Disclaimer: I got frustrated about a lot of religion-related arguing that was appearing in the news and on my Facebook feed, so I thought I'd weigh in because unlike many other things, I actually have an opinion about this. However, I'm going to set out a number of my beliefs here on LJ because I think it's more sensible than trying to convey a profound, ageless, spiritual truth in a 460 character Facebook post.

Bloody hell.  It occured to me that if I were going to write about Christianity, it might be helpful to actually first define what Christianity is.  As this has been done almost continuously by people around the globe every year for the past, oh let's say, 2000 years, I figured the work had all been done for me.  So I googled it.  I knew that the definitions of the Great Southern Anabaptists and/or the Rainbow Gospel Community of Arkansas mightn't be altogether what we are after, so I went to Wikipaedia because I thought they would have a nice, simple, straightforward definition and...well...bloody hell.  What a dog's breakfast.

So in summary, here's what I think Christians believe.  Basically.

- God is God. That means there's just one, and He is all-powerful, all-knowing, all everything, etc.  There are three parts of God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  More about that later.

- God created everything.

- Including people.  God created Man first.  Then He realised His mistake and created Woman...okay, just kidding (more about the Man-Woman thing later...uh, I have a lot of work to do, I may regret starting this).  He made them with a bit inside, their soul, which was sort of a teeny-tiny version of Himself.

- Humankind infected themselves with Death. It's complicated, but in short, God told Adam and Eve (sorry girls, that means you too) not to do something because it would make them die. They did it anyway.  DUH.  Since then, the history of humankind has pretty much been set on repeat. There are things people shouldn't do.  They do them anyway.  Things go badly. DUH.  &c. More about that later, too.

- God stuck around and worked with the material available - ie, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joshua, Elijah, Joseph, Ruth, Esther, Miriam, Daniel, Habbakuk, Isiah  Izi  Isiaaiaih Jeremiah, Melchizidek, etc.  His  star players were MOSES, ELIJAH and DAVID.  They, were, in order of appearance, a get-things-done guy, a prophet, and a king.

- God gave to Moses a set of rules called the Ten Commandments that basically outlined how life should be in order for everything to work, inasmuch as things could work, given that Adam and Eve had kind of broken everything before it really got started.  Anyway, the rules were about things like not lying and not nicking people's stuff or stealing their wife and being nice to your mum and dad.  They seem *darkly* simple enough. 

- There was also Leviticus and Deuteronomy, which are very long and confusing books and basically about putting those ideas into practice.  There is quite a lot of disagreement about whether Leviticus and Deuteronomy still apply or whether they were just for the days when you could die just from eating bacon because piggies get parasites and the purpose of a tattoo was to show you belonged to a pagan god, not to demonstrate you'd been in the Navy. More about that later...

- God also promised that he would send along a great king, who was a lot like David, who had been the best king EVER, who would put everything right. Again, there are differences of opinion about what being "a great king" was actually supposed to entail and exactly what is was that needed to be put right and how that was going to happen. A primary difference between Jews and Christians is that Jews are still waiting for the great king to turn up, where as Christians believe he's already been and gone, and that it was Jesus.

- Right.  Jesus.  The words "Jesus" and "Christ" are, in my experience, two of the most over- and misused words in the world today.  I'm sick of hearing them because they carry a lot of baggage to do with people harassing you about bible studies on street corners or painting them backwards on Death Metal t-shirts or moaning them in bed.  So, let's try and get away from the guy with the beard and the dressing gown and just say: There Was This Guy.

- This Guy was born during the height of the Roman Empire.  At around 30, he started walking around talking to people about what God actually wanted from them.  He said that it wasn't about rules.  He said that the point was that God loved everyone, and wanted everyone to love everyone else as well.  It was about how we think.

- This Guy also said that actually, not only were these his opinions, but that they actually really did come from God, from the Big Guy.  This Guy said that he was related to the Big Guy, in fact, that they were sort of even the same Person, and he had arrived to Fix Things.  A whole lot of freaky-ass shit happened to bear out his claim that he was More Than Your Average humanoid.

- This Guy was executed because the kinds of things he was saying didn't really fit in with the moral and political climate of the times.  He said, though, that this was a good thing because it would fix things.  No-one had the slightest clue what he was talking about. His friends ran away.

- This Guy came back from the dead and appeared to his friends and talked to them about what had happened.  The idea was that because Adam had messed things up for the Everybody, strictly speaking Everybody was broken - even if they were basically nice and meant well all the time - so they would die. Not just die, but nastily Die.  The bit of them inside that was like God, their soul, would be cut off from God - and that would be terrible, because God is where everything good comes from. However, because he was partly God, This Guy hadn't messed up.  Ever.  So, when he died, his not-messing-up-ness would make up for everyone else's messing-up-ness, so they didn't have to Die. This is called Salvation, which is another appallingly misused word.  It means Made Whole. No Longer Broken.

- Yay.

- There's just one catch: in order for people to be made whole, they needed to actually be open to the process. God couldn't just jam Wholeness in any old how, because part of your soul is Free Will.  So for the magic to happen, the person has to actively decide that a) they want it to happen and b) they want to stop doing things that will get in the way.  

- Once they do that, they are operating under a special arrangement (AKA a covenant).  This is an agreement with God where He says: OK.  Right now, you're still broken.  But, because That Guy has already done the dying on your behalf, I'm going to regard you as Whole. And, when your physical body wears out, I can make you Actually Whole, and you get to come and be with Me in person (for more details about why you'd want to do that, more later, &c).  But, your part of the agreement is that I'd like you to stop doing things I've told you aren't good for you.  I know you'll mess up, because you're not whole yet, but when you realise you have messed up, just talk to Me about it and start over.  In fact, more to the point, I'd really love it if you would start helping Me out in my job of looking after the world by feeding the hungry and comforting the distressed and so on. That would earn an extra big Thank You and an employee of the month award from Me.
 

...and that's Christianity.  Thank you and good night.

My status on Facebook today reads:

"Jewellery.  As much fun as heroin, and at a comparable price, but better for your health."

As you may have looked at this post because a link to it is on my Facebook page, this may not appear to sparkle with the same originality of wit as it did when you first saw it.  However, I am mentioning it now as it is nevertheless TRUE.  I find that these days it is constructive to think of my passion for jewellery as analogous to an addiction to very hard drugs - I am certainly addicted to it, it certainly costs a lot of money, but on the upside I don't have to live in a squat, none of my teeth have fallen out, and my family are still speaking to me (well...my brother's a bit slack with making phone calls, but...).  So all things considered, I consider it a healthy pastime.  Happy days.

In the latest news, one of the aspects of having a new job in the city (right...yes, I forgot to tell you about the job...um...next post, maybe) is that I am no longer in a cultural, natural and mercantile wasteland.  There is a meditation class just a block away on Wednesday nights, a Taize service I can walk to on Thursday nights, scenic churches/Town Hall, Hyde Park, Circular Quay and the City's Central Shopping District as well as the Galeries Victoria and the Queen Victoria Building right at the door.  Therefore it is a good thing I only get a half-hour for lunch and the shops close at 5 most nights, because who knows what terrible damage I could do to my bank balance if released into this environment for any length of time...

The jewellery shop right next to the entry lifts is probably the one that keeps me awake on the nights when I'm lingering in exquisite, guilty pain over my forbidden desires and wondering how long I have to wait before I can tell myself I've resisted for long enough and can give in and abandon myself to absolute pleasure (I am so GLAD I never tried heroin you know...).  On my first day, I lingered over the onyx, diamond, jade and garnet jewellery (necklaces...earrings...rings....oooh, stop) in the window, conscious that although the tidy little payout I got when I left my old job should probably be kept for useful things like travelling to London and having real-life experiences, or paying for an expensive experimental procedure to save the life of my aged mother or buying a new car or painting the house or something grown-up like that, the truth is that I'd much rather write wistful stories about London than go there, my mother is in good health and has plenty of money even if she wasn't, and at present the car is still running and the house still standing so I don't really care much.  So...

But I haven't. So far I appear to have told myself that although I WANT to say: "this is just an exquisite piece and if I purchase it it can be my gorgeous favourite bestest-ever-treat-forever", I seem to recall having already acquired a few of those, which sort of proves that that's what they're exactly not.  So, to avoid spending all that money on something I would really wear so rarely, I decided that if what I liked was an onyx, white stone, jade and ruby-coloured stone in a white metal setting, then I could make something similar.  So I made some earrings that are onyx (actually), white crystal, jade (also actually) and garnet in sterling silver (see below).  Result; I can actually wear these for every day without fearing I'm going to be mugged in the street, and they're quite nice.  But will they prove shiny enough to deflect the allure of the shop next door?  Will I be weak?  Well, yes of course I will, but weak about this particular temptation?  Only time will tell...stay tuned!

  
What I wanted...What I got.  Hmm, we'll see.
 

In the absence of much time over the last year, home decorating appears to have been one of my primary creative outlets (rather than...for example...posting on my blog, hence the long absences).

About - oh, I don't know, I completely lose track of time these days - maybe six weeks ago due to a set of complicated circumstances I was seized by a desire to watch Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette. If you haven't seen it yet, then you really ought to - it is absolutely gorgeous to look at and Kirsten Dunst, about whom I have always been fairly indifferent, is actually really good in it.  I had not appreciated exactly how good until I subsequently read Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette and realised that a lot of the lines that Ms Dunst delivers in the movie are things that MA actually said.

Anyway, I shan't go on for fear that you will go and either watch the movie or read the book instead of attending to my blog as you ought to, so moving right along, the point is that as usual, having loved the movie and lusted after the lifestyle (although...being beheaded, not so much), set about trying to transform mine into something similar.  In my world this usually translates to the purchase of new pictures and re-arrangement of soft furnishings, and this time was no different.  Behold!
 

The Boudoir

     

Okay, I concede that actually the bedroom looks quite a lot like it did before, but I bought a venetian mirror which I LOVE and I made the brocade cushion.  I also concede that the skull and crossbones is not terribly Baroque, or even Rococo, but if Sofia Coppola can play "Hong Kong Garden" at an C18th ball in Paris, I can have a skull and crossbones on my cushion, so there.  The bowl is HRHs, and would you believe it he just got it out because he wanted something to put his cufflinks, spare change and rosary in.  Why he has a rosary when he is neither Catholic nor terribly religious I cannot say - he is a man of mystery.

I also replaced one of the pin-up pictures I put up earlier in the year with this GORGEOUS print of a Jasmine Becket-Griffith painting.  No, it's not terribly Baroque either, but isn't it amazing?
 

My Room

   
 

calm among shapes of things unspoken
fusty, half-broken and blanched with time
soft as old feathers where he stands
master of silver and the winter light
splinter-sharp beneath the mask
cloaked in ash and spun from glass
white as sun and cool as mist
bearing sorrow through the halflight
riding the rivers of deepest dreams
carried on air
where sparks meet and flash
speaking of frost and falling stars

There are two ways of looking at my efforts to dye our quilt cover purple. I had to do this because in our wisdom, a few years ago we purchased a very pale blue quilt cover, which after enduring having the McDoggersons jump on it enthusiastically to wake up HRH in the mornings, sleep on it while HRH is in the shower etc, is no longer very nice and certainly not romantic.  Anyway, if the intention was to dye it purple, well, that end HAS been achieved.  Fundamentally.  Basically.  In essence.

If, however, I had also specified that I wanted to dye it a SMOOTH and UNIFORM shade of mid-purple, so that it doesn’t look as though an alien has just been sick on it, then Houston, we have a problem.  Behold: