Best gig ever?

Over the weekend I went to U2 3D. It was a strange experience wearing these 3-D specs watching Bono et al. strut their stuff in Buenos Aeries. My conclusion was that even in 3-D it is nowhere near as good as a live concert. It lacked the energy of a live concert, especially one where the audiance becomes part of the band. Which made me think about which of the many gigs I've been to over the years was the best one. After much thought I couldn't come up with a best ever, but there have been a number of memorable ones over the years:

Biggest Gig: Tina Turner at what use to be called Lancaster Park. Jimmie Barnes opened for the the Grandmother of Rock and joined her for a duet later on. For a grandmother she sure could rock!

First Big-Name Act: Joe Cocker at the Christchurch Town Hall. Having survived Woodstock and the Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour and spent a number of years pulling beer in an English pub Joe was back (with a little help from his friends)

Best Parachute Gig: Delirious in their first appearance in the natural ampitheatre at Totara Springs near Matamata. It was the year in which I entered the moshpit in white t-shirt and shorts and exited black from all the dust kicked up by the moshing.

Best Party Gig: The Exponents at the James Caberet. A hot sweaty beer soaked sing-along.

Best Small Gig: Bobby Mack at the Southern Blues Bar. A Texan blues guitarist who could make his guitar sing. Only about 200 could squeeze in but he rocked the place. Did the best cover of Voodo chile with the possible exception of Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Best Home Grown Gig: Shihad. with The Datsuns. It took me almost twenty years to finally get to one of their concerts but it was worth it. And the The Datsuns aren't a bad "warm-up" band either.

Worst Live Act: The Bats. They spent most of the concert tuning and retuning their instruments without ever getting the key right.

Gigs I'd love to have gone to: Queen at Wembley. Saw the DVD, listened to the CD. But the live atmosphere at the concert would have been electric.

Standing on the edge

It is one of the favourite team building activities. Stand on the edge, fold your arms then let go and fall backwards. Then if all goes to plan your team members catch you and return you to your feet. It’s all about trust. Trust in your team that they will catch you, trust that defies the natural survival instinct.

I’ve been thinking a lot about trust recently. Three things have brought it to mind. Two have to do with violations of trust, and a third has to do with trusting despite the circumstances.

Trust is a small word, but we exercise it every day. We trust the bank not to invest unwisely and lose all our money. We trust those in positions of power and influence to not abuse those in their care. Christian trust God to look after and keep us safe.

But recent events have tested the concept of trust in each of these areas. The collapse of financial services and investment companies such as Bluechip has left many facing financial ruin. The Pope has during his recent trip to the US addressed the abuse perpetrated by priests on children. A canyoning trip has gone tragically wrong leaving one teacher and six pupils from Elim Christian College dead.

We need to trust. But when that trust is betrayed how can we trust? In my own life I’ve had to face up to issues of trust and betrayal of trust. Growing up in an abusive cult trust was betrayed at its most fundamental level. While the abuse was not physical or sexual (thankfully) it was emotional. It involved the use of psychological manipulation and mind control to enforce the will of the leader upon those who followed. To go against the will of the leader was to be in rebellion against God.

Disentangling myself from that church proved to be a long slow process. While one can physically leave, to leave emotionally is another question altogether. It required learning to trust again, to trust myself, to trust others, and even to trust those in positions of power. It required forgiveness. Not a one-off forgiveness, but an ongoing process of letting go.

While Christians say that we can always trust God, going through experiences like I’ve been through makes trusting God hard. For where was God during those times when I was being emotionally ripped to shreds to satisfy the narcissistic ego needs of the pastor. Where was God when the same pastor drove a friend of mine to attempt suicide? Where was God amongst the emotional and spiritual carnage that that particular church (and others like it) inflicted upon its membership?

Questioning was (and continues to be) important. For in the process of questioning God I’ve found that he can be trusted. I may not understand him. But in all the questioning, the arguments, and the times I’d screamed at him “I trusted you” he did not reject me. I will continue to wrestle with God, for that is my nature. And in the wrestling I know that he will not reject me, for that is his nature.


I stand on the edge
Eyes closed, arms folded
I am a branch swaying in the breeze
I feel its gentle rhythm oblivious to all around

I let go
Deep down a silent scream emerges

Then floating
The finite touches the infinite
Being has become becoming

Flesh touches flesh
It sags then
Bounces
Eyes open
All around faces smiling

I stand tall again

Hotel Hilbert

Imagine at the end of a long journey your eyes are weary and you have to stop for the night. Then round the corner there a hotel appears. You stop outside and enter. A receptionist greets you. You ask for a room. The receptionist says that the hotel is full, then checks again and finds a room for you. What kind of hotel is this. It is the Hotel Hilbert (not Hotel California as some might have erroneously guessed from the opening lines) with an infinite number of rooms (welcome to the paradoxical world of infinity!!).

Elim college tragedy

Today I heard of the tragedy involving 6 students and one teacher of Elim Christian College in Howick. I've visited the church that runs the school on a couple of occassions and a friend who use to go to my church in Wellington and her daughter go to the church. So while this tragedy is distant it is not totally distant in the way that some other tragedies are.

My thoughts and prayers are with the family, friends, and members of the community. From my own experience of dealing with tragedy I know that as hard as the next few days will be, the hardest part will be be in the weeks and months ahead once all the attention has died away and the awful reality strikes home.

To ask questions is a normal response, but in the end there are no easy answers. In fact there are no answers. Into this situation the only thing that is required is love. A love that bears anothers burdens, and allows the weak to be weak, the grief striken to grieve. And most of allows God to be a God who can turn the most appalling of experiences into something good.

Love hurts

Many decades ago the Everly Brothers released the song “Love Hurts”. The song has been covered by a number of artists in the intervening years from Roy Orbison to Sinead O’Conner. The best version though is by Nazareth, a Scottish hard rock group formed in the early the 70s. Dan McCafferty’s piercing strangulated voice evokes the heart ache, pain and confusion of the flipside of love.

Why should a song about the pain of love be so popular? The Everly brothers are not the only ones to have written a song entitled “Love Hurts. More recently Incubus released their own song entitled of “Love Hurts” with totally different words and arrangement, which nevertheless expresses the same sentiment.

Maybe the popularity of such songs such as “Love Hurts” has to do with the paradox of love. Love is celebrated in film, art and song as the highest of human emotions. It is something to be desired, experienced, and expressed. In a scene from the romantic comedy “Love Actually” family and friends greet each other in the arrivals lounge of Heathrow Airport. In each greeting the joy of love is unmistakable. As the scene plays Hugh Grant’s character observes how commonplace love is. Yet love is also the source of so much pain and suffering. Most at some point have experienced the dagger of love - a relationship gone wrong, to love and not be loved in return, to search and never find. Each failure carries the sting of rejection and disappointment. To love is to hurt and be hurt. Why should this be? Are we nothing more than ignorant knaves sent on some fools errand? Is love a net to snare the unwary?

It has been said that love is a madness. And so it is for in the early days of romantic attachment each partner has the same chemical imbalance in their brains as that found in someone with obsessive compulsive disorder. Hence the euphoria, the obsessions and the compulsions associated with falling in love. Some become so addicted to “falling in love” that they move from relationship to relationship like a drug addict searching for their next fix.

But love is more than romantic attachment. It is a complex many layered thing infusing a vast range of relationships between friends, family and even to those with whom there may be the most fleeting of connections. The Greeks had three terms for love to describe each of its manifestations. Yet even these terms fail to capture its full complexity and subtly.

In all of loves manifestations there is a letting down of the guard. And here is the source of love’s pain. For in making oneself vulnerable there is the ever-present risk of misunderstanding, rejection and ultimately letting go. In this life all relationships come to an end. Mortality makes us fragile creatures. And in death there is the ultimate rejection. This then is the price of love. But to not love is to live in a drab, joyless world, a world devoid of family, friends, and companionship.

The paradox of omnipotence

I enjoy paradoxes. They can be fun and mind bending at the same time. One paradox that has been around for along time is the paradox of omnipotence. It has various forms but it requires God to create something he cannot do eg

If God is omnipotent then he can create a rock so big that even he cannot lift it.

The key to this paradox is the notion of omnipotence, which infers that he can do anything he wants to do. By this definition God should be able to create a rock that he cannot lift. But if God cannot lift the rock then he is no longer omnipotent. On the other hand if he cannot create such a rock he is limited to what he can do so that he is no longer omnipotent. Hence the idea of omnipotence is inconsistent and God cannot logically exist (by the principle of reductio ad absurdum).

A number of attempts have been made to refute this arguement. Descartes for example contended that since God is transcendant he is not bound by the laws that he created for his creation (such as the laws of logic). Richard Swinburne on the other hand opted for a more limited form of omnipotence in which God is bound to conform to the laws of logic as part of his intrinisc nature. Accordingly God will not create a rock which he cannot move since that would be to violate the laws of logic.

The paradox of omnipotence does I believe point to our limitations in understanding the nature of God. God is by his very nature deeply paradoxical. For the non-believer this is one of the reasons not to believe. For the believer the paradox of God is part of the divine mystery.

Tis a strange, strange world

There are some things in this world that are, quite simply, bizarre. One is these is the life cycle of the toxoplasma gondii. In order to reproduce t. gondii must pass through the gut of your local Moggi.

Nothing overly unusual in that; plenty of parasites must pass through the gut as part of their life cycle. But it is the way it gets into our moggi's gut that is strange but true.

The cycle requires a local moggie, lets call him Sylvestor



















And a garden mouse whom we shall call Basil.











In the normal way of the world if Sylvestor were to meet Basil, Basil's fear response would be triggered, and he would try to run a way as fast as he can. A case of "it is good to run away so that I can live to run another day".

Now this is where it gets bizarre. Remember our friendly parasite, the t. gondii which must find a way into Sylvester's gut so that it can do what gentics says it must do. What it does first is infect Basil. When it infects Basil it damages the part of Basil's brain responsible for the fear response (The amygdala to be precise). Basil is no longer afraid of Sylvester, in fact the damage to his brain is such that Basil is attracted to Sylvestor. Yes attracted to him - a case of let us make love not war. But Sylvestor isn't interested in making love.

As a result Sylvestor is happy because he gets an easy meal. The t. gondii are happy because they are now in Sylvestors gut and can merrily reproduce. And as for Basil . . .