Dinner Service

It’s Saturday morning and, rather than sitting on a train, I am sitting in bed with a cup of tea and a longing for the security of knowing I will have to get off the train soon. In other words, I don’t have a reason to stop writing until I get to the end of writing unless of course this seriously begins to threaten the time needed to make a selection of curries that I have to have done for a sitting with some friends at seven thirty this evening.

Don’t panic, I am unlikely to drone on for quite that length of time but I do want to delve into a thing or two that has been occupying my mind.

I only ever really pissed my mother of once. Of course that’s unlikely to be true but I can only really clearly recollect one time when she communicated that to me. It was on the subject of God. We had had what can only be described as a reductionist argument. My mum was a Roman Catholic, she wasn’t exactly strict, but it was all in there and you did not question the existence of God. I did and in doing so pissed her off. The conversation, which had ended with the facial expression I carry with me, had revolved, or, more appropriately, devolved, around the question of the beginning. The creation.

During the week I have been helping edit a couple of books. These books are related, one is the son of the other; it is unlikely to have existed but for the other. There is a chapter in this second book that brings God into the conversation. This is, in some respects a departure from the other book which it seeks to both reduce and simultaneously enhance by simplifying the language and situating the whole within the beginning; now there’s a sentence that I will likely read over and over. In brief, those curries won’t make themselves, the one author brings God into the room and in doing so caused a bit of a conversation.

The concept is altogether very simple. Nothing can come of nothing. The world is here and so too are you; both the world and you are acts of creation to wit there has to be a creator. The author had chosen to call this creator, God and in doing so caused a bit of a wrinkle. It is this wrinkle that pulled me back to thinking on that conversation cum argument with my mum some near forty years ago. It wasn’t that she wasn’t right (no matter how much I tried to extricate myself from that simple fact) it was something in her use of the word God that had irritated me. It was, doubtless in retrospect, my irritation at her use of the word, God, that had caused her to be pissed at me and she was right to have reacted so; it was childish and I was, or at least should have been, better than that; she was angered by my childish attempts to be godless.

Now the second part is the more interesting. In framing his book within the context of our relationship to God, the author advances a stunningly simple position; God, as creator of the earth is the grantor (as nothing comes from nothing; and you cannot grant that which isn’t yours) and we are both the beneficiaries to this trust and its trustee. The earth is trust property. Thus, our duty, our obligation is to the trust, as both beneficiary and trustee, and so in that respect we are all in service to one another and it is this, service to one another that is key.

And right now I need to be getting on with the dinner.