More than eight weeks of Summer gone already...

This is ridiculous. Seemingly Met Éireann, the Irish meteorological agency, has taken to running with all the other eejits that think that Summer is the three months of June, July, and August. It takes the view that Summer is defined as the three warmest months of the year, based on data over a thirty-year period; so Summer is, as far as they're concerned, June, July, and August in a typical year. It has, rightly, no time for the nonsensical claim that the seasons begin on the Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox, and Winter Solstice, ascribing the use of these astronomical dates as markers for when seasons begin purely to the needs of diary manufacturers and the like, but this doesn't change the fact that their basic thesis is clearly absurd.

Think about it. It was the Summer Solstice just a few days back. What else do we call the Summer Solstice? Yes, it's Midsummer's Day. Midsummer. That's the clue. It falls in the middle of Summer. It's not just a quarter of the way in, much less the day that launches the season. It's pretty much bang in the middle of the season. Go and read Shakespeare, if this doesn't ring any bells.

To have the Solstice fall in the middle of Summer, Summer needs to take up May, June, and July. It's common sense. Likewise with the Winter Solstice -- if it's Midwinter's Day, as it is, then Winter must be November, December, and January.

Despite the meteorological agencies' claims, the traditional European seasons have never been defined by weather. They're not about climate. They're not about fluctuating temperatures, not least because that leads to honest people such as Swedish meteorologists admitting that seasons begin at different times in different years and in different places. They're about light and darkness as experienced in the Northern Hemisphere -- obviously, the months are differnt in the Southern Hemisphere, but the principle's the same. Summer is the quarter of the year when we have the most hours of daylight, and Winter's the quarter when we have the fewest. 

For what it's worth, this means that Autumn is defined as August, September, and October, something the Irish calendar makes very clear, as the Irish names for September (Meán Fómhair) and October (Deireadh Fómhair) literally mean "middle of autumn" and "end of autumn".

And yes, I know it often rains a lot in May. So what? Do you remember June, July, and August of 2007 and 2008? Sodden, they were. Absolutely miserable. Dividing the seasons astronomically, so that the quarter of the year with the most daylight is called Summer and the one with the least is called Winter is meaningful, stable, objective, relevant through the hemisphere, and it's how this was traditionally worked out throughout history.

The Tale of One Bad Rat, or, thoughts on teaching adults to read comics

 I was talking to my housemate last night about Watchmen, raving about it as I tend to do, and following Pádraig Ó Méalóid in scorning the Zach Snyder film based on the book. I'd not say the film is a travesty, but I think Pádraig was almost exactly right to have said:

'It looks a lot like the original Watchmen book, but has none of its grace, or beauty, or subtlety, or sinuously beautiful timing. Watchmen is the most perfect graphic novel there is, and a huge amount of work went into making it that way, and attempting to streamline that for the big screen was never going to work. Alan Moore said it was unfilmable, and I have seen that he was completely right.'

Anyway, I wittered away about why I felt the film didn't work -- how it had fundamentally missed the point of the book, misunderstood the nature of the book's characters as created by Moore, seemed oblivious in all but the most cosmetic of ways to the how the fabric of the world of Watchmen differs from that of our own world, and been unable to play to the book's strength. It has strengths, to be fair -- the credit sequence was funny and clever, the casting was excellent, and every so often the sets were spot-on, but in the main I thought it missed the point and substituted brashness, gore, and gratuitous violence and nudity where Moore and Gibbons had been elegant, subtle, and often just matter-of-fact. 

At this my housemate pulled me up, as someone who had liked the film and never read the book, saying that he'd liked it and didn't agree with me, so I went and got the book and tried as best I could in a hasty way to point out how the book works, panel by panel. I wished I'd Gibbons and Kidd's Watching the Watchmen to hand, but I did my best.

My housemate's intrigued now, and is tempted to buy the book for himself, but I'm a bit wary of him reading it just yet. Watchmen, to be frank, isn't a book to start a new comic-reader on. It's too complex, too sophisticated, to dependent on familiarity with the form and its grammar. 

Years ago I went to a talk by Bryan Talbot, back when he'd just written The Tale of One Bad Rat, where he talked of how he'd been amazed in the aftermath of his avant-garde The Adventures of Luther Arkwright to learn that there were people who couldn't read comics, who found them complex and hard to follow. How does one read a page? How does one read a panel? What do you read first -- the picture or the speech balloons or the captions or the thought bubbles or a combination of them all? It was with this in mind that he wrote and drew The Tale of One Bad Rat the way he did.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is about as legible, and sad, as beautiful, and as hopeful a comic as one could ever hope to read, and it's become one of a handful of comics I like to show people who don't read comics if I want to show them how good work can be done in the medium, work as valid as anything in film or prose. Originally intending the book as a story of a girl obsessed with Beatrix Potter who runs away to the Lake District, Talbot needed to explain why she ran away, came up with the idea that she'd been abused, and then decided that if he was going to involve child abuse in the story then he'd better do it properly.

He did the work, and the result is a masterpiece, utterly nailing the distrust, the difficulty in forming relationships, the hatred of being touched, and the obsessional imagery that can so often haunt abuse survivors, while nonetheless showing paths to healing and being a beautiful and gentle ode to Beatrix Potter, the Lake District, art, and rats.

As a primer in what comics can be and what comics can do, it has very few rivals. I rather wish I had my copy here. It's something I'd like to show people so they can understand.

On Shaving the Roman Way

One of my occasional online haunts is the blog of Paul Gogarty, an old friend and until recently one of my home constituency's deputies to the Dáil, the lower house of the Irish parliament. About a month back he wrote a long and rather detailed post about the Eurovision and shaving. Now, the Eurovision I can take or leave, though I agree with the Brother that it's a better way of learning about geography than having a world war. Shaving, on the other hand, matters to me, and as Paul was clearly having ethical and practical issues with his blades, I wrote to give him my own thoughts on the subject.

I said something like the following...

As you'll know, I've been broke for years. What you'll not know is that I have sensitive skin, and that I like a close shave. These three factors pose a bit of a challenge, but over the last two years I have solved this problem.

The Blade

For the blade, I use the classic Wilkinson Sword double-edged razor, using the kind of blades teenage girls use to cut themselves. You know the ones.

Its very simple, very sharp, and very cheap. It takes a tiny bit of getting used to, as with a Mach 3, say, one uses pressure from the hand to effectively rip out one's bristles, whereas with this it's merely the weight of the head, combined with the angle at which one holds the blade, that slices away the hairs. I started using this as I found that shaving oil, which I used to use when I was travelling, as I so often was, tended to clog multi-blade razors. No matter how much I rinsed them, they'd get blocked up with a mass of oily bristles. Single blades can't clog.

For a while I experimented with a traditional straight razor, but the learning curve on it proved too demanding. I liked the idea of only ever having one blade, which I'd sharpen and re-sharpen, as it struck me as both cool and good for the environment, and so resolved to learn with a straight razor loaded with disposable blades, but found that I couldn't get it right. It wasn't the nicks that bothered me -- I'd expected them -- it was that after shaving my face would alternate between glassily-smooth patches and patches of horrible scurfy stuff, the latter having a tendency to appear overnight. I decided I couldn't be arsed with going through weeks of that, so turned to a more conventional handle and head arrangement.

(I've been shaved with a straight-razor, for what it's worth, one balmy night in Cappadocia last summer, with a young teenage boy drawing the blade over my face as his boss watched approving. Oddly, it wasn't as unnerving an experience as I'd feared beforehand.)

Oil

Secondly, I've stopped using foams, gels, soaps, and even creams when shaving, though I like the Palmolive shaving cream a lot, especially when applied with a brush which raises the hairs to make them easier to slice away. Instead, inspired by poverty and having run out of shaving oil one Christmas at home in Dublin, I've changed to Olive Oil.

Other oils are quite thin, and can clog one's pores, but Olive Oil, especially extra virgin oil, is viscous enough to form a layer that won't harm the skin and will actually enrich it, while providing lubrication and protection as you slice away the hairs.

I usually keep about an inch of oil in a mug, with a few drops of clove oil mixed in*, and leave my razor -- head down -- in that, as keeping the blade in the oil prolongs its life. The oil will get a bit dirty, in that some bristles will invariably find their way in, but I think that's a price worth paying.

So, when shaving in my neo-Roman way, I start by showering and then pressing a hot, wet flannel against my face; I then dab my fingers in the oil and smear it all over my face, rubbing it in especially where I intend to shave; I then set to work, shaving with the growth to begin with and against where necessary, judging by feel as I pull the skin and relubricating whenever I need to; once smooth, I use the hot wet flannel again to remove all oil and freshen the skin, and then use cold water to close up the pores. Mission accomplished.

(Then you must clean your sink, as you don't want oily rings and bristles around it, and your other half or your housemates certainly won't want that.)

People keep saying I have freakishly-young looking skin for someone my age. I don't know if this is true, or they're just being nice, but if they're right I reckon it's due to the olive oil.

Don't use oil with chilli in. That would be bad.

G.

* Clove oil acts as a very mild anaesthetic, which can be handy if you nick yourself while shaving.

Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church: A Taster

I wondered the other day whether somewhere out there in the world there's a Giant Bumper Book of Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church, annoyed as I was to see such respected Protestant preachers as John Stott and Don Carson perpetuating complete falsehoods about the Church, and someone soon told informed me that, in a sense, such a book exists. Roman Catholicism by Loraine Boettner, an American Presbyterian who worked for the Internal Revenue, was first published in 1962 and certainly looks like it fits the bill; while I doubt anyone I know has personally waded through Boettner's ranting, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if his ahistorical, unscriptural, and flat-out illogical claims have had indirect effects. Maybe people I know have read stuff or heard stuff by people who've heard what Boettner said, for instance, and who have passed on his gibberish on trust...

If you have a long spoon and fancy supping with the Devil, it seems you can read the whole thing here; I've had a glance, but am too busy to wallow in vitriol, bile, and hogwash. Still, if you want to waste your money you can squander it on Amazon.

With this in mind, I have a yen to write a series of short posts over the next couple of months -- an intermittent series, broken up by other things, as is my nature -- on Protestant Myths about the Catholic Church I've come across or been actively confronted with in the last few years. Offhand, I can think of about fifteen things I've stared or sighed upon hearing and then had to laboriously refute in conversations since moving to England. I'm sure if I thought harder I'd think of more, but just off the top of my head...

1. The Catholic Church was not created by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.
2. Catholics do not worship Mary, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
3. Catholics do not worship Saints and Relics, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
4. Catholics do not worship Statues and Pictures, and the Church doesn't say that they should.
5. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being in the arms of Mary
6. Catholics do not only ever think of Jesus as being on the cross, and the Church does not teach that Jesus is sacrificed every single time the Mass is said.
7. Catholics do not believe the Pope is always right, and do not have to do whatever the Pope says.
8. Catholics do not believe the Pope can overrule the Bible, and the Church does not teach that he can do so.
9. Catholics do not believe we're saved by doing good works, and the Church doesn't teach that we are.
10. Catholics do not believe they can be forgiven their sins if they put money into a box by a statue of St Peter in Rome, and the Church doesn't ever offer forgiveness for money.
11. Catholics were not forbidden from reading the Bible in the Middle Ages, and translations of the Bible were not banned by the Church.
12. The sixteenth-century Catholic Church did not add books to the Bible at the Council of Trent.
13. The Catholic Church does not teach that only Christians can be married, or that Christians whose marriages weren't presided over by priests are living in sin.
14. The Catholic Church does not teach that all non-Catholics will go to Hell.
15. The Catholic Church does not teach that everybody will go to Heaven.

Three of these are historical points, but those aside, almost all of these, as far as I can see, come down to misunderstandings about terminology. A major part of the problem is that Catholics and Protestants use language differently, and so Protestants and Catholics can often agree completely on a subject while sounding as though they differ absolutely, purely due to how both groups use words. Protestants see Catholic practices or read things by Catholic writers, and often do so in a spirit of sincere curiosity, but misunderstand what they're looking at or reading, and make assumptions which are fundamentally wrong.This is why one of the first requirements of any honest debate is that terms should be defined; without properly defined terms, things get confused and the most well-meaning people wind up at loggerheads over things about which they essentially agree.

I'm not saying there aren't real differences between Catholics and Protestants. There are. They're just not the ones above.

Roger Olson had a good piece about a similar matter the other day, saying, in connection with debates between Arminian and Calvinist Protestants, but stressing that this applies to any honest discussions of any theology:

'We need to distinguish carefully between criticism and misrepresentation.  Fair criticism is valid; misrepresentation in order to criticize (straw man treatment) is invalid and should itself be criticized by everyone.'

So anyway, I reckon I'll give this a shot soon. Fifteen or so short* posts, spread out over a month or two, interspersed with witterings about work, life, drawing, cycling, books, films, and whatever. None of them will be apologetic, in the sense that they'll not be about proving 'why Catholics are right' or 'why Catholicism is Biblical' or anything like that. They'll just be about what Catholicism is, and what Catholicism most certainly isn't. Not just yet, though. I've something to finish first.

* No, really. That's the plan.

Joycean Turtles

Improbable though it may seem, oodles of episodes of the late 1980s and early 1990s cartoon Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were made it Dublin, at Murakami Wolf which eventually became Fred Wolf Films; back then Dublin was a bit of a hotbed of animation talent, what with Sullivan Bluth making An American Tale and The Land Before Time there, and a brilliant animation school being set up at Ballyfermot Senior College.

Yes, I know, it's really Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, for so the original comic was called and so the cartoon was distributed in America. Still, my little brother watched it in Ireland, and for him it was called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles -- this was basically due to Ireland being lumped in with the UK for distribution purposes, and the Brits having an issue with ninjas. Back then, ninjas were seen as nasty. Now they're cool, from what I hear.

Anyway, I was a bit surprised the other day to learn that there was an episode of the series where the Turtles went to Dublin; I've managed to track it down, and found watching it an odd, and not unpleasant experience.

'The Irish Jig is Up', for so episode seven of series seven of the cartoon is entitled begins with a nice shot of Dublin, looking along the Liffey from the east, with the Four Courts easily recognisable, and what I think is a stylised version of the Liffey Bridge -- that's the Ha'Penny Bridge to most of us -- in the foreground. It's a nicely stylised take on the Quays too, for what it's worth, even if they can look more cartoonish in reality.

Anyway, the camera pans across the Liffey to where we can see the lads' van making its way along the south Quays, driving on the right, but, to be fair, given the eerie absence of any other vehicles on the Quays, they can probably get away with it. It's never made clear why things are so quiet -- I can only presume the Queen was visiting or something. Still, unperturbed by the Mary Celeste atmosphere afflicting Dublin, the lads decide they should pull over and walk around, so they take a corner at speed, hurtling past what appears to be an inexplicably-misplaced O'Connell Monument. 

In a convenient backstreet, the boys change into unobtrusive clothes so nobody will recognise them, clearly reckoning that Hawaiian shirts, shorts, sunglasses, and big hats are just the thing to help them blend in in sunny Dublin. April, sensibly, sticks with her yellow jumpsuit, and Splinter puts on a dirty mac and a false beard, presumably thinking that if he dresses as a random alco, nobody will notice that he's a rat. Frankly, I don't know why he's worried. It's not as if town is kicking. Off they stroll towards Stephen's Green, where just below a remarkably well-rendered Fusiliers' Arch Splinter says he'll tell them about Dublin's history.

It's good, isn't it? They even have Dublin's name right, as 'Eblana'. I've known people to fall at that hurdle in table quizzes back in the day. Anyway, they have a wander in the Green, strolling past a few stylised statues until they get to St Patrick, of whom there's no statue in the Green. No, really, there's not. I'm not sure if there's a public statue of him anywhere in Dublin, actually.

If there were, though, it'd probably not look like this.

Yes, that's Patrick, the Romano-Briton who spent years in slavery here, before escaping to Britain and training as a priest and then returning as a missionary to the Irish, here depicted on horseback, wielding two swords. Who needs a shamrock or a crozier when you can brandish two swords when astride a rearing stallion?

'Ireland,' explains Splinter, 'is a land of magical legends. One of the most famous is that of Saint Patrick. It is said he drove all the snakes and reptiles out of Ireland.'

'Bummer,' says Michelangelo, 'maybe I shoulda gotten us mammal disguises.'

'This is all very interesting, guys,' says April, who presumably has read her guidebook and doesn't believe a word Splinter says, not least because she may have noticed the bit about there being lizards in Ireland even now, 'but I'm supposed to do a report on the famous leprechauns of Ireland.'

'April, leprechauns are just mythical creatures,' retorts Donatello, scornfully adding, 'I can assure you that there are no such things as little green men.'

And with that the lads start throwing their hats around, clearly thinking that the complete absence of people in Stephen's Green gives them a golden opportunity to ditch their disguises and play frisbee, before heading off to their lodgings in the improbably well-preserved McGillicuddy's Castle, which looks rather more like Bodiam Castle in East Sussex than any castle in Ireland, and which is mysteriously dated by the gang to the sixteenth century*

I probably should have mentioned that this episode has a plot, shouldn't I? Basically, Shredder, or Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, has come up with a couple of gizmos, one of which enables him to lift up castles (yes, I know), and another of which can turn vicious animals into cuddly dwarfs and cuddly ones into savage monsters. Seemingly, Ireland has lots of cuddly animals, especially in Dublin Zoo, and so Shredder reckons that he can turn all the inhabitants of the Zoo's petting zoo into an army of monsters that will destroy Dublin. No, really.

I reckon from this shot that Shredder's up near the Magazine Fort operating his device -- it's certainly somewhere high, to judge by the topography, which gives us a view over Dublin and with the mountains in the background. He'd almost certainly need to be in the Phoenix Park to zap the Zoo with his machine, so I think the guys who did this should get marks for effort. Perhaps, given that they may well have been Irish they should have done better, but still. And no, I have no idea why Dublin has so many tall buildings in that shot, but, well, maybe the artists were feeling optimistic about the then embryonic Celtic Tiger.

Anyway, you can see the ray hitting the Zoo, and though this may seem unlikely, that's not a completely inaccurate stylisation of the old entrance to the Zoo. Sure, it's not thatched, and it is has a funny roof, and it says 'Dublin Zoo' rather than 'Zoological Gardens', but, well, it has a wide entrance in the middle and two small windows on each side of it.

The Zoo's interestingly rendered in the show. It has, at the very least, a rabbit, a chicken, a bull, and a lion -- which is a nice touch, as Dublin Zoo is famous for breeding lions, which it's done since 1857, with one of the MGM lions having been a Dublin lion. Perhaps most impressively, though, there's also a handful of people at the Zoo, which is a relief, as by this point, almost twelve minutes into the show, I was kind of expecting Cillian Murphy to show up in a nightgown.

Anyway, I won't spoil it for you. You should watch it for yourselves. Gripping stuff, I tell you. There is, however, one detail I want to draw your attention to, with the day that's in it. Remember how I'd told you about the lads putting on their incognito outfits just after they'd arrived? Well, it's worth looking just beyond Raphael.

Do you see the van? Do you see what's written on it? I'm not sure of the top word on the sign, but the other two, quite clearly, are 'James' and 'Joyce'.

Because it's Bloomsday.


* Note for potential tourists: McGillicuddy's Castle is made up. There are castles in Dublin, but they don't look like that. And if they did, they'd probably not be places you could just drive into in your van, there to kip in overnight while wondering at how the moat and drawbridge are so well-maintained in a place so otherwise neglected.

Tomorrow being Bloomsday...

Whilst strolling by Larry O'Rourke's pub on the corner of Eccles Street and Dorset Street on the morning of 16 June 1904, as detailed in the fourth chapter of Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom pondered how poor barmen could become wealthy proprietors in a city so festooned with pubs as Dublin.

'Where do they get the money? Coming up redheaded curates from the county Leitrim, rinsing empties and old man in the cellar. Then, lo and behold, they blossom out as Adam Findlaters or Dan Tallons. Then think of the competition. General thirst. Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub.'

It's would be a good puzzle, and if you think of crossing Dublin as taking you north-south over the Liffey and west-east across the city too, then it's not easy to do.

Anyway, this fella thinks he's got it all figured out.

It's not a bad attempt, and his thinking's pretty good, not least in his decision to use the canals as the city perimeters and to exclude hotel bars and restaurants that serve drinks. They're not pubs, and that should be the end of it.

Other than the fact that I think he should probably start his amble on Eccles Street, as Bloom would have had to do, the only concern I have is that Dublin now isn't the Dublin of 1904. Joyce, of course, famously boasted that if Dublin were ever destroyed, it'd be possible to rebuild the whole of it from his works -- his attention to topgraphic detail is astonishing, so surely to do this properly we'd want to be crossing Joyce's Dublin, not our own. We'd need a map of Dublin with only the pubs of 107 years ago on it. And, for that matter, you'd probably need to be crossing the river on one of the nine city bridges that existed 107 years ago, rather than one of the eight that've been built since.

Especially not on one built just eight years ago. Even if it is named after James Joyce.

A whistling sentinel...

When I heard Patrick Leigh Fermor had died, one of the first thoughts that struck me was to wonder who takes his place. If Paddy had been the greatest living Englishman, as I've long maintained, sometimes drunkenly, who now can lay claim to that title?

Seventy-five years ago tomorrow, T.H. White, yet to become the author of the twentieth century's supreme reworking of the tale of Arthur, clearly had a similar thought, and addressed his pupils to tell them his conclusion.

Boys, he said, 'G.K. Chesterton died yesterday. P.G. Wodehouse is now the greatest living master of the English language.'

I like that.

It's been three quarters of a century since Gilbert died, and he keeps delighting people and changing lives. Terry Pratchett was surely right to say that small doses of Chesterton, taken regularly, are good for the soul -- and how I wish he could take his own advice now -- but great gulps of the Wild Knight of Battersea can transform us.

Just speaking for myself, I think I'd like semi-colons a lot less were it not for Gilbert, and I'd almost certainly not be a practicing Catholic -- or even the most lukewarm of theists -- were it not for him. Even now, whenever I revisit him, I return refreshed and thinking anew, always remembering that when you get down to it where faith is involved,

'It is not a question of Theology,
It is a question of whether, placed as a sentinel of an unknown watch, you will whistle or not.'

It's worth reading what Mark Shea has to say about him, as well as Sean Dailey, who points out that were GKC to be added to the canon of the saints amongst whom is surely already rejoicing, today would almost certainly be his feast day.

Breaking Bread or Sharing Sandwiches?

I resisted the urge, weak as it was, to go along to my friends' Evangelical church yesterday; I'm busy, after all, and I really think that no matter how ecumenical I may be feeling, I just don't have the time to be attending another service after Mass on Sundays at the minute.

It was for the best, I think, as having listened to the sermon online, I'd have gotten very exasperated. The first half of it was excellent, all about the idea of the Spirit as a purifying fire, existing both in a corporate and an individual way in the Church. Unfortunately, things fell apart in the second part of the sermon, commenting on Acts 2:42-47... 

'Secondly, 'devoted to the fellowship'... koinonia. 'Fellowship' is a weak word. It really means a 'partnership', a 'bonding together'. And in Acts 2 it has the effect in a practical way of our homes, our familes, and our money. It's very concrete. It spreads its umbrella down to 47. Verse 47. These are the things that it means to be devoted to the fellowship. You see they're together daily, and when they break bread it doesn't mean Communion; it means that they ate together in their homes. [...] They devoted themselves to one another and they met together.'

At which point the minister began recommending that the congregation should eat with each other, or even just meet up for coffee. Well, if you've read my post from the other day you'll see why I'm frustrated with this analysis of the passage. It's not just that it's banal; it's that it's wrong, and it seems to be wrong because the NIV translation is inaccurate.

Here's the NIV again, to remind you:

'They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.'

Now, the first thing is that yes, it's true that 'fellowship' is perhaps a weak word to render koinonia with, but 'partnership' seems even more so; curiously, if one wanted a technical term to translate koinonia, there'd be a very serious case for using 'communion'; I doubt this would have confused anybody, as in an Anglican context the term is often used to describe all Anglican churches in union together.

I'll get back to that later, but for now I want to focus on the perplexing question of why on earth the minister claimed that when the first Christians broke bread they weren't participating in Communion, by which he meant the Eucharist. The passage twice refers to the breaking of bread, the first time saying that the early Christians devoted themselves to the breaking of the bread, and the second that they broke bread every single day. Based on how the NIV renders this passage, one might well be tempted to assume that when it says 'they broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,' it's simply describing the same activity in two ways, but again, the Greek doesn't say that. Rather, it clearly distinguishes between them.

Let's take a look at the Greek again, remembering what we know about 'te... kai...' constructions, which is that they're used to indicate a series of distinct points which are connected together. All told, then, this passage tells us that the daily activity of the early Church entailed four discrete things:

• kat hēmeran te proskarteroūntes homothumadon en tōi hierōi,
• klōntes te kat' oikon arton,
• metelambanon trophēs en agalliasei kai aphelotēti kardias,
• ainountes to Theon kai ekhontes kharin pros holon ton laon.

So, there are four separate elements here, each one clearly marked by its own 'te' or 'kai', and all four collectively governed by that opening 'kat hēmeran' which means 'every day'. Daily Christian activity for the Jerusalem Church consisted of:

• Continuing in their devotion at the Temple.
• Breaking bread in their homes.
• Partaking of food with glad and sincere hearts.
• Praising God and having goodwill towards the whole people.

Curiously, if you go back to the start of this section, you'll see that Acts 2:42 clearly states that these first Christians continued in their devotion -- yes, it's exactly the same verb later used for their continued Temple activity -- to the teaching of the apostles and to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. I'm inclined to believe that this sentence refers to the same four points later detailed, in that the the breaking of bread and the prayers are clearly present in both sentences, the apostles evidently taught in the Temple, and fellowship certainly entailed eating together.

It's worth noting that there are a few definite articles in Acts 2:42, which shouldn't be ditched in the way the NIV ditches them: it doesn't just say 'to the breaking of bread and to prayer'; it specifically says 'to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers'. This matters, because such formal language points to formal activity; it's describing liturgy, not lunch.

That's not to say that the Jerusalem Christians didn't eat together too, in association with their Eucharistic celebration. They evidently did just this, and it'd be surprising if they did otherwise, given that the passage and Acts 4:32 onwards make clear that they did everything in common. 1 Corinthians 11:17-33 shows that twenty years later the Christians of Corinth continued to associate a common meal -- albeit one where social divisions were problematic -- with their Eucharistic feast. However, the fact that Acts and 1 Corinthians reveal that the early Christians broke bread together and ate meals together should never cause us to assume that 'breaking of bread' in early Christianity was just another way of saying 'having dinner'.

Look at Luke 24:35, which records how the two disciples who met the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus told the Apostles that Jesus 'was known to them in the breaking of the bread', the exact same words being used as at Acts 2:42. Look at 1 Corinthians 10:16-17, where Paul asked his Corinthian brethren,'the bread which we break -- is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.'

For what it's worth, the word we usually translate as 'participation' there is koinonia again, so we could well render it as 'fellowship' or even 'communion'. I'm inclined to go for the latter, myself. Anyway, it seems that however we slice this -- and I think with we'd need to look carefully at John 6:32-66 and the various Last Supper narratives even to begin to understand it -- the breaking of bread is absolutely essential to koinonia, and it's not simply a matter of meeting up for coffee or inviting people around for tea.

No, for Paul the breaking of bread was by definition a ritual activity, and we have no reason whatsoever to think that it was otherwise for the Jerusalem Church and the author of Acts.

The Life and Death of a Modern Hero

As I said earlier, I think the world was a richer place yesterday than it is today, as it seems we've been doubly impoverished. Patrick Leigh Fermor has died.

Whenever I've told people about Fermor they've tended to stop me, usually about halfway through, and ask whether I was talking about a real person. How could one person, they'd ask, have done so much?

I don't blame them. Walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople when he was eighteen back in 1933, staying in castles and barns along the way, drinking and dining with gypsies and aristocrats... fighting in a cavalry battle between Republicans and Royalists in northern Greece... falling in love with a Romanian princess and living with her in a watermill, her painting and him writing... joining the Irish Guards in the Second World War but being reassigned to SOE, stationed in Crete where we worked with the Cretan resistance and headed the mission to kidnap, hide, and bustle away the German commander of East Crete to Egypt... travelling in the Caribbean and writing a book about what he saw there that's cited in Live and Let Die as James Bond's perfect introduction to Haiti... his only novel, a slight yet beautiful work that's been turned into an opera... embracing the quiet rhythms of French monasteries and later beautifully evoking these rhythms in A Time to Keep Silence, published the same year that Dirk Bogarde played him in Ill Met by Moonlight... two marvellous books on travelling in northern and southern Greece, with his descriptions of the monasteries of the air in Meteora being second to none... and then, in 1977, perhaps the finest travel book of the last century, A Time of Gifts, beginning to tell the tale of his great teenage peregrination to Istanbul, this retelling only becoming possible after his teenage notebooks had been returned to him after being found in a Romanian castle... swimming the Hellespont when he was 69, with his wife Joan following behind him by boat... a second volume of his great epic, From the Woods to the Water, in 1986... another travel book, Three Letters from the Andes, in 1991... a translation and a lengthy introduction his friend and old comrade George Psychoundakis' The Cretan Runner in 1998... being knighted in 2004... being honoured by the Greek state as Commander of the Order of the Phoenix in 2007... a delightful and weighty collection of his letters to and from his old friend Deborah Devonshire, In Tearing Haste, in 2008...

He died today, 96 years old, after a long illness. I'd been a fan of his for years, quoting him at length once here and giving copies of A Time of Gifts to a friend as a birthday present only last month. I'd long wanted to meet him; indeed, I've envied a friend who was once in the same room as him. I got within a few miles of his home in Kardamyli last summer. Soon, I hope, his publishers will edit and publish the massive pile of pages that makes up the third and final volume of his great walk across Europe, the third volume that'll take us from the Iron Gates to the Golden Horn.

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, DSO, OBE, Commander of the Order of the Phoenix -- may he rest in peace. We'll probably not see his like again, but maybe we should just rejoice that he graced us with his presence as long as he did. This blog, doubtless, will be the place to go for all manner of obituaries and articles celebrating his brilliance. It's been a fine site for a long time, but I think it'll come into its own now.

Brian Lenihan, Jr.

The world today is, I fear, a poorer place than it was yesterday.

I learned this morning that Brian Lenihan, until recently Ireland's Minister for Finance, had died. He'd not long turned 52, and had had pancreatic cancer since late 2009. Our Opposition has been weakened, and not just in numbers, but in quality too. We need good people on the Opposition benches as much as the Government ones, and today we've lost one of our very best.

I'll never forget the first time I met him. I was a new barman at the time, working in the local pub, and he was running as a candidate in the by-election to fill his father's seat. I'd read quite a bit about him, and had fairly high hopes, so it was interesting to see him. I know: I was young -- scarcely out of my teens -- and easily impressed. This was also going to be my first time voting too, and I was pretty sure I'd be voting for him. An odd choice, perhaps, given my normal Fine Gael leanings, but I wasn't impressed by the Fine Gael candidate at all, and Lenihan seemed to have serious ability, the kind the Dáil could surely do with.

He was surrounded by groupies, the typical tribal sorts who gather round political figures, and one of them, hastening to buy a drink -- 'For the candidate,' she said -- looked at my bemused expression and turned giggling to the others: 'He doesn't know who he is!'

Lenihan looked at me, noticed my querulous eyebrow, and grinned at me. I nodded, and finished the order. And I voted for him. It was my first time to vote to send anyone to the Dáil, and it was my first time to vote in an AV election, and my guy had got in. Joe Higgins, the other candidate to make it to the last round, got in later, and though I often disagree with him, I think he's a good man to have in the Dáil too. He asks good questions.

Despite being possible the most able TD Fianna Fáil had in their ranks -- or perhaps because of it -- Bertie kept him out of the cabinet for years, only seriously promoting him when he was on the way out himself. Once Bertie was gone he was appointed as Minister for Finance, there immediately to be handed the mess created by his predecessors and the global economic collapse. His guarantee of the Irish banks was seen by almost everyone at the time as the best possible response to the crisis of the day, though in hindsight it looks disastrous, as has his maintenance of the guarantee and the acceptance of the hugely expensive EU-IMF loans that we've all taken to calling a 'bailout'.

There seems something terribly ironic and deeply tragic in a politician of such ability and integrity, possibly the most gifted member of the last Dáil or two, having led the country into such a dire situation. I strongly suspect, though, that history shall judge him kindly, once the documents are all out in the open and we can see what really went on when the guarantee was decided, when its maintenance was agreed on, and when the bailout was accepted.

All who knew him seem to have loved him. I've no doubt he'll not be long for Purgatory.