The interview meme: questions from Oursin
Oct. 14th, 2008 10:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tree_and_leafYou all know the drill: comment and I'll ask you five questions, though - as I still don't have internet at home (no love, BT, no love) it may take me a bit to get round to asking.
1. Do you have a favourite liturgical thing?
This is surprisingly difficult to answer, as in some ways the thing I most like about liturgy is the rhythm it gives to the year – no service or bit of a service can have its true effect in isolation from the rest. That said – I have a great weakness for anything involving images of light in darkness, especially if the liturgy itself is then combined with actual effects with darkness and light. I think my favourite service of the year is the Easter vigil mass, starting in darkness outside the church by the Easter fire, then processing into the dark church with candles, before the final acclamation of the Risen Christ and the church lighting up. It's – I'm reluctant to use the word 'magical', but I can't think of a better one. A sort of yearly eucatastrophe. I also love the collects for Advent – when I was a child, my parents or I would read the collect for the relevant Sunday before lighting the advent wreath and then having coffee and Christmas baking (which may not be totally unconnected to the warmth of my memories around it, but it's all good, if not in quite the same degree…)
I also really like the Advent prose, or more specifically, the antiphon.
2. Who is your favourite fanfic character to write?
I'm not sure there's one specific favourite, but there's common ground – I like writing characters who are buttoned up and ironic on the surface, but who are secret romantics (indeed, who sometimes don't know it). Phineas Nigellus was great fun – I'd definitely write him again if the inchoate notion for a sequel to the Blue Flower ever coheres into anything.
3. If you had to give up one or the other, would it be wine or whisky?
That's tricky, but although I probably know more about how to appreciate whisky, I think I'd have to give that up, because you can't really drink it with food, and not drinking wine would have bigger social implications.
4. What would be your ideal holiday if cost and time were no object?
I'd like to finally have the money (and time) to go and visit a friend of mine in Japan. But if we're talking really crazy, money-no-object plans, since childhood I've had a hankering to travel round the Baltic, doing as much as possible on foot, that is everything that can be done without swimming or annoying the Russian army (we're taking Paddy Leigh Fermor epic lengths of journey here, I know), and write a book about it. Come to think of it, that's not actually a holiday, but it is a dream.
5. Arians or Athanasians?
I have my reservations about the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian creed, but nonetheless, Athanasius every time. God is love: but love is not static, it implies relationship. And it is the love which is between the Persons of the Trinity – the Father eternally giving birth to the Son, and the Spirit of love between them – which flows out in creation.
The attitude to creation which Arrius' doctrine of the Son as not God but the highest created thing implies is my other reason for rejecting Arianism. If God did not enter his own creation, if Jesus was not God, then it seems to me that any redemption from the sorrow and pain and error of the world can only be a flight out of it which views spirit as the only reality and flesh as a – probably dangerous – illusion. But despite the various follies of the church on the matter historically, the doctrine of the Incarnation proclaims that matter matters. We are people, bodies as well as minds and souls, and through Christ's birth and life and death the whole person, not just the spirit or the intellect (as Gnostics like to think) becomes the place where God meets us, loves us and transforms us, both in the everyday and quotidian and in great joy and wretchedness, but most especially where we are weak and vulnerable. Though we are changed by Christ to become like children of God, like God in participating in the divine love (you could, albeit cautiously, say 'becoming God') it is not a matter of absorption into the Absolute – we remain ourselves, indeed it's only that which makes us truly ourselves – and there remains a central paradox in that even in the closest union between God and the soul (which in any case only exists because God gives it being), God is still irreducibly other.
…. anyway, I think if you take either the Trinity or the Incarnation (the same objection applies, though coming from the other angle, to the sort of Gnostic who thought that Christ was not really in the flesh because it's below the dignity of God to suffer hunger and thirst and fear and pain), Christianity becomes utterly meaningless, and you really might as well just become an Epicurian or an ascetic Buddhist, depending on temprament.
1. Do you have a favourite liturgical thing?
This is surprisingly difficult to answer, as in some ways the thing I most like about liturgy is the rhythm it gives to the year – no service or bit of a service can have its true effect in isolation from the rest. That said – I have a great weakness for anything involving images of light in darkness, especially if the liturgy itself is then combined with actual effects with darkness and light. I think my favourite service of the year is the Easter vigil mass, starting in darkness outside the church by the Easter fire, then processing into the dark church with candles, before the final acclamation of the Risen Christ and the church lighting up. It's – I'm reluctant to use the word 'magical', but I can't think of a better one. A sort of yearly eucatastrophe. I also love the collects for Advent – when I was a child, my parents or I would read the collect for the relevant Sunday before lighting the advent wreath and then having coffee and Christmas baking (which may not be totally unconnected to the warmth of my memories around it, but it's all good, if not in quite the same degree…)
I also really like the Advent prose, or more specifically, the antiphon.
2. Who is your favourite fanfic character to write?
I'm not sure there's one specific favourite, but there's common ground – I like writing characters who are buttoned up and ironic on the surface, but who are secret romantics (indeed, who sometimes don't know it). Phineas Nigellus was great fun – I'd definitely write him again if the inchoate notion for a sequel to the Blue Flower ever coheres into anything.
3. If you had to give up one or the other, would it be wine or whisky?
That's tricky, but although I probably know more about how to appreciate whisky, I think I'd have to give that up, because you can't really drink it with food, and not drinking wine would have bigger social implications.
4. What would be your ideal holiday if cost and time were no object?
I'd like to finally have the money (and time) to go and visit a friend of mine in Japan. But if we're talking really crazy, money-no-object plans, since childhood I've had a hankering to travel round the Baltic, doing as much as possible on foot, that is everything that can be done without swimming or annoying the Russian army (we're taking Paddy Leigh Fermor epic lengths of journey here, I know), and write a book about it. Come to think of it, that's not actually a holiday, but it is a dream.
5. Arians or Athanasians?
I have my reservations about the damnatory clauses in the Athanasian creed, but nonetheless, Athanasius every time. God is love: but love is not static, it implies relationship. And it is the love which is between the Persons of the Trinity – the Father eternally giving birth to the Son, and the Spirit of love between them – which flows out in creation.
The attitude to creation which Arrius' doctrine of the Son as not God but the highest created thing implies is my other reason for rejecting Arianism. If God did not enter his own creation, if Jesus was not God, then it seems to me that any redemption from the sorrow and pain and error of the world can only be a flight out of it which views spirit as the only reality and flesh as a – probably dangerous – illusion. But despite the various follies of the church on the matter historically, the doctrine of the Incarnation proclaims that matter matters. We are people, bodies as well as minds and souls, and through Christ's birth and life and death the whole person, not just the spirit or the intellect (as Gnostics like to think) becomes the place where God meets us, loves us and transforms us, both in the everyday and quotidian and in great joy and wretchedness, but most especially where we are weak and vulnerable. Though we are changed by Christ to become like children of God, like God in participating in the divine love (you could, albeit cautiously, say 'becoming God') it is not a matter of absorption into the Absolute – we remain ourselves, indeed it's only that which makes us truly ourselves – and there remains a central paradox in that even in the closest union between God and the soul (which in any case only exists because God gives it being), God is still irreducibly other.
…. anyway, I think if you take either the Trinity or the Incarnation (the same objection applies, though coming from the other angle, to the sort of Gnostic who thought that Christ was not really in the flesh because it's below the dignity of God to suffer hunger and thirst and fear and pain), Christianity becomes utterly meaningless, and you really might as well just become an Epicurian or an ascetic Buddhist, depending on temprament.
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Date: 2008-10-14 02:17 pm (UTC)