The Manifold Letters

74.  Retreats from Darkness. Dearly Beloved, I don't watch a lot of television, and although I enjoy the odd thriller, especially spy thrillers, seeing violence on screen makes me most uncomfortable. What I have noticed is that there are now many series of adventure stories, but as these TV series progress the writers seem to run out of inspiration and the result is that each sequential episode become darker, and often more violent, than the one before. This seems to have happened even in what should be innocent series, like Harry Potter. In the first episode I was charmed by the plot and the imagination shown in setting the story out, especially the flexible bus taking Harry to platform seven and a half at the railway station on his way to school. In later episodes the plots darken and one is left with stories which remind one of the classic battle between good and evil, a dualism which was a problem for Christianity in its early years. Around 500 AD St Augustine of Hippo brok...

73. From Xerxes to Putin: Why are we humans so scientifically advanced yet so incompetent at preventing wars? Dearly Beloved, Last week I went for dental treatment and had four nerve canals in one tooth cleaned out. A flexible drill was used which was 0.13mm wide, as thick as a human hair. My dentist explained that originally these nickel-titanium alloy drills broke after being used on only a very few teeth but now, with heat treatment of the alloy, they could be used 10,000 times before breaking. The next day I read that Joint European Torus, which is attempting to produce energy by nuclear fusion, in the way the Sun produces energy -- non-polluting, cheap and with the capacity to produce a mass of energy – had run for five seconds, so promising a major break through in the way we produce energy. So human technology storms ahead whether in the dentist surgery or the energy industry, yet at the same time we read that the Russian government is amassing troops on the border of Ukraine,...

72. A Meditation on the Number Nought.  Dearly Beloved, My five year old Grandson informed me that the number nought was really quite a high number because there are as many minus numbers below it as there were positive numbers above it. Well, I was brought to nought by his comment and wondered “where can one go from nought?”  I stumbled across the answer at King's Cross station at Platform 0. If one takes a train from Platform 0, it is always in a hurry and having traveled 60 miles, it eventually stops at a station adjacent to the AstraZeneca offices. That company has so far produced three billion Covid vaccines at cost and distributed then around the world to offset the recent epidemic of the Covid 19 viruses. But this is not the only wonder in the town, for it is full of ideas, some practical and some less so. If you wish to know about magnetism or magnesium, caesium or Californium, romanticism, communism, communitarianism, disestablishmentarianism or stoicism, t...

71. On Hope for the Future of Ageing.  Dearly Beloved, When I had a birthday party to celebrate reaching the age of seventy years the invitation was headed with the passage from P salm 90:10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. That Psalm was written thousands of years ago and since then we humans have been trying to understand why there is a sudden deterioration in the human physical condition after the age of seventy. Modern science has struggled to understand this phenomenon and it was thought that it was due to an accumulation of genetic errors, specifically the erroneous replication of amino acids in the nucleus of cells that allows accurate replication of cells – so gradual deterioration of the quality of cells would result. Recent research has shown that something much more dynamic is going on. If I have understood it c...

70. On Trinity Sunday. Dearly Beloved. Trinity Sunday celebrates endings and renewal as the Church moves from celebrating Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter and finally Pentecost, and moves into “ordinary time”. This year Trinity Sunday was especially rich in such endings and beginnings. In the mass at St Clement's, Charles Cowper marked the end of his training at Ridley Hall and the start of his teaching career by giving the sermon, which is regarded as the most difficult of the year because of the complications of the theology of the Holy Spirit. Charles led a wonderfully psychedelic exploration of the Revelation of St John the Divine, surely one of the most striking but most difficult texts in the Bible, “...I looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven...” In the afternoon St Clement's was full with standing room only for the service to bless the six sparkling new bells installed in the tower. That ceremony marked the end of a period of hard fund-raising and hard work ...

69. The Noise of Eternity and the Noise of Argument. Dearly Beloved, Many years ago I sat on the west facing cliffs of the Island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel. It was winter and huge waves forty feet high were rolling out of the Atlantic from the West and breaking on the vertical granite cliffs. The noise was tumultuous; the bang of the impact was combined with the rushing of water back down into the sea, the fizzing of the surf and the sound of wind whipping through the grass on the cliff tops. Gradually the noise of the breaking waves became like a huge tolling bell and the white flecks of the spindrift were like white flowers blooming and then dying. Gradually the scene disintegrated in the mind's eye to become a vision of eternity where everything that had ever happened was occurring at the same single moment. The scene was full of noise, light and fleeting forms. Time disappeared. Yet in other ways timelessness does not bear thinking about. Ideas of timelessness and the ...

68. On Vanity, Charity and Timeless Eternity. Dearly Beloved, A contemplative life is certainly challenged by a suffocating sense of time passing and the distracting feeling that things need to be done. The idea that God is timelessly eternal is difficult for us to grasp, as are the memories of the brief moments when we may experience timelessness. A watch on one's wrist is not an aid to contemplative prayer. Unfortunately for the luxury goods industry, male vanity demands only a few items: cufflinks, signet rings, a tie pin – and of course a luxury watch. Some years ago I was part of a Royal Geographical Society project which was studying what was then called the Wahiba Sands but now called the Eastern sands of Oman. This is a desert of rolling dunes of calcareous sand blown in from the sea over the millennia. The RGS project comprised teams of Geologists, Biologists and Anthropologists and the leader of each team was promised the gift of a Rolex watch. However in due time onl...