@pontifex

So the Pope has Twitter. You may know this as, at time of writing, He has 1,115,327 followers. If you’re one of them, you may have noticed the three little Thought Of The Day style posers He’s posted, pertinent questions indeed. You may also already have your own solutions to them, but nonetheless here are mine:

1) How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives?

Now apparently this year, which lasts from 11 October 2012 – 24 November 2013 is a “summons to an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the One Savior of the world”, in which case ‘celebrate’ could well be replaced by ‘bemoan’. However, I’ll take a stab at this one anyway. The key word for me is ‘authentic’ – and I’m certainly going to celebrate better if my conversion to the Lord is genuine. So I believe, reading the above with a dose of interpretive license, the Lord, the One Savior of the world can be more personal and unconventional than traditional or even… religious.

In preparation and to get me in the right sort of mood for The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which I’ll be viewing on Sunday afternoon, I’ve recently been reacquainting myself with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (not that I need an excuse to justify doing so). And I see credible parallels between Frodo and a saviour of the world for sure:

• He saves the world.

So daily, from now until next November, I’ll be demonstrating a renewed conversion to my Lord: Frodo Baggins of Bag End, Hobbiton. Clearly the first step is to get down the barbers and sort my hair out – dark brown colouring and a perm please, one! I’ll be changing my birthday to 22 September. I’ll become more musically-minded. I’ll adopt a token in place of the One Ring, (the original can’t be used for obvious reasons) and destroy it in my fireplace on 24/11/2013 (it should be cold enough for fires then) – I’m thinking something that I can keep in my pocket; something I can wear; something others will covet; something that will melt… aha! An eyepatch it is. I’ll wear this when I want to escape the attentions of orcs and goblins (distant relatives over Christmas will do fine for these), and I might wear it too tight so it makes me irritable and snappy. And of course I’ll need to make a long and perilous journey somewhere with a group of mates – the Red Lion at the top of the hill, it gets proper icy around there in winter.

2) How can faith in Jesus be lived in a world without hope?

This one’s trickier as it unavoidably namedrops Jesus himself. I’m gonna stick my neck out here and say… it can’t. Yep – faith in Jesus can’t be lived in a world without hope. On second reading that’s a terribly-worded question anyway – can faith be lived? This one doesn’t deserve much of an answer, if I’m honest.

3) Any suggestions on how to be more prayerful when we are so busy with the demands of work, families and the world?

I’m gonna take a few liberties here and make an assumption: being prayerful is paramount an authentic and renewed conversion to the Lord, the One Savior of the world, Frodo Baggins. With this established, I say forget work, forget your family (unless they’re necessary as representative of other-worldly creatures) and forget the world. Pushed for time and can’t integrate your prayerful routine into your usual commitments? Screw the latter – and if they’re worth anything to you, they’ll be waiting on 25 November 2013.

Outcry? Stop those tears.

Does anyone else literally feel physically sick at the public outcry directed towards the two ridiculously Australian radio DJs, Mel Greig and Michael Christian? Not because Greig and Christian actually weren’t hugely moronic in not suspecting some consequence to invading the privacy of the UK’s second-most Googled person of 2012 – they were – but because a large majority of commentators are, well, commentating as if G&C teleported into the nurses’ living quarters at the King Edward VII hospital in London last Friday and forced Jalcintha Saldanha to take her own life, à la­ Trinity in Season 4 of Dexter.

Allow me, having trawled through countless indignant blogs, news stories and social media posts on the topic (so that you don’t have to, Dear Reader), to recreate the general tone of a few of the most preposterous:

To those Aussie DJs – how dare you indulge in the systematic bullying of a helpless and unsuspecting victim?! You were behaving as we civilised folk wouldn’t, and now you must be held accountable for that. Jacintha’s blood is on your hands – and you’re damn lucky that’s the extent of it given the stress you’ve caused Kate and baby George/Victoria/Hashtag (gotta be worth a punt at 500/1!).

I have two main issues with such opinions.

1)      The implication here is that you are personally directly responsible for the actions of an individual you have interacted with – because you’ve interacted with them and never mind any mitigating circumstances. You are responsible for the homicidal reactions of a drunk with anger management issues who flies into a rage when you knock his side mirror off, cycling whilst on your mobile. Of course it’s a ludicrously exaggerated example but we’re dealing with pure lunacy here. G&C didn’t “humiliate”, “terrorise”, “degrade” or “debase” Jacintha – listen to the call! I’m not in a position to speculate as to what mitigating circumstances do actually surround this case, but it’s undeniable they exist.

2)      You, moralistic observer, have a very high horse. I wonder how you got up there in the first place, and worry slightly for your health as the only easy way to get down is to jump off. Perhaps that’s why you are still up there.Never played a prank? Never had a laugh at someone else’s expense? What’s that, you have? Secretly found this particular one quite funny actually, at first, did you, before the tragic news emerged? Oh, just hiding behind the smokescreen of the internet are you, to peddle your didactic pish in the direction of like-minded fellow armchair say-gooders to see who can achieve the most “likes” or “thumbs-up”? Thought so. Still secretly find it a little funny? Me too.