6 New Presbyters and 1 Old Priest

I ordained 6 priests yesterday at St Michael’s Waddesdon. Many thanks to Liz Welters, Team vicar and David Meakin, Team Rector for looking after such a large crowd so beautifully. Will Adam, rector of Girton (near Cambridge) preached a really thought provoking sermon, drawing attention to the things that change and the bigger calling that doesn’t. Pictures to follow.

Meanwhile, amazing brasses in the Chancel tell their own tale of English parish clergy on the eve of the Reformation. Medieval Waddesdon was a prebendary (stall) of Lincoln Minster, a parish large enough to be divided into three rectories. In 1520 there were three rectors, each with a “portion” — Sir Richard Huntingdon of the third, Sir Nicholas Manuaring of the second, and plain Mr Hugh Bristowe of the first. Guess which one did all the work? Huntingdon and Manuaring were both censured for allowing their houses to become ruinous, so you can pretty much guess how much time they spent in the place. They have their own conventional brasses, clothed in magnificent vestments, holding chalice and paten.

Bristowe’s brass of 1548 tells a very different tale. It shows him as a corpse in a winding sheet, as became very fashionable among later Anglican clergy (such as John Donne’s grave in St Paul’s). Hugh’s grave carries a plain inscription in crude English verse (Right)

On whose soul, God have mercy according to his beseeching! and inspire all of us who are ordained to follow him truthfully and humbly in the way that leads us home; and bless his servants Tim Bustin, Mark Griffiths, Paul Mansell, Kay Peck, Robert Tobin and Rachel Weir, ordained priests yesterday a few feet away from Hugh Bristowe’s grave, almost 460 years after his death.

GAFCON future: not quite Jerusalem?

Looking at the GAFCON statement from Jerusalem, it all looks fair enough to me. Very few faithful Anglicans will disagree with anything positive the statement affirms. It's pretty much what we all thought we were doing anyway. What disturbs is its claim to have the exclusive franchise on “orthodoxy” and what this implicitly denies about those it tars with the “heterodox” brush. Powerful Conservative instincts don’t equal truth. Mugabe-speak about “Colonialism” feels a bit rich, as it started from Lambeth’s refusal to weigh in and discipline former New England “colonists”.

From the Conservative side, I was very much struck by the clarity and sincerity of Sarah Hey. She compares being a Conservative US Anglican to being a daughter of dysfunctional parents, torn between loyalty to the family and collusion. I’m not sure I’d follow her all the way home, but I bet she’s expressing exactly how things feel for people who lost the ECUSA domestic debates on sexuality in the nineties.

I believe heaven is about far more than the current social mores of either Nigeria or San Francisco, but can be fully incarnate in both. My eyes fell on a letter of Hensley Henson from 12 July 1920:

No ideal of unity can satisfy us which fails in range or in quality, i.e. which leaves outside the visible church any genuine disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, or which sets before the world a partial or distorted conception of Christian fellowship. Whether the attainment of that ideal would imply the organization of the visible church as a single polity is a point which neither the New Testament nor the experience of the Christian Society enables us to determine.

The true parallel to the spiritual society of Christ’s Church is not a single government, however effective and extended, but the human race. The Church is ultimately equivalent to redeemed humanity, and the nature of its unity will have its analogue in the unity of mankind.

History is continually revising the definition of the Catholic Church. We are called to recognize the teaching of history (i.e. the Mind of the Spirit disclosed in Christian experience), and to extend our definition of the Catholic Church until it covers the facts.

The Brain — Stroke of Genius

As both my parents had strokes towards the ends of their lives, a remarkable TED talk caught my eye. Recently Jill Bolte Taylor, brain scientist, had a stroke which she was able to analyse as it happened. Her story, from this year’s TED event at Monterey, affirms powerfully the concept of the brain as a powerful self-organising structure, along with some fascinating workshop manual information about what Woody Allen called his “second favourite organ.”

Prince Caspian — chaps in tights

All aboard, me hearties, for Narnia round two‚ ding, ding. After a slightly frustrating year trying to engineer Adolf Hitler’s downfall from their home counties prep school, the Pevensie kids are raring to go. Down the Underground, they get a blast of the Narnian Pot Noodle horn and it beams them back, Scotty, to something truly surreal — the world’s first surf romp scene shot entirely in Trutex flannel school uniforms. Plainly, something magical is about to happen...

Narnia news is not good. Aslan seems to have done a bunk for 1300 years. Narnian Heritage are even more hopeless at looking after ruined castles than their English equivalent. Worse, a race of piratical nasties has invaded and taken over, and true Narnians are living, again, in their own underground. Prince Caspian’s a nice young man but his wicked uncle Miraz, more Philip of Spain than Osama, is jackbooting around the place with a nasty army of hardback beardies. These aren’t nice hairy Richard Branson, Rowan Williams beardies. These Beardies are Bad, and they have tin beards on the fronts of their little helmets, so don’t you forget it. There’s a big showdown, and once Aslan weighs in, guess who wins. Er... that’s it.

Dawkins Left brain headbangers will probably find less to offend them here than they did in the stone table sacrifice last time round. More imaginative people will enjoy the cornucopia of weirdos and misfits from the Classics department. Where else can you see a Dryad, a Naiad and all-age centaurs, derring do with a talking badger, a Rambomouse, and testosterone-charged gnomes? I hope it’s not giving too much away to say that Aslan’s fighting trees make the whomping willow look like Mary Poppins. It’s a potent bunch of chums, but perhaps too inyerface for Right brain Enya fans — light on poetry and heavy on action. Still, most of us use both halves of our brains, so there’s plenty here for everyone to like in a good natured action romp for all the family.

Even the beheading is tastefully done, according to the film’s slightly Janet-and-John house style. And therein lies the glory, but also the limitation of the main characters. They’re not wooden — just British. It was surely a good call not to stick sneakers on the kids; but this may limit many people’s capacity to identify with them. It comes off because the whole context is so surreal that the back-to-the-future aspects entertain rather than clunking or jarring. One or two tongue-in-cheek one liners cut into the action, lending a bit of irony and fun to the proceedings.

So what is this film really about, on a macro level, apart from chivalry and enchanted critters?

1. It's about having the courage to believe in the face of adversity. “Never give up,” Winston Churchill told Harrow School in 1940, and this message speaks into a boring, weedy and faithless age like ours.
2. Prince Caspian ain’t no Grease, but it’s got a coming-of-age subtext as well. Having told one gawky paraour to push off in scene one, by the end, Susan learns how to kiss a boy. That’s neat, but she won’t be going back to Narnia.
3. There’s also something in here about the small rainbow alliance of misfits beating the big bad regiment of clones that would have played well in 1941 and still has some resonance. Beef up your diversity policies, friends.

On a micro level, it says something very special about the London underground that four children can fall off the platform, grab a shedload of offensive weapons along with feisty gnomes, ten foot centaurs and assorted furry animals, then swashbuckle their way to glory through an enchanted kingdom, all without the management realising anything unusual is going on down there.
How long, O Lord? London Underground smashed Bob Kiley. Who’s next? Ken did his best. Maybe Boris can sort out the mess.

Health and Safety: Strain at a Gnat...

One day in December 2005, Lucy and I were almost thrown out of bed by a major blast, followed by a rumbling roar. “Sonic boom? RAF playing silly B’s?” I thought. 14 miles away, Buncefield fuel storage depot was going up in smoke. At 2·4 on the Richter scale, this was a biggie, followed by the largest fire since World War II. A switch had failed allowing a tank of unleaded to overflow. The oil company accepted no liability and shot the sergeant. Apparently component failure in a complex fuel handling system with inadequate error traps, is all the fault of the little guy drinking tea in the shed at the gate. Interesting theory. But where, I wondered, was health and safety in all of this? Checking the paperwork? Counting the wheelnuts on the tankers?

Apologies to our glorious Health and Safety industry, but after a day’s chuckling over it, I can’t resist. Here, courtesy of the Wardman Wire, is the ultimate health and safety advice, on crossing your drive without risking life and limb. The delight is in the detail.

Zimbabwe — The Mask of Anarchy

The four horsemen of Apocalypse seem to be doing just fine in Zimbabwe. If you remember the deal, Empty Conquest (Mr White) leads on violence (Mr Red), Famine and Drought (Mr Black) and finally Death (Mr Pale). The sequence is eerily accurate.

I was first disgusted by the behaviour of former Anglican bishop Nolbert Kunonga after reading asylum papers from one of his clergy who came to live in Bucks. NK was chucked out of the Church last year, after much abusive behaviour, including a bizarre anniversary bash in the football stadium. His version was that he was walking out because of the Gay Issue, and British colonialism. Abusive Twaddle alert. Last year I met a former Zimbabwe minister of agriculture at a confirmation in West Wycombe, moved to tears by the destruction of the good land by politics and corruption. Earlier this year, I met a family at another confirmation who had come over here to try and build some kind of life for themselves — decent people who had been much abused — one among many families.

As Zimbabwe prepares for an election with no opposition, the level of atrocity and human rights abuse, bizarrely, doesn’t seem to diminish. Online media are harder to suppress than their conventional counterparts. The Wardman Wire has been running a Mugabe Monitor detailing election news, including an Election Photo Album. Sokwanele have a detailed Google map of 1450 cases of violence and intimidation with chapter and verse about the Terror. An initiative of the Churches, the Solidarty Peace Trust, gives a gallery of photos, and video background profiles.
And yet, incredibly, Mugabe apologists still toe the party line. The election violence is all down to the opposition, apparently. How long, O Lord?

God’s highway — Thinking Different

When I was vicar of a St John the Baptist’s Church, 24 June was the big annual knees-up. The ancient Collect for today pretty much puts it on the line:

Lead us to repent
according to his preaching,
and accordng to his example,
Constantly to speak the truth,
Boldly to rebuke vice,
and patiently to suffer for the truth’s sake.

For as long as I’ve known it, I’ve found this a very disturbing, but compelling vision of how we are called to live. What does John the Baptist have to say to us?

I suspect he would incisively question us over issues we are complacent about, but his big critique would be for the self-satisfied way we approach living itself. We all know about Western comfy suburban religion, but Riazat Butt’s shocking report of the Gafcon presser gave an equally disturbing vision of people subjected to violence and intimidation simply for being who they are, whilst bishops close their eyes and their hearts, simply because the victims are homosexual. If true, what kind of sell-out to prevailing culture is that?

I hear the authentic voice of John the Baptist in some words from the Mennonite tradition, from Rudy Weibe’s 1970 novel The Blue Mountains of China:

The whole idea of Jesus just talking about people being “saved” and feeling good about it is wrong. Quite wrong. He was alive on earth to lead a revolution! A revolution for social justice. The terrible question of his day as it is in ours was and is social injustice to the poor, to the racially oppressed, to the retarded and helpless.

Mary said, “All people will call me blessed because of the mighty things God has done for me, he stretched out his mighty arm and scattered the proud people with all their plans, he brought down mighty kings from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly, he filled the hungry with good things.”

That’s the good news Jesus came to bring and do. And he didn’t do it all by setting up a church that can never change no matter where on earth or in what century it is, a church that’s never as important to us as living, as eating, as making our pile, that’s there for a few hours a Sunday and maybe a committee meeting during the week to keep our fire escape polished, to keep us decent as our parents all told us.

No! The church Jesus began is us living, everywhere, a new society that sets all the old ideas of man living with other men on its head, that looks so strange it is either the most stupid, foolish thing on earth, or it is so beyond man’s usual thinking that it could only come as a revelation right from God.

Jesus says in his society there is a new way for man to live:
You show wisdom by trusting people;
you handle leadership, by serving;
you handle offenders, by forgiving;
you handle money, by sharing;
you handle enemies, by loving;
and you handle violence by suffering.

In fact you have a new attitude toward everything, toward everybody. Toward nature, toward the state in which you happen to live, toward women, toward saves, toward all and every single thing. because this is a Jesus society and you repent, not by feeling bad, but by thnking different. Different.

This is the new society of the “church,” and Jesus is its Lord. “The kingdom of God is within your grasp, repent and believe the good news!”

Far more deadly than the Male...

I’m trying to contain my disappointment at not being invited to Gafcon by watching Matthew Sweet’s delicious celebration of the British B movie, Truly, Madly, Cheaply (available on the iPlayer for 6 more days). My favourite was Devil Girl from Mars (1954). It makes Ed Wood look like Kubrick.

The IMDB warns “The plot synopsis of this film is empty.” But I look upon that statement as a challenge. Niyah, a shiny six footer in kinky boots and PVC cycle cape, comes straight from Mars. But what’s she doing over here? Well, Mars, now governed by women, has run out of men. Probably eaten by kinky devil girls. Let’s hope they died happy. So Niyah has come over here, accompanied by a Kelvinator Chunky Robot who doesn’t like trees, to replenish with hearty highland stock. All she can find on the moors are tweedy old gits with pebble glasses, and twinset girls in two piece business suits. Hope springs eternal at a humble highland guest house — They don’t do Bombay Mix, but they have got a desirably plummy Harry Enfield male lead.

NIYAH (for it is She): Fools!
DPHEML: Mrs Jamieson! May I introduce your latest guest. This is Niyah. she comes from Mars.
CRABBY LANDLADY: Oh, well that’ll be another bed.

Quite. You can work out the rest for yourself.

But these things were written for our learning. This is the summer of love when General Synod votes on female bishops, and some real ones come to Lambeth. Some will remember that Item 1 on the radical feminist agenda was a fantastic night of terror that menaced the fate of the world back in 1954. “Mankind’s greatest threat is a single woman.” The more reflective and mission minded among us will think that 50 years on it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Trashing people, wrecking the joint

Patronal festival this morning at St John the Baptist, Crowthorne (Berkshire) near my old parish. We prayed the ancient collect for the grace to repent according to his teaching, and then constantly to speak the truth, boldly to rebuke vice and patiently to suffer for the truth’s sake. This had me wondering what a real prophet trying to follow John the Baptist’s lead might draw attention to in our culture. That quest took me to a talk at TED Monterey this year by artist and photographer Chris Jordan, in which he uses everyday objects to call into question some of the hidden assumptions of our Western culture:

Church of England (Signs Following)

There’s a lovely picture in this week's Church Times from Hulcott, where I went to bless animals the other week, including a snake. I admit Fr Mark the vicar didn’t look too keen originally, but he soon cottoned on and was motoring before the end of the afternoon. I can guarantee the snake was lovely and warm and dry. I am now officially recommending snake handling to all my ordained colleagues. This is the Church of England, so they don’t have to be poisonous.
Sisters and Brothers can you dig it? I knew you could!

Tradition, Ancient and Modern

A slightly over-excitable person suggested to me this week that back in the 80’s Dr Martin Dudley was the first Anglican clergyman to marry divorcees in Church — I have no idea from where they got this comically ignorant notion. Throughout the last century registrar general’s figures indicate there was a steady trickle of a few hundred marriages of divorcees every year in C of E churches. Among famous marriers of divorcees on TV, Mills and Boon fans may remember the Revd Jardine who married Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson in 1937, but that was abroad, of course.

Hang on, some will say, wasn’t Archbishop Cranmer himself the first Vicar to marry a divorcee, and a rather famous one at that? Well no, I’m afraid not. Despite nonsense Pop historicism, Hank never got divorced. To get divorced Hank would have had to get in a time machine and jet himself 129 years into the future, stopping off at the Rump parliament by way of Milton’s Cottage for the world’s first Reno Divorce. Even he couldn’t do that. His “divorces” were RC style annulments, perfectly standard practice at the time, but without the sanction of the Pope which was usually sought and given to rulers on political grounds. Standard Hank Histories give the details. Divorce in England was actually invented by puritans in the 1650’s.

Interestingly enough, before the last century the marriage of divorcees was essentially mandatory in the Church of England. Pressure for a blanket ban really took off as an part of the attempt to stem the growing tide of divorce after the first world war. Comparing divorce rates between 1918 and 1979 when the Church might be said to have came back towards its traditional pastoral policy, you can judge for yourself how successful the policy was. I can exclusively reveal (scoop, scoop) that Hundreds, nay thousands of Victorian divorcees were married in Church of England churches, abbeys and Cathedrals by clergy who were not Martin Dudley at all. The Courts of Judicature Amendment Act 1925 permitted clergy to refuse to conduct marriages of divorcees, but only if they secured for the couple the services of a another priest to conduct the service. The right to refuse to marry a divorcee tout simple was secured by Cosmo Gordon Lang in the aftermath of the abdication crisis — part of the wheeler dealing to obtain the compliance of bishops in the Lords with the 1937 A. P Herbert Matrimonial Causes act.

Like public school straw boaters, many ancient traditions which cause grief turn out to be newer than you think. This ancient traditional rule dates back to 1925; though the Canonical instruction only to 1957. The idea that marriage of divorcees was invented along with sexual intercourse in 1963 by the teenage Martin Dudley is way, way way off beam from reality.

I sometimes wonder, reflecting on the characteristic fruits of post 1960’s “Mr Angry” traditionalism, if a lot of it isn’t driven by depression, which can easily take a sociopathic turn. Back in the 1820’s Sydney Smith, famous depressive, recommended a treatment that’s still worth a go — take long, and I would advise accurate, views backwards and short views forwards. It helped him stave off meltdown anyway.

Things to Come — airborne Jellyfish

An object of absolutely no theological significance, but a certain mesmerizing charm — The AirJelly comes with a major plateful of technical detail in German. From what I can make out, It claims to be unique, driven by small lithium ion cells (like a mobile) and harnessing the “Fin Ray” effect, with helium lift.

It’s great to find something that combines that high a technical specification with absolute lack of obvious practical utility. Could this beautiful object have any potential Liturgical use or significance?

Straying off Hysteria Lane to Lambeth

Readers of the Times will know that yesterday, apparently, the Church of England melted down over gays and women. Verdammt noch mal! I missed it! I was at Lambeth on a bishops theology day. Rowan invites any of us who want to come together and jam creatively with him about theology. We explored some free range patristics together — starting from, and expanding on, this year’s Gresham lecture — Early Christianity and Today. We jammed around 3 big historical realities

1. The impact of early Christianity on public life, and the beginnings of a modern concept of politics as something more than sacral kingship and raw power. Early Christians invented the concept of the secular, as their martyrs bore witness to a higher loyalty than the state. Augustine speaks of this world as organised selfishness and violence, but somewhere that can be worked on, against the grain. The church is not the kingdom of God, but you can find the kingdom reflected in it and it’s trying to be. You can labour to unite people around a shared vision of love, but usually all that will pull them together is social paranoia about a notional enemy out there, over and against whom you define yourself. This throws some light on the growth of state power and the “war on terror.”
   
2. Primitive Christian concepts of God and the natural world. Once you have a vision of ordinary reality as the fruit of the free action of an intelligent being, you can assume some consistency and seek a rational handle on it all. The Incarnation makes material processes significant. The blue touch paper that leads from here to our own natural science involves encapsulations of Classical thought in 6th century Syria, mediated through and supplemented by Muslim sources, back to medieval Europe. Thinking of nature simply as a machine has achieved amazing things, but has its limitations.
   
3. Early Christian concepts of the self as revealed in models of personal Discipleship from Origen to the desert Fathers, culminating in Book X of Augustine’s confessions. Grace remains the key concept. Much contemporary panic and anger about sex and the body is essentially Pelagian; which is why it’s dumb and overpromises/underdelivers.
   

There is a theme park school of history that assumes anyone who lived before, say 1960, was a complete bloody fool. Isn’t it incredible that Augustine held wacky views on, say, sex? But hang on, those views are pretty much bound by the immediate flow of the culture around him. It’s no more of a surprise he expressed them among his compadres than it is that a contemporary person thinks Communism doesn’t work, or reflects our implicit wacky stuff. Trouble is, we don’t know exactly what our wacky stuff is, or how wacky... yet. Give it a few hundred years and they will, unless we lose the script enough to destroy the whole bang shoot. Then there won’t be anyone to know. Our wackiness will have its own (non-)memorial. What makes, say, Augustine interesting is the glimpses of big thinking, honest reflection or creativity that transcend the general run of his age, and show us we could be bloody fools, too, but with our own transcendent possibilities. Pressures they experienced were as great as those bearing on us. This is worth considering as an approach. It turns tradition from a coffee table book into a living resource.

Guided reflection with high class information and sharing around this material with about 20 colleagues was a rather joyful experience.

1. Stepping back for a day from running the railway helps to put the minutiae of the day job in context. We live in a society that, like the ancient world, has largely lost its bearings. Sometimes Tradition gets hi-jacked by reactionary zealots who don’t really know much about it, to bolster their own insecurity and cosh their enemies. Christian tradition is actually a living resource, if you give it a chance.
2. I’ve got some astonishingly thoughtful, perceptive and creative colleagues, with whom it’s a joy to work. There’s an amazing range and depth of talent, learning and good humour among them.
   
3. Rowan lights up when you get him going on God. Perhaps that’s an essential quality in the nation’s holy man, but you’d probably have to go back to Cardinal Hume or Michael Ramsey to find someone as firmly grounded in, and passionate about, core Christian tradition and broad historical reality.
   

This was a grand day out. It was even worth missing the Church of England melting down over gays and women. To see the way forward we need prayer and lived tradition grounded in Christ, not managerialism and hysteria. Our hearts need to be fixed where true joys are to be found.

Dear Sir

Governors meeting at Cressex Community School, High Wycombe. Slap in the middle of one of our very own Bishop of Rochester style “No-Go” Areas, TM, it’s a great place, with big challenges. I didn’t really mean to be a school governor in this job, but they asked and I really enjoy being part of this school community. All of Bucks’ Building Schools for the Future money from 2005 (£31m) is all going to Cressex and we’re getting a completely new school. Er, thank you very much, Mr Broon.

When you look at the picture of our technology block on the left, you can see we needed a few bob spending on the place. With Dr Simmons, our inspirational chair of governors and our committed staff and our dead good new headmaster, Mr Hood, we believe we can renew our school along with our buildings. David Hood has really hit the ground running. His report was 100% on the button. It seemed like he’d been here for ages.

Mr Broon’s friend Mr Balls has also announced a shiny new programme to help schools like ours raise standards. He’s got us on his list. We’re now officially a National Challenge School. Oh goody. You get a biro and a clipboard and some exciting stickers to swap with your chums. You can get invited to special events by Mr Broon’s friend Mr Balls. You might even get to meet Mr Balls. I’m not sure if his real name is Balls. P’raps that’s just what we all call him.

Oh, and there’s an exciting “Death or Glory by 2011” game specially for you. If you don’t get 30% of your kids 5 GCSE’s or more by then, Mr Balls will chuck you off a cliff. Actually I made up the bit about the biro. And the bit about the cliff. But Mr Balls will come along and take over your school and run it better than you obviously could, or close you down. Carrot and Stick, you see. £400 million of carrot; a great big yummy custard pie full of cash. What could be wrong with that. Play our cards right and we could get closed down the day after we open our new school. Which leads me to say this solution looks a bit one-size-fits-all. Oh, and 2011 is election year. There’s a thing. [No it’s not. Election year is 2010. Which goes to show I should listen more in Citizenship. I was being too cynical. Sorry. Mr Broon and Mr Balls probably have no interest in winning the next election and if by any chance it happens needs to point out it was nothing to do with Schools. They just does it all for the sheer joy of doing it, like birds sing.]

But, of course we peasants rejoiced. Thank you very much Mr Broon. Thank you, thank you, Mr Balls. By the way, I hope you are well. We will try and find something to throw your money at so that you can win your eleckshun. Sadly, like Mr Broon, I am cursed with supercharged Scots genes, and thus a congential dystopic whiner. Thus I could even find something to whine about with the being an official National Challenge failing school, TM.

It’s always nice to have a yummy custard pie, but nicer still not to get it in the face. The way this was handled, with a blaze of publicity about “failing schools” and how central government is going to sort them all out, we instantly got slated for closure in the media! This does not raise morale, or help those of us who are trying to turn things round. We will work our socks off to meet this target, but the way this was delivered actually undermines our ability to deliver. There are all sorts of reasons schools do not achieve high academic results, especially in a selective authority. A centralised one size fits all solution will help, but is part of a bigger picture that is more complex than the way this was announced makes it sound. We could tell all kinds of tales about our LEA, no doubt, but we work in close partnership with Bucks who are OK really. Anything that undermines our LEA doesn’t actually help us; because they are our partners as much as central government. There are, no doubt, failing schools out there. Our trends are beginning to go the right way, and we would like to think that is no coincidence. Various people have been working their tails off to make this happen, and we don’t feel it helps us to be tarred with this brush in the media.
We notice the vast wadge of this money is slated for consultants. We’ve met millions of them down the years, and very nice people they are too. Actually we don’t feel we need more consultants to faff about with our structures and load us down with more things to do on rainy afternoons. We are developing a plan for renewing them ourselves, and we think it is pretty cool. What we need is a secure platform on which to work (and we’ve got that with the buildings money. Thanking you). We’d rather spend our management consultant money on teaching and learning support. We’d like to grow the stability of our staff so that they can stay for longer. We’d like academic mentors. We’re building partnerships with all sorts of people — Bucks new Uni and Wycombe Abbey (other school I govern) to help our students lift their sights a bit academically. Please don’t shoot us in the back just to make a political point. My friend’s mum says you understand failing schools, because your guvment is failing too. Thank you Mr Broon. Thank you Mr Balls.
PS There is a very rude song on South Park about Brown Salty Balls, but we do not listen to smut like that.

Looks like a Duck...

Interesting to wake up to the dulcet tones of my former colleague, Dr Martin Dudley, on the R4 Sunday programme, discussing a recent gay blessing ceremony in his church in London. He’s told the Telegraph:

First, it was not a wedding or a marriage but the blessing of a civil partnership. Mr Wynne-Jones was well aware of this from his conversation with me today. If others construe it as a wedding, than they do so deliberately in order to ferment division.

Second, it was not and was intended to be a provocative act. It was not undertaken in defiance of the Bishop of London and there was no plea from him that I should not officiate at the service.

Third, we should remember that this service celebrated the love that the two persons involved have for each other. I officiated at it because Fr Peter Cowell has been my friend and colleague for many years. 300 people joined in the service; nearly 200 received communion, and there were dozens of other clergy present. It was not a rally or a demonstration. If other people want to turn [it?] into a loveless battlefield for the future of the Church of England, then it is they who will carry responsibility for the consequences.

It would take a legal eagle t0 scope the formal implications of this event. How the diocese of London responds is up to the diocese of London. Church Law has its limits, and must be applied fairly and accountably. In the C of E law is not a prescriptive straitjacket, but a framework to secure mutual respect and understanding, a platform upon which to be creative, whilst caring for others. Dramatic unilateral gestures, however, inevitably strain mutual respect and understanding.

But here’s a how d’you do. Almost every line of Martin’s Telegraph statement seems disingenuous. Why might people think this service was a wedding? Well, apart from what Basil Fawlty used to call the bleeding obvious, its words do far more than pray for blessing on a personal agreement. They “join together these men in a holy covenant of love and fidelity.” This binding is done by “pledging of troth, declaring the same by giving and receiving of a ring and by joining of hands.” I can quite imagine Joe Public with no interest in “fermenting” (=fomenting?) division, or even Mr Wynne-Jones, misunderstanding the position.

Then there’s the absolute statement that this was not a provocative act. It reminds me of an old lady I met years ago in Slough who said “darkies deteriate (sic) an area.” When challenged, she simply declared that her words were not racist. But can we make things what we want others to think them by declaring them so?
Inquiring minds will wonder what the difference is between “defying the bishop of London” and “writing to ask the bishop for guidance, being given it, disagreeing with it, and then deciding to go ahead anyway.” Shooting first and asking questions afterwards has a longer pedigree in the Church of England than many might think. I once wrote a thesis on Victorian Anglo-Catholic defiance of bishops, and there are interesting precursors. However, inquiring minds will also wonder how acting outside the guidelines squares with the promises of accountability all clergy, including bishops, make when licensed.

Martin’s third paragraph is potent romantic novelist stuff, but eerily autistic. The logic is reminiscent of the Judaean People’s Front who kidnapped Pilate’s wife then declared that responsibility for her welfare was entirely Pilate’s. Couldn’t it accept any responsibility for its actions? The labrador feels so right when it crashes into the lounge wagging its tail. Little does it know or care about the furniture.

There is a natural and growing desire by gay people to covenant friendships in Church. As yet there is absolutely no consensus within the world, or world church, or C of E, about what or how. Concocting a service to make it feel as though there is won’t change that fact. How far are such covenants a personal and private matter, or to what extent can the Church Catholic share (or even form) them? The presence of a priest with two people praying for blessing is one way of discerning this. Perhaps a full blown Hello Magazine job is, too. Or not.

I suspect this particular service, whilst securing Martin’s place in the limelight, will generate far more heat than light. The theological confusion inherent in taking off a 1662 Prayer Book wedding, lock stock and two smoking barrels, may actually make it harder to define the significance of covenanted friendships before and within the whole Christian community.

Post-Freudian anthropology, whilst most triumphant in the West, is incomprehensible to the vast majority of people in this world. Many post-Colonials note that it flowers in the least relational, most depressed, screwed up and confused societies. They just don’t buy it. More work needs to be done about this aspect of the concept before it can go global.

Good work has begun to develop a stronger theology of covenanted friendship to engage people across the board and command the respect of more than just partisans. Jeffrey John’s book (Permanent, Stable Faithful) and responses moved the mutual listening and learning process forwards. This particular event, for all its private joy and publicity, will erode trust and muddy the waters. Hitherto, Screw-you-Jimmy polarizing unilateralism has been the preserve of a small coterie of reactionary zealots the other side of the river. It always makes the people who indulge in it feel good. It can easily become an issue in itself, distract and annoy, and sap the capacity of the organisation to address the real question intelligently. I hope I’m wrong. We’ll see.

Because nothing can happen in the wacky world of hackdom without “rage” and “fury” I just want to record that I don’t honestly feel any of either about this. Over and above all the synthetic inflammatory hacky-crappies, I think I identify strongly with Doug Chaplin’s take.