Ok, so I’ve had a few days in Oman with tom and his parents, which was amazing. We went to the top section, which is actually separated from the rest of Oman by a bit of the UAE and went to a hotel in the mountains. We went on a day’s trip on a Dow, a fishing/transporting people boat around a local type of fjord. We saw dolphins, swam in nice water (apart form the tiny weenie little jellyfish which prickled you a bit) and saw these ridiculously small villages (10 houses and sometimes a population on 25, in the capital of that area!) which you can’t get to apart form by boat. Crazy people. Anyway, it was very restful and let me see what a wonderfully creative God we have. I think some would find the landscape of grey and brown mountains slightly boring and there was no lush forest to walk through or paths to stroll up, but the majesty and strength you could see in the was phenomenal. I love this sort of landscape. It seems so old for some reason!
I had a longer think about what I wrote previously and tom and I chatted about it some more. We discussed how fundamentally although you say that you hold other denominations as equal, when they say something which makes you bristle, it is usually because you think they’re wrong. This must therefore mean that you think they are wrong and you are right, therefore making them unequal at a deep fundamental basic level of your consciousness. We then talked about the notion of needing to be right about things – an interesting human characteristic. It made me think about how different theologies might be right for different times and different places? Liberation theology works a bit like this I think. It makes me feel quite humbled in my views of Christianity around the world and challenges me about the in-built presumptions, beliefs, prejudices and biases I have. Can it be as equally right for me to believe one thing about Christianity as being the most important, non-negotiable and for someone across the other side of the world to believe something totally different, yet still believe in the same God. It makes me wonder what we can learn from other parts of the Christian faith that we ignore – we are all in the same stew after all.
We have a new digital camera – a fuji 440, which is brilliant. Once we manage to get some software on a computer somewhere we can download them and you can see some of where we were.
Ps Jacqui – the fish stank, there was no way you were going to get it anywhere near my mouth!