Eternal Life, Quality vs Quantity

Christmas. Jesus. Baby. Manger. Hay. Doting parents. Awestruck shepherds. Nonchalant livestock. It's surely the ultimate divine comedy that God answered Mary and Joseph's frantic prayers for a room in a B&B by providing a parking space for their donkey instead. So who was he, this holy infant so tender and mild? Why did he come? What did his words mean? How should his actions be interpreted?

Probably the most famously used abbreviation of this remarkable life is the one found in John 3:16, 'For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life'. As it happens I've been thinking a lot lately about this eternal life. I'm far from convinced that it is at all synonymous with the much loved idea of 'going to heaven'. ‘Perishing’ has always struck me as being a greengrocer sort of image. We have a fancy silver bowl in our kitchen that frequently contains perishing fruits of various types. Leave them in there long enough and they'll all perish into various forms of fungus and fuzz. None of them have eternal life. You see the things of this world deteriorate. There is a peak of life, energy, vitality (that I passed many moons ago) and beyond this zenith life grows less and less. The words of Jesus quoted in John 3:16 seem to be suggesting that God desires to gift to us, through his son, a state of being with the fear of rot removed, a permanent peak, no morning after the night before.

Related to this, I find that all too often, at mention of the phrase ‘eternal life’, my mind races off into the future searching out to measure the length of that promised infinity. This of course produces nothing but an ‘error’ message in the brain, the concept of eternity is as troubling as it is promising. But what if I were to consider ‘eternal life’ in terms of quality- a fruit of spectacular taste and texture, rather than quantity - a fruit with no best-before date. Do you get me? I think I'm trying to say, what if the linear dimension of time were not my singular reference point, but rather I managed to gain a glimpse into a life being lived in and measured by fullness. And after all, wasn’t the language of fullness used very interchangeably with the language of eternity in the words of Jesus, and later of the Apostles too, most notably Paul?

Anyway, to draw this to a close, suffice to say, this Christmas I’m trying to remember that Jesus came to open the way for me first and foremost into a quality of life, with the quantity of that life finding relevance merely as a shadow finds relevance from a solid object. Is that a bit too philosophical for Christmas Day?

Sinner?

First taste was in the dark
with the sound of crying echoing off the walls.
Your crying.
You have every right to cry.
You’re only 9 weeks old and the virus in your chest burns like hot coal.
Outline of sleep-deprived parent appears over the cot,
a fierce voice barks hot breath into your face.
Hands grab your little arms a bit too tightly.
There’s a heavy pause, followed by unrecognised words,
“Sorry… I’m sorry… It’s OK…”

Sin and repentance.
Simple and quick.
Sour and sweet.
It won’t always be so.
By the first sound of the school bell sin has struck more times that you can count.
This is the world that makes all Victim.
Worse.
This world turns all Offender.

Close fleshy lids and recall the times you’ve been scorched
by lies and scams,
by names called and rights revoked,
by property taken, identity mistaken,
your body used, trust abused.
Coerced and compromised.
Even if you resist its name you know sin’s forms
the way Adam knew Eve.

Now look about.
This talk of sin occurs on the salt plains where
there is no topography of differentiation.
Dirty fingerprints are on us all.
Beauty and beast find empathy in their scars.
But who invited this?
This life?
This world?
This injustice?

Tell me how an innocent bush-boy becomes a stoned-soldier;
how in a twist of fate the victim becomes the perpetrator.
His broken heart becomes cold and calloused.
And with every crime he tells our story.
For we are all enlisted, young.
Now our grown-up minds store toxic pools,
our tongues razors.
Cats claws have grown in our paws
and the truth sags through lack of exercise.
Actions provoked reactions and it happened.
Sin found a host, a home.
A soul to shame,
a name to blame.

Post-Charismatic? - review

For the last couple of weeks this book has had me hooked. Post-Charismatic? covers a colourful spectrum of well-researched material mostly drawn from the last 100 years or so of Charismatic experience. There are laugh out loud stories of early Pentecostals who, having just begun to speak in tongues, jumped on boats to far flung destinations only to find out that the cultures to whom they felt called had absolutely no idea what they were saying. There are serious exposés of a number of key 'Charismaniacs' examining their dubious theological tenets, wild prophetic machinations and disturbing manipulations of the faithful. And amidst all this there's a consistent focus on learning from mistakes and looking hopefully towards the future. This isn't an angry book, quite the opposite - it's hugely gracious. It's tone is probably best summed up in this little section from the prologue,
"...many post-charismatics... find it too difficult, or too emotionally exhausting, to sort through all the practices and teachings and discern the good from the bad. They simply withdraw and consider that chapter of their lives closed."
By the end of the book it's apparent that the people in this category are probably Rob's primary audience. This is why he structures the book in two clear halves; the first a headlong plunge into the present mess of the Charismatic Church and the second a valiant effort to describe a way by which the bored, the confused and the hurting can enjoy again a relationship with the Triune - Father, Son and Holy Spirit. In the closing pages he admits that 'post-charismatic' is far too limited and loaded a term to do justice to this new possibility and so he borrows a phrase from a blogging friend: charismissional. I quite like it.

Everything Is Spiritual

Binging. That word looks wierd when you spell it out doesn't it? Binge. Come to think of it that's not much of an improvement. Anyway, whatever the word used to describe it, today I may have had a bit too much Rob Bell. Now I know what you're thinking - 'Matt Wilson suggesting you can have too much Rob Bell?' Well no, you'll be pleased to hear that my Rob Bell groupie status is still intact. It's just that I'd taken a break from the spectacled wonder for a little while and now I'm realising again why I liked him so much in the first place.
Everything Is Spiritual is the name of the new DVD Rob has released, an hour and a bit of one man theatre theology produced off the back of his 2007 tour of the same name. I actually bought it because I thought it would be a great way to stretch the minds of some of our gap year trainees. Now having watched it (3 times!) I'm pretty sure it would just go right over their heads. The material in it is just superb - from theology to cosmology, blending observational humour with philosophy, bringing quantum physics to life with doodles and wisecracks... "because we all know how exotic leptons can be right?"
For everyone who worries or wonders about the shallowness or the narrowness of the arguments on both sides of the faith / science divide this really is a feast. For everyone else, well, there's a reason they don't stock this at your local Blockbuster.

The Language of Love

I would rarely ever turn to the book of Deuteronomy for inspiration. Yes I'm sure that there's loads of great stuff in there but I'm just being honest. Anyway, prompted by my 'New Best Friend' Eugene Peterson (OK I've been reading his books) I've been taking a fresh look. In particular my attention has been caught by the prominence of the word love within the book (29 uses)...
"Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." Deut 6:5
I now find that wherever I seem to turn in scripture this single line, this simple but heavily laden injunction follows me around, the perfect example being when Jesus himself verbally affirmed the primacy of this command, which of course he also physically embodied. And it's this second element of loving God that I'm most profoundly challenged by. I can mentally ascent to the fact that I need to love God, after all 'He first loved me'. But how do I live that love? In the pages of scripture it appears plainly that higher than believing in God, higher than trusting God, higher than even worshipping God is the invitation to love God, which is a fusion of believing and trusting and worshipping plus a whole lot more.
I want to love God, I really do, but love just doesn't seem to be a language I'm very fluent in.

Reading the bible is dangerous

Reading the Bible, if we do not do it rightly, can get us into a lot of trouble. The Christian community is as concerned with how we read the Bible as that we read it. It is not sufficient to place a Bible in a person's hands with the command, "Read it." That is quite as foolish as putting a set of keys in an adolescent's hands, giving him a Honda, and saying, "Drive it." And just as dangerous. The danger is that in having our hands on a piece of technology, we will use it ignorantly, endangering our lives and the lives of those around us; or that, intoxicated with the power that technology gives us, we will use it ruthlessly and violently.

For print is technology. We pick up a Bible and find that we have God's word in our hands, our hands. We can now handle it. It is easy enough to suppose that we are in control of it, that we can use it, that we are in charge of applying it wherever, whenever, and to whomever we wish without regard to appropriateness or conditions.

There is more to the Honda than the technology of mechanics. And there is more to the Bible than the technology of print. Surrounding the machine technology of the Honda there is the world of gravity and inertia, values and velocity, surfaces and obstructions, Chevrolets and Fords, traffic regulations and the highway patrol, other drivers whether drunk or sober, snow and ice and rain. There is more to driving a car than turning a key in the ignition and stepping on the accelerator. Those who don't know that are soon dead or maimed.

And those who don't know the conditions implicit in the technology of the Bible are likewise dangerous to themselves and others. And so, as we hand out Bibles and urge people to read them, it is imperative that we say, caveat lector, let the reader beware.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading

Ssssh... don't mention the resurrection!

This afternoon I popped along to the Manchester leg of the EA sponsored tour exploring the subject of the Resurrection. Here in Manchester we got Prof Gary Habermas, an able scholar, but sadly minus his stellar counterpart Tom Wright who has appeared at many of the other dates. The first session began promisingly with an opening reference to 1 Corinthians 15, but then sadly descended into a ramble about the common ground that exists between conservatives, moderates and liberals when it comes to the teaching of the resurrection in the writings of 'the big 4' (Habermas' reference to Paul, Peter, John and James).
I cornered said Prof over coffee and pressed him for a preview of his second session, hoping to hear that he would indeed be getting into 1 Corinthians 15 or material of that ilk. Sadly not. We had a helpful chat about the impact of the bodily resurrection of Jesus on discipleship in the here and now but I could not coax him into a discussion about why the personal resurrection beliefs of the early church have been sidelined more recently for a woolly expectation of the soul drifting off at death to spend eternity in heaven. Even when I pitched a carefully worded question in the public forum later on, Prof Habermas and two other able theologians all seemed to fail to grasp what I was getting at. It really does seem that there are very few people alert to the fact that it's almost taboo for contemporary Christians to speak of their hopes about their own future bodily resurrection.
I popped round to my dad's later and asked him what he thought. After pondering for a minute he said that the last time, and only time, he had ever heard anyone preach on future bodily resurrection was 30 years ago! That seriously needs to change.

The Location of Evil

It's been dawning on me of late that we live in a world that teaches us to always locate evil outside of ourselves. This is manifest in the blame culture, the demonization of certain people groups and sub-cultures and the blatant hypocrisy of mass media. And this isn't just a problem that resides in secular society, the church is equally possessing of this worldview. We have a particularly effective way of ensuring we are not troubled by the thought that something within us may be wrong. Religious imagination weaves a spell constructing a Satan with powers out of all proportion with the character described in the pages of scripture. He is omnipresent, he knows our thoughts, he afflicts us with sicknesses of body, mind and spirit. Before long we actually begin to shift our focus away from the author and perfecter of our faith and begin addressing our prayers to this imposter - beckoning him nearer by the volume of our declarations that he must flee.
It is two millenia since the Master first warned us that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean, rather 'all these evils come from inside' (see Mark 7). Why then do we still fail to allow the transformational potential of these words to affect our discipleship? Are we so blinkered by pride that we fail to see that the seeds of every human evil lie dormant below the carefully raked topsoil of our hearts. I hope not but fear so. Don't get me wrong, I don't expect every believer to walk around in a state of permanent shame and unworthiness, I just want to hear less blaming of the devil for issues that are self-generated and need dealing with honestly in the privacy of the 'secret place'.

Contagious holiness

In contrast to the traditional view that uncleanness was contagious, Jesus regarded holiness as contagious. The physician is not overcome by those who are ill, but rather overcomes their illness. Thus Jesus touches people who have leprosy, or who are unclean or sick or women, without fear of contamination. Jesus is not rendered unclean by the contact; rather, those whom society regarded as defiled are made clean. Holiness, he saw, was not something to be protected; rather, it was God's miraculous power of transformation. God's holiness cannot be soiled; rather, it is a cleansing and healing agent. It does not need to be shut up and quarantined in the temple; it is now, through Jesus' healings and fellowship with the despised and rejected, breaking out into the world to transform it.

Walter Wink, The Powers That be: Theology for a New Millennium

Onward Christian Gardeners

...it just doesn't sound right does it? And that, I think is a large part of the problem. Many in the Christian networks I tend to mix in seem to really revel in the idea of being a warrior for Jesus, fighting off Satan and his demonic hordes with the Sword of the Spirit and War Cry prayers. Revealing, creatively and consistently, the beauty of the Kingdom of Heaven in our little sphere of influence just doesn't appear enough to capture anyone's imagination.
This whole issue has really been on my mind this week. During a break in a tub-thumping prayer meeting on Wednesday I confided in a friend my worries about the whole militaristic dimension of charismatic Christianity (worries that have become even more acute in these days of religiously-sanctioned terrorism and war). I asked him whether he thought the primary reality for the resurrection community is one of ongoing conflict with spiritual forces - punctuated with some times of rest, or, whether the primary reality is one of increasing shalom - punctuated with an occasional battle here and there. We got interrupted before he could answer!
Anyway, that very afternoon, we had the opportunity to spend an hour listening to a guy describing his decade of ministry in Burundi (central Africa, bordering Rwanda and Congo). In that hour any illusions I had of forming the 'Onward Christian Gardeners Society' utterly evaporated. I was left with the stark reality that in a large proportion of the world the only response to the prevailing evil (and I can't even repeat the evils he shared with us) is a potent faith lived out through the travail of blood, sweat and tears.
As an interesting adjunct to all this I happened to be checking out an MA course this morning. The subject notes were handed to me as I arrived, the headline: The Powers. What followed was three hours of in-depth critical engagement around the theme of Spiritual Warfare particularly centred around the trilogy of books by Walter Wink. Superb stuff. It seems that God's making a concerted effort at the moment to get through my thick head.

The Story...

I've heard hundreds of people attempt to communicate the big story we find ourselves in. Different people have different views - emphasis is placed here, there or somewhere else. As a way of ordering my thoughts I've had a go myself. So here it is, 'The Story of God + Us' using just 10 pictures. I have some words too but it's getting late and tomorrow's my first day back at work. Maybe it's better if you make up your own narration anyway ;-)

Happy New Year!

Chasing the fox

Random things happen to me. Quite a lot. Take the weekend for example. I found myself in Oxford, browsing secondhand bookshops with a guy called Andrew Jones (aka TallSkinnyKiwi). If you're into books, Oxford is the place to be, and if you need a recommendation, TallSkinnyKiwi the the guy to ask. In the basement of the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles Street he found me a little gem - Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt and Certainty in Christian Discipleship by Lesslie Newbigin. Those of you familiar with my blog will know that doubt and questioning is a recurring theme. Andrew and I had never met before but I think he must've sussed that I'm a bit of a questioner and so pushed it my way. I'm only one chapter in at the moment but every line has been sweet - check this out:
'Questioning can go on forever and lead nowhere. There are always fresh questions which can be asked. Asking questions can become an all-consuming passion which can never be satisfied, for which any claim to know the truth is a kind of treason against the intellect. A recent writer has wittily suggested that there is a parallel between this certain kind of academic tradition and fox-hunting. The whole point is the chase; if the fox is caught the fun is all over, and we have to look for another fox. Surely, the asking of questions is a vital part of our encounter with reality. But reality finally encounters us when we have to answer the question put to us by the incarnate logos: "Who do you say that I am?" Similarly, one hopes that one day the hunter is confronted with the cruel reality of hounding a fox to death.'

On the importance of tents

I'm pretty sure that my most quoted verse in the whole bible is John 1v14. It's the fulcrum of history. Eugene Peterson offers my favourite rendering of it, "The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighbourhood." But you don't need to know more than very basic Greek to recognise that all the various translations are paraphrasing a root noun that basically means tent. According to John, when Jesus appeared on the scene it was as if God was, 'pitching his tent among us.' So it would seem then that the humble tent now becomes a pretty important New Testament image (as indeed it was in the Old). However, it was only yesterday, doing some prep for a talk on the subject of worship that I came across this in Revelation chapter 7v15: "he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them". Same writer using the same metaphor. He clearly knows exactly what he's doing.
The importance of tents then? Well, don't you see? If the incarnation was merely a pitching of God's tent among us, what we can look forward to eschatologically is that great day when we will be fully enveloped within the tent of God. And even for someone with a deep-rooted loathing of camping, that sounds very cool indeed.

The Five Act Play

"Imagine that a Shakespearian play is discovered for the first time but most of the fifth act is missing. The decision to stage the play is made. The first four acts and the remnant of the fifth act are given to well-trained and experienced Shakespearian actors who immerse themselves both in the first part of the play and in the culture and time of Shakespeare. They are told to work out the concluding fifth act for themselves.

This conclusion must be both consistent and innovative. It must be consistent with the first part of the play. The actors must immerse themselves in full sympathy in the unfinished drama. The first four acts would contain its own cumulative forward movement that would demand that the play be concluded in a way consistent and fitting with that impetus. Yet an appropriate conclusion would not mean a simple repetition or imitation of the earlier acts. The actors would carry forward the logic of the play in a creative improvisation. Such an improvisation would be an authentic conclusion if it were coherent with the earlier acts.

This metaphor provides a specific analogy for how the biblical story might function authoritatively to shape the life of the believing community. Wright sees the biblical story as consisting of four acts - creation, fall, Israel, Jesus - plus the first scene of the fifth act that narrates the beginning of the church's mission. Furthermore this fifth act offers hints at how the play is to end. Thus the church's life is lived out consistent with the forward impetus of the first acts and moving toward and anticipating the intended conclusion. The first scene of act five, the church's story, begins to draw out and implement the significance of the first four acts, especially act four. The church continues today to do the same in fresh and creative ways in new cultural situations. This requires a patient examination and thorough immersion in what act four is all about, how act four is to be understood in light of acts one through three, and how the first scene of act five faithfully carries forward act four."

Michael W. Goheen expounding one of Tom Wright's ideas in Reading the Bible as One Story

Don't look back...

This week I was in Oxford checking out a Theology course that I'm considering bringing to Manchester. Sitting in on a lecture the following thoughts occurred to me... Why do we have a habit of reading our bible's backwards? So many people, when looking for models of how to live well for God look backwards. And why not, after all the majority of the bible's content is set in the past. But why is that past recorded for us? Is it there to show us how to live now - or does all that history actually serve a different purpose? I'm increasingly convinced that the story of the bible is a progressive revelation of what I'm beginning to refer to as 'the ultimate dream of God'. All of the bible is anticipating a future perfection that is far beyond the scope of our imaginations. In the same way that the Old Testament anticipates the coming of the King the New Testament anticipates his Kingdom. Here's a practical example: Slavery can easily be justified 'biblically' by reaching backwards in the book - but it's impossible to make a case for it when you look forward and get a glimpse of what God has in mind for his creation.

I wonder how many of the issues that Christians argue over would become irrelevant if we could all get out of the bad habit of looking back...

PS - I'll post something tomorrow on Tom Wright's 'Five Act Play' that will help explain this a bit more clearly.

A story of two gardens

I've been thinking recently that the story of the bible is in many ways a story of two gardens.

In the first garden (Genesis 3) we find a man and a woman playing the blame game and going through the pain of dislocation from the one who gives meaning to their lives. They are sent out of the garden disgraced and disillusioned.

In the second garden (John 20) we find a man and a woman. But this man treats the woman very differently. He wipes away her tears, removes her shame and restores her to her purpose. She is sent from the garden rejoicing. Go and tell of the victory... sing Miriam sing... God has made a way through the sea, the time of slavery is over!

It's not surprising that the apostle Paul calls this man in the second garden the 'last Adam'.

Soul Survivor or Body Believer?

Its relatively easy for most people to accept that they have a soul that will survive death and go to heaven - who wouldn't want to believe that? And after all, the animating energy of life itself is a great mystery that keeps us guessing about where it comes from and where it goes when glowing flesh becomes rotting corpse. But for the evangelist concerned with communicating the original Christian hope (rather than its modern Gnostic variant) it's a hard sell to persuade people that our present bodies will at some unknown future moment be reconstituted to enjoy a new eternal life in a renewed cosmos. Perhaps that's why I don't think I've ever, in 30 years of being around a whole range of church meetings and evangelistic events, heard an evangelist promise resurrection. Yet I hear them promise eternity in heaven all the time.
Related to this I wonder if hope may instead be found in the practice of full immersion baptism. Above all else it's a statement about the death, burial and resurrection of the whole body. Let's get real, if we believed that the body is just a temporary shell we could indicate the presence of a soul waiting for collection in other ways, such as a sign on the forehead, a cross would be appropriate. But the authentic Christian hope is not that we will be soul survivors, rather the body is of great and lasting value in God's eternal order. But like I say, it's a hard sell.

Turning the tables

Prompted by a conversation I had in a coffee shop the other day I've been thinking about the story of Jesus getting mad with the money-changers and traders in Jerusalem's temple courts. The writers of the four gospels all give us slightly different perspectives on the event and therefore the variations in the text offer shades of meaning. But going beyond the words into a bit of architecture takes us even deeper. The key thing in this story may well be not simply what the traders were doing but where they were doing it. I don't know a lot about the Temple but I know this, the spacious outer courts were known as the 'Courts of the Gentiles' and according to the Law unless you were a full-blooded Jew you couldn't get any closer than this in your desire for connection with God. How significant then that as he violently throws over the tables Jesus shouts out the words of Isaiah 56, the classic prophecy relating to God's desire to welcome foreigners into his presence, which of course contains these wonderful words, "my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations."
I've never considered before that Jesus wasn't simply embarking on some puritan vendetta against the sharks and the charlatans; he was reclaiming worship space for the foreigners, he was making a statement about the way the practices of those who are already in the in-crowd impact those who are still trying to find their way in. The anger was a venting of holy steam - God's own desperation to receive the worship of the seekers and the wanderers. The challenge to us today is are we still building temples of exclusion? Are we cluttering the outer courts, the fringe space in which those hungry to know God can come as they are without discrimination? God forgive us if we are.

Is God good?

For quite a while now I've been struggling with large chunks of the Old Testament. By struggling I mean finding it hard to engage with passages of scripture from my 21st century perspective, for example the amount of wanton and apparently God-sanctioned or even God-initiated violence. So on the whole I've buried my head in the gospels and hoped that I might be able to just ignore all that stuff. But of course it's impossible to ignore all that stuff as one of the amazing things about the bible is the continuity of it's meta-narrative and for better or worse those ancient tales make up a large part of it.
The other day I was challenged to re-engage with this stuff and to see what deeper examination of the text might reveal, so I did. So far I've just looked at the first 7 chapters of Joshua (one of the most bloodthirsty books) and guess what I found... Prior to embarking on the wholesale slaughter of the inhabitants of Jericho the zealous Joshua has an encounter:
"Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, "Are you for us or for our enemies?" "Neither," he replied, "but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come." Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, "What message does my Lord have for his servant?" The commander of the LORD's army replied, "Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy." Joshua 5:13-15.
Fascinating. Bible scholars pretty much all agree that this incident was a christophany. And what message is delivered to Joshua? "I'm not taking sides here OK." And then he goes on to remind Joshua of the sanctity of the world in which he has been granted leadership responsibility. Even more fascinating then reading on to chapter 6 when: "the LORD said to Joshua, "See, I have delivered Jericho into your hands, along with its king and its fighting men." (v2). Er, did you hear that Joshua? According to the rules of engagement your army may put to the sword the enlisted men of the city, but who mentioned the women and the children? The NIV tactfully translates the genocide of the city as a 'devotion' to the Lord. Interestingly chapter 7 begins with God's anger burning against Israel because of the 'devoted things'. I'm no Hebrew scholar but seems to me that this incident is not at all what it first seems. What truth is hiding in that opaque language? I'm now wondering how many more of these Old Testament stories may have similar undercurrents? I'll do some more digging and let you know what I find.

White Shadows

The most listened to track on my iTunes player is White Shadows by Coldplay. Like many of Coldplay’s songs it seems to resonate with an effortless spirituality but until today I’ve been pretty vexed as to what the lyrics are all about. My moment of revelation into this musical mystery happened in the Bothy Gallery at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park which features work by Andy Goldsworthy. Several photographs were displayed with the title Frost Shadows. In his own words Goldsworthy describes how he stands still with his back to the sun early on chilly winter mornings. Slowly but surely the sun rises and its rays begin to melt away the frost from the grass - apart from in the areas obscured by his shadow. The result is, in the words of Chris Martin, white shadows that sparkle and glisten.

Going back to the spirituality of the song, I think that it can be found in its brave exploration of human transience. Rather like some of the Psalms or the book of Ecclesiastes it is centred beyond the self, it reaches towards eternity for perspective. I don’t know why it never made a full release on its own merit – it’s much to good for album fodder.