So What?

Working with Your Hands

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I am reading The case for working with your hands: or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good by Matthew Crawford.  I'll possibly review it later but here's a passage, from page 91:

Countless times since that day, a more experienced mechanic has pointed out to me something that was right in front of my face, but which I lacked the knowledge to see.  It is an uncanny experience; the raw sensual data reaching my eye before and after are the same, but without the pertinent framework of meaning, the features in question are invisible.  Once they have been pointed out, it seems impossible that I should not have seen them before.

This is a common observation and many people will recognise it.  But it is also something we don't necessarily acknowledge as a matter of course. 

To put it negatively we often fail to pay attention and it is being attentive that is at the core not only of working with our hands but also of spirituality.  Indeed, spirituality is essentially paying attention.  You can have something pointed out to you but someone must have paid attention at some point in order to be able to point it out.  Paying attention is hard work, often the experience of being stuck leads to someone paying attention to some detail after hours of frustration.

Paying attention is at the core of prayer.  When we pray, it is not God who is revealed to us but reality through God.  I think it was Anthony de Mello who said something like, asking God to reveal himself is like asking a knife to cut itself.

Prayer is about encountering reality, as it is, independent of our plans and strategies.  It is not hectoring God about what we need in order to do our thing, but simply being aware of what is there and needing our attention.  Indeed the god who needs to be hectored is no god, just a fantasy.  God is never revealed but always reveals.

In my other blog, Exploring Ecumenism, I have frequently visited the idea of conversation and its power to transform.  The mistake we make in too many religious debates, is to expect the world to be final and perfect.  What we find is a world not of unchanging perfect entities but of many things in relationships, in conversation, imperfect, sometimes free, sometimes imprisoned, extremely complex and always stumbling across new things.  This is what makes the universe the place where we encounter life, because all is in relationship with God.

We are conscious beings and it is through prayer our consciousness becomes disciplined enough to apprehend the genuinely new amongst the pointless frustrations of our fantasies.

Sheffield Street Art

I went to a very small book launch last night.  Sheffield Street Art is a set of images by Hedley Bishop and Jim Lambert.  I believe it is possible to purchase it on Ebay but I can't find it.  I suggest if you would like to purchase it (£5), you follow the link and leave a comment.

I am impressed by the amount of street art that's around us in Sheffield.  Perhaps the best known street artist in Sheffield is Kid Acne (bottom left above), who has an exhibition currently at the Millenium Galleries.  (On until 23 October upon which date this link will presumably die.) 

My favourite artist is Phlegm (top left above) who has a fantastic piece of work not far from where I live at Riverside.  This can be found on a website called Sheffield Street Art, which just to confuse everyone has nothing to do with the book and although it features some of the same artists covers mostly different works.

The book was expensive to produce and so won't make much money.  The authors are hoping to use the proceeds for a future 'Pictures of Sheffield Old and New' publication and they hope the proceeds from that will be substantial enough to go to the Alzheimers Society.

Homocide: A Year on the Killing Streets

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I've just finished reading Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, one of the script writers for the television series, The Wire.  This book is the result of a year's placement he had with Baltimore's homicide police in 1988.

I found this passage, which struck me as apt for its time and for the present day.  It comes towards the end of the book (page 635) where Simon is writing about his time on placement in retrospect.  He writes of the changes he's seen in the Baltimore police since 1988:

I came to realise that there was something emblematic here: that in postmodern America, whatever institution you serve or are served by - a police department or a newspaper, a political party or aa church, Enron or Worldcom - you will eventually be betrayed.

It seemed very Greek the more I thought about it.  The stuff of Aeschylus and Sophocles, except the Gods were not Olympian but corporate and institutional.  In every sense, ours seems a world in which individual human beings - be they trained detectives or knowledgeable reporters, hardened corner boys or third-generation longshoremen or smuggled eastern European sex workers - are destined to matter less and less.

Simon wrote these words in 2006 and I think they reflect exactly the situation we find ourselves in today.  We have seen it in the financial crisis, MPs' expenses, News International and the various scandals that have rocked the police in London.  And we've seen it in the riots and the response of decent people to the riots, who have lost any sense of the gains made by previous generations whereby bullets are not fired at crowds, whatever they are doing (except in N Ireland during the Troubles).

It is partly a cult of the young.  It seems inconceivable experience might count for anything.  Short term funding schemes mean communities cannot build a resource of people who know the area and its history.  They are recruited and after 3 years have to move on.  As there is no career structures, the best move onto other things so few garner experience over a lifetime's career.  This is reflected in all walks of life; we are told it is foolish to assume you are in a job for life.  Who can say this is not true?