Eschatalogical reserve

The number of things I'm failing to blog about gets larger and larger.  The second week of term was worse than the first, and in third week I started to feel like I was getting some control back until my laptop died.  My housemate/landlord has gone away for a month and it's wierd how much this is disconcerting me given that I lived alone in Cambridge for years.  But then, I had pets there.  I've put up a bird feeder in the garden but it's not yet getting many visitors.

Yesterday I went back to Occupy LSX, and the steps of St Paul's.  I went to hear the same vicar friend talk as on my first visit.  It's still a pretty cool place, but of course now they're just waiting for the eviction.  It won't be there next Saturday.  The talkers were more varied than last time, in that they weren't all talkers, but also singers, bands, and poets.  There were a couple of good performance poets, like this man with his "Crazy Santas Occupy the World":

He also did a poem about Sampson over the top of the instrumental from Dr Dre's What's the Difference.  That was great, and even I was sort of dancing a little bit.  It's not on YouTube, maybe because of copyright issues.

I feel sad that the place is going; I hope the eviction goes both peacefully and mediafully.

Afterwards I talked to my vicar friend about something eucharistical in London that had disturbed me, and which didn't seem to bother him at all.  But then by accident I profoundly shocked him by mentioning casually something else I had seen in Devon, and he wanted me to write and complain to a bishop about it.  I'm afraid I may have just provided another waystation on his inexorable journey towards Rome.  Oh dear.  But he did teach me a great concept -- or rather, a great name for a concept I already had.  This is "eschatological reserve".  It's the idea that when it comes to the end, perhaps we'll look back and see the patterns of things differently, and it will be clear who was doing God's will and it won't be the people we expected -- not the Pharisee or the Levite but the Samaritan.  Which was something I already thought but had no way to express except in something that Aslan says during the last battle, which didn't seem very respectable, intellectually.  It's good to have two ways to say it -- even though now I think of it there's almost no one in the world to whom I could suitably say the phrase "eschatalogical reserve".