Published July 31, 2010 by

Eucatastrophe

Despite all of the marvelous design specific publications out there, I find myself consistently drawn to a little Victorian publication about fresh Australian writing. Harvest is excellent. It is varied, it is pretty, it is emotive and contains some truly brilliant work and some rather nice illustration. I took Harvest on the train with me to work the other morning and read it with my window seat. The first article was an opinion piece, which you can kindly read here: To Our Generation of Precious Snowflakes and it made me stop. I was struck by either brilliant personal recognition or absolute horror and I couldn’t work it out. It forced me to think about life and about blogging and about youth/my peers.

The opinion piece addresses the thoughts of writer Ted Genoways.

At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers.

By way of overview – this is the opinion piece:

Pardon us for filtering out the unimaginable suffering we watch on live broadcasts with a sickening compulsion and can replay on YouTube. In the chasm between vacuous celebrity and the realities of insidious fundamentalism, perhaps it is only our own lives, logged hourly and picked over, that we can clutch on to for purpose, meaning and creative inspiration, in order to tune out the loud, fast world.

For now, might we be excused our navel gazing? When you have seen men glide down from burning towers on slipstreams of hate, perhaps it’s not too big a leap to conclude that one’s navel is the only safe place to be looking.

And to dear Ted, we are the wrecked and lovely world. It’s there in our writing if you can bring yourself to read it, and while it may not be ‘sterling’ enough for you, it’s as real as the Iraq war, and often as heartbreaking.

I find that I am struggling to hold my intense introverted and internal methods living and processing – my narcissism, with the outward looking life I desire to have. Perhaps this is why this article plucked deep hurt on the strings of my soul.

From letter 89 by Tolkien:
“…I coined the word ‘eucatastrophe’: the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of truth…. It perceives– if the story has literary ‘truth’ –that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest fairy story– and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love…”

Cannot we find some way to correlate our local and personal sorrow and experiences of living with the greater sorrow of this world, to lean on eucatastrophe and hope – wait and live that reconciliation of the overlapping now but not yet.

There is another response (in a more literary sense) to the Harvest piece here: A response to harvest.

Blogging Christianity Culture General Life On The Train Words

Published May 18, 2008 by

Church our saviour

The busy front must recognise the homework, the housework, the social inevitables, the tedious hunt for a new couch. The heart must recognise the crappy situations going on in Burma and China. The fingers must recognise a lack of touch to keys a small apology and the brain is simply flying around like a ninny making sense of frustrations I should have in someway long gotten over and in others, adhere to for sanity, reality and sensibility’s sake

I met a girl on the train the other day, she was terribly intentional about starting up a conversation. It was soon established that she came from (and I wont name it) a rather large and what I’d describe as hypey church in the city. Hypey from experience. We kept talking. I turns out she works there etc. etc. Her conversation (Once she’d established I was a Christian) was loaded with Christianese and she presented the appearance of quite a settled, ‘Everything is great when you have Jesus’ life, except that it was more, ‘Everything is great when you have church’. It disturbed me

One of the reasons I’ve delayed writing this post is that I have a good old fat tendancy to be rather rude and harsh and I’m not very good at being tactful. Look I’m trying assume the best that she had a particular extroverted personality that simply expressed itself in that way. But it did progress some thoughts.

Then last night I had the chance to hear Erwin McManus speak at CityLife – a huge church (He was great btw). I struggle incredibly in going to large, very polished churches, something feels really out of whack. I’m not dissing CityLife here, they had some ripper decent theology in their songs. But big and flashy always brings the thought home.

Christianity wasn’t ever meant to be a show, and I understand that it gels with some, perhaps even fits a particular culture but to me it presents a face that feels really fraudulent and it actually scares the pants off me.

Living authentically is difficult. Talking about Jesus is difficult. I wish for my life if anything, to be brutally honest.

What happens when that doesn’t happen in our communities? When they themselves become our world. Our work, our friendships, our lives.

I know that God will probably drag me nicely across the floor in terms of being far less judgmental when it comes to alternate expressions, and I know I have much to learn from the courage and the enthusiasm of others but it’s rather complicated at the moment, because the walls fly up and render me pretty well incapable of even participating when dumped in any situation of the like. I have a terribly jaded, critical beast in me that hates what I see (badly) and hurts for the people I know who have been repelled from this institution we call church.

I want for my life to be tied to His and not simply to a beurocracy, an idea or a specific community. So much good can easily go wrong. We do need community, but it cannot become God.

Christianity Church General On The Train

Church

Published April 2, 2008 by

Today I like people but not trains, busses or wind

It took me three and a half hours to get home tonight. It usually takes an hour.

Melbourne has been subject to some angry winds and a dirty brown sky due to the very tail end of a cyclone coming from the west and some Port Phillip Bay winds. Such bad winds that they canceled uni classes (I was in for all of half an hour). Truly it was more dangerous at Glenferrie than Prahran where I am but hey. My train was late (power issues) slightly expected, then the other train finished it’s trip far too early due to trees down – I grabbed a bus in quite good time only to have it arrive at the secondary stop to find the door of the bus was stuck. They finally opened it, but made us change busses (again I succeeded onto getting on quite an early one). This bus took me to the station before mine which meant yet another bus – also thankfully right there and with working doors.

I went inside for about two minutes and then drove back in towards the city to pick up Geoff who would’ve been even more stuck than me. So after leaving uni at 2:00pm, I officially ‘got home’ at 7:00pm. By then the power was out. So we went to the supermarket (the nearby one was closed due to no electricity). Just as we pulled in the drive, the street lights came on. We cheered.

So my day was all up pretty sucky (which is why you’re getting a whingy ‘this is what happened’ post) except that I met three new people at uni, caught up with a girl I know a little bit from last year and became reaquainted with another two.

Today I like people but not trains, busses or wind. And I’d really prefer it in future if the sky stayed a normal colour.

Life News On The Train Uni

I hate Connex people tired trains Uni weather

Published March 18, 2008 by

Two days explained faster

To the man wearing the red t-shirt saying, “Blog about me, I’m famous”. I’m blogging about you, because I never would have seen you except for the fact that a tree fell on my train line and I had to get a tram to Camberwell. This did mean that I had to wait for about three trams before I could even get on only to be told, once on, that the trains were working again and then had to walk a goodly distance in the stinking heat wearing none-to-comfortable-for-long-distance-walking shoes to get to a different station to get on a train. I now have blisters.

Two time delays of an hour each these past few days. Connex I am not impressed. Cut your trees or something.

The precursor to the hideous trip home was a rather splendid documentary on Michel Gondry. Of the fame of directing Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. Both of which are entirely and utterly brilliant. You haven’t seen a movie until you’ve seen them. How it has to fit with our Contemporary Design Issues class I am not quite sure, they mumbled something about the interpretations of time in media. Eh?

Prior to all of this, a day or so before infact, was our youth camp – which went quite well, despite being eaten alive by mosquitoes and getting little sleep. It was peculiar on a few levels, such as a kid who knew no-one being dropped ‘at camp’. My ‘talk’ went fine- I ended up talking about how I’ve seen God.

Before we recovered from camp, Geoff and I trotted off to lunch at Miss Marples with Beth and Bri. Jumping days: the Connex recovery was aided by a sushi dinner with Scott and Christina (and Jemima) and the introduction to Carcasonne (A little like Settlers of Catan). Yet another game we’ll maybe eventually buy.

Humor Life Ministry On The Train

carcasonne friends I hate Connex Life michel gondry

Published March 8, 2008 by

Deeply flawed

After a lovely dinner at the Pig last night, Geoff and I went to see Definitely, Maybe. We came out of the movie laughing… I claim and still claim that it was attrocious (even though it was enjoyable) and Geoff is leaning towards, ‘enjoyable but deeply flawed’.

On the way home Fred (the last remaining car) chuffed out some steam not very heroically, and had to be pushed while it cooled. We managed to drive it over the train tracks (pushing over train tracks tends to be dangerous) and get it into the station car-park. We walked home, and were stopped part way by some girls who asked Geoff to kill a spider on their car – that was funny – getting home took all of about two minutes.

This currently leaves us car-less, completely this time. Considering we were getting rid of Fred in about a month it’s not too bad, but it’s still a pain. It’ll be nice to have one that just works.

Life Movies On The Train

car trouble Pig and Whistle