Caution: Men at Work

A great year at Alton. Common themes and contrasts arise from six very different ministries, pooled openly in a context of deep knowledge, mutual liking and great respect. Experience is captured, Perspectives shift, new angles emerge. Why don’t everyone do this?

This year’s Discursive Reflection has been particularly well aided and abetted by its location — the Best Pub in the World, the Sun at Bentworth. Mary keeps good beer and runs a fine house of Discursive Reflection. (Obscure Note to self: Pickled Partridge especially good starter)

Australia, of course, being down under, poses particular challenges for discursive reflection, as witness this gem from less-well-known-than-he ought-to-be-in-England comic Shaun Micallef:

Riding the Tiger, Climbing the Ladder

Lots of Egos rubbing up against each other usually find ways to screw each other up. Churches, families and whole societies produce fruity horror stories about egomania and its products, from personal resentments to mad dictators. However, God gave us ego for a purpose. It feeds determination, creativity and resilience, even self-respect. Someone who really did not care about any of that would be less than themselves, and do very little creative for any community.

Wise as ever, Benedict sees the dangers and suggests real ways out. He doesn't simply say "Ego Bad" and squash people ("There is no I in Team"). One of the longest chapters in the rule (7) says how to grow humility. Benedict likens the struggle with Ego to Jacob's ladder — the place of work heaven and earth are joined. It begins by the simple awareness that we are never alone:

"Let each take account for ourself that we are noticed and observed at all times by God from heaven — our deeds in every time or place lie open to the divine seeing, and every time are reported by angels..."

From this interesting starting point, Benedict develops a twelve step recovery process (where have we heard of that before?) for recovering the person as they could be from the wreckage of our own egos run wild.

Note: Next time I get a silent retreat (Saint Wandrille in November?) go study RB7. Question: What creative contribution does Ego make to the building of community? How is it put to good work, and how allowed to run wild?

Happy Families?

The Gospel at Mass this morning was from St Luke 8:19-21:

Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, “Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you.” But he said to them, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.

Is our regular concept of “family” too narrow for the gospel? These words challenge many assumptions of anyone who has invested heavily in the concept of the 2·4 kids nuclear family as an ideal. Investing in anything as an ideal can make it harder to enjoy it as a reality, too. The "family” with all its possibilities for heaven or hell is no less in need of redemption than any other human community.

It's interesting to encounter Luke 8 whilst staying away from my family. It's more than interesting to hear them in a religious community, whose very setup cuts across the saccharine assumptions of the Mothercare catalogue. What scope is there for Christian covenanted community living apart from the nuclear family?

The way we relate to other people is a major expression, like it or not, of how we relate to God. If we approach all life as alternative, nobody can be taken for granted, every relationship is a gift, a field to be sown, tended and harvested if it is to be fruitful. Early Christians transformed the world by thinking different and living different, not by complaining about everybody else's morals.

Six Go Mad in Hampshire

I'm on the blink a bit (blogwise) at Alton Abbey for four days' annual review/retreat. Once described by Ruth Gledhill as "the best kept secret in the Church of England" the Community of Our Lady and St John is a brilliant place for a thorough annual MOT (UK compulsory auto checkup). I go to Alton every year with the same group of six. We rented a cottage in 1980 and 1981. By 1982 we discovered it was easier to go somewhere others did the shopping. Alton had a gatehouse, which we used to take over. About 10 years ago everything moved into the house. This is our 26th year here, because in 2000 we went to Lindisfarne instead - Alton were doing up the building.

We've developed a regular routine. We begin with the community mass. We have three 4/5 hour major sessions in the week, about the past year personally, the past year in ministry, and how the future looks, respectively. Afternoons are spent out or exploring resources and ideas from the year. The evening is spent in, er, discursive reflection (aka The Sun at Bentowrth)

We've found it pays to give this process quality time, to stick with a group you trust, who have heard it all before, and really know you. It helps massively to set the whole thing in the context of a religious community who understand unpretentious prayer and generous hospitality.

Et voilà! After 28 years, any group of old gits does get a bit like some grisly Alan Alda midlife crisis movie, but we've been through a lot together. This doesn't involve dropping out, like a silent retreat, but internet connections are decidedly ropey/ precarious, so expect extremely intermittent blog supply until Friday. Then Revelations?

Why? Wherefore?

There is something in us all that isn’t quite civilised — a gap between what we are and the basic requirements of humanity. Before 1945 it was possible, convenient even, to pretend that it didn’t matter, or that progress and education and secular wisdom would render this gap obsolete. In 1945 there were many who thought nothing so bad could ever happen again, as long as the memory was kept alive. Since 1945 the gap, a radical expression of what theologians call the Fall, has opened wide again, all over the world. Where does this leave us? How aware of the roots of it within ourselves?

Shoah is the first of a sequence of seven memorial poems called Menorah by Don Barnard written in 2005.

Shoah

In the beginning was the Word and the word was Jew.
And the word said Other, the word said Them. Not Me, not You.

Then the ploughing of the minds and the sowing of the lies
and the lies said Rapists and the lies said Thieves
and the lies said Evil in disguise.
And the Word was Demonise.

Then the growing of the Weeds. And the Weeds were Greed.
And the Weeds were Spite and the Weeds were Schadenfreude
and folk passed by on the other side.
And the Word was Bleed.

Then the writing of the Laws.
And the Laws said Jews
are not as other men.
No loving of your neighbour.
No Jews as citizens.
And the Word was Cleanse.

Then the packing into trucks and the tracks led east.
People carried like beasts and harried like beasts
and herded like beasts into pens.
And the Word was Untermensch.

Then the Words became a sentence and it sent them to their death
by burdening the strong, who earned another breath
before they died,
and murdering the rest, who simply died.
And the Word was Genocide.

Elephants and Trains

Having seen one or two rather ludicrous publishing enterprises down at the newsagents today, this one caught my eye:

More from the marvelous Peter Serafinowicz

The Power of Love

Today’s the Conversion of St Paul — a man knocked off his horse and blinded by the power of Grace. Some think Paul was a killjoy who turned the Church from a genial hippiefest into a hardball institution. That’s Tosh. It’s obvious from Paul’s letters to the communities he fathered that he was painfully aware of the limitations of institutional life and moralism. Paul says real faith is the end of religion and law, even good religion and law. In Christ God accomplishes personally something that religion and law, human processes, never could. This sets you free to live before God in a new state of radical liberation and joy. This process shows up not as conformity, but personal transformation. People who latch onto measurable religious norms and try to enforce them, however good their intentions, have missed the point and neuter real faith:

Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh—even though I, too, have reason for confidence in the flesh.

If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.

Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ. More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on towards the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

It’s a radical subversive message. Religion that is based on externals (“forcing others to make fair showing in the flesh” in Paulspeak), that works from the outside in, is not enough. It needs redeeming as much as any other human activity. God is bigger than all that, and to be fully alive we need Christ and the Spirit who are the source of true life and freedom.

Deep Doo-Doo under the Linden Tree

Bad News from the Virtual City. Second Life Northern Rock lookalike Ginko Financial has gone belly-up, blowing a $2m black hole in the Virtual Economy. It was unregulated, and paid 60% interest on its assets over its three year existence. It’s now got plenty of nuttin.’ Like it always had.

Following the ban on gambling in Second Life we began experiencing a wave of withdrawals from Ginko Financial. This led the funds we keep in reserve for day to day use to be exhausted, which evolved into a full blown panic depleting even our last line of cash reserves and resulting in the current situation, with about L$50,000,000 queued up for withdrawal. This situation is unsustainable, as we would be forced to sell off our assets at a significant discount in order to honor such withdrawals, thus severely harming Ginko Financial's long term prospects and it's ability to ultimately honor all of it's obligations to accountholders.

Of course in real life going bust does rather more than harm your long term prospects. “If it looks too good to be true it probably is” warns Linden Labs. Where virtual and actual circles overlap, $2m of Linden dollars = $750K real spondulicks. Reader beware. Some punters have lost $10,000 only too real dollars riding this particular porcelain horse. Freedom from reality has its limits.

But the Power of Dreams cannot be destroyed. What better to follow a hare-brained fantasy crash than a hare-brained fantasy rescue package?

After considerable thought, we have concluded that the only way forward from this is to convert, compulsorily, all customer deposits into a tradeable debt security called Ginko Perpetual Bonds. These bonds, listed on the World Stock Exchange (www.wselive.com), will allow Ginko Financial to recover from recent events by removing all pressure from our cash reserves while providing accountholders with a way to cash out on an open market.

Hacked off 3-d virtual investors, just like real world traders, now have two real alternatives — either move on to Third Life, or turn the bloody computer off and go back to real life. Thus Art mirrors life, as the world’s stock markets and debts hubble bubble, toil and trouble, Brown bails out the Northern Crock, and Bush begs oil off the Saudis. Anyone for Biblical Economics? Seriously?

Ten Rules for cooking up a Gay Schism

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Are we wobbling off piste? Reporting the same Lambeth Conference launch, Riazat Butt in the Guardian concludes “Gay Climate of controversy clouds Anglican gathering” whilst, probably more accurately, Ruth Gledhill of the Times reports “Sexuality will barely be on the Lambeth Conference agenda.” The blue train is wobbling on the tracks, friends. Entirely as an exercise in communications studies (and not theology, you understand) may I humbly propose a facetious little something to help keep this thing rolling, along the lines of Fr Ronald Knox's Ten Rules for Writing Detective Fiction?

1. Nobody must ever win outright. Every complexity must be reduced to two simple contradictory positions, or the readers lose interest. Whoever heard of a boxing ring with a blue corner, a red corner, a green corner and a pink corner? Forget it. No question raised in the dispute may ever have a particular answer, and every particular answer must always be twisted to produce a further generalised question.

2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3. The Archbishop of Canterbury must always be brought as directly as possible into everything. His Grace is always right in principle, but wrong in practice.

4. Wrap up your proposed next step in each particular event you report, and you can sustain interest. As in Volleyball, drop the ball and the game's over.

5. Reference can only be had to a very limited number of real Anglicans, or the public will become confused and lose the plot. In particular it is necessary to cover up the almost complete lack of manic anxiety about this subject in 99·99% of Anglican parish churches in the world, and confine yourself as much as possible to internationally rated single issue fanatics. You've got their numbers, and they are very talkative.

6. Litigious Yanks, or, even better, Litigious Southerners, bring plenty anger to the plot, but their actual legal system is complex, finely balanced and basically fair. American litigation is even more boring than American football. Therefore the rule when reporting US courts is quick in, quick out. Sound-bite the result, but for Pete's sake, don’t get bogged down in the contents or process.

7. Only Africans with American PhD's can be allowed to appear in the story. No Indians, thank you. Forget Canada. Remember Voltaire? Even with global warming, it's still only miles of snow.

8. The Bible is a powerful iconic juju, but you mustn't ever open it, or people will tumble to the simple fact that there is next to nothing directly about “gays” in it — not surprising since the word was first used this way in 1934 by Cary Grant. “Homosexual” dates from 1892. 4 out of 31,240 verses makes Jack a dull boy. Again, keep it general, and keep it moving. It’s OK. Most of the punters never read the Bible anyway.

9. Ecclesiology is a very long word. Don't go there, except for the anoraks on your blog. You have to pretend that the Church of England is a reduced form of the Roman Church at all times, because in fact autocephalous churches are structurally incapable of having schisms in the Roman sense. If that got out the game would be up. Dust over the line between “province” and “diocese” at all times — like Iran and Iraq. For most of the public, what the hell's the difference anyway?

10. The Reporter must not, themselves, be homosexual. Or if they are they must pretend not to be. As far as in you lies, keep everyone talking about somebody else at all times.

The Morning After: Indaba or Prozac?

Yesterday was officially the most depressing day of the year. Dr Cliff Arnalls of Cardiff University has worked out exactly how depressing yesterday was and why:

The formula for the day of misery reads 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.

Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January's pay day - and T is the time since Christmas. Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.

Help! I need somebody. Help! Not just anybody... The Royal College of GP’s suggests

Exercise and bibliotherapy - reading a number of books to allow people to understand their own symptoms and how to control them.

Hot Dog! Another thing you can do to try and cheer yourself up is study the programme for the Lambeth Conference, launched yesterday, the most Depressing Day of the Year (so far?).

The Conference this year has two key points of focus: strengthening the sense of a shared Anglican identity among the bishops from around the world, and helping to equip bishops for the role they increasingly have as leaders in mission, involved in a whole variety of ways in helping the Church grow. Because none of this would happen without a deeper commitment to prayer and studying the Bible, this year’s Conference will begin with a couple of days’ retreat, in which we can spend time together in quiet and begin to direct our minds towards the central issues of faith. And as in previous Conferences, every day will begin with worship and Bible study in small groups.

We’ve been exceptionally lucky in the gifts and the vision of the Design Group for this year’s Conference. Drawn from a wide range of backgrounds, they have come together in a remarkable way to create not only a programme of events – about which we can speak in more detail later – but a whole way of doing business. In contrast to previous Conferences, we have planned a larger number of medium-sized groups instead of larger issue-focused groups, so that more people can have a say in the discussion. We’ve called these ‘indaba’ groups, picking up an African word for meetings where significant questions are worked through in a community.

“Indaba” is Zulu/ Xhosa thing — the IzinDuna come together to do mutual business in a way which enables each to be heard, and wisdom to emerge from the group. It’s rather like a monastic chapter. It’s radically different from either Institutionalism, where people pretend to agree to save public face, Imperialism, where Billy the Bully rules OK, or Fascism, where you leave your brain at the door and the Führer tells you what to do because he’s always right.

Indaba is a noble ideal. It’s how the early Churches worked, often amidst bitter controversy, as every Patristics student is amazed to discover. Then, slowly, between the fourth and eleventh centuries, like formaldehyde, institutionalism and Roman imperialism seeped in. The reformation was a reaction to all that. Indaba is a gloriously messy concept. It annoys Anal Retentives, Bullies and Fascists, as well as lazy journos who can only understand punchups.

It’s counterintuitive, but indaba, if you stick with it, raises spirits and offers hope to the world.

Sinking the Flying Dustman

Acting on a tip-off from Charles Overton, Vicar of Chalfont St Peter, I actually bought a paper yesterday — the Sunday Times — mostly for the free DVD of the complete Captain Pugwash inside. As well as taking me back down memory lane, this turned out to be more informative and true to the real world than the rest of the paper. That's the Captain (Left), whose picture has somehow got mixed up with that Captain of Industry and fellow former sailor and broad tie enthusiast, the late great Sir John Harvey-Jones (Right).

The disk conclusively disproves those smutty rumours — there never was a Master Bate, Roger the Cabin Boy, or Able Seaman Staines. Pirate Willy however, came from Wigan, and the show spawned a mysteriously raunchy and operatic Donna Bonanza.

I wonder if this is where Mrs Thatcher got the whole Free Enterprise thing from. This glorious episode, for example, recalls an early incident in which the captain, or is it Sir John Harvey Jones, discovers how organisations and competitiveness really work:

Strangers on a Train

Not quite Babette’s Feast. On my way out for Eucharistic feasting in Chalfont St Peter where the Lord sets up his table for his people in the midst of those that trouble them, the Grand-daddy of all YouTube japes on the real Tube, from a group of North London Art Students. Is this how you do Underground Church?

h/t +Stephen Cotterell

Spineless Jobsworths 1: Humans 0

Let me tell you a story. I served 10 happy years in an urban parish that was, partly, the South’s answer to Coronation Street. Curly and Gwennie had a shop in Coldicutt Street at the end of King’s Road. Gwennie was a huge matriarchal character. At her funeral we needed two hearses and a lorry for the flowers alone. There was a slightly simple gentleman called Edwards. He used to live out on the allotments, largely under tarpaulins, take oil from the garages and burn it off. He was a slight man who rarely wore a shirt and everyone, not very politically correctly, called him Ghandi Edwards. Gwennie used to slip him the odd pie but one Christmas she found him wheezing all over the palce. Being the lady she was, she set off to find a doctor. Up the hill, behind a brass plate, lived a Harley Street specialist who, understandably, had other things to do on Christmas Eve. He explained this to Gwennie, and that the NHS system required Mr Edwards to consult his own doctor. She replied, unforgettably, “Look, I've got a sick man here. He hasn’t got a bloody doctor. I thought you were supposed to be a bloody doctor.” In those earlier and kinder times, Mr Edwards’ pleurisy was treated, and he recovered. Human Decency One: Jobsworth Nil.

BBC R4 (From our own Correspondent) carries a profoundly disturbing story by Will Ross about Ama Sumani. She’s a widow who came to the UK from Ghana as a student, flunked her exams, got a job so as not to sponge off everyone else, got a very nasty cancer. She was being treated in a Cardiff hospital. Her Visa having run out, the stamp on her passport as well as the credit card you understand, she was refused continuing treatment, deported, and dumped back, dying, on the streets of Accra, hundreds of miles from “home”. Paul Vallely asks where the Churches were. The Western Mail says, but comment by Archbishop Barry Morgan and others seems to have fallen on deaf political ears.
Some MP’s and officials are prepared to defend this decision. Apparently subhuman abusive behaviour is OK with them, as long as it's done by the book and to someone weaker than them to whom they don’t have to be politically beholden.
The Doctors are not so easily deceived. The Lancet’s response is clear:

To stop treating patients in the knowledge that they are being sent home to die is an unacceptable breach of the duties of any health professional. The UK has committed an atrocious barbarism. It is time for doctors' leaders to say so—forcefully and uncompromisingly.

Phew! The hippocratic oath does still apply then, however inconvenient that may be for gutless amoral bureaucrats and politicians.

1. Yesterday morning at Morning Prayer we read Cain’s gutless amoral question — “am I my brother’s keeper?” In Genesis 42, Reuben fears God’s judgment because he ignored his brother’s cries for mercy. No fudge there. The way the British government has behaved towards this widow would have been thought disgusting and degrading in the Bronze Age. No amount of bluster, evasion or political rhetoric will mask this basic moral and historical fact, let alone vindicate Jesus’ good Samaritan principle we all pretend to admire — as long as someone else gets to be the Good Samaritan.
   
2. George Orwell used to remind us that the face of evil is usually banal and bureaucratic. The holocaust was run, largely, by nice middle class people, by the book. Fascist politics gave them an over-ride mechanism for basic humanity. The Lancet’s point is a serious warning.
3. People who override or evade basic principles of human decency degrade themselves.

Richard Hall carries the whole sad tale, with access to Christian responses, on his Connexions Blog. Even if you don’t usually sign petitions, sign here.

News from the Eco Front Line

Last September (Lucy’s birthday) it became plain to me that our Struggle to Save the Planet had reached that Peter-Cook-and-Dudley-Moore point when a really futile gesture might be necessary, to raise the whole tone of the war. I went out and got Lucy one of these — a Tefal One-Cup water heater. It descales/filters tapwater and squirts it into your mug one shot at a time. Now we can all boil single cups without wasting the energy and water involved in Waltzing Matilda with a full Billy Can every time. You also save resources, because the shorter waiting time enables you to tuck fewer jumbucks in your tucker bag. And, long term, you reduce dependence on Coolibah trees. Obviously all micro scale Eco-Warriors should rush out and buy one. I bet they've got one on the Rainbow Warrior. I bet whales will soon be fitted with them so that they can do their bit by only blowing one bathful of seawater at a time. Maybe not.

But here’s the rub. Yesterday I ordered three replacement filter cartridges off Amazon. Back came the email confirming the order, with the suggestion that my “next purchase” should be... A Tefal One-cup water heater. So, apparently, real Eco-warriors just buy the cartridges, and don’t bother with the water heater. Aha! And not having a water heater to use them in not only saves power but also, long term, reduces your dependence on cartridges. Consistent radical thinking will win this war!

Last Word about the Festive Season

Says it all, really. Spotted in an Oxfordshire Church by Mary Saunders:Could this inspire a Carol?

Creepy Man, Scary Stuff

Herr Doktor Gunther von Hagens, that is, with a plastinated chum. Catherine, Lucy and I caught a bit of TV last night — Channel 4’s Eat to Save your Life. Jamie Oliver tried to lighten the load with his usual cheeky chappie bit, but the outlook is as as dark as the Doktor’s hat. In a nutshell, and it looks as though we could do with more of those, the food we eat is killing us, from 70% junk sausages to Killer Kebabs. Hydrogenated Meat and no Veg makes Jack a bloated corpse — and the bloated corpse agrees. We gawked at the yellowing sheet of glutinous fat strangulating his heart and squeezing his lungs up into shriveled mangos higher than his tits. His most noticeable feature was a bloody great slab of what looked like foie gras and turned out to be... foie gras. Talk about a notorious evil liver. This guy managed to stay alive whilst morphing his into warm paté. 18 queasy members of the Great British public lurched ’n retched before Doktor Death’s Monitor of Mirth, wondering what was in their wallets.
Who wouldn’t?

The message was obvious and simple. Our friends in the food industry are rendering everything except the squeak, piling it high and selling it cheap, stashing away industrial quantities of salt and covering their tracks with sugar. Get your five a day, stay off the junk food as much as you can, read the label, and you'll make a pretty corpse. And the undertakers will have another ten years’ wait for you.

Food for Thought. But is knowing the truth enough to set you free in itself? Faith without works is dead, as the man said.

Highway 61 Revisited

Indian driving is a social dance. English driving is largely an essay in suburban anger management and getting nowhere fast. What Mr Toad called “the joy of the open road,” the Easy Rider thing, is purer fantasy. To do it you need the Great American virtues — a big country, abundant gasoline, optimism, almost autistic self-absorption, resilience and a childlike capacity for wonder. If you really believe no-one else matters, Mister Kerouac, there’s a whole life to be made of it...

Parson says a sinner will
perish in the
flames (O parson
says a
sinner will perish
in the flames
Yes Parson says a sinner
will perish in the flames)But
i reckon that's better
than freez-
ing

Everybody's dying to be
someone
else(O every
body's
dying to be some
one else
Yes everybody's dying
to be someone else)But
i'll live my life if
it kills
me

- e.e. cummings

Poop Poop Poop

How people drive is a mirror into the soul. The English can be genteel about it, but the theory is pretty much the Mr Toad One. I want to get there soonest. I must defend myself at all times (as Mike Tyson used to say), and the horn is a rude emergency device. Only rigid lane discipline, traffic lights and roundabouts can defend me from the aggression of strangers, and prevent accidents. Road Rage is just below the surface.

Indian driving is different. Roads teem with life, ox carts, herds of goats, motorbikes going the wrong way, toddlers. Horns sound every few seconds, with no offence given or received. Seatbelts are ornamental, but not Mobile phones. 4 lane highways have speed bumps, herds of cows & pushbikes crossing:

The crowning glory of our Indian Driving Experience, was probably the gentleman in the Northern suburbs of Bangalore, riding to work on the back of a motorbike with an office chair on his head instead of a helmet. Like you do. But we also saw families of five on motorbikes, with one helmet between them and a baby lying across the back seat. An Indian road is a total transport system for anything. You wouldn't think anyone would survive ten minutes, but they do. How? Here are some tell-tale signs about the human logic of Indian driving:

Indian Driving is a Social Dance. Indians drive with elaborate, sensitive social antennae, tuned to everyone else. Everyone keeps going at their own pace, simultaneously. The root concepts are radical pragmatism and social sensitivity. The Horn is a greeting, and drivers expect you to use it generously. Red Traffic lights (very rare) have a word painted on them — not “Stop” but “Relax.” By and large everyone’s journey is held to be as important as anyone else’s. You don’t need roundabouts because the whole road is a roundabout if you need it to be. Everything has its own order, but here’s the interesting bit — priority goes to the smallest, the weakest, and the least able to look after themselves, including animals. If there's an accident rigid hierarchy indicates automatically whose fault it was — the biggest/ fastest/ most able. Whatever happened it was their duty to protect the weak!

Here’s an everyday example of the whole dance, from our front windscreen traveling through Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, possibly Gooty. They drive on the Left in India but actually our excellent driver happened to be driving on the right as the clip begins. I particularly liked the guy in the white van driving round and round in circles, and the motorbikes going the wrong way up the pavement on the left at the end. What does the way we drive in England say about our real social values?

Looking up, without baggage

Wonderful and inspiring day yesterday at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Bedgrove. It was very energizing to experience vibrant Charismatic Evangelical worship, and to feel part of a real learning, discipled community. There are wise and committed home-grown leaders within the congregation. I found at least one of any sociological group you care to name, always a sign of strength in depth.

They are currently looking for a new Vicar. The challenge will be to find someone gifted to catalyze able people for service, and draw the act together by mutual accountability. Power games would be lethal, as would fantasy football Church (“I've got a great half baked idea which I'm going to download on you anyway...”), or Fat Controller grandiosity.

We explored Jesus’ baptism as a type of our baptism — standing at the lowest place on earth, turning from thirty years of home and small town life, looking up to all that was to be. Inspired by George and Ben’s incredible journey, I quoted an old thing I came across years ago. It’s all over the internet, sourced from “an anonymous Confederate soldier.” It says something helpful about our ambitions and expectations at the beginning of 2008:

I asked God for strength, that I might achieve —
I was made weak, that I might humbly obey.
I asked for health, that I might do great things for God —
I was given infirmity, that I might do better things.
I asked for riches, that I might be happy —
I was given poverty, that I might be wise.
I asked for power, to earn the praise of men —
I was given weakness, that I might feel my need of God
I asked for all things, that I might enjoy life —
I was given life, that I might enjoy all things
I asked for great things in the future —
I was given the joy of the present moment.
I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I hoped for —
I am most richly blessed among all...

New Laptop for Lucy

Since 2004, Max the Cat has largely shunned human company, steadfastly refusing to climb on furniture, largely confining his role to Robocop for Voles. Following on from his recent operation and the loss of Spook, however, and Traumatised by a (worse than dog) Collar, he has suddenly decided Lucy is OK after all for a lap. And so say all of us...

Call this a Free Country?

Really? George & Ben find out by taking the long walk from Land’s End to John o’Groats, entirely reliant on the generosity of the British public, apart from their Union Jack Boxers. The whole story’s here. Saint Francis would be right proud of the lads. Mahood & Cocks went mendicant to prove a point — “how bloody nice people are.” They call into question any tendency to “misunderestimate” (© G. Bush) the kindness of strangers.

OK, fellow Christians. What does Faith mean to us, and what are we doing about it?

Clocked Up

A few weeks before she died in March 1999, my very dear aunt in the East End sent an old clock to be repaired. In the flurry of sorting out the will I paid the bill as executor, but never actually picked up the clock. Time passed by. Fortunately, like the Mounties, Albion Clocks of South Woodford, world class clock repairers, always get their man. Notwithstanding our move and two aunts’ deaths, Colin Bent ran me to earth a couple of weeks ago, to remind me the clock was ready for collection, and had been since 1999!

Like other enthusiastic professionals in similar fields, Colin is a real gentleman, and one of the nicest people you will ever meet. Lucy and I spent a fascinating couple of hours in the Albion Clocks Gallery, though you could spend all day. There’s a science museum corner with power station and factory clocks, and, current exhibit of honour, a German Black Forest Organ Clock, which plays rollicking folksongs ever hour on the hour. The whole gallery hums with a web of sound from a hundred ticking clocks — two o’clock was a work of art. I’m only sorry we missed mid-day. This particular web of sound has itself done a star turn on screen in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

So we are now reunited with a wonderful early Victorian French mantel clock. Most likely it belonged to my Aunt’s great grandfather (below) who set up shop (and house) in Winchester in the early 1840’s. I remember it from when we lived with Aunty in the late 1950’s as a bit temperamental, with the gilding on the front blacked over. Colin tells me people did this to their showpiece mantel clocks as part of the public mourning for Prince Albert, who had done much to popularise this kind of clock in England... The whole Betjemanesque experience was what Wallace and Gromit call a Grand Day Out, including a visit to Aunty’s grave, and fish and chips together in the kind of café they don’t do round here. Magic!

Peacemaking Boot Camp 2

Transforming Conflict Session Two (One, here and here). The plot thickens. On the train there, I got out some Integrative Complexity homework I’d done, and suddenly saw another way of mapping the second phase of it, leading to an actual (low wattage ecological) light bulb moment. During the day it got more complicated, and our group is now going to try our hand at working a homework problem with RCR, an 8-phase method which incorporates but transcends IC. Hmm...

These methods certainly provide effective, practical ways to slow down the reptile fight-or-flight bits of the brain whilst the intelligent bit catches up. That’s got to be worth knowing how to do, even more than waggling your ears.Their Achilles Bugbear could be that whilst proven peacemaking techniques infallibly help people who actually want to make peace, they only annoy small-minded thugs who derive their energy from getting into punchups, and stave off their terror of insignificance by terrorizing others. Or do they? More will be revealed in workshop 3, which I'm booked into on 26 February.

Toxic Moonshine about Muslims

Lots of press hoopla about “no go areas” for Christians, comprehensively summarised on Simon Sarmiento’s news blog, here and here.
It is immoral, horrid and shameful to bear false witness — the Ninth Commandment refers. The Scriptures instruct Christians to live at peace with our neighbours, so far as in us lies. In my many dealings with Muslims in Slough, Wycombe, Chesham, Aylesbury and Milton Keynes, including our few Muslim majority Church of England schools, I have always experienced courtesy and mutual respect. I have no idea what a no-go area would look like, nor would I want to. Buckinghamshire is a fairly conservative county, and, we do not really do radical “Multiculturalism” either. Sorry to diasappoint everyone, but there you are. I have, however, experienced some striking instances of hysteria aimed at Muslims:

1. An opinionated gentleman at the University of Buckingham who knew almost nothing about Muslim history and banged on obsessively about it using some stuff he'd got off the Internet
   
2. Hate mail here after I attended an Iftaar in Milton Keynes with Anouar Kassim
3. Last year‘s scare stories about extremist literature in a Mosque in High Wycombe, which turned out to be disingenuous hufflepuff, cooked up by a silly right-wing think tank.

Of course there are a few crank Muslims. There are a few crank Christians, too. And crank atheists. My (Hungarian) mother told me all about Central Europe in the 1930’s, and the lies and stereotyping aimed at Jews. Hitler lied. Millions died. This stuff is dangerous, and it is easy in a stable and humane country like ours to underestimate the stakes when people start to play fast and loose with it.