Why Morgan Freeman is Not God

7 Sep

Last week at church I learned that Morgan Freeman is not God. This probably doesn’t come as a great surprise unless you have genuine problems distinguishing between films and real life, or you subscribe to the conspiracy theory that Morgan Freeman playing God in the Almighty films is actually a clever double bluff.

The point the preacher was making, in fact, wasn’t so much that Morgan Freeman isn’t God as that God isn’t Morgan Freeman. By that I mean that God isn’t some wise, kind twinkly-eyed man who keeps a fatherly eye on us and gets in touch from time to time to give some sage advice and gentle encouragement. And that might come as a surprise. That’s not to say that God isn’t wise, or kind, or interested in our lives. The problem with the Morgan Freeman view of God isn’t that it’s inaccurate in details; it’s that it suffers from a staggering lack of scale.

It’s this same problem with scale that’s at the heart of people finding the idea of God creating the world laughable. There seems to be this idea that the universe is the ultimate reality, brought into existence (probably) by the Big Bang, and within it there are a group of credulous people who believe that their particular planet, or solar system or galaxy, were made by a divine being that internet atheists so charmingly call the Sky Fairy. That does sound silly, but that’s not what anyone’s seriously proposing.

Instead, try to get your head around a being who created not a planet or a solar system, but time, space, energy, matter, the lot. The one who brought into being all the laws of physics that supposedly make his existence redundant as an explanation of how we got here. The true ultimate reality who not only created everything the exists, but who is the source of all existence, upholds and maintains everything we know (and plenty we don’t) by pure will, and could wink it all out of existence on a moment if he so chose. You probably can’t get your head around that fully. People spend lifetimes pondering the implications of it. But the mere attempt gives you a fair inkling of what the preacher meant by “God is not Morgan Freeman”.

I’m always baffled by people (and I’ve met a lot of them) who believe there is “a god” but don’t feel the need to look into it any further, as if the existence of a creator to whom they may one day have to answer isn’t relevant to them. I’m not one for climbing mountains just because they’re there (not ones that require oxygen or special equipment anyway) but if you really believed there was an all-powerful being with the answers to life and who, rumour has it, is so interested in our lives that he came to live with us and die for us, how, how could you just leave it as merely an interesting fact, like the capital of Peru or the etymology of “treacle” (which is fascinating, by the way)?

In a rather nice bit of dovetailing, this week’s sermon was on how God should be at the centre of every part of our lives, not just a special religious section. It was based on a part of the Bible sometimes known the Shema:

“Hear oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” The passage continues: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” The preacher last week also quoted the Shema but, rather impressively, he was able to recite it in Hebrew. Jesus quoted this verse, along with another, “Love your neighbour as yourself”, when he was asked which commandment was the most important. His response was that all the commandments in the Bible follow from these two. Again, you could spend a lifetime of theological study working through the implications of that, but for today, let’s just take it as read.

The point the minister was making today was that Christianity is not just about a fuzzy feeling of “Jesus in my heart”, and nor is it a thing you do on Sunday if you have nothing better to do. Instead, loving God and loving other people should be at the heart of everything we do, say, think and are. As the song says, “that’s how deep it goes, if it’s real“.

I was once in a church service where there was an incidence of heckling. This is rare in church, so it sticks in my mind. A lady stood up and said, quite sincerely, that she believed that God just wants us to be happy. I remember thinking, “No, he doesn’t just want us to be happy. He wants so much more than that for us.” Holiness, for example. Salvation. To be fully known. Love. Joy. Peace. The whole shebang. Once again, it’s not an error in detail, it’s a failure of scale.

It’s sometimes tempting to make up the attributes of God we would like, as if he were a fictional character (played by Morgan Freeman, say). You know the kind of thing: “I can’t believe in a god who would X”; “My god would never Y”; or “God just wants us to be happy (regardless of what questionable things we may wish to do in the pursuit of happiness)”. Fine if you’re making up a character for a film, not so fine if you’re talking about the one and only pre-eminent being who can neither be deleted nor altered to fit in with someone’s dearly-held mental picture. You can get to know what God is like. You can accept what you find, or wrestle with it, or refuse to believe altogether, but you can’t seriously expect reality itself to conform to how you would prefer it to be.

The minister today asked, if you’re keeping God at arm’s length, what kind of god is it you’re keeping at arm’s length? Because the God on whom your every breath depends can’t be kept in his place or just brought in in scenes 6 and 31 for dramatic effect. His place is absolute sovereignty. He is in every scene. He wrote the film. So if the God you believe in can be portrayed even remotely accurately by a twinkly-eyed actor with a gravelly voice, you might want to take a few steps back, and get a better sense of scale.

Note 1: My church puts sermons online, so if you would like to listen to the originals, rather than just reading my musings on them, you can find them here. (31st August and 7th September 2014)

Note 2: Will Self wrote a short story called “Scale” all about losing his sense of scale. It was my first introduction to Will Self, who is an excellent writer, but it is not in any way related to this blog post.

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All’s Well That’s As You Like It

13 Aug

My good friend Rebekah Holden (who is the same person as the actress Rebekah Harvey, since actors are supposed to have unique names) had kindly posted guest post by me on her lovely blog. It is a simple, 5-step guide to writing a brilliant Shakespeare comedy. Just add genius. And comedy.

All’s Well That’s As You Like It; How to write a Shakespeare comedy

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An Unexpected Guest

1 Aug

One of the things I love about the internet are the random connections it throws up. I clicked through from Twitter to a list about books that are better than the films (as a writer and a film fan that’s the kind of clickbait I’m very vulnerable to.) Of course, one of the things that is very irritating about the internet is the difficulty in finding anything again, unless you’ve bookmarked it, so I can’t give you the link to the list, I’m afraid.

Anyway, there were two books on the list that I hadn’t read. One was Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk, which I have ordered from the library, and the other one was I am Legend by Richard Matheson. And just like that, I have added a name to my list of favourite authors, because it turns out that this man, whom I thought I’d never heard of, not only wrote the story Somewhere in Time (or Bid Time Return), which I really enjoyed but had completely forgot the title and author of, but he also wrote the screenplay of one of my favourite films, The Incredible Shrinking Man! (Yes, it sounds awful, but it’s actually a very thoughtful and touching film. And the fight with the giant spider is great!)

Continuing the theme of random connections, in the book I am Legend the narrator makes a joke about the last man on Earth being Edgar Guest. Not having the first clue who Edgar Guest was (although I could tell from the context he was probably a wordsmith of some kind), I naturally reached for my smartphone and looked him up. He was a poet, as it turned out, and the first poem of his that I turned up (courtesy of the Poetry Foundation), I rather liked. It’s also a very good fit for the book, in which a man keeps going in almost overwhelming circumstances. So here it is for you to enjoy, and I hope that my blog will also be a source of serendipitous connections in the vast internet.

It Couldn’t Be Done

BY EDGAR ALBERT GUEST

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it!

Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it;”
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.

There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure,
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.

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My heart’s in the Bubble, my heart is not here

28 Jun
St Andrews

St Andrews from the West Sands

It’s no secret that I’m extremely fond of the university I attended – St Andrews, affectionately known as the Bubble, because going there really is like entering a secret, magic world, cut off from this one. I’ve blogged before about the way St Andrews never changes, the bizarre things people say in St Andrews, and the way Latin incantations are used to turn the students into graduates, but I thought I would share someone else’s words about the Bubble today.

The St Andrews Alumni Network recently provided a link on Facebook to the June 2012 graduation address, given by Dr Chris Jones. The comments underneath said things like “this made me cry”, “I can’t get over this” and “I am still BAWLING”. With curiosity, but also a steely(ish) determination not to become easily emotional, I clicked through and read it. The beginning was spot on, the middle was fascinating and educational, and the end – well, I was blubbing like a baby throughout the last paragraph, too.

I know that university is a big part of all graduates’ lives, but it is remarkable quite how much of an enduring influence it seems to have on us St Andreans. I would encourage you to read the excellent address even if you are not a graduate of St Andrews, or indeed of anywhere. It gives you a quick run through 600 years of very eventful history, and some of the fascinating facts might come in handy for pub quizzes. If you are an exile from the Bubble, though – please have a hanky at the ready.

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Review of Augustine: The Truth Seeker

12 Jun

Danika Cooley, of the website Thinking  Kids, has kindly written a review of Augustine: The Truth Seeker, giving advice about how it would fit into a homeschooling curriculum. Specifically she identifies these subjects as ones where Augustine would fit in well:

  • Ancient History
  • The Early Church
  • Manichean Beliefs
  • The Donatists
  • The Roman Empire
  • The Fall of the Roman Empire

I don’t actually know Danika, so you can get an unbiased view of Augustine by reading her review. Or better still, form your own unbiased view by reading it yourself! It’s available from Christian bookshops and online (Amazon, Eden, TenofThose, Christian Focus website etc.).

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From Here to Remember Me

31 May

I saw the film Remember Me recently. You may have done, too. For some reason now TV is multi-channel and digital, schedulers feel the need to show a film about twenty times over a month. It’s a sweet enough little film, boy meeting girl and family members being reconciled and so on. I got quite into it and watched right to the end – which is where the problem lay.

*SPOILER ALERT* Please don’t read any further if you don’t want to know the ending of Remember Me.

Remember_me_film_poster

The thing is, for no apparent reason, when things are all going swimmingly, the main character, Tyler, dies in the 9/11 attacks. I was a bit nonplussed, and had a wee look on IMDB where I found that the director, Allen Coulter, had intended the film to end with the attacks all along – he hadn’t just run out of ideas and killed the character off, which is what it felt like.

There had been no indication of the date when the film was set, although it was clearly recent or contemporary. Tyler’s father works in an office in New York, but although the inside of the office was shown a few times, it was not until the planes were coming in that it was revealed that his office was in one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Perhaps that should have made the ending more poignant and shocking, but it didn’t. In fact it made it slightly ridiculous, like a Monty Python sketch where they got bored and just decided to bring in an explosion or wrecking ball or other distraction.

Interesting, at around the same time, I also had the chance to see From Here to Eternity all the way through. It’s one of those films where everyone has seen one scene (the one in the picture below), but no one seems to have seen the whole thing. I only saw it because I was recovering from a nasty stomach bug and had crawled from my bed of sickness onto the sofa to watch some TV.

The reason I mention the two films together is that From Here to Eternity also has a cataclysmic event at the end, but it’s handled much better.

*SPOILER ALERT* – as before, if you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read on.

From_Here_to_Eternity

In the case of From Here to Eternity it’s the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. As with Remember Me, the world-shaking event is not the focus of the film, which is about the rather seedy romances of some soldiers stationed on Hawaii. That’s the first clue, though: soldiers stationed on Hawaii during the Second World War gives an indication that Pearl Harbour is coming, if you care to think about it – but the film is engaging enough that you don’t stop to think about it.

There are other clues, too – the fact that America will probably soon enter the war is brought up a couple of times, and there’s the classic doomed love omen. You know it’s never going to work out, so something is going to go wrong, although you don’t know what. When the attack comes, it’s shocking, but at the same time it feels right, it ties in with the situation as it had been painted. You don’t feel cheated or confused, just a bit foolish for not realising it sooner (or perhaps that’s just me – maybe everyone else gets it a lot sooner).

It reminded me a bit of Cecil Hunt’s advice on solving problems in stories (which I’m sure is in his book Short Stories: How to Write Them, although the specific paragraph is hiding from me at the moment. That book, by the way, is the best and most practical book I have ever read on writing, and I would heartily recommend it.) He says that it’s fine to have the heroine beat the villain through her knowledge of kung fu, for example, but only if you’ve actually mentioned at some point that she knew kung fu, or was taking classes or something. Otherwise you’re left with the much-ridiculed “with a single bound, Jones was free” solution.

Of course, that rule doesn’t always apply. No warning whatsoever can work well for small shocks, as it does in the Final Destination films (a guilty pleasure of mine). Equally, it can be used for humour. In the extremely cool film Swingers, there’s a part where the shy, nervous, awkward hero plucks up the courage to ask the girl to dance with him to a nice safe slow number, and then a jive song comes on. She persuades him to stay on the floor, so he jives away in an understated, shy sort of way, then puts in a few wee turns, then some lifts, and then he’s suddenly the king of the floor, throwing amazing moves and impressing the girl. Afterwards his friends, who are as amazed as the audience, ask him how he could do that and he reveals that he took classes. It’s the “with a single bound” thing, but because it’s meant to be laughable, it works.

The problem with Remember Me is that it’s not meant to be laughable, it’s meant to be extremely sombre and thought-provoking. However, instead of making people think about the effect of 9/11 on ordinary lives, it just makes them think “what, how, huh?” If there had been the odd hint thrown in about the impending tragedy, the audience would have been emotionally ready to accept it, as in From Here to Eternity, but instead they emotionally reject it. Does not compute. Insufficient data.

Keeping the audience in the dark might work for small shocks, but when it comes to big shocks that the story rests upon, it seems that too much surprise undermines the shock rather than increasing it. It reduces it to a clever trick, draining it of all pathos. That, at least, is why I think the ending of Remember Me doesn’t work. You may disagree. Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts, but be aware that this webpage may explode without warning while you are wri

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Whatever Happened To The Leisure Society?

29 Apr

I have to warn readers of a sensitive nature that there are one or two incidences of sweary-words in my friend’s article, but it’s well worth a read.

OK, I never lived through the ’70s so I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but I’ve heard people tell tales of free university education (with grants! Grants!) and social equality, and it fairly makes your eyes mist with longing.

Whatever Happened To The Leisure Society?.

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Calling all truth seekers!

23 Apr

You are warmly invited to the launch of Augustine: The Truth Seeker on Thursday 1st May at 7pm in Faith Mission bookshop, Glasgow.

Augustine is being launched as part of a special prizegiving evening (which doesn’t mean they’ll be giving out prizes, it means it’s a chance to buy prizes for children to receive at upcoming church prizegivings) and there’s 15% off books on the night.

There will be drinks and nibbles, a talk about St Augustine and the book, plus a reading and the chance to chat and ask questions. The event will go on till 9pm, but feel free to drop in just for a short while if you have other committments.

I hope to see you there!

Cover smaller

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Why the chicken really crossed the road

15 Apr

image

I am just back from a lovely holiday in Albania complete with sun, sand, sightseeing and strange cocktails. However I have already written at length about how wonderful Albania is, so this time I think I will tell you what Albania has taught me … about chickens.

Before I continue, I should explain to any chicken fanciers reading this that there’s nothing unique about Albanian chickens, so far as I know, it’s just that I never had much exposure to chickens, or indeed any farmyard animals. My primary school teacher once let us hold some newly hatched chicks, and my family had the occasional visit to a farm during the school holidays, if we were passing one, but I’m a city girl born and raised, and I’ve mostly seen chickens in small, pale, plastic-wrapped pieces on supermarket shelves.

That changed when I lived in Albania, and especially when I married into an Albanian family. My mother-in-law keeps chickens, as do a lot of people in Albania, as long as they have a bit of garden for them to scratch around in. So let me share with you the wisdom I have gleaned about chickens so far:

1) Cocks crow all the time . I knew that cocks (or roosters, if you prefer) crowed at dawn, just like they do on cornflakes adverts. What I didn’t realise is that after they start, they don’t stop. They just keep going all day long. It’s pretty annoying if you’re trying to sleep late, or have a siesta – and I often try to do both.

2) People can recognise their own chickens. To me, one black chicken looks pretty much like another, and I assumed there was some sort of leg ringing system, or a more informal way of marking which one is yours, but apparently not. People can just look at a black chicken (or any other colour – I only give black by way of example) and tell whether it is their chicken, their neighbour’s, or a completely alien chicken. I think it must be an acquired skill. Despite a lot of peering at chickens over the last week, I still have no idea which is which.

3) Chicks are only cute for about two weeks. After that they stop being adorable little balls of fluff and turn into straggly, leggy things with half-grown feathers and a bad attitude. The males start to bully the females, which is not an attractive trait. However, chickens do produce new fluffy chicks pretty regularly, so it’s not too bad.

4) Chickens are chicken. This insult is well-founded because chickens really are scared of everything. They scuttle out of your way as if you were trying to kill them (even when you’re not), and when there was a loud bang at my husband’s cousin’s house, the chickens practically jumped into our laps. I can understand where the story of Chicken Little came from, because if anything dropped on their heads, chickens would undoubtedly be terrified enough to think that the sky was falling. This is also because…

5) Chickens are incredibly stupid. I mean so, so stupid. Especially the young ones. When they run from danger, as they so often do, they’ll as likely as not run in the wrong direction. They followed my husband’s uncle around when he was hoeing, even though one of them had already lost a toe that way. It’s no wonder they’re said to be able to live for a while without their heads – there’s nothing of worth in there anyway. And this also answers the age-old question, why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was too stupid even to realise there was a road, let alone that it would be in danger from traffic.

No doubt there is a lot more I could learn about chickens, and do feel free to inform me through the comments, if you are a chicken expert. For me though, it’s back to chickens being kept in the fridge, in pieces, until the next time I go back to Albania.

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Game of (Heavenly) Thrones

17 Mar

I was very excited a couple of days ago to receive through the post my author copies of Augustine: The Truth Seeker. It’s a brilliant feeling to hold your own book in your hand, and I have been waving a copy in the face of everyone I know, with what must be very irritating squeals of excitement.

Game of Thrones

I was going to write a post telling you about the book, and how you can get hold of it. (This is still something of a mystery – I have my copies but no bookshop seems to yet. Can’t be long now.) However, I have been watching a lot of the HBO series Game of Thrones recently – all three seasons in just over a week in fact, because we got a short-term Sky Entertainment pass. And I noticed some interesting similarities with my own work. Therefore, instead of telling you all about how wonderful Augustine: The Truth Seeker is, let me tell you why it’s just like Game of Thrones – but with a PG certificate instead of an 18.

  • It’s about an ambitious young man from a semi-noble, but not monied, provincial background trying to make it in the big cities of the empire. Remind you of Littlefinger?
  • Barbarian hordes start invading from the north and east.
  • Some people hold to the old gods, some to the new, and there are weird mystery religious from foreign lands with a worrying hold over believers.
  • Pretenders to the throne keep cropping up, and at one point in the book there are three monarchs, including a King (ok, emperor) in the North who comes south to try and take the whole lot.
  • Crossing a narrow sea was quite a big deal in both Game of Thrones and Augustine’s time. Especially when you did it with an army.
  • Family members scheme to undermine each other’s power base. (I’m thinking of City Prefect Symmachus and Bishop Ambrose – and just about any of the Lannisters, Barathaons and Greyjoys.)
  • Both have an emphasis on mothers who wish they had more influence over their wayward sons (Monica with Augustine, Catelyn Stark with Rob and Bran, and of course Cersei with Joffrey).
  • There’s a lot of celibacy, in the Night’s Watch and various religious orders of George R. R. Martin’s world, and in Augustine’s Monastry in the Garden. There’s also a lot of the opposite, when Augustine was a younger man – and everywhere in Game of Thrones.
  • Illegitimate sons who are dear to their fathers have an important role to play.
  • People drop like flies. Don’t get too attached to the characters in Game of Thrones or Augustine.

Of course, I’m being a bit facetious. It’s not just the lack of dragons in Augustine that distinguishes it from Game of Thrones; there are far more fundamental differences, the key one being that in Augustine’s world there is a truth that can be discovered, and the one who sits on the heavenly throne turns out to matter a great deal more than the earthly game of thrones. There’s also a lot less nudity and swearing of course, although there is some violence and “mild sexual references”. It’s aimed at the 12 to 14 age group, or mature ten-year-olds, so nothing too graphic.

So there you have it: Augustine: The Truth Seeker, the PG Game of Thrones. I await the phonecall from HBO about TV adaptation rights.

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