More reasons for hope

Here's a trilogy of clips which I hope you have time to watch. I've been put on to them by a number of friends. They say to me what Paul says at the end of Romans, that's there is nothing, neither homelessness, nor disease, nor old age that can separate us from the love of God. I've got to prepare a sermon for Sunday and so I'm leaving these for you to peruse while I'm busy!

Mark meets the Mustard Tree

Brian Irvine, Scottish footballer, has news

Dave Brubeck, jazz legend, reflects

I'm indebted to Paul Wenham, Marijke Hoek and Sally Hitchener for these stories. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have. Be of good cheer!
On Saturday we go to the first MND Association local meeting. It will be good to meet up with friends again, and to catch up with the latest developments.

Overwhelmed by hope

Yesterday I heard a remarkable story. Well, I'd heard it before, as have most of the world of course. But it's different when you meet the man himself, isn't it? When he tells his story. And when he shakes your hand and blesses you.

José Henriquez

Alfredo Cooper with José on the far right, Bishop Henry Scriven behind 

Last night, in St John the Baptist Church, Grove, one of the 33 Chilean miners who were trapped and rescued last year, José Henriquez and his wife Blanca, interpreted by Alf Cooper (evangelical chaplain to the President of Chile), told the story of the explosion, how the miners survived and how they were rescued. Here's the moment when José and Blanca were reunited: The rescue on TV. It was incredibly moving to have the two of them there, in front of us, very  much alive and saying, "Don't give up hope and don't give up praying." I particularly remember Blanca describing how she and her daughter first heard of the accident. At first, the radio gave the name of the wrong mine, and she thought, "Well, that's not where José's working." But later it was corrected and they realised it was Copiapó. Instead of staying glued to the radio, they turned it off and knelt down and prayed. And continued for the duration - as did the miners in their underground tomb, twice a day, for 69 days, all together.

José and Alf were interviewed on Radio 4's Sunday programme, which gives some idea of a little of what we heard (26 minutes, 10 seconds in):
Radio interview with José . Last night he was quite undemonstrative and struck me as someone who was very much at peace. He was utterly sure that the miners' rescue had been a miracle, as the exploratory drill which eventually found them hit a rock and was diverted into the chamber where they were.

His over-all message was that God is alive and real, that He hears and answers prayer, and that He is loving and good - which means His answers will be for our good. At the end he and Alf Cooper prayed for the whole audience. It was a privileged evening, I must say. Next week, the two of them are speakers at President Obama's presidential prayer breakfast in Washington! For all that and all the media attention, he struck me as a genuinely humble guy who simply wants to share the goodness of God

José and Alf praying for their audience

More hope less despair

Image credit: Dr Andrew Jarjour

I've just caught up on last night's 4Thought by Dr Irfan Sayed and was struck by his comment that doctors offering patients euthanasia gave the message that there's no hope. We actually live in extraordinarily exciting times in neurological research. One hears of new advances being made all the time.
For example I noticed this article in the latest Cambridge Alumni (! - I know! How posh!) e-bulletin: "Study reveals new possibility of reversing damage caused by MS". Obviously research is just a step towards producing drug therapy, but the possibility is exciting and dramatic. Hopefully similar breakthroughs for other neurological conditions such as MND will continue apace. You can read the article here: Advance in MS research article

José Henriquez

I've spent long enough contemplating the end of life for a bit. So here's the opposite: our local newspaper's running a story about one of the Chilean miners who came back 'from death'.

A CHILEAN miner who was trapped underground will speak in Grove next Tuesday about his ordeal.

It will be the first of three talks in the county at the start of a UK tour by 55-year-old José Henriquez, and he will be staying in Abingdon next week.

The miners were the centre of world attention when trapped 700 metres underground for two months last year.

Mike Burke, a spokesman for the Church Mission Society in Oxford, said Mr Henriquez, the 24th of 33 miners to be rescued, would also give two talks in Oxford.

Accompanying drill operator Mr Henriquez, and acting as translator, will be Alf Cooper, chaplain to the President of Chile, who led the nation in prayers during the miners’ ordeal.

Mr Burke said: “When the rescue was taking place, one billion people worldwide watched on TV. José is a pastor but he also has to work as a miner to support his family.

“During his time in Oxfordshire, José will be based with a family in Abingdon.

“There is a tremendous amount of interest in this tour and some of the destinations around the UK include mining communities.

“The three talks in Oxfordshire are now fully booked.”

Mr Henriquez will address about 300 people at Grove parish church — Mr Cooper has close links with members of the congregation — next Tuesday, at 7.30pm.

Mr Burke added: “To put things into context, after this tour José is planning to attend a prayer breakfast with American President Barack Obama.”

Jane and I are going (DV) to hear him on Tuesday with a good friend of ours from Oxford. I'm expecting to be inspired.

Channel 4 news

I've had a number of complimentary comments about Wednesday's 4Thought programme, as well as the licensed insults that are the stuff of internet feedback. (I notice for example on YouTube it's more disliked than liked! YouTube 4Thought clip) I must say I thought that the editors had done a  good job with my forty minutes of interview. I was particularly pleased that they'd focused on the positive elements of what I'd said. Today I had an email from a university friend:

"I guess they left out many good things that you also said. But what they left in left me quieted with that quiet that comes from knowing that one has heard truth. And that truth and love are one.

"A friend of ours died aged 50, of lymphoma. He was a pastor and, with his wife, at the heart of any party, connected to people near and far. As we accompanied him in his last weeks, besides the sadness there was something infinitely precious for us all. Before he died he said, I don't 'spect you'll want to put a gravestone up, but if you do, write on it, 'he never knew he was so loved'....

"Jane looked wonderful - beautiful, poised and with an air of 'don't anyone mess with me' that was just right." (Obviously, I agreed with that!)

Yesterday we saw retired GP Michael Irwin who accompanied a patient to end his life in Zurich and hoped to be prosecuted for it. He's a committed campaigner for euthanasia, and intoned the all too easy mantra of "compassion". As I've pointed out on a number of occasions, compassion means suffering with, not killing out of sympathy. We have a couple more doctors to look forward to, one on each side of the debate, and then a disabled man talking about palliative care. Interestingly at least three contributors, I think, are 'Dignity in Dying' (formerly Voluntary Euthanasia Society) supporters.

Meanwhile the news has continued. Alan Johnson MP resigning as Shadow Chancellor for personal family reasons - I'm glad he's apparently put his family in front of his career. (Coincidentally at the moment we're watching dvds of The Pallisers, based on Trollope's novels, in which Plantaganet Palliser sacrificed his career, as Chancellor, in order to save his marriage to Lady Glencora.) Andrew Coulson, former editor of The News of the World, resigning as David Cameron's communications director, because, as Mr Coulson said, coverage of the News of the World's phone hacking had "made it difficult for me to give the 110% needed in this role" - odd, that phrase, for a communicator. 110% (attention) is an impossibility, isn't it? Both resignations, we are told, call in to question the judgement of Ed Milliband  and David Cameron respectively. Oh no! They're not fallible, are they? As Tony Blair has proved before the Chilcott Enquiry. 

Utilitarian Victorian education

'Speaking on the BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, said it would be for the panel leading the review to determine what content should be specified in the new curriculum. "I'm not going to be coming up with any prescriptive lists, I just think there should be facts," he said.' 

If you've not read Dickens' Hard Times, here are some extracts from chapter 2:

"Thomas Gradgrind, sir. A man of realities. A man of fact and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir -- peremptorily Thomas -- Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all suppositions, no existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind -- no sir!

"In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words 'boys and girls', for 'sir', Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

"Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.
'Girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, 'I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?'
'Sissy Jupe, sir,' explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
'Sissy is not a name,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.'
'My father as calls me Sissy. sir,' returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsey.
'Then he has no business to do it,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?'
'He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.'...


'...Give me your definition of a horse.'
(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof of all the little pitchers. 'Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.'
The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer...
'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind. 'Your definition of a horse.'
'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus (and much more) Bitzer.
'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'...


'Now, if Mr. M'Choakumchild,' said the gentleman, 'will proceed to give his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request, to observe his mode of procedure.'
Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged. 'Mr. M'Choakumchild, we only wait for you.'
So, Mr. M'Choakumchild began in his best manner. He and some one hundred and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time, in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte legs. He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had answered volumes of headbreaking questions. Orthography, etymology, syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying and leveling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends of his ten chilled fingers. He had worked his stony way into Her Majesty's most Honourable Privy Council's Schedule B, and had taken the bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science, French, German, Latin, and Greek. He knew all about all the Water Sheds of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass. Ah, rather overdone, Mr. M'Choakumchild. If he had only leamt a little less, how infinitely better he might have taught much more!
He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another, to see what they contained. Say, good M'Choakumchild. When from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by and by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within -- or sometimes only maim him and distort him!"


 Good question, Head Government Educator. 

Evolutionary inevitability

Martin Amis, "novelist, journalist and teacher", packed a lot in to his 4Thought on euthanasia last night. He was, not surprisingly, highly articulate. Assisted suicide, he told us, was an "evolutionary inevitability" with longer life expectancy. He looked forward to a day when there would be "suicide booths"into which you could just pop and be welcomed as you popped off your clogs. He was, of course, using provocative novelistic language to make a point. I wouldn't be so uncharitable as to imply he really believes that dying is as inconsequential a matter as having mugshots taken for a driving licence. Grandma says, "I'm just popping down to Tescos," adding, "I may be gone some time." Death just ain't like that.

His main argument seemed to be "None of us likes being a burden." In other words, when we become a nuisance to the pack, it's time for us to be abandoned and left (or hurried) to die. That sounds more like the law of the jungle than evolutionary development to me. As I've said before, as civilisation has advanced, so we have learned increasingly to value human life. We recognise that life is ultimately inviolable. I wonder what tonight's chap will try and say....

In quite another context I was looking through Edward Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and came across this piece of 19th-century optimism:

"Should these speculations be found doubtful or fallacious, there still remains a more humble source of comfort and hope. The discoveries of ancient and modern navigators, and the domestic history or tradition of the most enlightened nations, represent the human savage naked both in mind and body, and destitute of laws, of arts, of ideas, and almost of language. From this abject condition, perhaps the primitive and universal state of man, he has gradually arisen to command the animals, to fertilise the earth, to traverse the ocean, and to measure the heavens. His progress in the improvement and exercise of his mental and corporeal faculties has been irregular and various; infinitely slow in the beginning, and increasing by degrees with redoubled velocity: ages of laborious ascent have been followed by a moment of rapid downfall; and the several climates of the globe have felt the vicissitudes of light and darkness. Yet the experience of four thousand years should enlarge our hopes and diminish our apprehensions: we cannot determine to what height the human species may aspire in their advance towards perfection; but it may safely be presumed that no people, unless the face of nature is changed, will relapse into their original barbarism."
Well, I guess he's been proved wrong by the 20th Century. And perhaps he will be by the 21st too. Human nature hasn't really changed, has it?