Temple Cloud

Our church had a breakfast meeting today.   Instead of gathering in the church for prayers, hymns, confession and absolution, Bible readings, teaching, and Holy Communion, we gathered in the warm, modern room next door for bacon or vegetarian sausages in normal or gluten-free baps, plus flapjacks or gluten-free cakes, tea or coffee, and informal chat.   The tables were laid out with conversation-starter cards, or pictures to colour on the theme of Jesus as chef (relating to the story of Jesus’s disciples, after his resurrection, finding him cooking breakfast for them on a beach). You could criticise this as being a theologically vacuous interpretation of ‘church’.   The picture to colour might have been a good children’s activity to reinforce a Sunday School lesson about the Bible story it illustrated, but colouring wasn’t a replacement for reading the story.   Still, it seemed more an activity that we could have taken home to do, rather than one to gather for. T...

Last year, I wrote a fantasy fanfic, Have Demon, Will Travel  in which the heroine accidentally acquires a supernatural being who combines the personalities of three men and a dog – one of the three men being her enemy.  A reader commented that this sounded like a persecutory alter, which is a known phenomenon in Dissociative Identity Disorder. I don’t suffer from DID myself, but I did a bit of research and found an interesting blog post here  discussing the idea that persecutory alters aren't actually malevolent.   They are just misguidedly trying to protect the person that they are part of, for example by trying to preserve the status quo (cancelling their host's therapy appointments, sabotaging their host's relationships) because they fear that change will be dangerous and may make things get worse.   As the writer of the blog explained, describing her own relationship with her alters, persecutory alters need love and education in how better to care for th...

A while back, my mum sent PDB11 and me a suggestion: ‘A little game to play with fellow readers.  Take the opening sentence of a book you know well, and then add, "and then the dragons arrived."  ' This is all very well with most classic literature: 'No-one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.  And then the dragons arrived.' 'It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.  And then the dragons arrived.' 'My father's name being Pirrip and my given name being Philip, my infant tongue could make nothing more of either word than Pip.  And then the dragons arrived.' 'Once upon a time there were four little rabbits, and their names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter.  And then the dragons arrived.' In our case, this didn’t work so well, because the walls of our bedroom are mainly lined with fantasy novels: 'There were dragons when I ...

One of the loveliest presents that I received for Christmas was a little model dragon holding a pencil.   According to the box, this model of dragon was called ‘Scribbles’, but PDB11 and I quickly agreed that it needed to be a name beginning with G – Gremlin?   Gizmo? – and settled on Grogu, because, as PDB11 said, he looks very like a baby version of Yoda. It had to be a name beginning with G because, even more than he resembles the young alien hero of The Mandalorian , our Grogu resembles Gadzooks, a dragon in the Last Dragon Chronicles by Chris d’Lacey, in which all dragons have names beginning with G.   Gadzooks is a dragon who has the power to inspire writers, usually by writing a one-word hint like ‘ Snigger ’ or ‘ Nutbeast ’.   So far, I haven’t seen Grogu writing anything, but maybe we don’t have enough of a trust-bond yet, or maybe he just doesn’t think I need the help. What dragons generally don’t do, even in fantasy novels, is write your entire homew...

Dear Temple, All right, I have problems.   But why do I have a responsibility to myself?   Isn’t it selfish to want good things for myself?   I remember in Sunday School, when I was younger, singing ‘Make Me a Channel of Thy Peace’.   I liked the words, but the chorus worried me:   Oh master, grant that I may never seek So much to be consoled as to console To be understood as to understand To be loved as to love with all my soul   I thought, ‘But we’re children!   How can we learn to love, if it’s selfish to want to be loved?   How can we give what we haven’t received?’   But I knew that if the Sunday School teacher thought it was a good hymn for us to sing, then it must be the way we should pray, even if it didn’t make sense to us, because the teacher had been a Christian for longer than we had been alive, so she knew best. Phantom of the Library   Dear Phantom, This is what I meant in my last letter by not trustin...

Dear Phantom, First of all, you are obviously a real person, or you wouldn’t be asking these questions.   So you definitely have a mind and a soul, in the sense that you have consciousness. Whether there is life after death – whether we have immortal souls, as many religions teach – is something we can’t absolutely prove one way or the other.   But this is a different question from whether you have a soul in the sense of being a person, someone who thinks and feels and can make decisions. If being middle-class meant you didn’t really have a soul, you couldn’t be in danger of going to hell, could you?   And if you have a soul, then Jesus doesn’t want to send you to hell.   However, this is something I need to talk about in a separate letter – probably in several letters, because your idea of God is so different from most people’s. The reason mum thought you were ungrateful when you said you thought God was evil was that she didn’t understand what you meant, b...