Critic Cal

I recently heard it suggested that church should aspire to be like the butterfly: beautiful and carefree, our days of darkness and enshroudedness past, existing only to reproduce and to bring joy. A lovely image – and I’m sure it resonated with those who needed it. For me, though, it registered a little … partial. There is so much about my Christian journey – raw, real, difficult-but-hope-filled good stuff – that is not described by such an analogy: times of personal struggle and limitation (often, for me, in the form of depression and anxiety) in which my faith is no less real, and God is no less faithful; times of heartache as I learn to lament the brokenness of a world in which there's no getting away from the fact that new creation life is ‘not yet’ as well as ‘now’ . It’s also, if you stretch the metaphor, a little bleak – the existence of a butterfly is famously fleeting, while the Christian hope is of something altogether more enduring. As I pondered this, a different ...

I struck the board and cried, "no more; I will abroad..." (George Herbert, The Collar   [1]) Or, in my case, I will not  abroad. Like Herbert, desiring to defy his priestly calling, to escape, to flee the life that God has given him which seems to him too burdensome, too wearisome, I don't want to do it anymore. I don't even know what "it" is -- I'm not a priest, I'm not a missionary, I'm not an anything-in-particular; the Bible tells me I'm "his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" ( Ephesians 2 :10). "Let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if you do not give up" ( Galatians 6 :9). Well, I'm weary. I'm not even sure I know what giving up looks like, but I know I want to do it. Part of me resents the strength to carry on, because without it I wouldn't have a choice, and without a choice I wouldn't h...

Being of an uncertain footing on the levelest and driest of surfaces, the recent wintry outburst marooned me in our house for four days straight, with little but my Bible, my Kindle, several bottles of red wine, and a dangerously diminishing supply of apples, carrots and peanut butter. I was panicked -- not just about how I would sustain myself without said staples, but about the potential repercussions of sustained solitude. It felt like a return to the 'bad old days', when sitting around on my own was my predominant activity, and I was worried that I would quickly re-adapt and would struggle to remember how to be around people once the sun came out and melted my excuse for isolation. The episode was not without its advantages though. For one thing, it gave me a good clear stretch to finish Robinson Crusoe -- a book which, I confess, I was not overly sorry to escape from. Less "rousing testimony to the triumph of human spirit in the face of adversity", more "...

I'm pensive as I pair the socks. A mournful sigh or two escapes my lips. There is a dramatic flourish to the manner in which I add each newly-reunited couple to the growing pile. "What is it, darling?" -- Mr. W, resigning himself to my woes in generous acknowledgement of my none-too-subtle signals. "Oh, I dunno, you know, the usual" -- I try to keep it brief. His magnanimity takes a turn for the mischievous: "Awww. Do you feel like the kid who didn't get the presents they wanted?" A horrifying, hilarious, humbling hiatus... I feel profoundly diagnosed, with no choice remaining but to laugh at myself and my hitherto noble sense of weighty sorrow. (The sorrow lingered, but its pride and self-satisfaction were sorely dented). Indeed, the major part of my more recent miseries could be aptly described in that way: I don't get the presents I want. 'Tis true I have, in my own way, had  ' stuff to contend with' over the years -- and by t...

I know you're not allowed to 'not like' Moby Dick, but in honesty I didn't enjoy it very much, and my laborious pursuit of the final page of the ample tome is material enough for many a frivolous analogy with Captain Ahab's own undertaking. I liked the start -- it was mostly about people. After that, save for tantalisingly occasional people-oriented diversions, it was mostly about whales. This, perhaps, should not have surprised me as much as it did. But it was *really* about whales…not just in a symbolic or allegoric way so as to indulge the would-be poet/philosopher in me, but in a detailed, nuts-and-bolts, zoologic/mechanistic type way that showed up the short attention span of my should-be scientific mind. The cetological taxonomies are wonderfully emblematic of what I eventually found all too wearying about the book. This excerpt from Chapter 32, for example: "First: According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into...