The Ten Commandments Show

UK Channel 4’s original mission was be innovative, naughty, alternative and provocative. In a week General Synod probes the state of religious broadcasting in Britain, I was interested to catch the latest in C4’s new series on The Bible: A history — Conservative MP and RC convert Ann Widdecombe exploring the Ten Commandments. I speculate that this series was commissioned by Aaqil Ahmed before he left Channel 4 to become head of Religion and Ethics and TV Commissioning Editor at the BBC. My first impression, drawn from the figures for hours output was that the BBC had reduced the quanity of its output on the sly — oh dear — but what about the quality?

The series isn’t quite what it says on the tin, but it’s a worthy concept. It gives a 40 minute platform to various people left right and centre, to pick a Biblical theme and trace it from its origins to a question for contemporary society. Novelist Howard Jacobsen did Creation, seeking to find a way between reigious and secularist fundamentalism. War Correspondent Rageh Omar did Abraham as a source of division or peace in the Middle East. Still to come is writer Bettany Hughes on Women in the Bible.

It used to be said that a well known make of Italian automobile was built by robots and driven by morons. Is UK religious broadcasting built by Secularists, and driven by Dumb-down Celebs? I poured myself a Ricard, opened a bag of pistachios, and settled down on the couch to find out.

Within its chosen genre, the show blended personal and informative elements very well. It gave its presenter a fair platform to make her points. I’m not an Ann Widdecombe fan in principle, but if you could get over her rather reedy voice, her content seemed sincere, candid and forthright. She had grown up with the ten commandments, and after examining their origins and uses in Judaism and Christianity, she went on to confront militant atheists, liberal scholars and fashionistas with their shortcomings measured against the standards of Torah.

There were holes and howlers. One why-oh-why?” comment on divorce rates rather obscured the fact that UK divorce rates are currently the lowest they have been in 35 years. She described Puritans as “a Protestant Sect” and ventured the suggestion that Henry VIII founded a new Church — a solecism for which His Royal Grubbiness would surely have beheaded a woman in 1545. More serously, she didn’t engage at all with source theory about the books of Moses in the texts themselves, preferring to see it as a liberal aberration, but one she was wiling to tolerate.

Nothing’s perfect, then. But this show was well above average telly, watchable, provocative and intelligent. Ann Widdecombe’s great exemplar of Puritan social action inspired by the ten commandments, the Revd John White of Dorchester, was absolutely on the money. She hinted at, but didn’t quite explain, an interesting theory that strong confident societies have to learn to control their desires to develop strength and confidence. I think I buy that.

Unfortunately the atheists on the show seemed high on testosterone from a public disputation and rather let themselves down. Christopher Hitchens running away through a door stopping his ears was an interesting sight. I’d like her to have taken that segment of the show deeper, to examine how the critique offered of the Church was actually one that rather assumed Judaeo-Christian values based on the ten commandments.

But these are minor reservations. This was a fine and informative show, which critiqued the erection of personal freewheeling into the only absolute value left, and was well presented and entertaining. Kudos, then, and Round 1 of the Great Broadcasting Debate to Ann Widdecombe and Aaqil Ahmed. If I can get the Channel 4 on demand site in India (off on a schools development visit), I’d certainly like to see the others. If this series indicates the kind of stuff we’re in for from the BBC, I think I could live with that, all things considered.

Human Rights Relativity

In a week which has seen all kinds of positive and negative comment about bishops, the Pope and Human Rights legislation stumbling through the House of Lords just now, I think we need to stand back and consider what human rights are and what they aren’t.

Civilised people need to have some way of measuring standards of behaviour that translates across culture from one context to another, indicating possible abuse. Clear Human Rights legislation is a good way for civil society to express some shared values, and measure where behaviour falls short. Pulling the whole ragbag of legislation from the past forty years together into a coherent whole is obviously a Good Thing Too. So far, so good.

But which Human Rights? How? More partcularly, how do you balance them? Human Rights are usually framed in terms of a Big Social Good, and this makes them seem like absolutes, which of course they can never really be.

Translating high ideals into the down and dirty world of Monday morning, where stuff happens, is an inexact science.

All Human Rights however idealistically framed, always need to be qualified, both by the constraints of reality, and other human rights. This is the nature of freedom arguments — my freedom to express who I am by practising my Euphonium is qualified by your right to a good night’s sleep. However excellent each notional right may be in the abstract, either, pushed to its logical extreme in the real world would cancel out the other.

So to current concerns. Equality and Diversity are both really good things, in the abstract. That means Discrimination and Homogenization are really bad things, in the abstract. Now try and apply that lot, and make laws to universalise the deal, and you will need to make a few cute calls. Doesn't mean it shouldn’t be done, just that it’ll be messy. Discussion along the way to deciding how to word equality legislation needs to be robust and realistic, not knee-jerk and generalised.

Every position has to be proofed against some other positive right, or the result will almost certainly be abusive.

That being the case slanging matches about whether Human Rights are a Good Thing or a Bad Thing are futile and childish. The Pope, left wing right wing, whatever, anyone has as much right as anyone else to express a serious point of view about the way the balance between Equality and Liberty looks as though it’s being struck in the UK.

The liberty of the individual to believe or not as they judge right, like the liberty of the individual to be treated fairly, are both precious things that can only be preserved if we are willing to give serous attention to working out how they relate to each other. One lot may have to swallow the uncongenial truth that the extent to which any of its people accepts any organisation’s dogma is ultimately voluntary not legally enforceable, and the other the equally uncongenial truth that illiberal liberalism is an Oxymoron.

Riddles of the Soul

Reflecting on the shared experience of six friends’ ministries this past year, I marvel how the balance works between belief (that is rational) and living experience of God (that often just grabs people unexpectedly from behind). Perhaps the best ways of relating both these dimensions of faith to each other and us are paradox and image. Offering a poem a day from this retreat/review at Alton, I suggest the paradoxes of a fascinating poem by New Zealand poet M. K. Joseph (1914-1981), and the great icon of SS Mary, John and Benedict in the Church here, which looked especially loaded and extraordinary surrounded by leftover candles from Candlemas on Tuesday.

A Riddle of the Soul

I cannot give
Unless I have
I cannot have
Unless I save
Unless I have
I cannot save
Unless I give
I cannot have.

Unless I live
I cannot be
Unless I am
I cannot seem
I cannot be
Unless I seem
I cannot live
Unless I am.

I cannot be
Unless I give
I cannot have
Unless I die
Unless I grieve
I cannot love
Unless I die
I cannot live

The necessity of Incarnation

Reflecting with the usual five friends on the last year’s joys, follies, grunts and frustrations, ecstatic and ordinary, long term trends emerge. We’ve been doing this together in this monastery at this time of year for almost thirty years, and someone noticed the way in which our conversation is less entirely than it was driven by ideals and the impossibility of bringing them to pass. We seem to have developed far greater acceptance of human realities over the past ten years or so. Rationalising this indicates that ideals, even good ones, need to take flesh or they don’t mean a thing. Cue D. H. Lawrence:

Demiurge

They say that reality exists only in the spirit
that corporeal existence is a kind of death
that pure being is bodiless
that the idea of the form precedes the idea substantial.

But what nonsense it is!
as if any Mind could have imagined a lobster
dozing in the under-deeps, then reaching out a savage and iron claw!

Even the mind of God can only imagine
those things that have become themselves:
bodies and presences, here and now, creatures with a foothold in creation
even if it is only a lobster on tiptoe.

Religion knows better than philosophy.
Religion knows that Jesus was never Jesus
till he was born from a womb, and ate soup and bread
and grew up, and became, in the wonder of creation, Jesus,
with a body and with needs, and a lovely spirit.

Affirmative prayer, affirmative action?

On my cell group retreat and annual review, I came across this intriguing, slightly disturbing, playful poem, by an American poet I had not heard of before, Kaylin Haught:

God says Yes to Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don’t paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

Not the whole story, of course... but I wonder what we make of the thought. There is a principle of “all God’s promises being yes and amen” that is not always central to the way we feel about God. Perhaps the point is in the relational dialogue between the poet and God, not the absolute rightness or wrongness of nail polish etc.?

A question to ponder as we in the monsastery review the year and look forward, anyway?

Anonymous Tosh?

Every now and then an envelope arrives like this one from Slough yesterday. I tear it open expectantly, and the first thing I look for is the address at the top and the name at the bottom...

Oh dear! I am disappointed because, to put it as kindly as I can, although the writer has rather trenchant views about a Vicar in Bucks, s/he seems to have forgotten to give a name or address.

I used actually to read letters like this, but these days I don’t. Out the back of the Chaplain’s office lives a good and faithful servant called Erik the Shred. These days I invariably take letters which people have forgotten to put their names or addresses on out to Erik. He shreds them so that they can be turned into compost and Lucy uses that to grow delicious runner beans. We find that is a life-giving use for anonymous letters.

This may seem like a slightly extreme thing to do. After all, I’m a nosy person and would love to know what everyone has to say, surely. The trouble is I can’t not know what I do know, even if it’s wrong, if you get my drift.

I believe I owe my colleagues a basic loyalty where if someone was ashamed to put their name to their letter, that’s the end of the matter.

I remember people saying to me when I was a parish priest “Rector I shouldn’t be telling you this.” The simple answer, which accords with my Scots Presbyterian genes, is “well don’t, then.” Bitterness, slander, gossip, words that say “Raca” arising from thoughts that breach the ninth commandment, grow from such roots. best strangle them at birth.

It may be that the letter I never read was the sort of letter that made the writer feel better to have written, but should, in fact, never be read in its original form. There are letters like that. I hope this is one of them. It may be that they really want to draw to my attention to something with words for which that they can take responsibility, in which case I’d be delighted to hear from them. It’ll get here even quicker with the correct postcode (“9BG” not “9BD”)

Erik is a hungry lad. He has only had two such snacks in the past five years, which, given the amount of mail we get, is high testimony to the basic character and decency of people out there. I wonder if my “straight to the shredder unread” policy is a bit hard-nosed, but suspect it’s the correct thing to do... surely?

Holocaust Memorial Day in MK

A great honour to say a few words with others at this year’s MK City Holocaust Memorial Day celebration at Christ the Cornerstone. We were opening an exhibition of art principally by two artists, Edna Eguchi Read and Alicia Melamed Adams.

Edna’s work explored the legacy of war, including Afghanistan, as someone of partly Japanese ancestry. She encodes the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not as anger, but an errily ash-covered general and domestic world of stuff. Ordinary things are reduced to a kind of useless sterility, where all that is left is form, bereft of function. She does something similar in this exhibition with passport-sized images of troops killed in Afghanistan, flattened as a collage onto a wall. Drat! I didn’t take a picture... you’ll just have to go and catch the exhibition if you can. I had seen the same thing on Sunday at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre — a collage of ordinary people’s photographs greets you as you enter the historical displays area.

During the evening Arran Hartley and Georgia Bateman, presented a moving a/v collage reflecting on their school visit to Auschwitz. It took a fresh, powerful view. They had been especially shocked and moved by the piles of stuff, shoes, hair, artifical limbs. Alicia’s work as an artist who survived the holocaust puts faces to the story. This is very important because we are about the last generation to have the privilege of talking with and learning from holocaust survivors. All our grandhildren will have are the faces in art, or the Holocaust may be reduced to a mere topic in history, not an exposure of our own tragic capacity for evil.

Alicia’s work is fundamentally a statement of hope in the face of the unspeakable. She pulls no punches. Consider this picture, The Parting, and commentary:

My parents and I and a few relatives who had survived worked for a German, Victor Kremin, who set us up in a small camp where we collected iron and rags. On 24th July 1943 we were surrounded by Gestapo and taken to the local prison. It was their custom to keep people for three days without food until they were weak and then to load them onto lorries and shoot them outside Drohobycz in Bronica Woods. When we were brought into the prison I saw Poldek Weiss who was 17. We had met twice before in a friend’s house. His father was a tailor for the Gestapo. His father made a suit for the head of the Gestapo and the son was released from prison. He begged his father to intervene on my behalf. I was 14 at the time. His father made another suit and I was let out on the third day as Poldek’s wife. My whole family were shot the next day. This picture is called The Parting. It shows me parting from my family in prison.

Ultimately, though, what makes Alicia’s work so extraordinary is her capacity for hope and joy that was not entirely rubbed out. Her final painting was entitled Going up soon, but where? in which, Julia Weiner says:

the artist thinks about her own death. After the horrors of her childhood, death appears to offer little horror to Alicia, and this light-filled work with its radiant pink backround contrasts to the earlier works about death. There, she used dark colours and menacing shapes to evoke death by violence and at the hands of others. When death comes naturally it’s not to be feared.

Judging Clergy misconduct

An HR day out in London training for the implementation of Common Tenure, and an Ecclesiastical Law Society meeting at Lincoln’s Inn, which included a characteristically wise, just and humane presentation by Sir John Mummery, Lord Justice of Appeal, President of the Council of Inns of Court and Chair of Tribunals appointed under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003. Sir John came to this work with considerable experience of appeals and disciplinary procedures in the legal profession having in the 1990’s headed various tribunals relating to employment appeals, the security services and investigatory powers.

CDM 2003 came into force in 2006, replacing a costly and obscure hotch-potch that had evolved down the years for complaints about the clergy in matters other than worship or doctrine. Some 22,000 people are subject to it. The 2009 report is due out soon, but in 2008 there were 69 formal complaints about their behaviour, 65% of them from ordinary members of the public rather than archdeacons or churchwardens. 3 were referred to tribunal, all of them resulting in a finding of guilt.

CDM is the only mechanism for dealing with clergy professional misconduct or abuse of trust and office, and anyone can access it by simply downloading the forms from the internet, complete with guidance notes (here). Transparency and fairness are paramount, though not everyone involved will always agree they have been served perfectly because, frankly, they aren’t aways. All legal procedures need to be subject to continuous vigilance and improvement to serve justice the way they are designed to. The system doesn’t deliver in and of itself. People operating the system try to.

CDM is emphatically NOT:

• for questions of doctrine or ceremony, which are provided for in other ways more appropriate to the complexity of the subject and the ancient liberties of the clergy
  
  
• a mechanism for grumpy people or bullies to attack clergy they don’t like. There are safeguards and rules of evidence for everyone built into it to prevent not only abuse of office by clergy but also abuse of the legal system by compainants. If the people soncerned agree to be reconciled the system encourages this, but if they require their day in court, this is where they get it. They have the right to decide.
  
  
• what HR people call a capabiity procedure — a way of getting individual clergy to raise their games. Among other places, capability’s being worked out in the new terms and conditions of service guidelines going to General Synod next month, not CDM.
  
  
• a mechanism for preventing pastoral breakdown. Indeed if there has been a breakdown of relationships going to court usually just winds things up and raises the stakes. Everyone can come out of it more cross than they went in. This is coercive and disciplinary, not a substitute for honest communication and relational gitches. Jesus taught the wisdom of dealing with relationahl matters directly and honestly, and being sparing about court proceedings.
  
  
• a way of preventing anyone (especially bishops) dong anything. There are good procedural reasons why in the early stages, if there is possibility of it being used, bishops need to protect complainants, complainees, and themselves by not weighing in and fouling the procedures up, but especially if no finding of guilt is made (as in the majority of cases) that emphatically does not mean there is nothing to be done — the so-called “Black Hole problem.” You can do all sorts of things with people apart from sacking them and depriving them of their homes, indeed in the vast majority of cases something else will probably turn out in the end to be the right thing to do.
  
  
• The question of parallel proceedings needs to be worked out carefully case by case, but CDM is not in any way a substitute for criminal or civil proceedings, or a gratuitous supplement to them in order to make them especially nasty for members of the clergy.
  

CDM Is a way of punshing serious misconduct, that is specific provable blameworthy behaviour that would lose your your job in any other line of work. Like all legal decisions, it is a matter of fact and degree. The system also aims to prevent repeat occurrences, and deter others.

Therefore actions for changing service times, parking in a disabled bay, sunbathing in your back garden (whence the complainant had to stand on tiptoe to see you), and “looking at someone in a funny way” (all of which have been atempted) are unlikely to succeed. Complaints about inappropriate relationships, improper management of Church funds, and anything damaging the welfare of a minor, if proved, are far more likely to result in findings.

Like any legal system it is and should be, as it seems to be, wide open to learning about its own shortcomings, constantly seeking to improve its capacity to deliver justice. The attitude is “Every day I learn something I didn’t know before and am often surprised I didn’t know before.” It’s prosection not persecution. It’s designed to help everyone as much as legal proceedings can help everyone (which is not always and everywhere possible). I was encouraged to find that it is served, with great humility and realism, by one of the finest and most experienced legal practitioners in the country. That’s good news for everyone.