My piano was tuned the other day. It’s been a while. We’ve been in our current house for almost twenty three years, and it hasn’t been tuned all the time that we’ve been here. Before that it was in our house in Glasgow, and before that a flat in Edinburgh. It had been moved there down several spiral flights of stairs from a third floor tenement flat in Edinburgh. So it has travelled around throughout my adult life, since the days when I would daydream rather than practice in the front room of my Granny’s tenement flat in Glasgow’s east end. And that, it turns out, is only a small part of the story of this particular piano.

As far as I had known, it was bought from a shop in Duke Street, Glasgow, some time in the 1950’s by my “auntie” Mary (actually a great aunt). It was later, in the 1960’s, that it was moved to my Granny’s front room, where I encountered it most weeknights. I’m sure I started piano lessons with the best of intentions; they lasted barely a fortnight, the lessons lasted much longer. I went to lessons for about eight years – poor Mrs Stephenson (my long-suffering piano teacher). I didn’t know if Auntie Mary had bought the piano new, but I do now. When the piano tuner removed the front of the piano, both top and bottom, to get at the mechanism, in addition to some mould and a broken dampener, the most significant thing to be seen was a label that I assume was affixed when the piano was new. It listed the dates of the first few tunings along with the initials of the tuners. The date of the earliest tuning was in 1903 - my piano is about 120 years old. It is in fairly good nick for its age, especially now that it is approaching being in tune for the first time in a while. Gets you thinking though.

I met all four of my grandparents, although my paternal grandparent both died when I was a small boy. It is worth noting that it is only relatively recently that knowing your grandparents became common. When my piano was first tuned, average male life expectancy in the UK was only about 45 years. According to the latest ONS figures, average life expectancy is now around 80 (and greatly improved from the 68.1 for my birth cohort). These numbers are population averages and hide vast variation. The 20^th century was a tough one for many. After all, there were two world wars and the privations that came with them. Disease for many was an ever present, potentially fatal threat. The pandemic has reminded us of how modern medicine has improved our lot. In the mid 20^th century, infectious diseases like TB were still killing large numbers of those infected (the pre-WW2 case fatality rate was about 50%), and childhood diseases like measles still killed hundreds every year. Polio, in the news recently, was a major scourge. I remember, as a child, visiting a family friend who was in an “iron lung”, the result of a polio infection. The antibiotics that became widely available after the war, and the childhood vaccines that were gradually introduced, fundamentally transformed this health landscape. The net result of this, plus other innovations like the NHS, improved diet, improvement in air quality because of the clean air acts, is that my children have known all four of their grandparents, and I (maybe/probably) might get to know mine.

Back on the subject of old age and music, we had the sight and sound last week at Glastonbury of the 80-year-old Paul McCartney introducing those two young whippersnappers Dave Grohl (a mere 53) and Bruce Springsteen (72) to the crowd during an acclaimed set lasting almost three hours. It was a reminder that by and large we are not only living longer lives, but we’re remaining healthy into old age. All things being equal, I might have quite a long time to enjoy my newly in-tune(ish) piano. And I get to enjoy other things too. I celebrated my own 60^th birthday this week (hence all this meditating on age). So the other day (as a special treat) we made our way into town and I obtained my Merseytravel over-60s travel-pass. The (Merseyside) world is now my free oyster, although only after 9.30am and at weekends. I have no idea if I will actually avail myself much of this new-found freedom of buses, trains and yes, the famous Mersey ferry. But it’s the principle that counts. I don’t have quite the same life to reflect on as Macca; he has been a cultural icon for at least sixty of his eighty years. But my life, the only one I have to ruminate on, has been truly blessed, and by much more that even living in Liverpool.

Many things have changed over my sixty years, and many things will change should I have twenty or so more. But for fifty of my sixty years there has been one constant. One of the things I was blessed with was parents who know and love Jesus, and so introduced me to Him. This was about example, not coercion. For reasons we needn’t go into, at the age of ten I asked Him (as it seemed to me) to keep me safe (I had something pretty specific in mind that I wanted to be kept safe from). I had no deep understanding of what I was doing, or its implications, but something fundamentally changed at that point which has shaped my life since, and indeed my eternal destiny. My understanding has grown. I am surer now of the basis on which I made my commitment to Him, and I am clearer about His commitment to me. This is not a symmetrical relationship; how could it be? But it is a relationship that goes both ways. The basis of that transaction (for that’s how I saw it) was all to do with who He is, and what He accomplished in His death two millennia ago. That basis is unchanged and unchanging – it is His grace through which His benefits have continued to flow to me.

There have of course been bumps along the way. There always are in real life. And there will be more. But when knocked of out of tune, He always has the skill to set me right; He has perfect pitch.

Mellowing with age….?

I was struck by an article in yesterday’s Times (“It’s time feeble feminists started to condemn the misogyny in Islam” p32, 30/1/16) in which Richard Dawkins opined about the decency he detects in the Church of England, the cultural value of Biblical language, feminism, Islam and the Koran, and even about his own death. As an aside, over the years he has been an expert and interesting evolutionary biologist; he’s worth listening to and reading on these topics. He talks with deep knowledge, based on years of skillful practice. He is an authority on such things, although I suppose it’s possible that now (in his 74^th year) he’s a bit out of touch with his specialist field. It’s not my field, so I wouldn’t be able to give an authoritative view. On that other long list of topics, he clearly has opinions that people want to hear (otherwise they wouldn’t send journalists to interview him). I have no doubt that his opinions are sincerely held. He may even have thought about them deeply. But the authority he has in the one realm should not carry over into the others. His views carry the weight of an interesting, articulate, generally well educated amateur, nothing more.

Back to the article. A couple of things in it struck me as particularly interesting. First is the almost wistful way in which he thinks about the Church of England and the Bible (or at least some of its language). These things seem to have some useful role to play in our culture. Is this a mellowing with age? Well, maybe. As he makes equally clear, he still has no time for the God whom the Bible reveals. Presumably he still thinks that both this God, and the morality He would have us follow is pernicious and despicable. Or at least that his reading and interpretation of these are. But can you really recommend the one thing without the other? And if the basic premise of even beautiful language is wrong, can the language really be said to be beautiful? I suppose it might have a beautiful sound. But this of course was the trick of the Sirens, the sound of whose beautiful voices lured innocent sailors to their doom. Given all that Dawkins has said and written about not just the irrationality of religion (particularly that based on the Bible), but its dangers, it’s clearly highly illogical, perhaps even dangerous, to now say that some of it is worth having because it’s “nice”. One can imagine the fulminations of the younger Dawkins against such talk.

The other thing is that is striking is the reason for some of this wistfulness. The problem is that Dawkins fears cuddly Christianity being replaced by fundamentalist Islam. To be fair he probably objects any sort of religious view that is fundamentalist in his terms. Sadly, these days he appears to encounter few Bible-believers who are prepared to stick to their guns – “Christians have grown out of that. They don’t believe every word of the Bible.” He thinks that this is a blip. But as so often happens when one strays outwith their area of expertise, he’s probably missing the point. 

Religion is not an unfortunate accident or diversion from the true path of intellectual progress, it is basic to it. Indeed, all that happens when you deny this, is that you set up another religion in the place of those which you seek to deny. So we have the idol of scientism, or its close cousins rationalism and naturalism. These have all the hallmarks of the religion that they condemn, including creeds, rituals and priesthood. They don’t stand outside the game, they are part of the game. They are not the referees and umpires of the competition between other strange, barbaric, teams, they are on the field of play themselves competing hard. Except that these “isms” (note the distinction here between science and scientism) haven’t actually produced much of worth. No, that’s harsh. They’ve occasionally produced nice words, I’ll grant them that.

The problem is that it was and is the truth of the Bible that produced a society in which science developed and flourished and in which questioning, challenging skepticism (“virtues” in Dawkins’ view) were not just tolerated but encouraged. It was centuries of Christianity which conditioned minds and developed intellectual life to the point where advance was possible beyond a certain point. While one cannot rule out the possibility that a different network of beliefs and truth might have led to the same end, it’s a brute fact of history that we came from where we were, not some other starting point.

So, maybe the eponymous Professor is mellowing. Although I suspect that even old mellow Dawkins bridled when he read the first sentence of the article, in which he was introduced as “the high priest of atheism”.