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| Spuds are up! |
I spend the biggest part of my time these days in our quite extensive garden. I have made a new vegetable bed and am reclaiming a wild part. We will be getting rid of a impassable tangle of briars, other weeds and dead or dying trees, planting new ones, aiming for a pleasing glade through which to approach the house. I would love to have it all done before the Anna M is back in the water. My personal little kingdom straddles sea and land somewhat uneasily!
It's not that I myself will even see it with the trees grown tall. How is one to keep at it, even when the old knees would rather not do so and one may well fail to enjoy much of the fruits? So much for my kingship! However, there is sustenance in the very act of bringing order to chaos, which is very hard to live with, so we instinctively combat it. Yet we humans live between the necessity of order and chaos, in our own hearts as in the sea. Order feeds on chaos, even as a king upholds his kingdom by combatting it, and a skipper keeps his ship in order against the jostling of the waves.
Christians have a special way of coping with this situation. Even while we tend our gardens for our families and the wider communities of which we are part, we do so in the hope of welcoming the King of Kings to them, whether in our own lives or at the end of time. We can abide the Cross, the everlasting dissolution, because it is necessary for Him to come and establish that eternal Kingdom, in which nothing good and beautiful will be lost, and we ourselves hope to participate. This asserts the value of the Present Moment and is the opposite of the despair that actually seeks to bring about the End Times, which certain gentlemen in Iran seem to be horribly entangled in. The cycle of the seasons teaches us to be patient,- resurrection follows death as surely as spring follows winter.
Dear King Charles, who seems to reckon that being a Christian is simply a matter of being 'a good chap' and who tries to be friends with everyone 'of all faiths and none', is apparently reluctant to recognise the fact that there are some weeds in this world that unfortunately one simply cannot get on with. In this he speaks for the entire western, liberal establishment. Our media have been trying hard to cope with the Islamic Republican Guard Corps by pretending that they sane, and it's the people who go out and get themselves shot by them who are insane and should be ignored,- but this attitude will not endure.
So, this is a time when we find ourselves particularly impelled to revisit the basic presuppositions of our lives. What about, for instance, the enduring symbolic power of kingship? Even today, King Charles manages to convey a sense of context, of meaning and direction, that actually had both Houses of Congress on their feet applauding him together, and very nice it was to see Republicans and Democrats united for a change!
As for President Donald J. Trump, it does seem that leftists are justified in saying that, rather like Presidents Putin and Xi, he would like to see himself as a king. When he manifests this, as in famous photos before the Trump Tower's golden gates, he earns my sobriquet for him as 'the Ducky', and I am not even a lefty! So what is the difference between this kind of vainglory and the kingship Jesus claimed for Himself, the Son of Man, and thereby for all who take up their cross and follow Him? Which kingship, by the way, is the very essence of democracy, which is based on respect for each sovereign individual, brethren of the Lord Jesus and therefore sharing His kingship.
Reza Pahlavi is finding it difficult to take up the kingship of Iran, though this would seem to be the best hope of bringing the chaos to an end. Since every war is at bottom a war of narratives, I find the deafening silence from Europe when it comes to supporting him, and those in Iran who risk their lives to do so, quite disgusting. I get the impression that such reticence even tends to the extreme in republics such as Ireland and France. Well, kings did indeed let us down, but isn't it time to get over that? They do provide provide a reminder that our kingship by no means justifies us in thinking that we are ends in ourselves, entitled to homage on all sides!
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| Sea-pink time in Co.Clare. |
