why does warm+fuzzy=christmasy?

We do like to dress Christmas up in fairy lights don't we! Let's all feel "Christmasy", jingle some bells, remember a night when all was "calm and bright", hang up our stockings, sniff the cloves and cinnamon, let it snow let it snow let it snow.
Don't get me wrong, I love our ridiculous traditions and the once a year chance to get together with the extended family but in all these wrappings I've started to see the birth of Christ through those warm fuzzy spectacles. Songs like “Silent night” where “all is calm and all is bright” don’t really help things either. Yes, Jesus birth was a miracle. But he was born in the humblest of circumstances, in a messy birth in a dirty smelly stable! Can you imagine giving birth in a stable?! Yeeeeuch… There was no tinsel, no fairy lights. It may not have been an ordinary birth. Angels announced it, and then shepherds turned up to gape, some wise men brought their gifts a little later, leaving his parents somewhat awed and bewildered.
But there’s a distinction between what is “christmasy” or magical and what is miraculous.

Got to bring Sufjan in here... another thing I love about those albums is the fact that interpersed amongst the bells and banjo carols is the occasional song that reminds me that the whole world doesn't just become glowing and "christmasy" at Christmas time. That people still hurt, families don't suddenly become unbroken, fighting doesn't always stop, wars don't just end, people don't suddenly escape poverty or become happy at, or just during the christmas period.

Jesus coming was a way of healing the broken-hearted but think about what it took him to do that... He came to live among us, he came to live as one of us, experiencing weakness as we do, he humbled himself, in life, taking on the very nature of a servant, not just his death on the cross. He taught, healed, reached out...

The miracle is that God came as the light of the world, to bring us peace and joy! It's awe-inspiring and well worth celebrating! But in order to bring us that peace and joy, he had to experience the ordinary and weakness and suffering, whether that was being laid as a newborn in a feeding trough or being crucified alongside common criminals. I wouldn't call that magic.

So I've been trying to remember that Christmas celebrates the fact that Jesus came down in human frailty. He was fully God, just and righteous and love, and yet he became fully human; lived life, experienced weakness, hunger, brokenness, hurt and pain. And so He understands our weakness... Amaaaazing!

Christmas was a miracle! Christ is a miracle! But miracles don't necessarily mean "magic". And somehow I don't think there was any "magic" on that first Christmas.

This is my first year sans advent calender :"(

I roughly estimate that I spent the run up to Christmas doing

countless hours of studying
almost as many hours of celloing
several hours of singing carols at the top of my voice
8 hours of cleaning the flat
7 hours of 12 hour cheesy pop, (of which 2 hours were spent watching It's a Wonderful Life, 3 hours were spent boogying on at the headphone disco (quality concept!) and 2 hours spent chatting to randoms and not so randoms at the stall)
6 beanscene visits (most of which were to "chat about the critical review")
5 hours of mince pies and mulled-wine consumption
4 christmas carol services (to date)
3 and a half ceilidhs
2 exams
and 1 critical review

And after all that and some more that I couldn't fit into 12 verses, I am back in Edinburgh again for a proper break! It's roasting inside (having Sri Lankan parents means the heating is on ALL day!) and baltic outside (frost, unlike anything we ever get in glasgow, woopwoop!) Actually getting a proper break, except from celloing... in exchange for being fed I am playing in 3 church carol services avec les parents. A cellist's work is never done.

Apologies for misinformation in my last blog entry. Turns out we're not being broadcasted till Friday at 7.15pm on the "highland cafe show"
Though for the next week or so it should be possible to stream and listen to the show on the above link
Right, I'm off to bed

blatant procrastination

I had been determined to avoid procrastination blogging until the end of this week (end of deadlines/exams). I just cracked.

But there is soooooo much to blog about!

1. The wonders of carols! In the last few days I have been to a carolling party (lots of musical people jamming and singing carols together all evening), 2 different carol service rehearsals, sang non-stop on the half an hour walk to church with my old flatmate. You'd think I'd be sick of the music, but no. Yesterday I made the purchase of Sufjan Steven's 5 CD christmas wonder! To be honest I would have bought it for the beeeeeyoootiful version of Joy to the World on CD 4 (one of my fav carols) but getting 5 wonderful CDs was more than an added bonus! Siiiigh...

2. Last week, I discovered that - prancing around in a ball dress + quality time with coursemates (i.e not talking about or even thinking about looming deadlines) + silly dancing and good food = remarkably therapeutic stress-free evening

3. The wonders of TEA!! (in response to this post)

Builder's tea... meh... I've lost my liking for the stuff. In the tea corner of our kitchen however, I currently own, an assortment of loose teas with random names like "arctic fire", green tea, white tea, camomile, honey and vanilla tea, lemon and ginger tea, lady grey. Despite the fact that yesterday Potter managed to bleed over a few tea bags and boxes (now hopefully all disinfected away) they still haven't quite lost their appeal. Tea consumption in the flat is an excitement... i.e "hmmm what do I feel like today?" What kind of choice can be had with the likes of coffee?! What I'm saying Quinn is, for the sake of your stomach, why don't you try branching out? ;)

4. This Wednesday lunchtime (methinks about 1pm) ze band is going to be live on BBC radio Scotland! Woop woop! Shame we have to get up at 6am and train it up to Inverness for like 3 hours just for the pleasure!

Reminder to self

Lessons from my time in France to be re-remembered/afin de les reapprendre

- Treat people as equals (even if they struggle with my language)
- A smile is not enough. What they want is my time and friendship not just my friendliness.
- Kindness and genuine friendship go a long long way. I am still strongly affected by the impact of kindness a few french (and non-french) people demonstrated towards me last year when I was a foreigner, relatively powerless and pretty lonely.

En bref - I should be taking my lead from Him

trop vite!

Life's moving too fast right now! I keep starting blog entries and not finishing them and suddenly they're out of date or no longer applicable! Although I missed my hectic lifestyle when I was in France, I can't help but envy the french sometimes and their laid-back attitude to time. Yesterday a few of us from the CU ran ceilidh dancing classes for internationals, (I ended up having to call the dances and be the "backing music" to Auld Lang Syne, which was amusing to say the least!) Anyhoo a french friend turned up an hour and a half late, whilst we were in midst Orcadian StriptheWillow. He was really surprised when I told him this was the last dance. In his own words he thought it would run until at least half 10 or 11, and that he "ad to eat at 8 (as every frenchman does), and euuh it takes 'alf an 'our for me to prepare the food you know euh..." Bear in mind that the class started at half 7.

Aaah I do love the french :)

In other news:
- my camera is dying hence my lack of camerage.
- After 2 weeks of reading ridiculous amounts and getting more and more confused, I have finally decided on a direction for my 4000 word "critical review" in psychology... phew!

Life just keeps on going and the Christmas season is calling! woop woop!

a little hyperbole

Just back from the cinema to see Stardust. I loved it... my pragmatic flatmate (of the emerald isle variety) on the other hand wasn't so convinced by the romanticglowingstarloveconqueringall nonsense. "Too much hyperbole" were her exact words. Personally I like a little hyperbole from time to time, though I'm glad real life isn't like that. Those witches were scary!
We did however enter into the spirit of adventure, rushing down the tallest cinema in the world to catch the last underground and then rushing back up again, rooting under chairs to the soundtrack of the cancan in search of pragmatist's gloves, until we realised that she hadn't actually brought them with her in the first place. So we legged it back down again and made it in time (just) to catch the last underground... Ah we do know how to spice up the mundane antics of normal life! And who needs to put the heating on in the flat when a little exercise is all one needs to keep warm!

stress

A very dear friend gave me a bit o paper in ze uni library today with this written on it:

- "I ask him to satisfy my longings and fill my hollow places with his unfailing lavish love, this frees me from craving the approval of others or requiring them to fill my 'cup'. Then if someone does demonstrate love to me that's overflow! I am free to appreciate and enjoy it, but I didn't emotionally require it." Beth Moore

words of clarity on a frenchopsychologised/psychofrenchified/francopsycho day

I don't know what reading that makes you think of but I found myself drawn to the concept of how being filled with God's utterly satisfying love doesn't just stop there with us and Him. We are left free to appreciate and enjoy other people and the rest of his creation in all its fullness. It is for freedom that Christ set us free.
This period on the university calender should be labelled with a health warning "This is the time of the year when you will start feeling innudated and may well succomb to stress". What with all the essays, exams, lab reports, presentations, generally keeping mein head above the workload. I don't seem to overly stress about these things. When I stress it's more likely to be about my motives behind what I do, whether other people are taking a precedence over my love for God, about what's happening in my mind because I feel as though I can't control it half the time to name a few... But it was for freedom that Christ set us free! Why should I stress about these things? He leads me by still waters, He restores my soul, He fills my cup.
He acted, I accept what He has done and continues to do, I overflow.
Maaaan I wish the formula would be tha simple when trying to put it into reality! And it's not Him that is lacking, it's my unwillingness to accept that's the problem. What is it that can possibly hold me back from handing over the controls of my life to God, towhom nothing is impossible, who knows what's best and truly cares?! Think I might take the advice of Beth Moore there.

I'm just grateful that we have Jesus constantly interceding (overuling our stupidity) and that He fully understands :)

to foveate or not to foveate?

"Humans do not stare at scenes. They foveate. Their eyes dart about the scene at locations of interest during the analysis of the scene. Except for special cases, humans tend to focus on corners and edges of important objects of the scene." Jason Kinser, Institute for BioScience, Bionformatics, Biotechnology

We don't process everything we see. And that's not surprising really since we wouldn't get anywhere or do anything if we were constantly processing everything that's round about us. However that can sometimes result in confusion and/or misinterpretation. I did a presentation on how this kind of misintepretation manifests itself in language illusions on Friday. Let me demonstrate.

How many did each kind of animal did Moses put on the ark?
.........................

Did you get it? Did you say two? Or did you see the anomaly? If so, nice work because most people don't and this is known as the Moses Illusion and it's an example of "shallow processing" (what linguists call foveation). So why am I waffling about this other than to fulfil my geeky inclinations? Well today I was thinking about how much of a conscious foveator I am. How I so often only critically evaluate what I find relatively easy to understand because I am scared of the stuff I find more difficult to understand. How I so often see what I want to see and not what I'd prefer not to see. And that applies to everything, from bits of the bible I can't get my head around and would prefer to avoid, to things going on in another part of the world or even part of my city I prefer to remain blissfully unware of. But I specifically want to talk about the way in which I read the bible.
In order to avoid misinterpretation surely we need the full picture. So many mistakes have been made in the past, and we are still unclear on things because we are unware of the full context of a statement within the bible and in the era it was written in. Shouldn't we need to at least be aware of all these things so that we might understand the bible more fully?

But where does the balance lie between, one the one hand, questioning things, finding reason and understanding behind what we believe and on the other hand, knowing that God is God, that His wisdom is far above and beyond us and that we won't have all the answers in this lifetime? It's one of those "to what extent" questions that seem to crop all the time. I think it's easy to lean either too much to one side or the other. I definitely lean in the foveating direction i.e "I don't have all the answers so why bother too much about it?" but it isn't enough. Especially when I get interrogatively questioned about my faith.
I've leaned the other way in the past too; trying to process too much at once and as a result getting tied up and confused with trivial issues. To the point where it has gotten in the way of my ability to see and do and think straight in other areas of life. I think experiences like that may have scared me off deeply questioning things... but then maybe I've been questioning in the wrong way before.
I've been reading this passage over and over again the last few days, and something is starting to click in my head. We have God's Spirit in us, He gives us understanding, He gives us knowledge and the Spirit is key to that. But what kind of knowledge is that? I do know He enables to know Jesus and that He enables to understand God's plan for salvation so we can accept it and communicate it to others. I do know that He helps us grapple with the kind of knowledge that results in us having everything we need for life and godliness and that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is futile. But is that knowledge and understanding of the more difficult concepts, having a grip on prophecies that scholars have studied for years? Or is it just a grasp on concepts such as grace (not that those are especially simple)? Does the Spirit help us gain academic knowledge; the kind of apologetics that go way over my head or knowledge as in knowing God as a father, lord and friend? Should we as Christians know the bible inside out from cover to cover, or is it ok to skim the bits that we "may never understand" like certain prophecies or parts of Revelation?

That's a lot of questions and this probably makes for muddy reading. But if you do get through this I would appreciate any thoughts you might have on the matter. I'm kinda unsure...

Apologies for lack of bullet points in this post

Bon degustation

There are times when I get odd urges to do something random, whether be running down a hill with my arms pretending to be a plane or hugging a friend for no apparent reason. Last Saturday morning (or rather afternoon. Staying up late the night before was for a valid and valuable cause!) I woke up and decided I wanted to make some kind of chocolate mess.

Well I expected it to come out as chocolate mess. Actually it turned out to be a beautifully delicious and perfectly formed chocolate pudding :) This made me and my flatmates and all others that entered our flat walls this weekend very happy

We do know how to do "bon degustation" in our flat that's for sure

I am a french magnet

They've just installed some computers on level 8 of the library... I'm right beside the window and the sun's out. I don't why people say that Glasgow is ugly, from where I'm sitting that's not the view I'm getting...
So it's been 5 months almost to the day since I left France. 5 months. Man alive, that's a long time! The first 3 months I spent in the burgh felt far removed from my sun-lit dossy french lifestyle. However since coming back to Glasgow I find myself frequently hearkening back to those days. This is partly due to the constant presence of chocolate, cheese and wine in our flat. But the main reason is definitely due to my ohsofrequent croisements with french people in and around the university.
They are becoming so frequent that I think I may have become some kind of french magnet. I hope I don't smell of blue cheese and I'm sure I don't give off any Ilovespeakingfrench aura. At least not the kind of aura that can be seen from a distance.
Yet since freshers week, I have consistently and continuously bumped into french people. My magnetic field seems to be at it's most powerful between the hours of 1 and 3am on a Saturday when I have been known to stand outside the QM union and give out tea and coffee with some other equally daft Christians punters. There is one regular who brings his copains to chat to "la fille qui parle super bien francais" (For a Scot that is, though that doesn't stop me grinning from ear to ear each time he says it). But this weekend was almost absurd. There were the regulars, then a girl I recognised from one of my classes, one lanky dude who had only arrived in the country the week before, there were 6 Grenoblois students enjoying a reunion. They had the same favourite pub as me.
Perhaps it is just that a high percentage of frenchies smoke and so are more likely to be loitering outside the QM that in it? Someone told me there are 50000 french people in Glasgow, though I find that somewhat hard to believe.
All I know is, my desire to speak french and franglais on a regular occasion is being well and truly satisfied, I'm starting to make friends with the randoms and I'm starting to realise that God may be engineering all this.
Tis a little bizarre but I like it :)

almost better than snow

I love autumn and I love Kelvingrove Park. En bref I love Kelvingrove Park in the autumn

- the trees

- the colours

- the leaf-fights

- and just general silliness

Diversity of personality

I had one of those lightbulb in the head moments this morning at church... I was listening to my dad saying something at church. My dad: intellectual, logical, rational, scientist-mind, doesn't small-talk on the phone, isn't especially affectionate, except with his family and also a christian; with a strong belief in and commitment to Jesus Christ. I realised, thinking of the person that he is, that he isn't exactly your "stereotypical christian".
But then how many stereotypical christians did I actually know?

I started thinking about the other christians I know and building a little map of them in my head. Intellectuals and touchy feely types, socialists and tories, scientists and artists, old and young, the irrepressible jokers and the sincerely serious, the quiet and the outgoing, the academic and the less academic, trendies and self-confessed geeks, techy geniuses and computerphobes, dreamers and pragmatists... I could go on and on...

I don't think I'd ever before noticed the diversity of personalities Jesus has attracted.
We always seem to emphasise the diversity of the church in terms of things like nationality or family background and I don't want to undermine that because it is an amazing truth. But the crazy of mix of God's family isn't just reflected in "every tribe, tongue and nation" but every mind-set, level of intellect, talent, nature et ainsi de suite...

Then again, should it be that surprising? Essentially He did made grace available to us all.

My urge to blog has increased tenfold in the last week and I do believe this may be directly correlatable with the fact that my workload has also increased tenfold in the last week. But what to blog about...

- I could tell you about the exciting bits of homework I have to do for next week.
- Watch 3 french films made in the 1920s
- Translate 2 texts from english to french and french to english
- Read 3 research papers on psycholinguistics and be able to summarise them in tutorial
- Catchup on lectures notes (caused by lecture clashes)
- Read 4 chapters of a french novel l'usage du monde by Nicolas Bouvier
Ah the joys of studying for an odd combination of a degree.

- I could also tell you about my lovely new flatmates and the banter and copious amounts of chocolate that have been consumed in this last month, though I think I might leave that till I have some incriminating photos...

- I could tell you about the trouble I have with saying no to things. I want to be a part of everything, and not saying no to doing things was something that kept me busy in France but here I just get swamped to the point of silliness if I don't!

- I think for now I'll stick to talking about the weather... Rain, dristle, changeableness, the fact that one day it's really warm and the next it's baltic! What's that all about?!

- I miss french cheese... :(

the joys of academia

Today was my first day of academia and what did I learn...

- That to do a joint honours in a subject one has to be exceedingly organised (timetables are handed out and one has to fiddle and sort out clashes and make sense of them on one's own.
- That sorting out timetable clashes is more stressful than studying

So when do I get to start learning real stuff!?

I want to be a tree

I want to be a tree

Trunk broad, boughs long

the epitomy of life whatever falls

Rooted in good soil, reaching for tall

I want to be

a tree by still waters

that just grows, grows, grows

Yet is patient to wait

till the season for fruit

till I deepen my roots.

Patient to wait through the winter, bare.

Won't panic when leaves fall

Thrills when the buds form

No hurry, never ever, at all...

I couldn't pretend to be something I'm not.

I'd be happy in purpose

in bloom and in want.

I'd be happy just being.

These Magic Changes

Yesterday I made a scrapbook of my year in France... It was both satisfying and disconcerting to reduce what was a year of my life into 20 pages of random bits and pieces of junk I've hoarded... kinda sad really. Still... I'm back in Glasgow indefinitely and excited by the prospect of starting back at uni, though looking at the course details for my joint honours coursem am feeling eversoslightly scared... what have I let myself in for?! A dissertation and a maxi project!?

As for the summer. Well that finished with a bit of a bang... The day after I finished at good ol H of H, I was jetted off for 3 days of glorious surreality in Lewis with the Potential Strangers... thankyou BBC! Here are some of my photographic highlights...

Sound-checking in the studio...

This pic (that Dol Eoin's 7 year old sister drew for the occasion) reminds me of this lovely welsh band that I fell in love with, not only for there ace music and genius lyrics (those that I could understand anyway) and the fact that the 4 of them sing in harmony at various points of each song but the fact that are genuinely nice boys :)

It's not an exaggeration... Harris though a little cold and windy, at least when we were there, really is stunningly beautiful.

Trop trop trop

I've been watching far too many films lately, in the same way that I used to consume books in my younger geekier days, I have relished escaping but I think I might be taking it to extremes.
Over the last few weeks I have watched
- Billy Elliot - several times. Best facial expressions of any film I've ever seen.
- I bought the sister High School Musical and Bugsy Malone - now that was a mistake.
- That gem of a musical West Side Story twice.
- Along came Polly - why?!
- fractions of Princess Mononoke. Think I might need to watch all of it before I understand it.
- A bbc production of Woman in White with my dear mother
- Amelie - for the first time in about a year believe it or not!
Been to see
- The Bourne Ultimatum - now that was good :)
- Hairspray. Twice I'm not ashamed to say. Second time was even better!
- Shrek 3, Harry Potter 5 - disappointments
- A random french-canadian film at the Edinburgh international film festival - Dans les villes - the blurb promised light-heartedness, the film delivered the opposite. Though I must admit the enlightening chat with director/producer afterwards improved it.
Oh and I saw one festival show quite possibly better than any of the films I've seen of late... I blame the changeyourmoodinablink atmosphere and amhaaazing soundtrack!

ticktockticktock just over a week to Glasvegas and return to a TV-less flat... wooo! :)

saying that, it never stopped us from watching copious amounts of Dawsons Creek

Un éclat

I like this photo because of the memory I have of the moment when I took it. It had been raining for days and when it rains in Grenoble it snows on the mountains (up until about April that is) so you can't see them for the thick white clouds that obscure them. The mountains are a constant and familiar presence in Grenoble. You can see them looming behind all manner of buildings in almost every direction. So it's a kinda eerie feeling, not being able to see them. I was waiting at the bus-stop to go to school and then spotted that tiny gap in the clouds and that stunning turquoise blue patch of sky against fresh snow-covered mountains made me catch my breath! I just had to snap it! It was just so beautiful to see and even more so because it felt as though I was seeing blue sky and mountains for the first time! I felt as though I had forgotten what they looked like.

I had another one of those gap in the clouds experiences just recently though it didn't involve mountains or clouds.

My hope had been leaking for a while... I didn't notice at first, and then after a while I started noticing a pit-hole kinda empty feeling when I was alone, something which I hadn't experienced in a long time and it didn't feel like something I could stop. I suddenly had so many questions that made my head hurt. It was kinda like having my vision obscured by impenetrable clouds.

See I had forgotten what God is like. Somewhere along the line I had lost perspective and so lost heart. It seemed to me that He was letting people slip through His fingers that shouldn't be slipping through, people that I really cared about or who had grown to care about. I had the initial gap in the cloud experience because of a few words that made me realise God wasn't letting things slip through his fingers at all. That He truly cares. And once realising that I found my eyes opening to other situations and people that God was working in and through. This week I'm helping out with kids and youth work with my home church. This week is "launch-week" of a church-plant in a small town Kirkliston, the next nearest town to where I grew up. The very fact that God has put so many passionate inspired gifted people in the area and is enabling this to happen is evidence of the fact that He doesn't let seemingly hopeless areas, people, situations just slip through His fingers even if everyone else seems to have given up hope.

I'm not going to give up on Him, Christ Jesus our Hope.

A beeeeyooootiful morceau de franglais :D

a leeetle bit of context...

The 2 frenchmen each having found an RAF man in completely separate situations have been told to go find their officer in the baths... they've been told they'll recognise him easily due to his beeeeg moustache by humming the code song, which is "Tea for two". I think that's all you need to know
Enjoy :D