bayoneting an Argentine conscript whilst the poor teenager clutched at his rifle and implored him to stop. The whole thing lasted many minutes; certainly enough time to consider acquiescing and to contemplate the different consequences involved in desisting or pressing on. And yet we can die so easily. An ill-judged step off a kerb can result in a fatal basal skull fracture. Life is fragile, but the desire to hold on to it is the strongest instinct we posess, stronger than any desire. I would certainly paint the fence if my life depended on it.
It seems to me that we are now engulfed in our humanity. We tolerate all sorts of viscera in our line of sight. We wallow in flesh and indulge in an orgy of the material. Although there isn't a cornucopia of phalluses decorating the television, we're pretty inurred to the sight of genitalia actually. We can accept megadeath statistics in abstraction as long as no one we know is involved. Even dead bodies themselves soon lose their resemblance to the living things they once were. We no longer raise an eyebrow at disintered remains on forensic cop shows and we probe inside still living tissue to extract a giant tumour for the cameras.
Perhaps that only leaves self-sacrifice left as something truly obscene. Why give your life for another; especially someone who doesn't want you to; never asked to you; is not yet even born?Why do it willingly and without complaint? It is perverse when looked at from a humanist point of view. We are asking young men and women to put themselves at risk of death on our behalf every day in Afghanistan. They are doing so for a far less noble reason than that for which Christ gave his life - geo-politics. And they are being sacrificed by someone else. And I doubt any of them, if asked, would give their life so that the flow of opium might be slightly disrupted. Suicide bombers appear to sacrifice themselvs for an ideology but in reality they are young lambs sacrificed by their elders who have no intention of giving up their own lives when they are stilll gainfully employed recruiting more semtex fodder. More prosaically, in the current recesssion the wealthy (who are usually older) are seeing their pensions dwindle and in order to preserve what is left they are making others (usually younger people without pensions) redundant. Would Abraham have given up his son if God had not provided the ram instead? I believe he would have just because he knew he would not be judged for it; God had said it was ok. Sacrificing youth for what you believe to be the greater good isn't nearly as hard as it ought to be.
So did God sacrifice his son, rather than Christ sacrifice himself? No, because Jesus had the power to save himself on any number of occasions and he knew exactly what he was doing. At no stage did he ever just run off, or lie, or ask someone to hide him or lie on his behalf. Arguably he also knew that his death would be the most significant self-sacrifice anyone had ever made in the context of the politics of Judaea if not the future of the world.
We're still talking about it.
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