Bournagain

I’m sitting here in my shed, which has recently had an extensive facelift to transform it into an office.  Part of the process has required sorting through piles of old papers – the accumulation of several years of odd documents that I couldn’t quite bring myself to throw out.  Surrounded by piles of paper, let me take a break and share with you an old treasure I must have clipped from somewhere.  I mean really old – this one dates back to A.D.150 – well, the text, if not the document itself.  Apparently it was a report received by one Diognetes from some outpost of the Roman Empire.  This man had evidently been marked by his dealings with a peculiar group of people that seemed to be spreading throughout the empire…

The Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country nor language nor the customs which they observe.  For they neither inhabit cities of their own nor employ a peculiar form of speech nor lead a life which is marked out by a singularity…

They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.  As citizens, they share in all things with others and yet endure all things as if foreigners.

Every foreign land is to them as their native country and the land of their birth as a land of strangers…

They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.  They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.  They obey the prescribed laws of the land and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives.

They love all men and are persecuted by all…They are poor yet make many rich…To sum up in a word: What the soul is in the body, that is a Christian in the world.

Were Diognetes alive today, I wonder if he would be able to recognise a Christian.

There has been another claim to have found Noah’s ark.  You are probably not aware, as to date it has been difficult to find coverage of this event in mainstream newspapers.  I am not well-placed to attest to the authenticity of this find as I am not an archaeologist, nor have I been to Turkey.  If you are interested in this subject you can examine the claims for yourself in this report issued by the organisation behind the search, and this video footage purportedly filmed inside the ancient wooden structure discovered at an altitude of over 4,000 metres up Mount Ararat.

I admit to being fascinated by the possibility that the remains of the Ark could still be buried somewhere in eastern Turkey.  I would not consider, however, that I have any vested interest in the finding of the said artefact because of my faith.  The Christian faith is not based on whether or not the Ark can be found, but rather whether or not a certain first century Jew died and rose again three days later as he claimed he would.  For me the historical evidence for this second fact is quite sufficient to give me confidence to follow the way of Jesus.

However, quite apart from the question of whether or not this latest finding is authentic, we are again witnessing the news media behaving in a very peculiar way, as it does every time some archaeological discovery is made that sheds light upon an event that is recorded in the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures.

Have you ever noticed that for an archeological find that is corroborated by the Scriptures to be accepted as authentic, an impossibly exacting standard of proof is required?  The set of criteria for evaluating biblical archaeology is quite different to those used in any other field of archaeology, or indeed historical science in general.

A collection of statements from media reports concerning the latest Noah’s Ark find illustrates this:

The evangelical group says it found wood structures on Ararat, and carbon dating placed it at 4,800 years old. But even this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s Noah’s Ark – or that the “structure” they found is that old.
New York Daily News 20/04/10.

Carbon14-dating is generally presented by the popular media as being infallible, even if it yields an age of over 60,000 years, which is widely understood to be the maximum extent of the method’s reliability.  If we read in the news that a fossil or an artifact has been dated to x number of years, we accept that report as being reliable.  If, however, it concerns a biblical artifact, carbon-dating doesn’t prove anything.

It could be ancient, it could be medieval, it could even have been constructed last week,” he said. “Even carbon-14 dating will only tell us how old the wood is; it will not tell us when the structure was constructed.

A quote by Professor Eric Cline of George Washington University, from the same article.

All historical evidence needs to be evaluated and interpreted, as there are no eye-witnesses available to confirm whether or not a find is authentic.  We see both plausible and implausible interpretations put forward, and in most cases, when an expert rejects an implausible interpretation, this rejection is confirmed and accepted.  When it comes to biblical archeology, however, experts get away with publishing the most absurdly implausible interpretations, and are taken seriously.  The above is a prime example – Mr Cline would have us believe that it is possible that somebody found a store of 4,800 year old timber that he carted 4,000 metres up a mountain and built a wooden structure, embedded it in the ice, and managed this feat in a week.

Noah’s Ark Hoax Claim Doesn’t Deter Believers, trumpets Fox News, followed by a stereotypical medieval engraving of the Ark (supposedly highlighting the unsophistication of our credulous forbears who actually believed the biblical account).  Further down in the article we read:

Maybe the find on Mount Ararat in Turkey really is Noah’s Ark. More likely, it isn’t. But if it isn’t, that won’t stop Ark enthusiasts from believing it is out there somewhere.

The headline tells us it’s a hoax.  The article specifies that the authenticity of the find has not yet been determined.  This article does not tell us anything useful regarding the identification of the artifact, other than portraying the author of the article, Lauren Green, as someone who considers herself qualified to brush off of the find with a summary “more likely it isn’t [the ark]“, which begs the question, “what would she know?”  Can a journalist who entitles her article with such a blatantly contradictory headline really be trusted?

Difficult to find serious journalism on the subject, although the Christian Science Monitor seems to do a better job than most.  It has published in-depth articles about the expedition and its findings, and brings up a number of factors that need to be seriously examined before the find could be considered conclusive.

Nevertheless we also see in these articles exacting standards that would not necessarily be required of less controversial discoveries:

While news of the find is making headlines around the world, there’s one part of the story that Yeung is conspicuously silent about: He is only the latest in a long line of people who claim to have found Noah’s Ark. In fact, there have been at least half a dozen others.  Christian Science Monitor, 28/04/10

Would it be generally expected of someone going public with an archeological find to give an account of the work of their predecessors?  Is there really anything so “conspicuous” about this silence?

There are several reasons why the new claims should be treated with skepticism. For example, Yeung refuses to disclose the location of the find and is instead keeping it a secret. This of course is inherently unscientific.  From the same article.

If the discoverer is convinced of the authenticity of the find,  is it so surprising that he would not want the exact location published?  Later in the article the research team is criticised for not making their find available for independent testing, but for this to occur, surely the site would need to be protected from pillagers and the alterior motives of any number of adventurers that could cause serious damage.  It’s early days – let us first wait and see if peer review is undertaken.  It could be a very lengthy procedure.

Much more could be said, by people eminently more qualified.  I suspect a lot more work needs to be done before the value of this find on Mt. Ararat can be finally determined.  In the meantime, we will no doubt be treated to more examples of double-standards in the news media when it comes to archeological finds as they relate to the Bible.  There is a world of difference between healthy skepticism and cynicism.

Update: For a comparison of the media treatment of biblical archaeological finds  and “missing link” discoveries supporting Darwinism, OneNewsNow has an interesting article.

Photograph courtesy of sacredsites.com.

After 10 years of living in France we had never seen the Mediterranean, so as a belated wedding anniversary present to ourselves we jumped on a cheap flight and zipped down to Marseille for the weekend. We had heard that Marseille was just a big city like any other. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you just need to know where to look. It was a visual feast – hard to describe, so I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, although the colour of the water in the photos goes nowhere near the captivating blue of the Med in real life. In order, the Calanque de Sormiou, Cassis, Vallon des Auffes, the Le Panier quarter, the Old Port…

It’s not that often that I get really frustrated, but this week dealing with the public service just about sent me into orbit. I needed to register a car – should have been a simple enough procedure. My expectations have been honed after 10 years of playing “the France game”. I know the rules, and not a few little techniques to help you get ahead a few squares. I know that there are a number of absolutes that cannot be avoided: such as the fact that the number of supporting documents your application is missing is inversely proportional to the amount of time you spend studying the list. There is ALWAYS at least one missing. The other absolute is that deciding when to turn up to hand in your application is rather like Russian roulette – you seem to have about one chance in five that the service will be closed without any forewarning on the day you take time off work, pay for a carpark (miles away) and show up. There is an even higher likelihood that the day before the mysterious closure it will be totally impossible to connect with a person on the telephone who is able to tell you the opening hours for the week when you sensibly phone ahead to make sure you don’t get caught out. I know how it works – and I know that there is absolutely no point getting frustrated, it’s just the way it is.

But my stoicism seemed to have left me when I most needed it this week. I had prepared everything carefully, went into town by car because I had another appointment afterward (always a bad idea), found an expensive carpark, and walked to the Prefecture. The usual building was still closed for renovations (which seem to have been going on so long I foolishly thought they must have finished by now…). So I retraced my steps and wandered around looking for the temporary shelter of our local outpost of the Republic. I went in, obediently took a ticket, looked up at the screen and discovered that my number was not the radar – not even on the far distant horizon. So I hunkered down thinking I would get a bit of work done on my smart phone. Smart phones are very useful insofar as their owners are smart enough to have charged them up before leaving home, which sadly was not the case that day.

So I sat, surveying the crowded room and the curious dance of people craning their necks, eyes fixed on the numbers flashing on the screen, until all of a sudden someone bolts up and hurries through a dark passageway into the unknown. Gradually the numbers began resembling my own, until my own bingo moment came a full one and a half hours later. I sat down at my booth, handed over my dossier which had been checked and rechecked for the required papers. Exactly 37 seconds later my little pile was handed back to me, incomplete. I had forgotten to enclose a photocopy of my wife’s ID card. My head nearly hit the desk … Il y a TOUJOURS quelque chose qui manque! Without the slightest sympathy I was informed that it was impossible for me to leave the application and just drop off the wretched photocopy later on. I would have to come back and go through the whole rigmarole again.

As I stomped back to my car my mind was full of the lamentations of the righteously indignant. I was internally shaking my fist at the universe – it just seemed so inhumane, that we are imprisoned in the web of a faceless, robotic, all-imposing administration and can’t get out. It was as if my whole life was being reduced to a pile of paper destined for the shredder. It was just so wrong, yada yada yada.

I was still steaming as I was driving through our neighbourhood later in the afternoon, when I saw a sight that put everything in perspective. As I turned the corner a woman raised her head and looked straight at me. As I drove past in my nice new car (the reason for the afore-mentioned visit to the Prefecture) I just had the time to notice that she was a Rom, with a huge blue plastic jerry-can at her feet, struggling to fill it at a fire hydrant. She would then have to lug her precious water several hundred metres back to the camp where she lives in a caravan, probably with 4 or 5 children, in the former carpark of an abandoned warehouse. This place is reputed as an eyesore, rubbish and graffitti everywhere – a piece of land that has been tied up in some legal dispute for at least 10 years, and left to go to ruin.

I know that living this way is part of their culture and identity, and that pity is an emotion that can be patronising. These people live off the grid, and it is sometimes tempting to think how nice it would be to avoid the endless paperwork required to live legally in this country.

But I couldn’t help comparing my life with the life of this woman, thinking of her daily existence (subsistence?) and I heard a still small voice speak to my heart: Have you any right to be angry?

Today was a great reminder of how much you miss when you don’t take the time to appreciate the beauty of your surroundings.

On the one hand, France has an absolutely fantastic road and rail network. The high speed trains get you to your destination quicker than flying if you count the time messing around in airports; the autoroute system covers the whole country and although the tolls are expensive the roads are fantastic – everything is designed for speed.

But I normally dread the boredom of the drive to and from Paris – 4 and a half hours of monotony, and in addition to the high cost of petrol you feel like you’re shelling out megabucks for the tolls.

Today, however, was a completely different experience. I picked up some friends from the airport in Paris, and as we weren’t in a hurry, we decided to take the slower national roads instead of the autoroute. It added two hours to the trip, but it was so worth it. Ten years I have lived here but often miss the beauty of this country because I’m in too much of a hurry. For my friends it is their very first visit to France, and their exuberant appreciation of the sights was infectious. I so enjoyed drinking in the beauty of the rolling countryside, snow-dusted fields, long straight stretches of tree-lined roads, picturesque villages, massive country mansions in various stages of repair or disrepair, and the contrast in architecture as you pass from one region to another. Admittedly the gorgeous weather helped, but a rainy day would not have done much to spoil the effect.

Is it really worth saving two hours but missing the sights we saw today? – scenes that make you delight in the abundant variety of God’s creation on one hand, and that remind you of that conviction that there is hope for humanity after all.

Spent all day moving house today. Not my own place – we’re getting a house ready for some co-workers arriving to work with us in a few days. Finding the place was a bit stressful, but once we had it the big question was how to furnish it.

A young friend who doesn’t have a lot of work on at the moment offered to help us, and as we were driving around picking up bits and pieces he made a very wise observation. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be part of a community where whenever somebody needed to set up a new home, everybody rallied around to help; if people would pool their resources, pulling little-used items out of their cellars and garages, and bring them over to help furnish the new house. What if it became a real community effort – that way a house could be furnished very cheaply, the occupants would be all set up in a short time, and people could enjoy getting rid of unnecessary stuff.

Well, I don’t remember if he said all that exactly, but it reflects very well what we experienced today. We drove around picking up stuff from people’s garages, and a load of stuff from some friends moving countries, and apart from a couple of items, we managed to furnish the whole house for under 400€. Not to mention my friend who freely gave up his day to help us get it done. With this kind of giving and receiving – everybody gets blessed. That’s how the kingdom economy works.

Is it a significant event when in a country of 64 million people, 18,000 marchers descend on the capital to stand up for a cause they believe in? Or 25,000 marchers? Or 3,500? These are the three

estimations I have seen for a march that took place in Paris last weekend – the first two are according to the organisers, the 3rd according to the police. Why such a huge variation? Either the organisers have grossly exaggerated, or the police have some specific reason for underestimating. Such a discrepancy couldn’t just be a mistake.
The media certainly didn’t think it was significant. In any case, the two major newspapers that I peruse daily didn’t even mention it. If the march had been protesting over redundancies in the public sector, changes in retirement conditions, or the famous pouvoir d’achat (buying power), it would have been all over the news. Instead it was over what the marchers consider to be a human tragedy that surpasses the one that was to explode into the world’s media two days later – that of Haiti.

The march concerned what a friend of mine who blogged the event calls “the calamity of abortion”. Marchers came from all over France, accompanied by delegations from several other European countries, to participate in an event called En marche pour la vie (marching for life). The object was not only to honour the 7 million lives that have been snuffed out in France since 1975, but also the millions of women who have been physically, psychologically and spiritually damaged through the process, and the many marriages and relationships that have been dislocated as a result.

This was not the first such march but the sixth, and numbers have been steadily growing. This year there were interesting developments. Firstly there is a growing number of medical personnel demanding that a conscience clause be in included in the relevant legislation allowing doctors to refuse to perform abortions. And secondly was the presence of a number of marchers representing left-wing political organisations – revealing that opposition to the IVG (intérruption volontaire de grossesse – the very euphemistic technical term for abortion – “voluntary interruption of pregnancy”), is not simply the domain of the political right, nor is just it an obscure notion of the religious fringe.

If you read French you can head over to my friend’s article. Otherwise here’s a brief snippet from his conclusion:

There is no question of us remaining silent. The witness of women who have been through it prohibits us. The silent cries of embryos killed in their mothers’ wombs prohibits us. Our conscience reproaches us…We all know about it! Before becoming who we are, we also were embryos! Why should today’s embryos have less right to life than those of yesterday? Let us help women in distress! Let’s invest without counting the cost to support them! But let us refuse the diabolical short-term easy solution… which in the long-term creates nothing but difficulties.

Credit to Onlyphotos.org for the photo.

I have got so much out of reading other people’s blogs over the years (see my list of bloggy heroes in the sidebar), but my own has suffered from a bout of indentity crisis to the point where it went into hibernation.

It was partly due to the challenge of living as a person of faith in a culture where everybody assumes that faith is to be completely restricted to the private sphere of life. This creates somewhat of a dilemma if your life’s goal is to follow Jesus who said not to hide your light under a bowl, but to put it on a stand so everyone in the house can see it – how can you reconcile keeping faith private with letting the world know what makes you tick?

For my work I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and it has become increasingly obvious to me that the only way to completely protect your privacy on the Internet is not to use it at all. Anything you put up there is available for the whole world to see. This was brought home to me when I was kicked out of a local community centre where I was running an activity. The director had been alerted to the fact that a dangerous cult leader had infiltrated their centre and was trying to brainwash their members. Some well-intentioned officer of the French religious police (the anti-sect brigade) had followed a rabbit trail from a press article about me, to my blog (via Google), to the mission organisation I am part of, and discovered that I was a threat to the well-being of all the patrons of the community centre. The humour of the fact that it was the yoga instructor that showed me the door was definitely not lost on me. Yoga, sophrology, tarot reading, doing spooky things with magnets were all kosher, but faith in Jesus of Nazareth was definitely not – not that I had even mentioned anything about my faith by that point.

This experience was partly what lead to my bloggy identity crisis – I wasn’t sure how much I should be putting out there for general consumption, and it was easier just to give up writing altogether. The kind of behaviour I witnessed at this community centre might seem extreme – and I hasten to add that many of my non-believing friends also found it very peculiar. However, it is a completely logical application of the assumption that faith should be private – which incidentally was never the intention of the separation of church and state. La laïcité – that untranslatable concept which is a foundational value of the French Republic – should be about protecting French citizens who adhere to a minority faith from being disadvantaged, protecting us from having religious beliefs imposed upon us, and allowing free exchange and debate on the subject of religion. Instead it has become an innoculation against any faith other than the majority faith of the culture, which is difficult to name, but can be expressed in a series of -isms (individualism, materialism, existentialism, evolutionism, republicanism à la française, laïcisme etc.)

But why should that stop me from blogging about things that are important to me? If somebody reads something on my blog that s/he finds offensive, the little red circle (for Mac users) or the little red ‘x’ (for the unconverted) is only one click away. I now see blogging as one way of being a whole person – not talking psycho-babble here – I mean that there is a huge temptation to modify your words and actions to suit the circles you are moving in. I have a tendency to be much more open about my experiences in God with those who share the same faith as me, than with those who don’t. This is normal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its good. I use religious jargon when speaking with other Christians, which I would not use when talking with work colleagues, for example. This is part of “hiding my light under a bowl” because the language we use can exclude people. Being whole is about being the same person whoever you are with, which is why blogging is such a good discipline, because it makes you think about how you communicate. Everything I put up here I have to be willing for people from all the different spheres of my life to read (well, theoretically at least – the odds of people finding my blog amongst the 36 squillion blogs out there are almost as great as the odds that the universe evolved from nothing).

All that to say to anyone who stumbles onto my blog that I’m back (Hi Mum), with a spruced-up blog theme, and occasional postings where I will think out loud about living in France, faith, family and mission, not necessarily in that order, with lots of unfinished thoughts, digressions, and useful links to people I admire.

Had a fascinating session with one of my students yesterday – a doctor. We were discussing a podcast on advances in medical research, and he was explaining how some of the most important discoveries in medicine have been accidental. He is sceptical about the idea that to that advances in medical research are held up by lack of funding, transdisciplinary studies, or simply the lack of a culture of research in the surgical area (the main arguments of the podcast). He also feels that medical breakthroughs are not discovered at conferences, colloquiums, or formal meetings to discuss research – gatherings which, in his experience, frequently degenerate into arguments between two parties, neither of which has the answers.

Apparently it is far from uncommon for major medical breakthroughs to be the result of failed experiments – “failed” in the sense that they contradicted the hypothesis that led to the experiment. Sometimes these “failures” can unlock secrets in areas completely unrelated to the object of the research. My client gave the example of how an experiment to change the colour of petunia plants led to a breakthrough in the treatement of cancer. He maintains that the secret of being a good scientist is to not throw out the results of “failed” experiments, but to study the failures in an attempt to understand why the experiment produced such results.

I loved the idea that major breakthroughs can be discovered by accident, unplanned and unexpected. “It’s not about concentrating the means of power and money, but about just letting the guy get on with the research he wants to do”, said my client. I understood that it’s about setting capable people free to follow their hunches and instincts, and waiting to see what might come up. This goes along with another concept I have come across lately – they idea that we are moving from an information age into an inspiration age. The basic idea as I have understood it is that the vast amounts of information we are currently swimming in will expand beyond our capacity to sort through, and knowledge of information will no longer be a realistic basis for intelligence. The real “geniuses” of the future will not be those who have vast knowledge, but rather those who have learnt to tap into an intelligence that is higher than their own, into inspiration. Jesus understood this when he explained “he did nothing on his own, but only that which he saw his Father doing”.

My student (seems odd to be calling a medical expert “my student”) also spoke about his fondness for the application of chaos theory to a variety of fields, not just the medical (a theory originally pioneered by the French). I’m not very familiar with this theory, other than the fact it sounds like something that would help my wife understand the state of my desk (or under the bed, for that matter). It sounds like fun, though – chaos is all around us, and like the untidy reverse side of a tapestry, conceals beauty and order which would astound us if we could just apprehend it.

I put “house church” in inverted commas as we are still not sure what to officially call this gathering we have weekly – not having a name doesn’ t seem to have been detrimental up till now so we’re going with the flow.

Tonight was a meeting just as I like them. We all arrived a bit late, and everything was a bit disorganised. We discovered nobody had eaten but the soup we had made for dinner just stretched as each person turned up and joined us at the table – not that this had been planned. Had a great time just sharing news around a bowl of soup – catching up on some issues people in the group are facing related to their homes, their jobs etc. – things that we had already been praying about.

We then moved to the comfortable seats and opened the Scriptures where we had left off last time (we’re in Revelation at the moment), and although nobody had had the time to prepare a “study” as such, we drew out all kinds of insights which led into some very worthwhile learning. I think we could have all gone on much longer, but we try to respect the one and a half hours we agreed on – seeing that we meet weekly, and some have to get up early to work.

One great story we heard tonight was about an original way of starting a church. The parents of one of our house-groupies started a house church, and the way the group really took off was when they decided to have baptisms in their garden and invite all the neighbours. Many of the onlookers were that surprised to meet Christians so ingenious as to have a baptism in their garden that they asked all kinds of questions, and this process morphed into an Alpha Course which now has many of them making definite steps toward faith. This is FRANCE, folks – not India, Guatemala, or some other place where you just need to put a church sign up and they get a crowd. Who says that people aren’t interested in the gospel in “post-Christian” Europe?

Complete change of subject: this poor blog suffered from such neglect for such a long time – I hadn’t updated WordPress for ages, and when I finally did I lost all the bells and whistles in the sidebars. So we’re going for a kind of pared down, minimalist look until I get a moment to fix it.