Month: Jan 2016

Camino – all about symbols

The Camino runs in, pretty much, a straight line, but I love the way it weaves itself into your life, with reminders here and there of that extraordinary heritage into which I tapped last autumn.

We stopped in Ludlow ten days ago, and visited the wonderful parish church, which has held on to its medieval heritage better than most. A palmer was someone who’d completed the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the palm was his symbol. Ludlow’s Palmers’ Guild was formed in 1284 and with wide commercial interests across the area they became very wealthy – and they put that wealth into the church.

But, curiously, I noted that another symbol of pilgrimage, which appears more than once, is the shell, rather than the palm.

The palm had other symbolic meanings, not least triumph and victory. The shell, very much the symbol of the Santiago pilgrimage, had become a symbol for all pilgrimages.

Once you’ve walked the Camino and knowing how many routes cross-cross Europe you’re always on the look out for the shell symbols. It’s there even in biblical representations of St James with no pilgrimage associations – his supposed burial place wasn’t discovered until eight centuries after his death.

I found one in an unlikely place last week, on a muddy track, just off Offa’s Dyke. It was – a large shell-shaped fungus, of guaranteed impermanence, and a clear case of the symbol being in the eye of the beholder.

Camino reminders don’t only come fungus-shaped.

The chancel of Leonard Stanley church near Stroud has a carved capital depicting Mary anointing the feet of Christ, his hand raised in blessing. There’s a wooden head of Christ at South Cerney, a little further east into the Cotswolds, that’s comparable, and it’s thought likely this was brought back by a pilgrim to Compostela in the mid 12th century. The way the beard curls apparently gives the clue: I love that kind of detail. A curling beard another symbol? (Acknowledgements to David Verey’s Cotswold Churches for this information.)

And finally, guess what I’m cooking for supper tonight – scallops, with bacon, and it’s clear from one or two looks in my direction that it’s time I headed for the kitchen…

The press and the bedroom

In an interview which focuses on where to locate parliament during the coming major refurbishment, the speaker (of the House of Commons), John Bercow, also took in other subjects, including the tabloid press, in a way that politicians, constrained by party, rarely do.

Would that more politicians felt able to speak truth to the nation.

He denounced much of the UK tabloid press as what he called the ‘more downmarket, low-grade, fifth-rate scribblers on newspapers – if they could be called such – that might be thought to be racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, comic cartoon strips’.

Right on! Few in the media will dare to repeat or report this, and yet it’s the way so many of us feel.

Another big cheer this week followed the Court of Appeal ruling that the so-called bedroom tax ‘discriminates against a domestic violence victim and the family of a disabled teenager’. The bedroom tax euphemistically called by the government the ‘spare room subsidy’ is one of those pernicious pieces of legislation which fails to take into account the realities of ordinary life – the lives of ordinary people. Reduces them to statistics.

Cameron’s comment that it is ‘unfair to subsidise spare rooms in the social sector if we don’t subsidise them in the private sector’, entirely misses its damaging effects. No spare room means no family or friends to stay, no room for emergency, no place to escape. What happens in the private sector is an irrelevance. The iniquity of opposing a Mansion Tax while supporting a bedroom tax, where the occupant in the one case by definition has resources and the other doesn’t, is self-evident.

Policy-makers have to mix with the real world, and have to remember as I’ve argued many times that if your policy fails the basic test of compassion, then you should scrap it.

Mindfulness – the Ladybird way

Predictably – and happily – I was given Mindfulness in the new Ladybird series for adults for Christmas. Only 54 pages – and sometimes it misses the mark, and sometimes if gets it spot on.

Clive practises loving-kindness meditation – and it ‘finds it easier than bothering to meet his friends and lending them money’.

‘In ancient times Guru Bhellend entered a state of mindfulness that lasted 35 years. During this time he thought about everything.’ When he’d finished he writes ‘the answer on a grain of rice’. ‘He never married,’ it concludes.

(In Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the computer Deep Thought comes up with 42, as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything, after a 7 1/2 million year search.)

The easy way and extreme way, and both miss the path. The good old middle way.

Though even that may not work out. Last week walking on Offa’s Dyke we took the middle way, and ended up in a field looking east when we should have been by a stream looking south….

Three political issues – getting it wrong

One or two political issues – London, and election for mayor coming up this summer, and the Europe referendum. And a third – Adidas withdrawing athletics sponsorship.

Three egregious examples of getting it wrong. And they’re all three in their different ways about identity – our identity as Londoners and as Europeans, and in the Adidas case, brand identity.

The Tory candidate for London mayor, Zac Goldsmith, was on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday. He accepts that the London building boom under Boris Johnson has pushed prices up beyond what ordinary Londoners can afford, but he still claims Johnson’s London to have been a great success story. A very partial success. Goldsmith claims to have a plan, should he become mayor, but such is the gap between average house prices and the income of the average Londoner, it won’t be enough to subsidise first-time buyers, and reductions in housing benefit have already made life much harder for low-income earners. Johnson has at the most basic level failed Londoners, and that point needs to be drilled home.

Goldsmith is a confessed eurosceptic, waiting on the result of Cameron’s renegotiations, a state of being which doesn’t impress me. Europe is a matter of identity, and part of our identity is as Europeans. The EU is a remarkable achievement, the benefits historic and tangible, but change and reform have to be ongoing – as they must be for any large organisation. The muddled scepticism and brave imaginings (of a brighter future outside) of the Tory right are a major obstacle to that process.

Adidas: it’s withdrawing its sponsorship I assume because it’s worried about damage to the company name and brand.  Did it take into account the damage it will do to athletics? It’s the athletes and not the IAAF which will be big losers. Make reform a condition of future sponsorship, yes, but don’t withdraw it altogether. The damage to the Adidas brand is to my mind now – their act of withdrawing sponsorship.

Who do we want to be? If we’re Londoners, London should be for all its citizens. We’re British – and we’re Europeans. As for Adidas, they and their brand should know be judged by what they give, and not by what they take away.

Country notes

The early sun below the hill was turning the dawn clouds orange as I ran down the hill this morning. The electric fence has been moved and the cows, Belted Galloways, now graze the eastern side of the common, whereas before they roamed more widely. I have to avoid cows pats and there are big dents in the hoof-trodden earth.

Back Saturday from three days in the Welsh borders, near Oswestry. Oswald’s tree: named for the defeated king and saint from whose dismembered body a bird picked an arm and where it dropped it a tree grew. I’m sure they have dismembered bodies in Game of Thrones, but do trees grow from arms? (Please advise.) We’re back in 642AD, so all things were possible then.

There used in the first half of the 19th century to be a racecourse on Offa’s Dyke above Oswestry, and the stone foundations of the grandstand still sit there, on the edge of the woods, a local equivalent of a Mayan ruin on the edge of the jungle…

Adjacent to the grandstand a common stretches east along the hill, and scattered across it last Friday were the remnants of a multitude, a small army, of snowmen which the locals must have had great fun building a day or two earlier. Now the snow has gone, but the snowmen remain…

I mentioned Game of Thrones. Also on TV, BBC TV, another army will be gathering, the Russian army, to face Napoleon, as the battle of Borodino looms. We’re back in 1812, and it’s War and Peace.

Zen hits the target

Not being one to waste a good quote here’s an entry I posted on Facebook just now:

‘The one who is good at shooting does not hit the centre of the target.’ (Zen quote.) Man U players are, we always believed, great at shooting. And they sure as hell ain’t hitting the target. I’m with my son – van Gaal out! This not hitting of targets has gone on too long.

Trying to relate Zen to everyday life should be easy – just go ahead and live – but something tangible, something you can get your boot onto, isn’t always easy to find.

This hits the target as Man U players can’t.

OK – and what does it mean? Zen koans are meant to be obscure. I’d interpret it as – if you try to hard, aim for the very centre then you reduce your chances of hitting the wider target. And my guess is that Man U players are simply too wound-up – simply trying too hard.

And just in case you aren’t a Manchester United fan of 60 years standing, Louis van Gaal is the Man U manager, and WE HAVE HAD ENOUGH.

What money can’t buy

‘Everything has a price.’ How far do we take that maxim? The American experience is a warning to us innocent Europeans.

Consider Harvard professor and Reith lecturer Michael Sandel’s book, What Money Can’t Buy, where he explores how everything (almost) is monetised in today’s world, and especially so in the USA. How far should markets invade ‘family life, friendship, sex, procreation, health, education, nature, art, citizenship, sports, and the way we contend with the prospect of death’?

Take, for example (American examples, but a warning to the rest of us) buying insurance on other people’s lives, so that you profit when they die, or advertising in schools, directly to children, burgers and sweets, and more, heedless of health risks. Money rules, so that if you’re poor you miss out – no level-playing field.

We devalue what we monetise, we devalue education, devalue sport, when ‘sky boxes’ (high-priced seats at stadiums) separate the affluent from the ordinary supporter (once rich and poor pitched into together in baseball crowds), devalue public service when police cars carry ads, and the fire service put ads on fire hydrants …

‘In 1983, US companies spent $100 million advertising to children. In 2005′ they spent $16.8 billion.’ Education in Sandel’s mind, and mine, is to encourage critical reflection, advertising is to recruit consumers. Two radically different functions, which we keep rigorously apart in the UK. Though advertising creeps in in many other places, many other ways

The USA is a warning regarding where ‘market triumphalism’, as Sandel calls it, can take us, at a time ‘when public discourse has been largely empty of moral and spiritual substance’. That’s a subject in itself.

And value spreads right up the chain. In the UK as in the USA. We monetise elections – he who pays the most dominates the news and bludgeons opinion. Many would limit government action and expenditure because it functions to interfere with a pure economic process – there is no sentimentality here. The only compassion lies in economic value: as the most efficient system it’s the most compassionate.

Ultimately I wonder if we’ve might we put a value on God. We put a high value on self, and all the possessions that define our identity, and the next step would be a God who we identify with our self and aspirations. The American Bible Belt already goes a long way in that direction.

Remember indulgences, paying to offset the wages of sin, and building chantry chapels and paying for others to pray for your soul.

Everything, but everything, can be priced.

Paths not taken (Richmond Park)

The cold sun cheers the soul and the hard ground make good terrain for running, so I was off for a long and steady run round Richmond Park yesterday, with the jackdaws and rooks and jays all busy, and many people walking and chatting, and the occasional too fast cyclist on the Tamsin Trail, and all those wonderful tracks, it felt like thousands of them, made by man and deer, scooting off among the long tufty grass and the dead bracken and bog.

And all those quiet places too, where the tracks take the deer and rarely take us humans, though mad runners like the wilder ways.

Several times I stopped and wondered which path to take, each time a path not taken, and in Robert Frost’s words, that could have made all the difference. Each turn dictates all later turns, and along each path different thoughts, and different times for getting back to the carpark, and getting back home – and for lunch. And every other junction, another decision, and in one, and in every, instant, your life can – and will – change. Avoid any notions of permanence! We are all creatures of serendipity. So keep your mind empty – something I’m very bad at doing (one reason why I meditate!) – let the dao take you where it will, and best to ride it, and not seek to break the flow.

A day of innocence

The subject is innocence (sounds like I’m an old-style, tub-thumping bible preacher – but do read on!), with Philip Larkin’s poem MCMXIV (1914) my starting point:

Never such innocence,/Never before or since,/ As changed itself to past/Without a word – the men/ Leaving the gardens tidy,/The thousands of marriages/Lasting a little while longer:/ Never such innocence again.

Larkin’s poem, to which I’ll return, is about innocence lost as we went to war, an innocence of the consequences, an innocence we could never see again.

But here is also another innocence, what I’ll call ‘found innocence’, which we find by looking within, and which helps us to understand a little more about ourselves.

For me the quiet interiors of country churches are places of innocence, where we stand simply and openly and innocently before God. In one church, Winstone, in the Cotswolds they invite you to say the collect of the day, aloud, so the church is prayed in every day, even if no priest or congregation is there to read or witness. So that’s what we did, and I felt a strange and special innocence that moment, as if I was a middle man, briefly connecting God and the world.

If that’s too spiritual, there’s another innocence, the innocence of animals, from which we can learn about ourselves, and which should determine our attitudes toward animals. There’s a letter in the Economist on behalf of the Nonhuman Rights Project in New York which expresses this beautifully: ‘The Nonhuman Rights Project does not demand human rights for animals. Rather, it wants chimpanzee rights for chimpanzees, orca rights for orcas, elephant rights for elephants.’ Animals may be in our terms cruel or violent, but they act as evolution dictates. We may choose to eat animals but that doesn’t mean that we should act with cruelty toward them, or deny them a ‘natural right’ to live in their natural state.

We are in this case not so much intermediaries between God and the mankind, but between nature and mankind. We have a responsibility both to the animal world and to our own species. If ultimately we mistreat animals we mistreat ourselves, and devalue our own innocence.

And, finally, back to Larkin. I read his poem, MCMXIV, for the first time at lunchtime today. Immediately after lunch I drove to a local supermarket, and put on my car radio. It was a programme, Brain of Britain, that I hadn’t listened to for many years. And the first question: the quote I’ve printed above, and the question – from what poem with a title in Roman numerals does the poem come?  This was all too much of a coincidence for me. If I innocently believed coincidence to be no more or less than an accident of timing, the absolute perfection of this coincidence challenged that belief as never before.

How it can be explained I simply don’t know. But if ever a day was a day of innocence – me thinking on the subject, rather than consciously acting innocently! – today was that day.

A few big ideas

Zenpolitics … sometimes I drift quite a distance from the ‘politics’ bit. But it’s always there, behind the scenes. And it’s all of Buddhism, not just Zen. And for that matter, other traditions, including Christianity and humanism. Wherever wisdom lies.

I try and avoid being too serious. But sometimes you can’t avoid it!

Three big ideas, and forgive the vast generalisations in what follows:

Compassion –  compassion, above all, being aware of the other person, the other party, the other side, and treating them as equals. This lies at the heart of Mahayana Buddhism, and ‘the ideal of the bodhisattva, someone who benefits not only himself but also others at one and the same time’.

Aspiration – to better oneself, and others, make the best of any situation, make the best of life. Aspiration is a very western concept. In Buddhism the closest I can find is viriya, which translates variously as ‘energy’, or ‘diligence’. How we balance aspiration and compassion in modern society (capitalist, global, interconnected, because that’s the way it is) is the political test of our times.

Capability – the ability, the wherewithal, for each and everyone of us (no exceptions), to aspire, to make time for what we each most value, to fulfil ourselves in our work and our lives. Making that happen for others is the ultimate act of compassion. Capability encompasses the ideas of freedom and equality – access, including access to justice, equal for everyone. My inspiration here is the Indian economist and Noble laureate, Amartya Sen. (‘Freedom to achieve well-being is to be understood in terms of people’s capabilities, that is their real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value.’ Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.)

And, in addition ….

Community – working with others, caring for others, the practical expression of compassion, at a family, friend, local or national level.

Government – seeking the best, most effective, most accountable form of government, which I’ve argued before has to be not just democracy but parliamentary democracy, which it’s our good fortune to enjoy. If you think that’s overly specific, think of the alternatives, and how they’ve fared in the world. Encourage debate, avoid populism and straw polls.

And finally …

Freedom – referred to above, but specifically the freedoms of speech and expression, of assembly, movement, commerce. Freedom isn’t seamless (for example, hate speech, riotous assembly – to use an old term, mass migrations) but freedom has to be the ultimate context in which we reach decisions. (I’m arguing for freedom in a positive context, in which each of can achieve what we wish, and not in a negative context, whereby the only limitation to our freedom would be our ability to do harm to others.)

The middle way  – the balance between two positions, where the interests of everyone are best represented, the balance of ideas, not least the recognition that while we seek permanence impermanence is the reality, so all fixed positions are transient.

Insight – or wisdom, the nature of things, encompassing all of the above: the absence of self in any final reckoning, the illusions we have that we are masters of our fate, that we can be lords of the universe – lord it over the earth, or other people. We are of the earth, and our ultimate aim has to be to live in harmony with it.

One or two practical implications:

Always work with others when you can. When you achieve the extraordinary, for example, the European Union, and it’s failing, don’t walk away, face up to the problems, make it work.

Balance the private and the public. And if your choice, as for many it is, is to live a private life, don’t scorn government. Government is as good as we, as citizens, make it.

Value each person on earth the same: of course we love our family, friends, our country – we have pride in all of them, but others do too, in theirs, in their lives in faraway places.

The refugee, and how we treat him or her – that is the measure of our time.