Light In The Darkness

Christmas gets knocked sometimes for having its roots in a pagan festival. That is really to miss the point though. The reason for the pagan festival was the winter solstice: the shortest day has passed, the longest nights are behind us. On December 25th this is not obvious, and everyone knows that the coldest weather is ahead, nevertheless from then on the nights get shorter and the days get longer.

This is the metaphor which Christianity takes over - not the paganism, but the hope. The meaning of Jesus' birth, at whatever season it actually occurred, is that God is dealing with the mess which is our world. It is going to take time and there are still hard times to come, but the light is brightening and the darkness is pulling back.

Two thousand years ago the superpower of the day dealt with its enemies by crucifying them: a long and agonising death displayed along the main roads, to discourage the others. As the 21st Century begins we have Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib - pick your own superpower abuse - but now it is hidden and shameful. Things really have changed.

Today, here in Caversham, it's a bright sunny day; still cold, still windy, still wet - not Spring by any means - but a sign that Spring is on its way. There is life, there is hope, every breath is a gift from God. And when it gets dark again, we can always light a candle; not just for ourselves but to place in a window so that others may see a light in their darkness.

Two thousand years on and there's still so much needs doing ... someone has to make a difference, why not us?

(Click the link for YouTube to see the lyrics)

Out With The Old

It's a rather sad end to 2012, as I have resigned my membership of Caversham Baptist Church, where I have been a member for almost seventeen years.

The new(-ish) pastor at CBC, who is a little inclined to say strange things without thinking them through, reckons that being a member of a local church is like being in a marriage. As a pastor he must have been a member of some four or five churches over the past twenty years - I wonder if his wife realises how casually he views marriage? I view being a church member more like living in a house: moving house is a painful experience, but sometimes the old house is just not suitable. It is following Jesus which is the lifelong commitment, like marriage; where one is based can help or hinder, but it is not the main thing.

Why have I resigned from CBC after all these years? Basically because seventeen years ago Caversham Baptist was a church I admired and was proud to become a member of; and because back then I found it a really good place to worship God with my fellow Christians and to seek to work together for God's Kingdom here in Caversham. Neither of these things is now the case: there are some lovely people at CBC, but as a church it has lost its way; and as a place to worship it no longer does anything at all for me.

There is a classic alternative approach, which is to hunker down and outlast a lousy 'minister': "I've been here x years/all my life, I'm not going to allow some johnny-come-lately to drive me out." This is a fair enough approach, especially for those who have grown up in a church, or who are getting on in years, but it does ignore the question of what sort of state the church will be in by the time the duff 'minister' leaves. It also treats a church as more of a club to belong to, rather than a working organisation which is tasked with actually achieving something. Better would be to work together to actually change things, but passive deference is a hard habit to break.

Really, though, CBC has been moving away from its roots for longer than the new pastor has been here; indeed the whole process of 'calling' him (the procedure a Baptist church goes through to - in theory - seek God's will for its new minister) was severely tainted. The church direction and organisation have been becoming more top-down and centralised, and less member-driven (the Baptist theory is that Jesus' will is best discerned through his many followers within a church rather than just a single individual 'minister' or small group of 'leaders'), for many years. Focussing out, into the local community, has long been a talked-about aspiration: lots of preparation, not much action. To be fair, during the 'interregnum' - between pastors - there were some encouraging steps made towards this, but these were quickly killed off by the new boss.

For me, preaching is at the heart of Baptist worship; it used to be the one thing they did really well. But even this has, for several years, been drifting further and further away from teaching Scripture and proclaiming Jesus, to be more and more about highlighting the preacher and his traditions and opinions. Granted the new guy has taken this to a new low, but the CBC congregation has happily accepted substandard fare for far too long (remembering that Baptists, in theory, are very Bible-centred).

So, where now? Another disillusioned ex-churchgoer worshipping Jesus in daily life, but without an established Christian community behind me? I hope not: many, many people take that approach, but I am too aware of my own limitations to think that is an effective way for me to live and serve. Obviously there are no perfect churches, in Caversham or elsewhere; for now I'll worship freely and see where I find a calling.

Footnote: I can't help feeling that my final post of 2012 (not my favourite year, in truth), and my only post for December, ought to have more shape and more point than this. But I guess that's where I am at the moment: lacking in shape and clear point. Nevertheless, 2013 is another year, and God always has something new to say; the trick is to be in a place where one can hear Him and respond.

A happy and blessed New Year to any and all who read this.

Acts 8: We Are The Others

I wonder how many people have heard of Sophie Lancaster? Very few, I suspect, and those mostly either part of the goth subculture or fans of a style of music sometimes called 'gothic metal'. Sophie was a young woman who was beaten to death in a park in 2007, apparently just because of her looks (her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, who she was with, was reportedly left with brain damage). She looked different, she was an outsider, she was 'other' and so she was attacked, beaten and killed.

There is a story told in the Bible:

There was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, ... He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this:

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter
and like a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he opens not his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.”

And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptised?” And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptised him.

It looks like just another Bible story; I've even heard it used an example of 'how to do evangelism'. But knowing the context makes all the difference.

Here's a guy travels all the way from Africa (probably around N. Sudan) to Jerusalem to worship God. When he gets there he will have been told he's not allowed into the Temple to worship, because he's a eunuch and eunuchs aren't allowed in the Temple (strictly speaking they're banned from the 'assembly of Jahweh', Deut 23:1). He was a literal 'outsider'. So when he asks "What prevents me from being baptised," that's not a rhetorical question, more of a challenge. Baptism is how one joins this new 'assembly of God' in Jesus, and it's how someone becomes part of the Church, which is Jesus' body, which is the new Temple.

Why would this outsider, this 'other', ever think being baptised by Philip was even a possibility? The answer lies in the passage from the prophet Isaiah that he quotes; but again only in context. I deeply dislike the use of 'proof verses' - bits of Scripture ripped out of their context to 'prove' a point. One of their problems is that people then start to assume that the Bible does the same thing. Many of the early Christians will have known (what we call) the Old Testament off by heart. They would have known that the book of Isaiah is essentially a collection a passages - some short, some long - linked together. The 'sheep led to the slaughter' quote is from near the beginning of a long passage about when the Messiah comes. Toward the end of that passage it talks about eunuchs:

Let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

So, when the Messiah comes then the rules banning eunuchs will change, and outsiders like him will be welcomed and honoured. If Jesus is the Messiah, as Philip's 'good news' claims, then Jesus changes everything, especially for the 'others', the outsiders, the excluded, the different. Now they are to be welcomed into God's people ... and they are to invite and welcome others, especially the outsiders and the excluded.

According to the Bible, that is precisely what Jesus did, and what the early Church did after him. It is sad then that today's 'churches' are better known for excluding those who are different than they are for including them. Yes, there are many churches who follow Jesus in being genuinely welcoming to all, including those who are different, whose 'face doesn't fit'; but the pretend churches - really Pharisees in disguise - are louder and more often heard.

The challenge for all of us - church-goers or not - is how to welcome and show respect to those who are 'others', in whatever way:-

A Week Of Windows 8

'Do not try this at home', as they used to say on Brainiac before blowing stuff up in a microwave, or something equally daft. Last Friday Microsoft released Windows 8, its new and rather different take on Windows. And last Friday I downloaded Windows 8 and did an upgrade install on my oldish Vista PC.

A daft idea, usually, but my job is to support people with PC problems and that is much easier if I have already met those problems myself. It also looks dead impressive if someone contacts me with a really weird issue with the new Windows and I fix it in 5 minutes flat (carefully not mentioning the hair-tearing hours I had previously spent at home when I first hit that issue myself).

It is always good advice with new software to give it a few months to get the bugs ironed out before trying to use it yourself - they don't call it the 'bleeding edge' for nothing. Also, my recommendation is that you should never do an 'upgrade install' of Windows from a previous version - it's asking for a world of pain - and, if at all possible, you should install on current generation hardware. Typically Microsoft release Windows to run properly on the hardware which they think will be around about 6 months to a year after first release. A PC which was originally built when Vista first came out - even if it has been upgraded significantly since - is likely to have issues. Microsoft, though, state a minimum hardware spec. that my PC considerably exceeds.

The download and upgrade install took me about 2 hours, roughly an hour downloading and answering questions, and another hour leaving it to get on with it. Impressively, it just worked. No installation problems at all (apparently).

Logging on for the first time was a bit tedious, as it insisted on my giving them a Microsoft username and password. It is possible to skip this and just set up a 'local' account, but that brings its own issues.

Then you reach the start screen ... yeuch! A solid colour background overlaid with lots of plain, flat monochrome boxes, with writing and/or crude icons in them. I can imagine it doesn't look too bad on a 4" smartphone, or even a 7" tablet, but on anything bigger it looks like a child's drawing. Some of the boxes are 'live tiles' where the writing changes and sometimes pictures pop up (sports news is one); nearly all of them go straight to one of the rather naff Microsoft/Xbox/Bing 'apps' installed by default.

One of the boxes/tiles is a 'desktop' tile which takes you to a more familiar Windows desktop, although without a Start button. It's also without all the attractive 3D and transparency effects familiar from the Vista and W7 desktops - everything is very flat and old-fashioned looking, presumably to support the limited graphics hardware of phones and tablets.

Another tile is the Mail App, which should be really useful but isn't. The problem is that you click on it, it asks you what kind of email you use, and if you click on POP3 (far and away the commonest) it tells you that it doesn't work with that, so you should tell your email provider to give you something different. Talk about arrogance!

As mentioned, I chose an upgrade installation, keeping documents and settings, but losing all installed programs. This left lots of 'dead' icons on the main desktop and a lot of unusable games and programs on my 'D' drive (the 'C' drive programs had been archived out of the way into a folder called 'windows.old'). So there was a certain amount of cleaning up and reinstallation to do, but nothing terribly difficult.

There has been a lot of fuss in the media about the 'missing' Start menu; actually the blocky startup screen is really just the Start menu laid out inefficiently. You can press the 'Windows' key or click in the bottom left corner of the screen to toggle between the Desktop and Start views. From the Start screen you can view everything installed by right-clicking a blank area then selecting 'All apps' - which actually shows all programs, not just apps.

I mentioned that the default apps are pretty useless; the ones in the Microsoft App Store, at present, are not much cop either. Basically I had to go online and download programs I needed, in the old way. Windows Live Essentials can be downloaded for its decent email program, Windows Live Mail (which simply carried over the old settings from Vista's Windows Mail). Kaspersky installed with no problems, as did Firefox, iTunes, Steam and various games. Although the Start screen defaults to naff Xbox music and video apps, Windows Media Player is still available: just right-click on the Xbox versions and uninstall them, search for 'Media' - you search apps by simply typing from the Start screen and it goes straight to search - then right-click the Windows Media Player result and choose 'Pin to Start'.

With a bit of effort, it is not too tricky to set up a usable Windows 8 system, but two big irritants remain. The first is that it is slow. Reports say that Windows 8 is quick, but not on my hardware it isn't. Vista was probably slightly quicker, but what really makes W8 a pain is that sometimes you click on something and nothing happens for several seconds. Did I miss the click somehow? No, it eventually acknowledges me and starts to work, but that 'dead' time when I don't know if my program has started or not is very frustrating.

The other irritant is that the corners of the screen make Windows 8 app-related things happen. So I go to close a program by clicking on the cross in the top-right corner and I get the odd W8 sidebar instead; or I want to display the blank desktop by clicking in the bottom right corner and again get that sidebar, or the first icon on the quick-launch bar is just as likely to give me the Start screen because it is in the bottom left corner, and so on.

The old 'Blue Screen Of Death' (BSOD), with all its scary techie info and its really unhelpful hints for solving the problem is now gone. You still get a blue screen - although a softer, less scary blue - when the system crashes, but now it has a big sad emoticon :( and just tells you it has gone wrong and is shutting down. I guess you could call this the 'Blue Screen Of Sadness' (BSOS). I've only had this once in the week, which is pretty good I reckon. I have had several problems with waking up from sleep (I had to change a BIOS setting for that) and with hibernation (I fixed that by turning hibernation off). Windows update doesn't quite seem to be working right, and there are a few odd errors in the error log. But so far I think this seems to be the most stable properly new version of Windows ever.

In summary, after a week with Windows 8 I am finding it usable, but ugly, and with some irritating habits. I see no reason why anyone would want to change to it from Windows 7 (on a desktop); even from Vista or XP getting a shiny new PC would be the only convincing reason to upgrade, in my view.

It is clear to me that Microsoft view their desktop users as being essentially captive, there is no serious competition so we'll have to accept what we're given. Windows 8 is all about tablets and phones; personally I prefer Android, but those are the platforms where Windows 8 makes a lot more sense.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The movie remake:  ✮✮✮✩✩

This is a pleasantly entertaining mid-Atlantic remake of the 2009 Scandinavian original, sticking quite well to the events of Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel but losing much of its roots, its soul and its social conscience. Note that the 18 certificate is justified: sexual violence is a key theme of the story.

I watched the original film of this a year or so back, and found it powerful but rather confusing. Still, I was impressed enough that I then got the book, which made a bit more sense, followed by the rest of the Millennium trilogy. Now that the new film is available on Lovefilm I thought I'd give it a go, to see what that was like.

The first problem that struck me was the main characters. Lisbeth Salander is an angry, violent and incredibly intelligent young woman, walled off from most meaningful personal contact after many years of abuse and betrayal. Rooney Mara plays her as weak and sulky; in an early scene of rape and revenge she comes across as being mostly interested in money.

The other main character, Mikael Blomkvist, is a middle-aged investigative journalist. He's reasonably fit for his age but a most unlikely hero. He's a rather passive, courteous, stubborn man; a foil in many ways for the many powerful and abusive men who also people the novel - and, of course, a massive contrast with the angry Lisbeth. Daniel Craig tries hard, but he really doesn't fit; when he backs down from confrontation it jars.

Then there's the storyline. Watching this film it looks as though the scriptwriter has been through the book (it's a thick book) and extracted the main events that make up the basic story. Then it seems he just strung them together in a way which made 'movie sense', leaving out the themes about corruption, about hacking, about sexual violence against women, and about right-wing politics. They've turned a powerful crusading novel into a slightly strange, and safely foreign, 'entertainment'.

The feel of the film is curiously rootless. It doesn't have the dark brooding buildup of pace we are becoming accustomed to from Scandinavian drama, but it also doesn't have the action or shape of a US movie, nor the quirkiness of something from the UK. The lighting is gloomy and most of the actors speak with a slight Scandinavian accent, but to be honest it could have been made anywhere.

All that said, the film was entertaining: a pleasant enough way to spend two and a half hours. So three stars it is. Also, I'm now rereading the book, and plan to rewatch the original Swedish film version again, so this film can't be all bad.