Church of England Newspaper Seasonal Pic n’mix

The Church of England Newspaper front page reports that Canon Paul Williams has been appointed Bishop of Kensington, with picture. Wrong Canon Paul Williams. The cleric pictured looks egregiously unlike Paul. Here is a selection of men called Paul Williams. In this season of party games I invite CEN hacks, using their own prejudices and fantasies, to select the one they would most like as a Bishop:

PS Boring conventional journalists would check the Church website rather than just googling aimlessly. And if they did google search, they'd at least check their source. It was only their front page, after all.

PPS The Times reported my present appointment as Birmingham, not Buckingham. Birmingham, Buckingham, what the hell’s the difference? Bit like Iran and Iraq, really.

PPPS The genuine next-Bishop-of-Kensington Paul Williams is one of these people (Right). But (Tough Poser for Professional Newshounds) which one?

Clergy stress and wellbeing at work

The slow days after Christmas are a good time to check back on the basics. After interesting posts and discussions here this year on Clergy bullying and wellbeing at work, I’ve revisited my standard list of stresses bearing on the health of clergy in multiparish benefices that I drew up a few years ago. An Occupational Health Physician asked for a copy of the person’s job description, to help her assess the health impact of the job. None. The parish profile? All it said was that they wanted a perfect vicar — telling, but insufficiently detailed information. This list was an attempt to summarize where the stresses came from, so as to enable a concerned professional to understand and help.

One of my ambitions for 2009 is to find better ways to care better for appointments and colleagues in work. If others know of other similar lists, I’d love to see them. Revisiting my summary, it seems to me to stand up fairly well to the experience I think colleagues are having — but does it? I’d love to know what I’ve missed, or mis-stated.

Factors bearing on the occupational health of incumbents in multi-parish benefices — a generic handlist

Many general facets of being a Vicar in the country are pluses when things are going well relationally, but significant sources of stress when they are not. For example, being housed free of rates rent and maintenance in a four bedroom family house would generally be thought to be a benefit worth several thousands of pounds a year, but the requirement to live in the parsonage house can become a source of significant stress, inducing a feeling of being trapped, if things break down relationally.

This job always requires a higher degree of capacity to manage a work/life balance than would be the case in an occupation which did not require as much working from home.

Particular dimensions and requirements of the job which bear on health include:

1. Interaction with volunteers and the public —
   dealing professionally with strangers, which requires significant discernment and versatility. For example, The partner of a person who greatly dislikes you may die, and then you have to conduct the funeral cheerfully and competently. Relating to people of all ages, positively and fairly, is easier if clean and effective communication has been established with a variety of people and organizations including key volunteers such as churchwardens and treasurers. Many members of the public have real difficulty knowing how to respond to anger in clergy.
2. Leading public worship —
   including family celebrations and funerals and teaching the Christian faith, by word and example, in a way which is sincere and competent, personally grounded, but outwardly focused.
3. Administration —
   Time and workload management in a basically unsupervised environment, including appropriate record keeping, calls for competent self-management. Work/Life balance needs diligent monitoring and management, and the careful holding of working and relational boundaries in a sustainable way that inspires confidence in others. Hours are mainly flexible and undirected. Clergy aren’t required to, but many of them work longer hours than they should and skimp on holidays.
4. On-call and occasional emergency availability —
   handling personal and family crises (sometimes acute) with an awareness of the needs of others and ability to manage sensitive and confidential materials professionally.
5. Acting as a professional representative of the Church —
   with all the complex and personal transference people may have about religion. This means relating to people with differing views, some of which conflict with your own, openly and positively. Sustaining appropriate behaviour in role requires self-discipline, clear thinking, and careful boundary keeping, especially where roles potentially conflict. The job can involve juggling the roles of a parent in the school/ school governor/ chaplain to the school/ Village vicar — all at the same time.
6. Leading volunteer teams in a voluntary organisation —
   sometimes (especially in a rural multiparish benefice), teams have conflicting and unclear traditions and aims. Local feelings and rivalries can run deep. Your job is to try and provide a focus for unity in the community. Word goes around villages. People are very interested in their vicars — this unlocks high levels of interest and personal support on occasion, especially when the relational infrastructure is there to support the person in their ministry, but can be experienced as oppressive.

Being a rural multiparish incumbent has many dimensions, and that is one of the satisfactions people derive from doing the job. Although no clergy person is perfect, they need to find an approach to their work and the people they serve that is good enough to sustain their sense of personal and professional wellbeing. If this is compromised, the whole structure of deference that used to surround clergy is no longer there, and they can easily find themselves in a lonely, frightening and even dangerous working environment. The occupation requires a high degree of personal self-knowledge, resilience and versatility, or it can turn into a nightmare.

Desperate (Pastors’) housewives?

After a sweet and most triumphant time with family and friends over Christmas, it’s easy to underestimate the pressures of the job on everyone else at home. I am aware of being insanely lucky in the person I married and the kids we got. I often think of a comment a good friend made years ago when we were discussing a job move — your family are the closest members of the body of Christ — if there is no good news in this to them, there will not be good news in this to anyone else. And in this context, it’s fun to watch a silly wee movie from Florida, h/t Pierre Whalon and Kirk Smith, that therefore comes with heartfelt endorsement from three bishops...

This be the Verse 2

Philip Larkins (in)famous “This be the verse” (They f*ck you up, your mum and dad...) has long been highly regarded in counselling circles. It’s a lot of fun, and every time I've heard it quoted, it’s met by by knowing looks of recognition, wherever folks gather for encounters like Dr Evil’s legendary Father/Son family therapy session with Carrie Fisher:

Now, in the week of the poet’s death, John Halton has posted a response from a newspaper cutting by Adrian Mitchell:

They tuck you up, your mum and dad
They read you Peter Rabbit, too.
They give you all the treats they had
And add some extra, just for you.

They were tucked up when they were small,
(Pink perfume, blue tobacco-smoke),
By those whose kiss healed any fall,
Whose laughter doubled any joke.

Man hands on happiness to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
So love your parents all you can
And have some cheerful kids yourself.

Kudos to John for the poem. Two impressions from yesterday — Anna waving goodbye before my annual Xmas trek, & one of the sights of Newport Pagnell, more Philip Larkin than Adrian Mitchell...

Christmas: a Reboot not a Bailout

Christmas Message, please. One that will fit in 140 characters on Twitter? OK — I choose one from Thomas L. Friedman’s Op-Ed article in yesterday’s New York Times — “we don’t just need a bailout. We need a reboot.” Sounds good to me, and I shared it with congregations at Brill, Newport Pagnell and Weston Underwood this Christmas.
And for those with slightly more time, a delightful Irish short that says much the same thing, whilst Children take a fresh look at Christmas:

Giant Prickly Virgin Births

Ah! Bless! Parthenogenesis in our very own home on Christmas Eve. After a week or so of voracious bramble chomping in the tank, the complete stripping of all vegetation from their habitat, our first stick insect egg of this batch arrived last week, and now has six sisters.

Like other phasmids, MacLeay’s Spectres (Extatosoma Tiarata) reproduce in two ways —

1. Standard sexual reproduction (Vatican approved) which produces males and females, females with wing cases and males who fly. But for that you need males. We don’t have any, thus the girlie Phasmid Canoodling pictured below.
   
2. Parthenogenesis. Yes! Real Parthenogenesis! But I caution earnestly against any attempt to build a Dawkins busting Virgin Birth sermon out of such phenomena. I once heard it attempted, and it made Jesus sound simultaneously like a freak (some kind of superior stick insect) and a run of the mill natural phenomenon, and both are exactly not what St Matthew had in mind. And, of course, what the preacher forgot was that if this model provides any insight into events in the first century holy land, Jesus would have been a girl.
   

So, it’s seven Girls! and we await some 700 little sisters for them from our five giant prickly virgins in their tank. This could challenge those with wonky thinking about paradise — Good news, here are your 700 virgins: Bad news, they’re all stick insects — Hallelujah!

How Unprincipled is God?

In yesterday’s Telegraph, Rowan Williams asked the question, quoting a Christmas sermon of 1931 by Karl Barth, a deeply principled man, who said we must “live with principles, but we must also be able to live without them.” One obvious parallel might be Edith Cavell, profoundly a patriot, famously saying she had learnt that “patriotism is not enough.”

Vituperative Telegraph Hacks, who seemingly don’t understand the stuff in their own paper, slapped on a provocative cliché from the Beatles for a headline, then twisted the whole piece, bizarrely, to suggest Rowan was recommending Nazi Germany as a role model for the credit crunch, in order to annoy Gordon Brown. Spiteful Contortion, or what?

For those of us back on Planet Earth, along with Rowan Williams and Karl Barth, God takes the initiative by taking flesh at Bethlehem — a personal risk, not an abstract proposition. God is not entirely uprincipled, with his ten (or 631) commandments. Neither is Jesus with his Golden Rule. However, both God and Jesus know that principles, as Nurse Cavell discovered, are not enough. The world by principles knew not God. St Paul, a Man of the Law to his fingertips, discovered on the Damascus Road that the law could be no more than the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. That’s why Pelagianism, for all its good intentions and common sense logic, is not enough. We need Grace.

Jesus comes at Christmas, says St John, full of Grace and Truth. By comparison any set of principles can only reflect the light that shone in the stable, as the moon (indeed the whole earth) can only reflect the light of its Sun. The Sun of Righteousness rises, for our healing. In Karl Barth’s immortal phrase, the Eternal Light needs neither fuel nor candlestick. (Nor even Mangers Boiled Linseed Oil, seen in the Vestry at Little Kemble last Sunday)

So goodbye to the Pelagian duty to condemn everything that seemingly fails to meet my standards. I’m not God. I’m just the Vicar. Goodbye to the great abstract fears and fantasies that fuelled and licensed the holocausts of the last century. Goodbye to the silly notion that I can somehow make or unmake the Church, or the world, by politics or manipulation — even, perhaps especially, if I am right. Not by might, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. This is why we can hope. This is the Gospel of Christmas.

Radio Christmas 87·7 FM

Early start to go and do a brief slot with Martin Hughes on Radio Christmas. This terrific project, initiated by Duncan Dyason, supports his charity, Street Kids Direct, working to help young people rebuild threir lives on the streets of Guatemala and Honduras:

Getting a radio frequency for 1-24 December involves licensing, equipment, helpers, programming, production. Radio Christmas is a massive collaborative effort — take a look at the Flickr slideshow, and you'll see how many different people have been up for it, many of them young people getting early experience of broadcasting. It’s been hot in the studio!

I imagine Duncan will sleep the sleep of the righteous on Christmas Day, but this is plainly an idea that could spread all over the country. It’s generated fabulous community involvement and Christmas cheer, and is well on its way to raising £10K for street children in Guatemala... Click here to be part of it!

Crash bang wallop: real joy!

Lost and Found Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall. I hadn’t been there for about twenty years, then Herbie Hancock last month, and now a friend kindly gave Lucy and me tickets for this Son-of-Stomp! spectacular. It’s music, Jim, but not as we know it. No conventional instruments are involved. An orchestra of 50 (plus choir of 40) produce a riot of co-ordinated, elaboate, messy joy. The instruments are made from a variety of items off a skip (US - Dumpster), including parking cones, saws, crutches, shopping trolleys, rubber hosing and IV Drip stands. There’s dance involved, and presentation is as important as the sound. It’s a whole composite deal, where everyone is someone. It alll sounds a bit like Adiemus, but crazier. To get the best of it, you do have to be there — no mere film can do it justice.


I think we learned something last night —
It’s amazing what you can find in the things people trash — there is music hidden away in everything, waiting for people with the imagination and commitment to release it together.
Is this what Saint Paul meant when he described the Church as the “dregs of everything”?

’tis the reason for the season

Wacky families? All of us? Weirder than this (Right h/t Brent Diggs) — plucked out of the blogosphere in random fashion? back in May Brent posted a Short Conversation with God. Here’s a snippet...

God: (sigh) Yeah. Good help is hard to find.

Me: Help?…Oh right, christians. I know what you mean. They can be kind of weird; kind of freaky. Scary even.

God: They had a rough childhood, you know. Always getting beat on and fed to the lions and such. But they never stopped feeding the hungry or taking care of the poor in those early years, they made me really proud.

Me: What happened?

God: You know how kids are. They get to a certain age and they start thinking they don’t need you anymore. That they’ve got it all figured out. Of course, I’m supposed to keep providing the blessings: the sun, the rain, cheap labor in the third world. Other than that they just want me to not bother them while they sit in their rooms and talk to their friends about me.

Me: So basically, you’ve got teenagers?

God: Yeah.

Me: Sorry.

God: I know. I forgive you.

Me? I’m just enjoying the kids playing with the rats upstairs, to Janis Joplin, now Steph is home... We’re not wacky...

Happy families? all a bit weird...

Do nothing — Christmas is Coming! Last year I followed Maggi Dawn’s excellent Biblical advent course. This year Lucy and I have been taking Stephen Cottrell’s advice as we prepare for the Big Day. Stephen tracks through most of the weary things we’ve all felt, and some of us have said, about Christmas on its way, then takes the whole thing to the cleaners, by suggesting some down-to-earth ways of Thinking Different, that could really make a difference.

On Page 1 (as far as the busy journalist can be expected to read in any book) Stephen quotes one weary grinch:

Groan. It’s the first day of December, I’ve got about a hundred Christmas cards to write...”

Sadly our journalists were so busy that they didn’t get far enough to realise that this wasn’t an ex Cathedra statement from Stephen but an opening quote about feeling harrassed round Christmas. This mistake gave birth to a “Father Ted has got it in for the Chinese” story about Stephen and Christmas Cards. This straddled the world, from GetReading:

The self-styled “crazy bishop” has made the news again urging us all to forgo sending Christmas cards.

to the sunburned splendour of the (Murdoch) Brisbane Courier Mail

Church of England Bishop Stephen Cottrell says we should chill out this December and forget about sending Christmas cards.

Even Kiddiwinks got misled, as the fountain of niceness, CBBC Newsround reported:

Stephen Cottrell says we should stop sending Christmas cards to absolutely everyone we know, because it's a waste of time.

This is the time of year when most journalists go out, leaving machines to write ritual formulaic stories instead. There is a Holy Trinity of seasonal RF Stories:

1. Sales exceeding all records (possibly not this year, but they might run it anyway)
   
2. A council somewhere cancelling Christmas so as not to offend other faiths
3. Some vicar somewhere who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus.
   

These stories are not produced by human beings. There is no point treating them as though they were. The tale of a bishop banning Christmas cards is a variant of (3).

Having read as far as page 46 of Stephen’s book, I can testify that it’s worth it:

To one degree or another, we all find our families embarrassing. It’s something we all have in common. And the other sobering fact that we seem hell-bent on avoiding is that we are all members of our family. What really irritates us about them is that they are so like us! And here’s another uncomfortable truth: we are part of a common humanity. We all have the same frailties, insecurities, anxieties and heartfelt longings. We are all a bit weird. We are all flawed. We are all less than the people we want to be. We all get embarrassed by ourselves and by those around us. We all cause embarrassment to others.

Christmas can be a time when we let this get on top of us. Wouldn’t it be better to take the medicine on offer? To accept these frailties, and then do two other things: first, accept yourself as the flawed and beautiful person that you are; and second, have a very good laugh at your own foolishness and enjoy the foolishness of others, especially those you’re going to be spending the next week with. After all, this is supposed to be the season of goodwill.

I defy the risk that the world’s press will now report that the self-confessed weird bishop has murdered all his family. I like his advice today:

• The best comedies will not be on TV this Christmas. They will be around your own table, if you can but see them.
• Re-imagine the peoples of the world as a hugely complex, extremely muddled, wonderfully odd and riotously funny family. Enjoy the differences. Take proper account of the deep-seated similarities.

Anglican Schism — Righteous Salami

Ages before the words had quite today’s meaning, they used to say in Yorkshire, “The whole world’s queer save thee and me, and I’ve been wondering about thee recently...” People in every Church have said it, from the Great Papal Schism (1378-1417) to the Marcel Lefebvre movement, or the salami slicing of the Kirk since the Great Disruption of 1843. It happens. Always the righteous minority walk away, claiming that everyone else has constructively dismissed them.

Actually this behaviour transcends religion. The extreme Right Swinton Circle does it. “It’s not the party I joined,” wailed old Labourites in flat caps through the 90’s. And, of course, they were right. Things change, and righteous remnant attitudes lie crouching at all our doors, awaiting their day.

For fun, Bosco Peters has started up his own Real Anglican Communion. Salami slice your way to True Orthodoxy with Mickey Mouse, and you are actually heading towards vanishing point. Bosco’s pulling our legs, but the guy who got consecrated in Kalispell Montana as Pope Pius XIII is deadly serious about being the “true Catholic Church,” following the liberal defection of the other billion odd Roman Catholics in the world. It’s hard to tell where Mickey taking shades into reality. The whole process of rancorous straining at gnats and swallowing camels seems to Bonsai people’s self awareness, as various ecclesiastical costumiers ring up the dollars, to illustrate the grandiose websites.

Cue Dr Ephraim Radner — a deeply grounded and spiritually aware Conservative theologian from Wycliffe College, Toronto. He’s posted his Advent thoughts, What I have learned these past five years, and I commend them to the house as a supremely wise, humble and hopeful resource to everyone on all sides, a blast of human and spiritual reality for us all:

The last few years of struggle within the Episcopal Church (TEC) and within the Anglican Communion have taken their toll on many persons and congregations, and on our common life in a larger way. Every day brings some new report on the impending or already achieved “break-up” of Anglicanism and on the spectacle of “global schism”, even while Anglican leaders insist that this hasn’t happened yet. Many congregations in the United States, and some in Canada, have left their denominations for other forms of Anglican relationship. Even more congregations, including many that have left TEC, have been torn by conflict or bled by tension and malaise, and TEC’s membership has shown a steady and alarming drop in the past three or four years. Declarations affirming something “new” about to begin or demanding something “old” be restored are issued from various groups, and the project of developing “adequate structures” or even canons for this or that ministry, mission, and witness is seen by many as a necessity, even if understood in contradictory ways.

How does one navigate this time as an Anglican Christian? I have a number of friends and colleagues who have decided simply that it is not possible to do so. For various reasons, they have left Anglicanism altogether – becoming Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox (less common), non-denominational evangelical Christians (often) or finally (most frequently) “church drop-outs” altogether. A common theme among these persons has been a sense of exhaustion and spiritual depletion, even as they have discerned elements of doctrine and ecclesial life that they believe, in different ways, are best embodied in other Christian traditions. The ache of inner ailment has stirred up a theological ferment whose outcome has opened up the press for a new direction altogether....

More importantly than the substance of the issue in question, however, I have had to face quite simply the fact that my own views, however carefully constructed and believed in, are not the measure of the church’s life or of anybody else’s. They cannot displace, in time, a whole range of other imperatives to action, relationship, reflection and counsel, witness, and prayer. And once I allow them to do this, I have given way, not to God’s sovereign power and love, but to my own self-regard. I might well ask, “why do the wicked prosper?” and find God staying my heart (cf. Psalm 37); I might remember Paul’s exhortation not to insist on one’s own ways (1 cor. 13:5; Rom. 15:1f.), not for the sake of giving up convictions or of compromise, but simply to give oneself over to God the just judge (1 Pet.2:23); I might also, finally and even better, plead, “I am a worm and no man, have mercy on me” (Ps. 22:6, 19).

In a world of inceasing individualism and single issue fanaticism, the gentleman is right, and his point, of course, cuts all ways. He draws attention to eleven particular action learning points:

1. You can’t always get what you want, even if you are right
2. Parishes are mixed, and require building up by non-conflictive teaching, not transformation into battlegrounds
3. So is the whole Communion, and it has the same need
4. Legal complexity cuts both ways
5. The impact of global culture on Christian life needs to be understood carefully and accurately
6. We cannot avoid repeating the mistakes of the past
7. There is no magic bullet solution, to be brought about by cataclysmic change
8. No one person or group is in a position to bring about such a solution
9. There is no credit in failing to defend the integrity of adversaries, or remaining silent in the face of indefensible behaviour by allies
10. Spiritual Malice remains Spiritual Malice, to be avoided at all costs
11. Israel, wait on the Lord
    What I seek to do – through God’s mercy and grace — is to retain the faith, hope, and love that will permit constancy in testimony, perseverance in learning, willingness in encounter, and the wisdom through such persistence to persuade in trust and service. The great gifts of Anglicanism have always turned in this direction – for we were ever sinful, were we not? — so that our mission has triumphed over our internal tensions...

I spent Tuesday in a day’s personal growth, learning and reflection with senior Christian leaders in Buckinghamshire, Baptist, Methodist, Savation Army, United Reformed, Roman Catholic. As we shared openly together what God has been showing us, very much in the spirit of Dr Radner, a tremendous sense emerged of the importance for our common life of integrating the ways God sees us, and the ways the world sees us, and the ways we see each other and ourselves. Ditto at yesterday’s wonderful Diocesan senior staff meeting. We only get one Advent this year, during which we pray

O wisdom that proceeds from the mouth of the most high, reaching powerfully from end to end, sweetly (elegantly, smoothly, gently) ordering everything: Come teach us the way of good judgment.

Let’s not waste it this year...

Wisdom and Night driving

From Benedictus to Magnificat — Today’s the Day everything changes gear. O Sapientia, 17 December, is named after the first of the great sequence of antiphons before the Magnificat, marking our final approach run to Christmas.
In the old money —

O Sapientia, quæ ex ore altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem fortiter,
suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiæ.

I love what this says — its depth and insight into how things really happen:

O wisdom that proceeds from the mouth of the most high, reaching powerfully from end to end, sweetly (elegantly, smoothly, gently) ordering everything: Come teach us the way of good judgment.

Much of today was a diocesan staff meeting. We’ve always been reasonably well-mannered and efficient, but I notice we’re working together more freely and joyfully. I put it down to a greater commitment to working at our relationships, and more time going beyond the shopping list of business items. In any enterprise there are things that need doing, and one strategy is to fixate on them until entirely functional and task driven. Do that and people try their best, but there’s always an x factor missing — harmony and understanding that comes from real working friendship, sincere ownership with open eyes.

You can only achieve corporate goals fully at a pace that matches your knowledge of each other. Like night driving, it’s only safe within your headlights. You may well get away with going faster, but output will be less than the group’s best, and everyone will have niggling doubts about it that they don’t want to own up to for fear of seeming to slow things down. It’s one mechanism that leads people to pretend things are better then they actually are. The same old niggling doubts surface and resurface ages after you thought the group decision had been taken. Better to trust God’s sweet ordering of everything, and invest more time in the people and their relationships — drive within the group’s headlights, not faster, and you actually arrive at a better place, possibly even sooner.

George Bush the Edomite

Praying the Bible liturgically every day you don’t half get to know the bits that aren’t headlines or sound bites. Seldom do you see them enacted before your very eyes, like Muntadar al-Zeidi’s dramatic gesture at Sunday’s Bush Iraq presser — a graphic example of the ancient Semitic gesture of disgust and contempt to be found in Psalm 60:8 (Doublet at Psalm 108:9): עַל-אֱדוֹם אַשְׁלִיךְ נַעֲלִי — Over Edom will I cast out my shoe (Coverdale).

The curious can regularly encounter this gesture in the prayers of monastic communities at around 5.45 a.m. every Wednesday and Saturday morning. None of us are at our most compos mentis that early. Jerome rather softened it (“In Idumæam extendam calceamentum meam,”). The Hebrew is down and dirty – (root שלך: looks like a straight hiph‘îl)— to chuck/ pitch an offending object, like the rocks God tossed down from heaven in Joshua 10:10. The 1945 Latin liturgical psalter headed back towards the orignal (“Super Edom ponam calceamentum meam’’), but 1980 went a bit soft — “Super Idumæam extendam ...” Call me old-fashioned, but Coverdale’s BCP hit the nail on the head.


President Bush himself was correct — This is the 8th century BC Semitic equivalent of giving the finger on the freeway, but more considered, contemptuous and rather more dramatic. It was very striking to see this done on cable TV, and eliciting so much comment. The Bible speaks today! Whatever next? ritual shaving for humiliation? Cutting animals in half to make a contract? Moloch?

If it takes some heat out of the situation, the Ship of Fools has a Biblical Curse Generator, where you can smite your enemies with boils like Amalekite Dogs...