Richard's Ramblings

Our postal ballot forms turned up yesterday, a further reminder, if one were needed, that there’s a Federal election coming up. So I’ve dusted off a Ramble from three years ago. Then, I was at Synod as the results came in.  This time, Synod will have ended a few days before the Election.   So, how should a Christian vote?  God be praised, we don’t live in a theocratic Catholic or Eastern Orthodox country where clerics tell us for whom we should cast our ballot, nor in the Amer ican bible belt where voters are urged bizarrely to vote for the most  unbliblical ne’er-do-wells imaginable. You’re an educated subset of the electorate, you can make up your own minds. But HWJV? How would Jesus vote? Romans 11 and 1 Corinthians 2 ask, “Wh o has known the mind of the Lord?”, so it’s presumptuous to say HWJV. But He and the OT writers have left some tips.  Matthew 10 “Heal the sick”. Is my  favoured  candidate from a party with a good track record in this regard?  Matthew 25: “For I was hungry  a

  When I were a lad, as Monty Python’s reminiscing Yorkshiremen might have said, I was frightened of shadows. Especially, the moving shadows cast on the ceiling of my childhood bedroom as a tree in our neighbour’s yard waved around in the night breeze. What are those dancing shapes? Are they ghosts? Do they mean me harm? It’s dark! But wait. Of course, it wasn’t very dark, or there wouldn’t have been any shadows. I hadn’t twigged then, but there were only shadows because the moon was out and bright, and the swaying tree stood between its beams and my ceiling. The Greek philosopher, Plato, describes a similar if depressing phenomenon in his allegory, The Cave. Prisoners, chained to a cave’s walls, see dancing shadows cast by people behind them carrying objects – the light of a fire between the prisoners and the unseen carriers is what produces the shadows. The prisoners think that the shadows are real, because they are all that their senses have perceived, while the actual reality is be

  I took flying lessons for a while in UK, before I ran out of money. I have my logbook somewhere, lurking in the recesses of an unopened packing box. It’s much more expensive to learn to fly in UK than it is in Australia, because you pay for your booked lesson’s instructor, even if a lesson is cancelled because of bad weather. There is a lot of bad weather in UK, you might have heard. I still don’t have the money that I ran out of, but I’ve been idly googling “What’s the oldest that you can learn to fly?” Have I run out of years as well as money? With caveats, it seems that late 70s is still do-able. In case you wonder, Leisa won’t be worried by this revelation, she knows that my fantasies come to nothing. One of my favourite songs by one of my favourite bands: “ You know I've always been a dreamer (spent my life running round)/And it's so hard to change …” William Carey, the great Baptist missionary and social reformer, famously said “Expect great things from God. Attempt gre