Cadfael on the importance of small things

I am slowly working through the entire canon of Ellis Peters’s Brother Cadfael novels. At the moment, I am nearing the end of Book 11, An Excellent Mystery. At one point, it occurs to Cadfael that

Happiness . . . consists in small things, not in great. It is the small things we remember, when time and mortality close in, and by small landmarks we may make our way at last humbly into another world.

On not writing

‘All the time I’m not writing I feel like a criminal . . . It’s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. Especially when it goes on for years.’

Thus, Fran Lebowitz. I sort of know how she feels. Not that I think that not writing is in any sense illegal or even immoral. But I do feel very frustrated and upset with myself all the time I am avoiding keyboard or pen.

I have a year’s worth of research notes for a historical fantasy set in sixth-century Constantinople. I have a couple of dozen ideas for theological papers. But I struggle to pick up a fountain pen and just write or to mindmap those ideas.

Photography is a very satisfying alternative outlet for my creativity. But it doesn’t feel enough. I am convinced that photography and writing are complementary activities.

I have no problems with photography. There is always something new to see even in the places I am most familiar with. But how to get back into writing? I no longer have the energy to sit down and write for hours on end. Perhaps it is time to go back to basics and work through Dorothea Brande’s Becoming a Writer (again!).

Rollo May on totalitarianism

An interesting quotation from Rollo May’s Man’s Search for Himself (1953):

Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, for example, do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer. (p. 35f.)

This suggests that blaming the emergence of totalitarianism on bad actors is a cop out. The rise of Nazism in 1920s’ Germany cannot simply be laid at the door of Hitler and his cronies. Rather, it was the product of the psychological (moral?) and spiritual bankruptcy of the Weimar Republic.

It follows that Democrats are deluding themselves if they think that by voting Trump out of office, the USA will have dodged the totalitarian bullet. Rather, the phenomenon of Trump and MAGA is a symptom that American society is rotten.

Another thing that follows from May’s thought is that it is never enough to oppose the false ideas of Trump, or Farage, or Le Pen, or Bolsonaro, or Erdogan, or any other of the would be strong men and women of twenty-first century politics. What is required is the much more demanding task of creating and sustaining forms of life in which people can experience freedom and meaningful and bearable, rather than as a burden from which they desperately need release.

Exposure One Awards: update

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of my photographs achieved a bronze in the Architecture category of the Exposure One B&W Photography Awards. And, for the sake of completeness, here is the one that achieved a nomination in their Conceptual category:

Exposure One Awards

At Shawlands Cross

Uprooted

Two of my photographs (see above) have been nominated for awards in Exposure One’s Photographer of the Year contest – in the Architecture and Conceptual categories. There is also a People’s Vote Award. If you would like to vote for me, please go to the People’s Vote Award Gallery and search for ‘Lawrence Osborn’.

The essence of capitalism

A striking quotation from Michael Parenti from Against Empire (1995):

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and force.

St Sergius of Radonezh: A memory not made for war

St Sergius of Radonezh, whose feast day it is today, was one of the great monastic figures of the Christian East: a man of prayer, humility, hospitality, reconciliation, and patient spiritual renewal. He lived in Rus’ in the fourteenth century, a time of division, violence, and oppression. And the tradition remembers him as an ascetic who sought peace, rebuilt common life around prayer and labour, and called people towards unity rooted in love.

Sadly, today the real Sergius is in danger of being supplanted by a Sergius reinvented to serve the purposes of the Russian state. The famous saying attributed to him, ‘By love and unity we shall be saved’, which invokes our union in the body of Christ relativizing all ethnic differences, has been weaponized to justify the forced reunion of Ukraine with Russia (or perhaps we should think of it as Moskovia). The later story of Sergius’s blessing of Dmitry Donskoy before the Battle of Kulikovo has been transformed from a blessing on a defensive campaign after all avenues of peace had been exhausted into a precedent for a war of aggression against Ukraine. 

To invoke Sergius should mean recalling the spiritual discipline required to resist hatred, falsehood, and the intoxication of power. It should mean praying for all who suffer in this war: for the Ukrainians living under attack and occupation, for displaced families, for the Russians drawn into violence or silenced when they speak truth, and for the bereaved on both sides. It should mean refusing the suggestion that any nation possesses a divine mandate to dominate another. Contrary to the poisonous ideology of Russkii mir, a shared Orthodox inheritance, language, or historical memory does not give one people the right to subsume another. Christian communion is not empire. Rather, it is freely received fellowship in Christ. 

May the memory of St Sergius call Christians not to the consecration of war, but to the difficult work of peace: truthful remembrance, solidarity with the vulnerable, repentance where the Church has blessed injustice, and unity formed by love rather than force.