Friday, March 24, 2006

Lately...

Lately I’ve been feeling very spiritually lethargic and I notice that it affects every part of my life. Discipline becomes less important, hearing Gods voice becomes harder, the desire to be creative begins to wane, I become more needy in my relationships…the list is endless as I attempt to replace God in my life with anything mundane that I can get my hands on, not out of spite but simply because I can’t be arsed. Why? I wish I knew.

Into these times I find that God invariably breaks through, even if they are short torrents of intense relationship that flare up and die down again, they are truly precious and some of the most creative times for me. An island of promise and joy in what seems like a sea of ignorance and waste.

One such time occurred only a few weeks ago. I hadn’t written anything for a long time and finally wrote out of my despondency, this.


It Would Be You…

Who’d have thought?
It would be You I’d loose my heart to.
Find life-lust on your lips.
Your words awaken my life.

Who’d have thought?
It would be You who’d draw me near,
Sat down, tear-smeared and breathless.
Overwhelmed by Your knowing.

“You are mine…”
Writing the words is like a kiss.
“…And I am Yours”
And You say; “I didn’t pay in part,
All it takes is surrender”.
Oh, my beloved, what of me now?
That it were just about my heart.

In the week that followed God took me on a journey of promise that ended with a revelation of the way that surrender brings authority. That when we submit to the beauty of the Holy Spirit working through us, we can do all things. That’s when your life finishes. I’m dead already – or at least I might as well be. My life isn’t my own and because of that God promises more than I could ever dream of achieving through ambition and subscribing to the politics of ‘success’. A week later I wrote this next poem. Somehow the two together sum up a watershed moment when I began to stop running towards what my life was going to look like and began to think about how I could burn it all and watch it blaze, bright and hot in a dark place, where the only people who would see, were the people who needed the warmth.

Temple

Man, so stripped in his worship;
Naked-aware that You are God,
And he, flesh, kept from death,
But for the constant frail flutter,
Of time ticking in his breast.

O familiar ache in the centre;
Your presence pressing deep.
What a mystery for the Great I AM,
To choose this throne of breath,
And bone, my humble God, to use.

I am an anthem of my Gods renown,
The train of his robe fills this temple,
Richest fount of exquisite emotion,
Free-flung, wild and unbound,
Yet found, bound in my Zion.

Man, so stripped in his worship;
Naked-aware that You are God,
And he, a paper cup, kept from ash,
But for the very furnace within.
A frame of dust on a blaze of authority.

I’m a pillar of fire;
So show me a desert.

I think I’ve learned that if you find yourself in the grip of an attitude or a lifestyle that you hate but can’t get out of. Try crying out. Whether out of bitterness, distress, hatred or just boring nothingness. The Psalms demonstrate a God who responds when we become passionate, if even for the briefest of moments.

posted by Matt Heaton @ 11:45 pm 4 comments

Thursday, March 23, 2006

My E-mail Stalker and Newton's Third Law

Over the last few months I have been receiving regular e-mails from an unknown girl inviting me to sign up to various websites with her or to be her Bebo Buddy or whatever the latest communal website fad happens to be. For the most part, considering that I don’t know her at all, I have ignored them but last night I became curious. Just who was this girl? And where did she get my e-mail address from and is she some sort of sordid e-mail stalker?

So, to put the conspiracy theories in my head to rest, I signed up to one of the websites and clicked on her profile. To my horror, this is what popped before my eyes:




Oh, dear Lord…words fail me.

As I reviewed the eloquent synopsis above I couldn’t help but begin to pick out some deeply disturbing issues:

1. The dreaded photo. Well it’s a bad starting point really isn’t it. The cap…and those eyes! What happened? Did she loose her eye liner and thought a black marker would suffice? Was it a fight? A disease? Some things man is not meant to know.
2 Build: Muscular? There’s just no need for that.
3. The Personal Words form a poetic summary of the whole. I hope I never meet Trev.
4. Peter Andre? Peter Plastic Pecs himself is her favourite artist?
5. She loves to party on the corner of the street. I suspect that the full implications of that statement have not really sunk in for her. Plus, she’s 20, not 13.
6. She relaxes in the back seat of a Saxo, loves to holiday at Butlins and her favourite sport is ‘to bitch’.

The only thing that's missing is the cliched, Sex: yes please. Clearly, I could go on, and the effort not to be cruel is immense, although in my defence this post would not exist if she didn't persist in e-mailing me. However, far be it from me to act as the self-righteous character assassin here, especially as I don’t even know her. Long may that continue. Instead I would like to share with you my new theory. It goes like this:
In physics for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction right? I have now come to believe that for every person, there is an equal and opposite person. For example you have Christ and the Anti-Christ, Arnold Swarzenegger and Arnold Rimmer, Camilla Parker Bowles and Johnny Knoxville, etc etc. And that this girl…(I changed her name, more out of sympathy than for any legal reasons),…this girl is my Anti-Me. Yes, she is the Anti-Heaton (or possibly a character from Little Britain). Every word I can think of to describe myself finds it’s antithesis in this young lady (or “durty hoe”) from Walsall.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if we ever met. Would the world come to a sudden end in a supernova fusion of matter and anti-matter. Cool. But then I think of her ‘relaxing’ on the backseat of Trevs red Saxo and pray fervently we never do meet. Or, for that matter, that she never finds this website. Hmm. Well, it’s all been in the best possible taste…I’m just not sure she’d understand.

Supposing that i was going to end on a sensible note, I guess i would say that it's strange, the extent to which someone elses life is so instantly an anathema to me. For me everything ends in reflection and introspection and this, I know, reflects something that I don't like. Genuinely, I wish her all the best in her ambitions...although maybe not the one about becoming a page 3 girl. But more than that i hope that she finds herself living in a community where people love her for who she is. That only leaves me asking myself; could that community involve me? Impossible? It shouldn't be.

posted by Matt Heaton @ 1:26 am 4 comments

Monday, March 13, 2006

August 6, 1945, 8:15 am. It was a Monday...

This is an extract from the memoirs of Mrs. Futaba Kitayama, a 33 year old housewife who survived the bombing of Hiroshima.

"It was in Hiroshima, that morning of August 6. I had joined a team of women who, like me, worked as volunteers in cutting firepaths against incendiary raids by demolishing whole rows of houses. My husband, because of a raid alert the previous night, had stayed at the Chunichi (Central Japan Journal), where he worked."Our group had passed the Tsurumi bridge, Indianfile, when there was an alert; an enemy plane appeared all alone, very high over our heads. Its silver wings shone brightly in the sun. A woman exclaimed, 'Oh, look -- a parachute!' I turned toward where she was pointing, and just at that moment a shattering blast filled the whole sky."Was it the flash that came first, or the sound of the explosion, tearing up my insides? I don't remember. I was thrown to the ground, pinned to the earth, and immediately the world began to collapse around me, on my head, my shoulders. I couldn't see anything. It was completely dark. I thought my last hour had come. I thought of my three children, who had been evacuated to the country to be safe from the raids. I couldn't move; debris kept falling, beams and tiles piled up on top of me.

"Finally I did manage to crawl free. There was a terrible smell in the air. Thinking the bomb that hit us might have been a yellow phosphorus incendiary like those that had fallen on so many other cities, I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a tenugui (a kind of towel) I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my left hand fell off too, the five fingers, like a glove."I found myself sitting on the ground, prostrate. Gradually I registered that all my companions had disappeared. What had happened to them? A frantic panic gripped me, I wanted to run, but where? Around me was just debris, wooden framing, beams and roofing tiles; there wasn't a single landmark left."And what had happened to the sky, so blue a moment ago? Now it was as black as night. Everything seemed vague and fuzzy. It was as though a cloud covered my eyes and I wondered if I had lost my senses.

I finally saw the Tsurumi bridge and I ran headlong toward it, jumping over the piles of rubble. What I saw under the bridge then horrified me."People by the hundreds were flailing in the river. I couldn't tell if they were men or women; they were all in the same state: their faces were puffy and ashen, their hair tangled, they held their hands raised and, groaning with pain, threw themselves into the water. I had a violent impulse to do so myself, because of the pain burning through my whole body. But I can't swim and I held back."Past the bridge, I looked back to see that the whole Hachobori district had suddenly caught fire, to my surprise, because I thought only the district I was in had been bombed. As I ran, I shouted my children's names. Where was I going? I have no idea, but I can still see the scenes of horror I glimpsed here and there on my way."A mother, her face and shoulders covered with blood, tried frantically to run into a burning house. A man held her back and she screamed, 'Let me go! Let me go! My son is burning in there!' She was like a mad demon.

Under the Kojin bridge, which had half collapsed and had lost its heavy, reinforced-concrete parapets, I saw a lot of bodies floating in the water like dead dogs, almost naked, with their clothes in shreds. At the river's edge, near the bank, a woman lay on her back with her breasts ripped off, bathed in blood. How could such a frightful thing have happened? I thought of the scenes of the Buddhist hell my grandmother had described to me when I was little."I must have wandered for at least two hours before finding myself on the Eastern military parade ground. My burns were hurting me, but the pain was different from an ordinary burn. It was a dull pain that seemed somehow to come from outside my body. A kind of yellow pus oozed from my hands, and I thought that my face must also be horrible to see.

"Around me on the parade ground were a number of grade-school and secondary-school children, boys and girls, writhing in spasms of agony. Like me, they were members of the anti-air raid volunteer corps. I heard them crying 'Mama! Mama!' as though they'd gone crazy. They were so burned and bloody that looking at them was insupportable. I forced myself to do so just the same, and I cried out in rage, 'Why? Why these children?' But there was no one to rage at and I could do nothing but watch them die, one after the other, vainly calling for their mothers."After lying almost unconscious for a long time on the parade ground, I started walking again. As far as l could see with my failing sight, everything was in flames, as far as the Hiroshima station and the Atago district. It seemed to me that my face was hardening little by little. I cautiously touched my hands to my cheeks. My face felt as though it had doubled in size. I could see less and less clearly. Was I going blind, then? After so much hardship, was I going to die? I kept on walking anyway and I reached a suburban area.

"In that district, farther removed from the center, I found my elder sister alive, with only slight injuries to the head and feet. She didn't recognize me at first, then she burst into tears. In a handcart, she wheeled me nearly three miles to the first-aid center at Yaga. It was night when we arrived. I later learned there was a pile of corpses and countless injured there. I spent two nights there, unconscious; my sister told me that in my delirium I kept repeating, 'My children! Take me to my children!'"On August 8, I was carried on a stretcher to a train and transported to the home of relatives in the village of Kasumi. The village doctor said my case was hopeless. My children, recalled from their evacuation refuge, rushed to my side. I could no longer see them; I could recognize them only by smelling their good odor. On August 11, my husband joined us. The children wept with joy as they embraced him."Our happiness soon ended. My husband, who bore no trace of injury, died suddenly three days later, vomiting blood. We had been married sixteen years and now, because I was at the brink of death myself, I couldn't even rest his head as I should have on the pillow of the dead."I said to myself, 'My poor children, because of you I don't have the right to die!' And finally, by a miracle, I survived after I had again and again been given up for lost.

"My sight returned fairly quickly, and after twenty days I could dimly see my children's features. The burns on my face and hands did not heal so rapidly, and the wounds remained pulpy, like rotten tomatoes. It wasn't until December that I could walk again. When my bandages were removed in January, I knew that my face and hands would always be deformed. My left ear was half its original size. A streak of cheloma, a dark brown swelling as wide as my hand, runs from the side of my head across my mouth to my throat. My right hand is striped with a cheloma two inches wide from the wrist to the little finger. The five fingers on my left hand are now fused at the base."


Having read this any ruminations on the "horror of nuclear weapons" would be pointless and cheap. My only question is 'Why did I have to search around on the internet to find this on some obscure website?' If I learn about the second world war in school i'm told to read war poems all about mustard gas and the way it was used. I'm shown photographs of mountains of Jewish shoes left ownerless with in-depth detail of the Holocaust and it's machinations. And i'm told that on August 6th 1945 a nuclear bomb called Fat Man was dropped on Hiroshima in order to end the war with the Japanese.

As Stalin said "Kill one and it's a tragedy, kill a million and it's a statistic." I thought we'd got past that. If being taught was more about imparting past experience than just reciting facts would we still have such massively indiscriminate weapons? Along with the fact that modern nuclear weapons are now 4,000 times more powerful than Fat Man comes the question of what siezure of stupidity has so gripped our leaders that the UK feels the need to keep and maintain 392 such weapons (US has 8,000!) when clearly we are not going to use them?

posted by Matt Heaton @ 1:09 pm 1 comments

Monday, March 06, 2006

"File them next to the toilet..."

Two posts in as many days! I'm on fire...except that this is mostly not my work. This is an article that was printed in the Guardian newspaper and touted as a genuine letter, sent by the Inland Revenue. Whether or not that is actually true is totally irrelevant because it tickles my sense of humour either way. Apologies if you've seen it before...


Dear Mr Addison,

I am writing to you to express our thanks for your more than prompt reply to our latest communication, and also to answer some of the points you raise. I will address them, as ever, in order.

Firstly, I must take issue with your description of our last as a "begging letter". It might perhaps more properly be referred to as a "tax demand". This is how we, at the Inland Revenue have always, for reasons of accuracy; traditionally referred to such documents.

Secondly, your frustration at our adding to the "endless stream of crapulent whining and panhandling vomited daily through the letterbox on to the doormat" has been noted. However, whilst I have naturally not seen the other letters to which you refer I would cautiously suggest that their being from "pauper councils, Lombardy pirate banking houses and pissant gas-mongerers" might indicate that your decision to "file them next to the toilet in case of emergencies" is at best a little ill-advised. In common with my own organisation, it is unlikely that the senders of these letters do see you as a "lackwit bumpkin" or, come to that, a "sodding charity". More likely they see you as a citizen of Great Britain, with a responsibility to contribute to the upkeep of the nation as a whole.

Which brings me to my next point. Whilst there may be some spirit of truth in your assertion that the taxes you pay "go to shore up the canker-blighted, toppling folly that is the Public Services", a moment's rudimentary calculation ought to disabuse you of the notion that the government in any way expects you to "stump up for the whole damned party" yourself. The estimates you provide for the Chancellor's disbursement of the funds levied by taxation, whilst colourful, are, in fairness, a little off the mark. Less than you seem to imagine is spent on "junkets for Bunterish lickspittles" and "dancing whores" whilst far more than you have accounted for is allocated to, for example, "that box-ticking façade of a university system."


A couple of technical points arising from direct queries:

1.. The reason we don't simply write "Muggins" on the envelope has to do with the vagaries of the postal system;

2.. You can rest assured that "sucking the very marrows of those with nothing else to give" has never been considered as a practice because even if the Personal Allowance didn't render it irrelevant, the sheer medical logistics involved would make it financially unviable.

I trust this has helped. In the meantime, whilst I would not in any way
wish to influence your decision one way or the other, I ought to point out that even if you did choose to "give the whole foul jamboree up and go and live in India" you would still owe us the money.

Please forward it by Friday.


Yours Sincerely,

H J Lee
Customer Relations


Comedy! A more serious post on the Hiroshima nuclear bomb later in the week...

posted by Matt Heaton @ 7:28 pm 1 comments

Christian GBH

Imagine yourself, in the dry heat of the afternoon, walking down a dusty side road in a small African town, the red earth littered with strips of old chewed sugar cane, old men staring as you pass. When one of the small, brightly coloured, breeze-block shop fronts causes you to pause; “Christian Music Shop” reads the rough hand painted sign. It’s no Wesley Owen, but still seems a little out of place and until the moment you actually enter, a part of you is expecting it to hold a family of swine, a corn grinding machine…anything but Christian merchandise. To your surprise you find yourself standing in an Aladdin’s cave of Christian tapes and books, all thick with dust and displaying the cheesiest selection of titles imaginable.

This is what happened to my fellow travellers and I on one of the days we were staying in Kenya. We felt like we had stepped back in time. Imagine any Christian material produced in the 70’s, that was deemed by the West to be too disgracefully happy for human consumption, was all dumped in a tiny shack, then this was it. We rummaged through gospel tapes with titles like ‘Pure Joy’ and ‘Sing His Praises in the Morning’ accompanied by pictures of stags prancing in a morning mist or rainbows sprouting from magnificent moss-clad waterfalls.

It was then that my eyes fell upon a set of two books by Steven Ogan the first of which was emblazoned with the immortal words; “How to Beat Your Wife”. It was one of those moments when your mind is so thoroughly confused that it takes a few moments to respond. Perhaps I had read it wrong? But, no. A swift check confirmed that I was correct and that the beauty nestled next to it was indeed entitled “How to Beat Your Husband” – lest the author should ever be accused of fostering gender inequality. I glanced at the shopkeeper – a pretty young African woman. She didn’t look like the husband pummelling type.
“Have you read these?” I ask.
“Yes” Came the reply.
My mind had by now recovered from its confusion and was beginning to inform me that this situation was deeply funny. “Are they any good?” I said, cracking a grin.
“Yes, very good!”
“Ahh!” Clearly spouse beating was a popular form of recreation. After all, you wouldn’t need to spend any money to get started; all that’s required is a frying pan or hefty branch…or fists, I thought, eyeing the slight girl behind the counter with wariness. In my mind i was wondering what life might be life for a couple who had both read the appropriate literature on administering good Christian grevious bodily harm. It was at this point that I decided it was time to leave before I got myself into trouble. That and the fact that everyone else was leaving, having found no Hillsongs CDs. Or, indeed, any CDs for that matter.

So why tell this story? Well, I feel that it’s worth it, just for the unbridled joy of knowing that you too can be the proud owner of the complete set of relation-battering manuals for only £3.49 each!! Yes, I’ve found them online here at http://www.canapublishinguk.com/Uzima%20Books%20for%20life.htm

“Books for Life” indeed!

And what makes it all absolutely perfect is the revelation that they’re part of a 4 book series:
The third, brilliantly, is “How to Beat Your Inlaws”, and the fourth? It’s simply entitled “Mercy”, which of course is cheaper at only £2.99.

Ironic magnificence!

Ps. Seriously; check out the link...it's worth it just to read the blurb for 'how to beat your wife' and the awesome spelling error in 'Mercy'.

posted by Matt Heaton @ 12:30 am 1 comments