Cycling and the meaning of life...

Victoria Pendleton (pictured) won a gold medal at the Olympics and has won six cycling world championship titles to boot. She is also (as the photo suggests) a "girly-girl" who won the award for Britain's most glamourous Olympian in Beijing. Not a bad set of achievements for someone who is 28, one might think.

But in a brutally honest interview in The Guardian recently week she described her life in quite shattering terms:

"I'm terrible. I beat myself up the whole time because I'm striving for something I'll basically never achieve. I portray this image of confidence, of arrogance, and it's not really me. I'm never satisfied and I'm never content. It means I'm a bit of a mess some of the time. But I wouldn't be here talking to you if I was a different person."

In a world of cliches and trite answers her candidness is wonderfully refreshing. Here's how she describes her Olympic games and the trauma of being one of the last cyclists to race:

"I was an emotional wreck beforehand because, while I was happy for everyone else, I was apprehensive about my ride. I worried that I would be the one person who let down the team. So winning was just a relief. And even that felt like a complete anti-climax. It was very surreal on the podium and as soon as I stepped off it I was, like, 'What on earth am I going to do now?' I found it quite hard to deal with. It was, like, I've got no purpose anymore."

It is, I suspect, an astonishingly common way for people to feel having reached the pinnacle of their chosen profession or talent. And what a wonderful signpost that, without a knowledge of the final purpose of the human race, and of my own life, any achievement is always going to feel somewhat hollow and empty. In the end, I'm sure, Pendleton knows perfectly well that her cycling legs will fade and that another rider will, one day, eclipse her achievements. And that, of course, is true for all of us. Her answer to this relentless quest and its unsatisfying conclusion?

"I soon worked out that the only thing I could do was to get another gold medal. I need one. If 2012 goes to plan, winning the Olympics on my home turf, I might finally feel I've achieved the ultimate for me."

Well I'd be prepared to bet that Victoria Pendleton won't find that kind of satisfaction even if she does win in 2012. And, I suspect, that in her most honest moments she knows she won't either.

So what are we left with? Well a simple choice I think. either we have to accept that there is nothing that can provide true satisfaction - because there is no final purpose to our lives. Or we have to relentlessly pursue the answer to the one question that takes us to first base and enables us to answer all other questions: "what am I here for?" The great news of the Christian gospel is that we don't have to go further than the pages of the world's best-selling book to find the answer!

On beauty...

Evangelical Christians are not, in general, renowned for having great love of aesthetics or for being defenders of beauty. Quite the opposite in fact. Our buildings can be austere and frequently even ugly. The evangelical tendency is to activism - and time, effort and money spent on physical beauty seems to most evangelicals to have a whiff of worldliness about it.

Enter Elaine Scarry. She is not a Christian, or at least certainly not an evangelical. Scarry works as Walter M Cabot Professof of Aesthetics at Harvard University. On Beauty is more of an extended essay than a book, weighing in at 134 small pages with large margins!

Scarry takes on a thesis that most evangelicals would, I suspect, be inclined to agree with. It goes (in my paraphrase!) like this... Since there is so much injustice in the world shoildn't we stop faffing around with aesthetics and spend our time and energy campaigning for justice?

Scarry argues that this line of argument is at best incoherent and that, in fact, "it may even be the case that far from damaging our capacity to attend to problems of injustice, [beauty] instead intensifies the pressure we feel to repair existing injustices."

Essentially her argument is that, far from leading us to pay attention to beautiful things for their own sake the natural outworking of beauty is "to give rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of "a symmetry of everyone's relation to one another."

I won't rehearse the whole essay here. Suffice to say that it is exquisitely drafted and quite compelling in its own terms.

But I think that a Christian has an even better reason to believe in the power of beauty. Beauty, the Christian knows, exists both visibly and invisibly. It is seen both in physical form - a wonderful flower, a graceful woman, a stunning building - and in the moral beauty of God and of people when acting in line with God's character. Since both physical and nonphysical beauty are part of God's creation Christians are not at liberty to despise the former and love only the latter.

Instead we ought to see a relationship between them. Sure in our world they are not perfectly matched; many of the physically beautiful people in our world are far less morally beautiful than those of us endowed with merely average (or below) looks! But the existence of the visible beauties is a reminder of the existence of other virtues as well. Whilst there is, without a doubt, a subjective aspect to beauty (one persons taste does not precisely match another's) the undeniably objective nature of beauty; the fact that people gather round to look at a Monet painting or an Adam fireplace or a woman on a Pirelli calendar - points to the existence of a reality outside ourselves. Where does this beauty and our sense of it come from? Well, of course, the Bible reader knows that it is placed in our creation to point us to the God who made us. "The heavens declare the glory of the Lord."

Christians should appreciate beauty. It is not to be worshipped; but it is a reflection of the God who created everything beautiful and it is, therefore, to point us to worship and adore him.

While I'm on the subject...

...of beautifully crafted books they don’t come any more stunning than Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. I’ve reviewed Gilead elsewhere on this blog. Housekeeping is an earlier (in fast her first novel. It’s a little bit a coming of age kind of book (not totally different in some ways from Black Swan Green, see below).

The principle characters, Lucille and Ruth, are orphan sisters, coming to terms with the disturbed minds of both family members who have gone and the succession of guardians who remain.

But mostly this is a novel of place. The place is Fingerbone, a small town in the vast emptiness of northwest America. The images are wintry and dark and the whole feel of Fingerbone, with its vast lake and mountains is that human habitation is a fragile lodger which could be turfed out at any moment.

I was moved by the might of the scenery – and made to reflect again on the temporary and precarious nature of human existence. The characters in the novel are intensely aware, perhaps too much so for their own good, of the endless depths of the lake and the light hold we have upon life. Most of us though, most of the time, are their mirror images. We construct an illusion of solidity and permanence in our lives which bears no relation to the fact that, as God tells us, we are like grass....

Moving to happier subjects...
Black Swan Green is a hilarious, though at times quite profound, romp through a year in the life of a 13 year old boy. But not just any year. It’s 1982. The whole novel revels in the sights, sounds, TV, films, music and gadgets of the early 1980s. It’s not just about bullying, divorce, snogging and sisters – it’s about bullying, divorce, snogging and sisters in 1982.
Undoubtedly with elements of autobiography from author David Mitchell, if you loved the 1980s – or if you’re too young but want to know what they were like for a teenager this is a book for you. Brilliant!