Licensed Insanity, or what?

Just capping off thoughts about the God I don’t believe in, whilst on a train I noticed a story online from the New Zealand Herald that definitely belongs in the “Don’t try this at home” tray:

A 55-year-old man who beat his daughter over the head with a lump of concrete when she refused to go to his Mormon church “does not understand what all the fuss is about,” Hastings District Court has heard.

Judge Geoff Rea said on February 22 this year Muliipu had become involved in an argument with his daughter who refused to attend church. He chased her down the street and back into the house picking up a lump of concrete along the way. He then whacked her over the head in a bedroom with the concrete causing skin on her head to split and start bleeding. They were both “covered in blood” and he kicked her in the face causing bruising...

Defence lawyer Roger Stone told the court Muliipu had been angry his daughter refused to go to church. He had been under stress before the incident. He was a “proud” man who was “disappointed” his daughter had elected not to follow his Mormon faith...

Judge Rea said a probation officer's report made “grim reading” because he “still does not understand what all the fuss is about.” He had been ejected from an anger management course because of his views and had an inability to understand “whacking someone on the head is unacceptable.” In the circumstances there was only one response and that was imprisonment. Muliipu was sentenced to 12 months in jail.

Enthusiasm and sincerity are not enough. As Jesus’ scribes and pharisees strugged to see, religious commitment is validated not in its own terms alone, but by its fruits. Put another way, human anger does not work the righteousness of God... Crazy is crazy.

The God I don’t believe in

Some pastoral disasters, along with many reactions to authority, have an interesting a whiff of Sylvia Plath’s “daddy, daddy you bastard, I’m through” about them. Our images of father figures certainly play out in our images of God, for good or ill. Like the Policeman in the sky, the Omnicompetent Fat Controller the Atheists rightly reject, “Almighty Gawd,” is a long way away from the God and Father of our lord Jesus Christ — more like Blake's nightmare vision of Nobodaddy — manipulative, angry, vengeful, controlling. Nobodaddy deals in Certainty not Clarity, Ideology not Mystery, Status not Reality, Politics not Truth, Control not Trust. He is less than half the truth. He uses words as weapons, not the creative impulse to make the world.

Cue a poem by Martin Bell:

Instruction for my Godson
(To William Redgrove)

God help me, I’m supposed to see you’re told
All about God the Father. So my beard mutters:
There are always two Fathers, one Good and one Bad.
You can always tell the Bad One, he’s always around.
Particularly first thing in the morning,
Scruffy and screaming for a razor-blade,
Wondering who to eat up for his breakfast —
He won’t eat you however much he shouts.
I’m not trying to sell you bad old Nobadaddy,
Learn to shrug off his sessions on his throne
Farting thunderbolts and belching clouds.

The Good One has a different way with Clouds; he watches.
He knows fifty-seven ways at least of looking at them,
He addresses them politely, and his looking
Can hold them still in the sky.

Martin Bell

Why ordination? Why today?

I was overjoyed to ordain three stipendiary Petertide priests for Buckinghamshire at St Mary’s Aylesbury on Sunday evening. In an age where everything seems consumer driven, functional and changing, Western churches can easily lose the script about the meaning of ordination. I gave the candidates some words from the Evangelical theologian and translator Eugene H. Peterson:

The pastors of America have metamorphosed into a company of shop-keepers, and the shops they keep are churches. They are preoccupied with shop-keepers’ concerns — how to keep the customers happy, how to lure customers away from competitors down the street, how to package the goods so that the customers will lay out more money.

Some of them are very good shopkeepers. They attract a lot of customers, pull in great sums of money, develop splendid reputations. Yet it is still shop-keeping; religious shop-keeping, to be sure, but shop-keeping all the same... “A walloping great congregation is fine, and fun,” says Martin Thornton, “but what most communities really need is a couple of saints. The tragedy is that they may well be there in embryo, waiting to be discovered, waiting for sound training, waiting to be emancipated from the cult of the mediocre.”

The biblical fact is that there are no successful churches. There are, instead, communities of sinners, gathered before God week after week in towns and villages all over the world. The Holy Spirit gathers them and does his work in them. In these communities of sinners, one of the sinners is called pastor and given a designated responsibility in the community. The pastor’s responsibility is to keep the community attentive to God.

That last sentence is the great clue to ordination. Peterson goes on to explain exactly what it is people need from ordained priests in our kind of society, and why:

We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don’t trust ourselves — our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know that we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and that there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to help us: be our pastor, a minister of word and sacrament, in the middle of this world’s life.

Minister with word and sacrament to us in all the different parts and strands of our lives — in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. This is yours: word and sacrament. One more thing: we are going to ordain you to this ministry and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community.

We know that you are launched on the same difficult belief venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know that your emotions are as fickle as ours, and that your mind can play the same tricks on you as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we are going to exact a vow from you.

We know that there are going to be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like we are believing anything and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know that there will be days and weeks and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you now. Promise, right now, that you won’t give in to what we demand of you then. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of word and sacrament so that you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.

There are a lot of other things to be done in this wrecked world and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the basic terms with which we are working, the foundational realities with which we are dealing — God, kingdom, gospel — we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives.

Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, I have to record one magical moment — the sort of thing that makes this job such complete joy at times. As we came out of the Church, just the new priests, Rosie the chaplain and I, a photographer came round. “That man,” said David Cloake with his local knowledge, “was the first on the scene of the Great Train Robbery.” “Really?” said Paul Collins, former Police Officer. “I always thought that was Ronnie Biggs.”

Dumb versus Intelligent Conservatism

I used to take the Daily Telegraph seriously. It was sometimes over to the right of the gentleman on the left, but it was good for sport and contained an extensive compendium of what was going on around the place. In a slightly contrarian way, I have always valued Conservative insights as food for thought, even, no especially, if I didn’t entirely agree with their starting points. Neil Davies’ Flat Earth News said significant things about the decline and fall of Fleet Street as a serious source of comment, and this week I noticed one story, nothing to do with religion, that really says a lot about the kinds of dogs to which the Telegraph is presently going.

Screamed the Telegraph story, and I smelt a rat. Is this our old friend “Rape is really the Victim’s fault?” I wondered. When I worked in a prison, I noticed it was the story rapists used to tell themselves, anyway. I never did believe it, myself.

Said the Leicester University press release. Notice, and ponder, the difference. Now you know how the subs at the Telegraph view this subject.

But what of the story itself? As explained by Dr Ben Goldacre, this is what happened. Sophia Shaw, MSc student, conducted some research for a dissertation. The point of making trainee scientists write such things is to learn how to turn tentative preliminary research into disciplined scientific conclusions. She hasn’t yet done this for her, as yet unfinished, dissertation. Turned into a press release, à la Flat Earth News, her work became the germ of the Telegraph story. Not surprisingly, she objects to her work being manipulated and turned into rubbish by the Telegraph for its own idiotic purposes.

Looking at hot button issues, let’s turn to the grand-daddy of them all, the gay issue in Church. I turned not to the Telegraph, but to Cranmer, for a genuinely perceptive, intelligent Conservative take:

...dear readers and communicants, homosexuality is not an issue worthy of schism: it is simply not of the order of the sort of debate that used to divide the Church: the divinity of Christ, for example, or the nature of his humanity – the great controversy at the Council of Nicea in AD325 – or even over liturgy or the transforming nature of infant baptism. The issue of homosexuality affects only a tiny minority of its adherents: it is of distinctly secondary, even peripheral, scriptural importance.

The role of the Bible in addressing the modern question of the place of the homosexual in the church is complex, not least because where it is mentioned in Scripture, the authors give little sustained consideration of the issue as it manifests in the modern world. The nature of a biblical perspective will invariably be affected by the questions posed of the Bible, by the particular hermeneutic employed, and by the unavoidable perspective which each scholar brings to his or her reading of the Bible. While some may have an instant negative reaction, others seek to understand the debate in the different and changing circumstances in which we now live. Still others, who may identify themselves as homosexual Christians, struggle to express either their feelings or their thoughts on the issue. They are themselves divided into those who acknowledge that homosexuality is a sin and therefore a call to celibacy, and those who assert that they also are made in God’s image and therefore seek to express their sexual desires in an intimate, monogamous relationship.

That God established an objective, moral order in creation, and continues a work of re-creation through Jesus, is a source and standard of all that it beautiful, good and true. If such a moral order means anything, there may be no via media on the issue of homosexuality. Accepting theological diversity is not the same as tolerating all beliefs and practices, because ultimately the Church is called to be holy because God is holy (Lev. 19:2; Mt. 5:48). We cannot as Christians just give way to ‘you believe this, I believe that’ approach to being together, or moving apart, in the Church. Nor even can we be content with the rather cheap model of ‘reconciled diversity’, meaning benign tolerance, which many Christians find an easier option to the costlier pursuit of real, ‘visible’ unity. We need to continue to struggle together for the truth, to find the right and godly balance between the call to solidarity and the recognition of difference. Presently, nowhere is this more important – especially in the Anglican Communion – than in the area of sexuality.

But Cranmer is persuaded that the whole issue may really be a non-issue because the wrong question is being asked. His Grace posited a few days ago that the modern era is sex-obsessed: we live in a consumer society, and there is little that is marketed without a glance, a wink, a flirt, a breast, or allusions to sexual intercourse, because ‘sex sells’. If one were to judge by the media (which is more frequently a mirror to society than a catalyst for change), the fascination with people’s sex lives is now more important than politics, religion, philosophy or even Mammon. Jesus may have had to address the latter as the dominating idol of his era; his judgement was that one may not serve both God and Mammon (Mt. 6:24). But he did not enter into discussion on the fiscal minutiae of cash, credit, bonds, shares, loans or interest; a macro-warning not to be obsessed with Mammon was sufficient. If one were to apply the same principle to the modern idol – ‘Eros’ – it is doubtful that Jesus would address its sub-divisions (gay, bi, straight, oral, anal, tantric); he would most likely directly challenge society’s obsessive fixation with Eros, and by so doing confront both those who prioritise issues of sexuality and those in the church who presume to judge them.

By devoting so much time and effort to the ‘gay issue’, instead of challenging society by deconstructing the question or focusing on poverty and wealth (for example), the church is simply showing itself to share the same obsessions as the world. Paul allowed no compromise on the restriction of sexual activity to heterosexual, monogamous marriage. But such an ethic seems almost utopian to our sex-besotted age, in which it appears at times that one’s identity is made to reside in one’s sexual organs and their untrammeled exercise. The issue for the Church of England is that this debate has been blown out of all proportion; it is neither a battle for the soul of the church, nor an issue worthy of schism. It is a question utterly peculiar to this era, and those on both sides of the divide – both politicians and theologians – might consider toning down the rhetoric and the apologetics, and instead preaching a message that, contrary to society’s thinking, sexual expression is neither a necessary line of inquiry in every human interaction, nor an essential component in human fulfilment.

If, as is suggested here, we do indeed live in a society which has a basically gormless, obsessional, and corrupt over-sexualised self-image, playing along with its assumptions about how these things work is less than the best we can do. Church has to position itself somewhere other than as the thrower of custard pies from the midst of the fray, whether from right to left or left to right. Rather it exists to bear witness to the Scriptures and our tradition — a deeper, richer, more ancient and meaningful wisdom. We offer it as a resource to our society, which it may care to take more seriously when it has had enough of its current obsessions and becomes seriously interested in human beings — a truer, more humane vision of what we could be than simply whizzing down the slide, as Philip Larkin used to say “like free bloody birds.”

I have also been chortling over the Archbishop’s recent run in with Facebook, who took a dim view of His Grace’s ecclesiastical title, whilst simultaneously allowing that old scoundrel Cardinal Wolsey to keep his. After a surreal correspondence with various cheery FB Sockpuppets, in the best traditions of cussed Englishness, His Grace refused to take the sleight lying down and set himself up with a new account in the magnificent name of “Ayatollah Cranmer.” Right wing, but fun. Inexplicably, he was allowed his new moniker. Draw your own concusions...

Intex: A bigger splash

Now in its third year, the splash pool is turning out to be the best £150 we ever spent on eBay. With clergy family barbecues coming on, our whole family extends a cordial welcome to its other afficionados, hoping the weather this year will be up to it. With new solar heating the water has reached temperatures of up to 32 degrees recently, four or five degress higher than it ever managed with its original 7Kw electric heating.

With school friends etc,. it gets hours of use many days. One first this year was adoption and families workers on a staff day here using it for a teambuilding game with paper boats. On a cloudier Sunday, I just wanted to try and convey the full solemnity of the naturally Anglican way our children have been interpreting the instructions printed in six languages on the side, about not jumping in:

Hoovering up Crime and Johnny Depp

Public Enemies, like every gangster movie, contains dirty rats, and requires us to be sufficiently open to a Robin Hood point of view to hope secretly that the dirty rats get away with it. We are fascinated by damaged people and evil, but faintly slimed for taking an interest at all. Actually we know the world would be an infinitely nicer place without Bonnie and Clyde, or whoever, but can’t help wondering why they did it. We identify with them as a means of reassuring ourselves we are really not at all like them. And people, especially sixty years ago, loved to see authority made an occasional monkey of, as long as we don’t get mugged on the way home. That’s where the fun and fascination would end.

For those who miss James Cagney Jr and wonder when comes such another, Public Enemies is a beacon of fun and hope. This movie is tough and occasionally nasty, repellent but not revolting. Some may not even notice Michael Mann’s decision to make the movie on HD Video rather than the stuff you take to the chemists, but I was fascinated by the result.

With HD-V there's more detail on the plate, and what I can only call a slight dark steel, bluish sheen around night scenes in the woods or down the dives of Chicago. Lighting the movie was a challenge — the best boy must have enjoyed the experience. I hazard a guess that low available light registers more readily and across a different part of the spectrum on HD-V. The whole effect, which ought to look more natural, actually looks more contrived, but approprate. It’s grittily detailed, ideal for old time dirty rats, and the dolls don't have the slightly airbrushed look Celluloid gives them. The result is rather documentary, an impression reinforced by the use of steadicams and low angles, putting us where the action is.

Johnny Depp does his rough diamond thing perfectly. Cap’n Jack Sparrow had a streak of Ronald MacDonald that was fun for about ten minutes but wore a bit thin over two hours with people over 12 years old. Depp’s Dillinger is an altogether deeper and more complex kind of psychopath. Marion Cotillard plays the faithful Moll faultlessly, providing excellent and absorbing chemistry between the principals.

Much as we know that the whole ruddy lot should be strung up, we are glad to come along for the ride, even with its repellent occasional violence, and slightly sorry when it’s over. That’s the sign of a first class gangster movie.

Placing itself in historical context, the film stays clear of O level sociology, and wisely majors on characterisation. J. Edgar Hoover is, like everyone else in this film, perfectly sketched — a scientific beureaucrat struggling to organise clearing raids into a jungle where the public representatives are as dodgy as the public enemies. Christian Bale is the sharp end of the feds’ operation. He’s sincere and occasionally frustrated to find himself as one of the good guys, unable to be as nasty as the bad guys. Amidst a sea of clean-cut but essentially expendable G-men, his Agent Purvis conveys, perfectly, a sense of being a brighter man than his profession requires him to look.

None of this is revolutionary, on a narrative level, but it’s perfectly executed and it works. If your idea of summer fun is Year One or Hannah Montana this will not float your boat. For those of us who prefer Dark Chocolate to Milky Bar, Public Enemies is absorbing, well-paced and characterful. For all the film’s occasional nastiness, it’s reassuring to know the midwest is not as flat and boring as some people say it is, and Dillinger’s appearance of fortuitous invincibility was, after all, an illusion. At a visceral level it’s always fun in a depression to see big banks treated with the contempt they deserve. As you see pretentious senior bank managers haplessly fumbling in terror to open the safe for Dillinger, people this side of the pond can think Fred the Shred. I hate to admit it, but the sight is sweet. For overseas readers, Fred is the real-life character who walked into a bank and got away with several million in a way Dillinger could only dream about, and was rewarded with a knighthood and pension on a desert island. But that’s another story, too improbable for a movie.

C of E: Historic, Sublime, Ridiculous

Three thought provoking posts floated out of the blogosphere today, which say something very imortant to me about what our Church is, and what it is called to be, and how, in different ways. First up, a bon mot from Martin Jackson, parish priest of St Cuthbert Benfieldside, Co Durham, drawn from the annual Durham clergy gathering, on the immortal pairing of nostalgia and pews. As plans were drawn up to remove some, wailing arose:

“Someone died in that pew.” To which the parish priest had replied, “Then it had better go before it kills someone else.” At which another priest leapt to her feet and shouted, “Let me have it - I can put it to good use in my parish....

This led to a beautiful and extraordinary post from Kelvin Wright, a New Zealand priest who has been going through profound personal, spiritual, and ecclesial testing. Visiting Kent after a period of great uncertainty and disillusionment, he reflects profoundly on the meaning of the Church of England in its historical and cutural contexts:

Journeying to England has been an experience of the things which set this European country apart from the rest of Europe. A different currency, system of measurement and language and a deeper rigour about immigration matters are only part of it. In the rest of Europe you see the European flag flying as often as the national flag. Not in England. Here it's Union Jacks all the way, proclaiming a sense of difference and independence which is mirrored in the relationship of the Church of England to European Catholicism. This is a different church. Quirkily different. Proudly different. Sometimes different just for the sake of being different.

The Church of England is like that most English of jokes, a curates egg. Parts of it are excellent. The new life bursting out of Holy Trinity Brompton and the deep spirituality of Walsingham could not be more different but they are held in the same organisation and both are inspiring. I have been in dozens of small churches, though, where a tiny congregation struggles with the upkeep of their much beloved ecclesiastical museum (aka the parish church) with diminishing resources of money and personnel. I have seen both the church's impotence in the face of the increasing social and economic malaise which seems to be engulfing Britain, and her small courageous, and often ingenious attempts to make a difference. But it's the history which has helped me to understand the current Anglican church.

The church here is old. I met a vicar who spoke of the damage done to his parish church by "the invasion". He meant the one which took place in 1066 but he spoke of it as if it was last week. In every place the plundering of the dissolution, the ravages of Viking longboats and Luftwaffe bombers and the vandalism of the puritans have left their mark, and the current parishioners are dealing with them still. This is a church which has been part of the fabric of the society around it, and where the demands of being a social institution and of being the body of Christ have caused constant tension. Sometimes the church has become more a part of the social fabric than the spotless Bride of Christ, and it has failed. Sometimes though, it has been a witness to the Gospel in the face of hardship and oppression and sometimes the Spirit has caused rebirth, even centuries after a seeming full stop.

Unsurprisingly, it is where there is a continuing practice of spirituality that the church has flourished. Where there has been prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, meditation, social responsibility and almsgiving the Church of England has thrived. It has also thrived where there has been disciplined, holy, fearless leadership. To see the marks of the Church's history and to hear the stories has been to encounter this deep vein of spirituality and to feel again the influence of her sainted leaders. Where this rich seam is refound, as on Iona and in Mother Julian's cell, the 21st Century church has risen, seemingly invincible, from the ashes. It is this, the great treasure of our church, that I have glimpsed, and which I know to be the only hope of my own diocese and of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

I was raised a Methodist and chose to be an Anglican. After this month in England, I choose still to be an Anglican, but I know that much of what occupies our church and seems so important in our councils is froth and bubble: the detritus rising to the surface from the ongoing struggle with our wider culture. I choose to be an Anglican, but know that the only way for my own faith and my own parish to be viable is if I try to dive deeper and find the cool streams beneath. This seeking the depths must be what forms my ministry in this, the last decade of my life as a stipended Anglican priest. Which brings me to reflect on the third thread of my own journey: that inward one of my own soul.

The simple fact is you can’t write a cheque to “The Church of England” because it doesn’t, in any simple corporate form, exist, let alone had a bank account! What does exist is a messy bundle of several thousand ancient and modern trusts and corporations in context — and this reality is what Kelvin has captured. Those of us who live within it seldom see it anything like as clearly as he does from the outside.

That’s why detractors or zealous reformers can make no sense at all of the Church of England, as long as they imagine it is some kind of simple denomination or corporate organisation like Microsoft. Should it be more of that? Reading Kelvin’s beautiful reflection, he has captured a truth that would be profoundly threatened if it ever became so. In times of uncertainty and frustration, it’s easy to be attracted by autocratic models of church, Catholic or protestant, but they bring problems of their own.

Which brings me on to a thought from Ecclesologist and priest Nathan Humphrey, from St Paul’s K Street, Washington DC. A major custard pie fight has been going on in the US and elsewhere between Optimists and Pessimists about Progress. The Custard flying from Left to right is Justice-flavoured, and the Custard flying Right to Left is Orthodoxy flavoured. Custard is fun, but you can’t live on it; and this custard is largely sterile. In these circumstances, Nathan questions the facile use of terms like “inclusivity” — Inclusive of who, and why, and how — and concludes:

More and more, I am tending to think that any church that is not robustly ideologically diverse (that is, where there are safe spaces for conservatives and liberals to engage in dialogue, discernment, and conflict without the threat of broken communion) will end up a "niche church."

Diversity for diversity's sake is not an inherent good, nor does it necessarily promote justice. Diversity for the sake of maintaining a space wherein all may patiently form relationships with each other that will be mutually converting is more likely to lead to a fuller expression of justice, truth, and evangelical mission than any "niche" where everybody thinks like me.

The Church exists to be a humble delivery system for a greater Kingdom, within which human and divine truths can meet, try to recognise themselves, and, on a good day, take flesh. The ways they do this will be as quirky, occasional, and inconsistent as the human beings involved. But if you cut the human beings out of the picture, as they are, you exclude the people — and it’s the people God loves most of all, just as they are, but loves far too much to leave them that way...

Punishment, Stability and Community

In my ordinary daily sequence of reading, prayer and meditation, I’ve been reading the really uncongenial part of the Rule of Benedict, chapters that deal with punshment in the community. To put things in historical perspective, corporal punishment was universal in the sixth century, and Benedict’s use of it minimal compared to contemporaneous sources. The Rule is not designed to absolutise the disciplinary practices of its age any more than the Parable of the Good Samaritan is designed to make people beat up Samaritans.

However, it is interesting to note who gets punished in the rule. Unlike our age, Benedict does not punish incompetence, human failing, ignorance, lack of spiritual intensity, failure, or saying the wrong thing openly. The rule does punish subversive grumbling, and sabotage of the community life. He expects dissent within the community, indeed encourages it as an expression of repect, but takes its toxic forms very seriously. A stable community cannot grow without basic respect, humility and realism all round. Community is not a syrupy and largely meaningless synonym for “everybody”, but a testing ground for character and motives.

So farewell then, if we want to walk in the way of Benedict, to email firestorms, hypocritical finger wagging, control by threats and manipulation, angry cynicism, and ego driven community sabotage. These need to be exposed for what they are, not tarted up with Conservative, or for that matter Radical suspenders. The community needs to be honest about what is really going on. Nobody gets punished for making bad tea, but however passionately they feel they are right, if they start slipping arsenic into it, three strikes and they’re out (another interesting Benedictine principle)