I’ve been back in the UK for over a week now, but things have been so hectic with going straight into my election campaign I’ve not had time to update this blog. You can see some of what I’ve been up to on the campaign website, though – vote Caleb for SPI officer!
As far as China goes, I’ve started uploading some of my pictures onto Flickr:
I hope that over Easter I might have time to combine them with my journal of the trip to give you a full account of my adventures in words and pictures!
I’m currently in a cybercafe in a building overlooking Tian’an Men Square – we came up by internal flight from Shanghai, and are off to the Great Wall tomorrow!
I’ve got a few brief moments online in the hotel (it’s fairly expensive here, and I haveb’t had chance to get to a cheap webcafe). It’s amazing being here in China, and being in such a vast city. The hotel we’re staying in is literally just off from the end of the Bund, and there are amazing views from the balcony on one of the top floors of Shanghai – I’ve taken several photos!
It’s been hectic, visiting the Jade Buddha temple, the house where the Chinese Communist Party was founded, Yu Gardens, and lots of other places. Lots of strange sights and tastes – eating is quite an adventure!
Thinking of my friends and family at home… I hope you’re all well. We’re off to Beijing tomorrow, so it’s all very busy!
In an hour I’ll be leaving Cardiff on the coach to Heathrow, and this evening flying out to Shanghai. I’m specialising in Chinese History this year and learning Mandarin, and Professor Greg Benton has organised for the Chinese class to go our to China for two weeks. So when I get back I’ll have plenty of adventures to talk about!
Blimey, over 3,000 hits in two days because of those Doctor Who photos! Doctor Who fans may also be interested in the report I did on the Doctor Who press launch for the student magazine Quench, photos and report on the filming of The Idiot’s Lantern, and much more besides. Also, keep an eye on Gair Rhydd and Quench, because an exciting Who-related feature should be hitting the news stands sometime soon!
Talking of Quench, the Debate page in the latest issue takes up the subject of dating, what with Valentine’s Day having been recently. Here’s what I had to say on the subject:
The trouble with dating is that, generally speaking, it’s an individualistic, consumerist and self-centred method of relationships. Now people can mean different things by “dating”, and some manage to date unselfishly. But our habits and culture of dating lend themselves very readily to selfishness rather than love.
Dating is usually about finding the person I find attractive, who I like and who will give me pleasure. Dating treats people like a product to be returned to the store if I don’t like them. But the paradox of hedonism is that whoever seeks happiness for its own sake will never be happy; we need something to be happy about. We won’t find real happiness in relationships if we start by seeking our own satisfaction. Love is its most hedonistic by giving up hedonism: love is finding pleasure not in your own happiness but in the happiness of your beloved.
Our culture is also relentlessly individualistic. Dating is just you and the person you fancy, usually divorced from any kind of normal social situation. There’s a place for privacy, but all our relationships exist in a wider social context. It’s far healthier to begin with getting to know someone as part of a wider friendship group, and moving on to romance supported and helped by our friends, and dare I say it, family.
Dating is usually a series of casual, commitment-free liaisons. Commitment gives meaning and security to relationships. True romance involves both pleasure and purpose, duty and delight, hand in hand with one another. Where there is love, or we are seeking to develop love, commitment is not a cage, but a delight.
Love is not about finding some mystical soul-mate. Fancying someone, having a crush on someone, being “in love” is good soil in which to grow genuine love, but it needs to be cultivated. The best environment to do so is not dating as usually practiced, but one of commitment, community and mutual giving.
I went in to the city centre to shop this morning, and what did I see – or rather, who? Updated with more photos below!
Feel free to cut them up for internet forum avatars and suchlike, if that takes your fancy! If you want to reuse them wholesale elsewhere, I’d appreciate a link back to my blog, though.
…perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an
empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident,
materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars
maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are
crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic,
unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar to that
very same place, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three?
– Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize in Literature speech, 1970
Valentine’s Day… I don’t really see the point in waiting for one particular day to declare your undying love for someone, and it’s the worst day of the year to buy someone flowers or take them out for a meal, because so many other people are doing so. And if creativity is a major part of being romantic, then just going with the crowd doesn’t earn you many “romance points”.
But criticising this consumerist hijacking of romance and all the silliest ideas about “twue luv” isn’t what I want to talk about. I’ve been meaning to get around to posting some thoughts on love and relationships since Contagious, where I went to a seminar on “The Cross and relationships”. I’ve not got round to it, but was recently reminded of this by reading a friend’s thoughts on what love is on her blog. And a talk I heard at L’abri sparked off some new thoughts in my mind about the nature of love, and the relationship between love and hope. So I think I’ll write about these things now.
(By the way, just in case anyone tries to psychoanalyse me, or read in coded hints to a loved one into my post, or anything like that, sorry to disappoint you, but it’s not supposed to mean anything to anyone more than what it says on the tin – or in the post title!)
My friend mentioned love as “Self sacrifice and enjoying it”, which seems to me to be pretty close. But I think that precise phrasing sounds vaguely masochistic, as if we have to enjoy denying ourselves pleasure. I think John Piper put it well when he said words to the effect that love is “finding your pleasure in the pleasure of your beloved” – it’s not denying ourselves pleasure that’s necessarily virtuous, but giving pleasure to someone else (which may involve denying ourselves certain other pleasures for the right pleasure of generous love).
I think that being “in love” involves daring to hope (that is, daring to desire with expectation of future fulfilment) that the one you love will also love you. I think you stop being in love when you stop hoping for that love to be returned, though you can still choose to love as an action, seeking pleasure in the pleasure of another, even if they don’t reciprocate or even if you don’t feel particularly romantic.
I’ll talk a bit about hope generally, drawing on the lecture by Edith Reitsema given at L’abri on the question “What do we need to have hope?” but developing the ideas myself. Hope can be defined as “desire accompanied by the confident expectation of its fulfilment”. Hope involves daring to desire, daring to expect, daring to wait, and daring to act. It’s a dangerous thing to let yourself desire someone or something, and more dangerous yet to allow your expectations that it could happen be raised. We open ourselves up to the possibility of disappointment, and have to make ourselves vulnerable and dependent on the one we’re hoping in.
But for all the risk, we can have confident hope. For example, the hope of glory in the Christian faith isn’t just wishful thinking, but based on the knowledge of God’s past grace, supremely the historical event of the resurrection. That means that we have good reason to hope God will keep his promises in the future, because he has kept them in the past. And it’s not just our hope in God that can be more than wishful thinking: hope generally can be confident, as our reason and future-orientated faith work together. (What John Piper has to say in his book Future Grace is also coming into my thoughts on these matters – a lot of what he has to say about our relationship with God has relevance for our relationships generally, though of course it doesn’t carry over directly).
A confident hope gives us the grounds and power both for acting and for waiting. Hope gives motivation and good reason to act to work towards the realisation of one’s hope. If I am really confident of my hope, I won’t just sit back and wait for a girl to throw herself at me (and I probably won’t get anywhere if I wait for that to happen!), but can act in the confidence that it is worth doing so and that my actions really will help bring my hope to fruition.
One of the hardest actions for us to take is to choose to wait. Hope shouldn’t make us complacent, but sometimes waiting is the right action for a given moment. If we have a confident hope, then that confidence takes the worry out of waiting. Daring to wait is often a real act of bravery and trust – if I have real hope, confident hope, then, for example, I can wait faithfully for someone or something.
If hope is longing for what we do not yet see, then does hope cease once we’ve “got the girl” (or guy)? No – the desire and eager expectation for your beloved’s love should continue moment by moment. The moment I stop hoping that the one I love also finds pleasure in me is the moment I start taking them for granted. You can still continue to love someone by putting them first without this hope, but it seems to me that the romance of being “in love” depends on the hope of their continued pleasure in you, at least from my admittedly limited experience!
That’s perhaps a bit airy-fairy and impractical, but I’ve written an article for the Quench Debate page against dating as it is commonly practiced which has some more practical thoughts on how we should “do relationships”, which I’ll post on here in a few days.
I’ve been emailing some individuals about this, but that’ll take ages, and although I’ll probably continue to pester some people individually because they’ll be more likely to pay attention, I think a general notice won’t hurt.
I’m planning on running for Societies and Internationals Officer in the SU elections which are coming up soon. Nominations open on the 22nd February and campaigning begins on Monday 12th March, with polling the following week. I’ll be away in China from 24th Feb to the 10th March, so more than ever will need to be well-organised and have a good team of people behind me.
This Saturday at 11am at my house, 78 Miskin Street, I’ll be having a meeting to explain what I’ll be standing for and to discuss the running of my campaign. This will include discussing ways in which people can help, ranging from small things like putting up a few posters, to bigger responsibilities.
So basically I’m looking to get my friends along to see if they want to help, and get the campaign organised and underway. If you’re interested in helping, please come along! And if you’re one of my friends, be warned, I’ll probably be chasing you to try and rope you in sooner or later…
Cardiff Christian Union‘s events week is here, with the theme “id:entity”, asking “Jesus: who do you say he is?” Throughout the week, there are various events, including a music night, questionnaires on people’s beliefs, talks, question and answer panel and various other stuff.
Yesterday there was a lunchtime talk in the Woodville Pub on “Is there no place for Truth?”, which was pretty good, though rather simplified compared to the more academic level at which I’ve had to consider such questions on my course! The lunch was very good, and would be enough to lure me back even if I wasn’t interested in the topic for today’s lunchtime talk, “Has science buried God?”
It’s been good to see people coming along, and having interesting discussions with people while questionnairing about their beliefs and seeing a real interest in many about the big questions of life. And since Jesus is the founder of the biggest religion in the world (one third of the world being at least nominally Christian), the question of “who do you think he is – legend, lunatic, lord or liar?” is a pretty big one! Why not come along to the CU events to discuss it?
