Soup spoons

We are a mix of nationalities living here and English etiquette is not high on anyone's list. For example our cutlery set (aka silverware) has two sizes of fork, one for main and the other for desert. But who uses desert forks now-a-days? So we don't differentiate. And the  Americans amongst us leave their knife and fork in random positions when done, so when clearing plates you have to ask "have you finished?" which seems to me vulgar. And they are used to different sizes of spoons than we have.

So why, oh why do they put out soup spoons when we have soup for lunch? In case you, my reader, are from other climes where perhaps you drink soup from the bowl, in the picture the soup spoon is 5th from the left.

In England and one supposes also in Ireland etiquette demands that one sips soup from the side of a soup spoon. Which (a) is hard to do and (b) takes an age to consume a bowl full. You are not meant to put the whole thing in your mouth and to do so is uncomfortable - they are too wide. So in defiance, and for comfort, I always get myself an ordinary desert spoon (3rd from left) when we have soup. But I'm the only one that does. I must do a survey and find if folk do the sipping thing.

The smallest spoon in the picture is a tea spoon, for which there must be an international standard because recipes use them. Next is the American I-don't-know-what-they-call-it but it is used for deserts and soup - our desert spoon is not common over there. Which makes eating pudding (aka desert) too slow. Strange people!

The largest in the picture is of course a table spoon - for serving, not eating from. No confusion there.

Here be dragons

Last Monday, in a community "devotion", I spoke about an experience of many years back that suggests to me that God intentionally tells us to do things he knows perfectly well that we cannot do. Biblical examples include the promise of a son to Abraham - who tried to make it happen, and Mary before Jesus' conception who wisely responded "be it unto me according to Your word".

God promised Abraham a son,

But Sarah laughed and said, "It can't be done;

I am too old," she said; "it is impossible,"

But in due time a son was born.

The Red Sea lay right in their path,

And Pharoah's army pressed them from behind;

They were so desperate, they had no place to run,

One step by faith, the seas did part!

God said to Noah, "Go build an ark;

All living things are soon to be destroyed."

The people laughed and said,

"It's not been done before,"

But those inside the ark survived.

So stagger not through unbelief,

Be strong in faith, give God the praise.

It looks uncrossable, with God it's possible,

Have patience, then in God it's done.

A similar thing happened to Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.  He became a dragon easily enough through his own lust, but it was not so easy to un-dragonify. He was told to peel off his skin but however many layers he removed he was still a dragon. His attempts at least demonstrated his intent and I think that is what God looks for when He tests us with impossible tasks. For "intent" in this context you can read that much misunderstood word "faith". And so, later on, the Book says that God tested Abraham in telling him to sacrifice his son, his only son, the son of the promise.

[Eustace] "Well, exactly the same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away for the third time and got off a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.

"Then the lion said - but I don't know if it spoke - "You will have to let me undress you." I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know - if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away."

"I know exactly what you mean," said Edmund.

"Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off - just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt - and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me - I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on - and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again. You'd think me simply phoney if I told you how I felt about my own arms. I know they've no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian's, but I was so glad to see them.

"After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me -"

"Dressed you. With his paws?"

"Well, I don't exactly remember that bit. But he did somehow or other: in new clothes - the same I've got on now, as a matter of fact. And then suddenly I was back here. Which is what makes me think it must have been a dream."

"No. It wasn't a dream," said Edmund.

It wasn't easy to rehearse the past... Back then whilst praying for a particular need in a 14 year old here, I had the very strong impression that "I should not be afraid to get involved in his life". The boy had never known a natural father and perhaps as a result had certain tendencies that rubbed others up the wrong way, like always wanting to justify himself. When I talked with other adults here and particularly with his mother and sister they all seemed to confirm that I had "heard God" and so I began to gently encourage, teach, love and discipline him, always openly and with his mother's knowledge. But what started well soon came to grief - I think he did not appreciate my endeavors and, blood being thicker, I suppose his mother heeded him rather than me. I was counselled to cease all communication with him because "it was not working". I could not, indeed still do not, agree that temporary failure meant I had been deceived, and it became a hard thing for me to accept how things had turned out. But I began to see that the task I believed I had been set was humanly impossible, and eventually I realised that, wonder of wonders, I could in fact continue to be involved in his life indirectly through prayer. Like Orual enabled Psyche to carry out her impossible tasks in Till we have Faces.  And so I distanced myself in person but set myself to repeatedly petition our Heavenly Father to be a father for him where I and his natural father had failed.

Whether my prayers have made any difference I may, of course, never know, and indeed I should not need to know. Although one part of me would like to.

Having dug up the past and re-stated my position I thought there might be some negative comments afterwards from those involved, but strangely there were none apart from one or two perfunctory "thanks for sharing".  Does this mean the matter, which seemed big at the time, no longer concerns anyone other than myself?  It concerns me now, by the way, because upon it hangs, to a large degree, my ability to hear from God. Or maybe we have moved on and it is no longer an issue. Or is it that no-one wants to open a wound - better to leave dead dogs lie. Or maybe everyone else reckons I had lost the plot back then and my speaking about it again was "just Michael again" so let's humour him?

And why do I post this personal struggle?  In my very first blog post I noted that "writing an honest blog is a bit like undressing in front of the world".  It is easier for me to write because I get so tongue-tied when speaking: even with writing I edit and re-edit something like this many times before I am happy enough to post it, and even then my style and logic is sadly lacking. The boy is a young man now and is making his own life-decisions. As for myself, I have learnt to never again get too closely involved with anyone outside of my own immediate family: once bitten twice shy.

Klein bottle and Hugo in 3D

A few evenings ago I got to scratch my itch in an opportunity to watch the film Hugo in 3D for the first time, courtesy JA. I can still rate this movie high on my would-I-ever-watch-it-again list. And to mark the event JA presented me with a Klein bottle which their 3D printer produced whilst we watched the film.

All 60mm of my very own Klein bottle

Most people are familiar with the Klein bottle, but not so many can follow its mathematics. Sentences like "an immersion is a differentiable function between differentiable manifolds whose derivative is everywhere injective", which occurs in Wikipedia's definition of the Klein bottle, leave me feeling I am too old...  However some attributes are more down to earth, like:

A Klein bottle has only one surface, just as a Möbius strip has only one side. But you might say that any bottle has only one surface - if you start at a point on the inside surface you can travel smoothly to the outside via the neck. The catch is that, topologically, both shapes should have zero wall thickness, just as a line is defined to have no width, and, if so, to get from inside to outside you have to negotiate an edge at the rim, and an edge is what divides two intersecting surfaces. With a Klein bottle with zero wall thickness, however, the transition from "inside" to "outside" is smooth and continuous: there is no edge, there truly is only one surface.

The Klein bottle is to a Möbius strip as a cube is to a square.  Thus a Klein bottle is properly a 4D shape, so that my very own pictured above is in fact only a 3D representation in which it must intersect itself (where the top bends over and disappears into the body) and that intersection is clearly a cheat because it creates an edge, a discontinuity which a true Klein bottle doesn't have. In 4D that intersection would, apparently, not occur thus the surface would be continuous.

I still use a 2D printer in my office. JA used a 3D printer to make my bottle. Roll on the 4D printer!

Back to Hugo: need I repeat how it is the perfect story in which each colourful and larger-than-life character is introduced in turn at the start and exeant at the end having gained in some way? Apart from Hugo Cabret who in contrast is a normal, coming-of-age kid who we love for his persistence.

The Book of Mormon

Whilst at my son's I picked up a copy of the Book of Mormon. It is a substantial tome and has perhaps 15 million adherents so it should not be dismissed without argument. I grant that Mormons generally have high moral standards but some of their beliefs are whacky to say the least. And they claim to be the one true church which is somewhat of a challenge to mainstream Christianity. As their president Joseph Fielding Smith declared: "Mormonism, as it is called, must stand or fall on the story of Joseph Smith. He was either a prophet of God, divinely called, properly appointed and commissioned, or he was one of the biggest frauds this world has ever seen". He goes on, of course, to rule out the latter with arguments like "No impostor could have accomplished so great and wonderful a work".

I've heard a similar argument applied to Jesus although in His case I say with more justification.

I'm neither a theologian nor do I claim in-depth knowledge of the Mormon beliefs, but I can make a judgement based on the little I do know, well summarised in this link which seems to me to be a fair criticism. In addition I have bitter experience of being deceived.

I tell my grandchildren stories about Sally-Anne and her adventures with Smokey the dragon. I make them up as I go along. One of my grandchildren has a particularly vivid imagination and will play and talk make-belief for hours at a time. I note that children can handle the conflict of reality versus fiction from an early age. Our ability to imagine is truly amazing. We use it equally to create artefacts like the cell-phone and fantastic worlds like in The Lord of the Rings complete with its fictional history and languages.

Soon after we got married we met a Christian leader whom we recognised back then as having a level of "spiritual" maturity far above our own and who in consequence we then followed like disciples. I use quotes because the term is ill defined. Due, I suppose, to inertia we continued to follow him even after we began to see serious flaws in his character. You will probably know of other strong and charismatic church leaders with strong followings. One we know by repute was Sam Fife on whose teaching the Move of God was conceived. In common in these cases is the ability to "talk the hind leg off a donkey" - they preach for hours at a time with their followers lapping it up, with most of what they say being challenging and credible, but inevitably mixed with error. The listeners ought, of course, to sift all of what they hear, but we thought - how could such a mature Christian leader be in error?  But then how can respected Christian leaders at the same time also secretly be active peadophiles, alcoholics, smokers, adulterers?  The fact that humans are fallible ought not to surprise us, given our own record, but somehow the position we adorn leaders with blinkers our discernment. Similarly I often hear folk using language like "the Lord told me to..." or "I felt led to...", or even claiming to see visions, and I wonder to what extent is this really the voice of Almighty God as opposed to just a fertile imagination coloured by what they think to be true?

Joseph Smith translates while Oliver Cowdery acts as scribe.

And so I do not find it incredulous that the Book of Mormon and the other two major documents he authored came out of Joseph Smith's imagination. Perhaps he was very sincere and with good intentions, but nevertheless deceived. Perhaps he really believed he was the voice of God for the hour. It seems that folk were even more superstitious back then than now-a-days.

The three, and then eight, witnesses of the origin of the Book of Mormon, whose statements are printed in the preface to every edition, were later excommunicated and appear to have been gullible. I too have known folk adopt another's belief against their better judgement, when under strong peer pressure. And the golden plates themselves were returned to the angel Moroni so we have no other means to justify the story apart from the fact of the staggering number of adherents world-wide.

Perhaps the dividing line between reality and fantasy is rather thin in places. After all we are told that God spoke and the world came into existence: perhaps what we call reality is no more (or less) than thoughts in the mind of God.  Which would kind of explain the idea that God is outside of time.