Sadness, The Chartists, and Isaiah

Since last night, things have been going terrible. I feel like my breath was. Last night I ate cheddar flavoured chips and orange juice, and a hot dog, when I woke up, my breath was so terrible I could taste it. That’s how life feels right now. So what could I do? I tried reading some Christian books but it felt hypocritical because I was in sin. I had very little sleep (I was up till 4am) and so I decided to lay down and watch Simon Schama.

Simon Schama is like a father figure to me. He’s a famous historian, very well read in the bible (he alludes to it every few minutes), and his modern liberalism makes me envious of his beliefs which I cannot share but in some ways admire, as a Conservative Pre-Modernist living in the modern liberal world.

Anyway, he was talking about Victorian England and the Chartists, they were middle-class and poor people who sought to make England a Democracy, and to go back to the rural world of medieval england. MP Fergus O’Conner was a leader of them, who after being turned down by the British Government decided that they would compile their money to buy plots of farmland and to move out of the cities into the countryside.
So they moved to Great Dodford, and farmed even though they had no experience. Their motto was “do or die” and some of them managed it. Schama says summing up this movement:

“what seemed to count for most was making a home not a revolution”



It was about taking back a proper life, not necessarily changing the world. There’s a verse in Revelation that tells us to “come out” of Babylon (the world). The Chartists remind me of that. Their dream to quit being ‘machines’ in industrial Manchester is something I understand after seeing Manchester. My Cottrill ancestors moved from Manchester in the mid 19th century as well to Hamilton (which I think is about the same if not worse). But it’s funny to think as I wait to go to work, that this same dream seems to reappear over and over again in us Anglo-Saxons. The desire to farm the land, to get away from the cities and machines. It’s a dream I see in every page of Tolkien. And come to think about it, it’s the image of the perfect New Earth in Isaiah, and it’s something that maybe one day I’ll get to partake in, if God has mercy on my soul...



“For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
But be glad and rejoice for ever
in what I am creating;
...
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
...
They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
They shall not labour in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord—
and their descendants as well.
Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.” – Isaiah 65: 17-25

I'd really like to have my own vineyard where I enjoy the work, and where God answers before we ask questions.

I still feel sad today, and I'm sure tonight will be terrible at work, but maybe I'm a bit more hopeful now. Maybe one day that vain hope will materialize into a New Zealand adventure, I was looking at schools and jobs and religious vocations there last week...



This is a New Zealand Vineyard, perhaps I may have one on the New Earth...