Credit Crunch Bank Bust: King Rat?

Brilliantly rendered graphically by Jonathan Jarvis: h/t Euan Semple:

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
This side of the pond, Sir Fred Goodwin wrestles internally with Jiminy Cricket over his £650,000 a year life pension from age 50, his reward for delivering the biggest cockup ever in UK corporate history, a record breaking loss of £24,000,000,000, at a cost to his fellow citizens of £20,000,000,000, including the ruin of many of his colleagues and customers.

Give it back, or what be stripped of it? I don’t believe anyone should do anything illegal or vindictive. There are plenty of others out there as bad, but less public, no doubt. But if I were Sir Fred, I’d scrabble up as much of the offending money as I could and do something genuinely altruistic with it, perhaps an investment that helps poor people through hard times. That way some good comes of his cockup, nobody breaks the law, and he can recover a bit of respect in the community. Howzat?

Meanwhile the Long Johns (Bird and Fortune) explain the matter perfectly clearly, as is their wont:

Magical Music in a Digital Age

Yo’ music listening pleasure need never be the same again, thanks to Shazam and Spotify. WARNING: Running mystifactious software on your computer will probably destroy your brain, but, once it’s gone you won’t care ayway...

You are listening to Radio 1 whilst preparing your sermon. No, your kids have Radio 1 on loud whilst you are trying to prepare your sermon. Anyway, a half decent track accidentally makes it onto the airwaves and you think “Wossat?” Wonder no more. What you do is launch Shazam on your iPhone or computer, and tag it. The machine listens to a brief snatch from anywhere in the track, sends it away for analysis, and comes back with its identity, along with any iTunes or Youtube references, and further information about the artists. Shazam is probably powered out of a basement somewhere by a couple of ageing “High Fidelity” hippies on weed. Alternately, it’s Magic. Anyway it’s fun and it works.

But why listen to Radio 1 anyway when you could order up what you want to listen to and have your own bespoke music show? Spotify is a narrowcast station which enables you to listen for free to music on demand, using your computer. Read that sentence again and think about it. Several million tracks are up there, including more classical music than I expected. You sign up for a free account; ask for the music, listen and enjoy for free. The only cost is a single advert at the end of the track. For a modest subscription you can bypass that and listen for nothing. Becauze you don't download the track it's legal, and it's free. Think of it as a music radio station where you control and mix your own personal broadcast. It's also superb for tracing recordings — enter a song title and get a comprehensive list of covers — and then, best of all, you can listen to any or all of them to your heart's content gratis, feee and for nothing. Perfick.

Mushing our Brains on Facebook?

Is Facebook doing all our brains in? Susan Greenfield is the country’s most distinguished popular brain scientist, and has asked hard questions in the house of Lords about the harmful effects that hours spent on Facebook may be having on our childrens’ attention spans and social development.

The whole experience social media offer is

devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity

Woody Allen once said his Brain was his second favourite organ, so this is an urgent question. And, typical Anglican, my instant superficial response is to say I believe that, as reported, her words are both entirely correct and entirely wrong-headed.

Her concern is fundamentally right, because everything we experience has some impact on the brain as a complex self-organizing system. We learn by adaptation, and it is impossible to think that, however we fill our hours, this will have no impact on our personalities, expectations, skills and aptitudes.

That said, I believe her particular concern is probably entirely misplaced, in the grand Scientific tradition of Dr Dionysius Lardner’s dire predictions that trains would kill people if they went over 40 mph.

• I have learnt from Professor Greenfield, and others, that the brain is not a single entity. It's more accurate to think of it as a bundle of specialised centres, each developing its own competence by adapting to experience. This makes personality, the vital precondition of rich social interaction, an emergent reality. We have an amazing ability, especially during teenage neurological growth spurts, to develop superabundant multiple interrelated abilities, rather than simply manage static or limited capacity. The whole brain is fantastically adaptive and compensating.
  
  Therefore experience of hours on facebook is unlikely to skew the whole personality in the way suggested. Walking three miles to school every day for eight years doubtless strengthened my legs and their neurological controllers, and scored pathways at various loci in my brain. It certainly absorbed many hours of time I could have otherwise been reading. But to go from that self-evident truth to an assertion that adapting my neurophysiology to largely autonomic control processes could only be done by stunting my capacity to develop centres for higher non autonomic functions like reading, is nonsense. Those tradeoffs are neither necessary, nor desirable. I walked to school, and got into Cambridge. So did thousands of others.
  
  
• Screentime may be damaging eyesight, obesity levels, the ways people connect stories and spirituality; or not. Research is always welcome. But the autism thing is surely nonsense. How can babies, for example, have been corrupted by hours on Facebook, of all things? Autism seems to be a parking lot for anything we don't like and don’t get — it fulfils the social function witchcraft did in Salem, MA. Witness recent hysteria over MMR jabs.
  
  
• Finally, and this is the thing people my age never get at first, the whole point of social media is not the screen, but the human beings with whom you communicate using the screen. My kids don’t MSN because they love MSN technology. They do it to be with their mates. Offering a rich palette of ways of interacting, mediated by screen, actually enriches their interactions. All I could do at their age was talk for hours on the phone with my girlfriends. They can share videos, etc.
  
  The effect of the whole is not to make them want to stay at home, but to develop an even more voracious appetite for social interaction, including face-to-face. Having more material from which to construct narratives doesn’t prevent you doing so, any more than living in a forest would prevent you having log fires. Au Contraire.
  

Therefore, above all, I beg to differ because the vast majority of young people I meet are intensely socialised and socialisable, very aware of others, and far less geeky and withdrawn than many of my compadres were thirty years ago. My generation’s geekiness resulted from hours reading books on our own, when we should have been socialising with small talk down the pub.

If you really push me to source attitudes that are “infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity,” I’d head right for Fleet Street. Since nobody much under 30 reads a newspaper any more, I’d say the human race’s social future is pretty secure...

Interfaith Dialogue in Slough

Great to be part of the Festival of Dialogue at St Mary’s Slough on Saturday afternoon, organised by Art Beyond Belief, and funded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Representatives of all faith traditions in Slough gathered for an afternmoon of structured dialogue and panel discussion, ending with a meal together.

David Sparrow is a photographer by background, who uses computers and art to unlock understanding, not only between faith groups, but as self awareness for autistic young people and victims of domestic violence. People who don’t know Slough are sometimes snooty about it, (and The Office didn’t help) but it is fantastically inclusive, with its long tradition of hospitality, energy and rich diversity.

Among other events during the preceding months has been a joint project with Slough Libraries, “Borrow a Person.”

If you have ever wondered what someone of another faith thinks about something that’s important to you, or why anyone would want to be part of a religion at all, come along to Slough Library and, instead of borrowing a book, borrow a person instead! The idea of ‘Living Libraries’ was introduced in 2000 by the Danish Youth organisation ‘Stop the Violence’. It has been developed in a number of countries and has been gaining popularity in English libraries. This is the first time that sessions have been offered in Slough. The ‘living books’ to be borrowed will be ordinary members of local faith communities, who will be happy to discuss their religion and traditions, faith and spirituality, beliefs and experiences and any other subject besides.

This was an occasion for hard mutual questioning as well as good intentions. From my own table, I was struck by two hard truths:

• Some UK politicians take a line that ring fences foreign policy (Iraq/Afghanstan, Israel/Palestine) from issues of community cohesion in the UK. Pile lots of money into the latter and maybe people won’t mind about the former. This is an illusion.
  
  
• This event was locally initiated and organised, growing from work going on anyway, but earnest Government attempts to promote community cohesion, especially those that seem to be targeted at Muslims, are not appreciated for the lovely things they doubtless are. People don't like being having money thrown at them on the premise that they are somehow the problem, and especially not if the sauce it’s served up with tastes of secularised religious illiteracy.
  

‘Why dialogue, apart from as a tool for government social control?’ I was asked. The Christian answer is simple. God teaches that our highest duty is to love him, and to love our neighbours as ourselves. Love grows from respect, justice and active goodwill to understand. Without intentionally giving other people your attention and your respect, you cannot do this.

MK NHS Hospitals Trust Good News

Licensing Karen Reeves to Milton Keynes Hospital as colleague to Carole Hough on Friday, felt like a new beginning for the trust, as well as the chaplaincy. Karen brings a strong professional background in hospital and community healthcare, along with a profound commitment to justice, social inclusion and peace. MK is very much the kind of diverse, fast-moving urban environemnt in which she has really flourished.

Milton Keynes has grown continuously and exponentially over 30 years, with a chronic and worsening overhang as money follows people, sometimes several years behind. This makes any social, health, educational planning a nightmare. Hospitals are especially vulnerable, as a burgeoning young population puts an immense load on the whole system. As MK grows into the 10th biggest city in the country, John Prescott's target for 2020, this problem rages on.

The temptation is always to sweat the immediate challenges, whilst ignoring the big unfolding context. MK Hospitals NHS Trust, chaired by Mike Rowlands and, since last summer, Walter Greaves, has worked hard to make the most of the realities, challenges and opportunities of Milton Keynes, short and long term. Where chaplaincy could easily become roadkill, the trust has worked hard to provide proper spiritual care in in very trying circumstances. Karen’s arival is a tanglible sign of that commitment.

After a few years of backs-to-the-wall, through which Carole has, incredibly, managed to cope, Friday’s service was good news. Karen’s arrival, partnership with bereavement services, a good and supportive trust (Thanks to Gill Rodney and, particularly Nicola Lester), means the chaplancy team is now back on track for full out of hours cover, increasing voluntary support, developing its present excellent ecumenical and interfaith character, and a host of other good work. The Creation hanging in the chapel was by sisters from Turvey Abbey — a beautiful piece of work, that looks all the better at a time of great hope, as well as challenge, for the hospital...

Dwinding congregations: the Truth?

When and why did the English stop going to Church en masse? Earlier than we think, perhaps. The Church in an Age of Danger, Parsons and Parishioners 1660-1740 is a rewritten PhD thesis by Donald Spaeth, that pokes about in the unfashionable basement of popular religion in 17th/18th century Wiltshire. He suggests the rot set in earlier than we like to think, and for relational rather than theological reasons.

Health warning: I have received considerable spiritual benefit from Evangelical and Tractarian revivals, and spent 21 years of ministry as a resident parson in a parish. What follows is hypothetical historical sketching, not bitter twisted comment on any of those fine things in themselves. But, remembering Ronald Reagan’s wise words “Don’t be afraid to see what you see,” here goes...

Evangelical and Tractarian historiographies have tended to suggest their people saved the Church from terrible neglect.

Terrible it may have been, but, paradoxically, far more people went to Church. Every place had its own story, but the mass of people seem to have become detached from their village churches as relationships broke down. The English did not become anticlerical like the French did, but got into habits of ploughing their own furrows, as the Church became more top-down, professional and exclusive.

So here’s one possible historical narrative of how congregations dwindled.

With box pews, churches began to look and feel like cattle pens, or our swimming pool changing rooms. Religion was becoming radically privatised. The parish church became an icon of class division, imposing a top-down order, dismantling previous relationships and practice, enforcing various new model ideologies. This set the stage for three new reforming clerical waves:

1. the Evangelical revival, with clergy enforcing their own particular apparently narrow bands of belief, Calvinistic or Arminian, as the way to salvation.
   
   
2. Resident gentlemen clergy after residence was legally enforced in the early nineteenth century. In came big Georgian rectories, out went peasant curates who were less learned and often part time, but radically incarnational in village life.
   
   
3. the Oxford movement, with robed choirs in the chancel and powerful organs to deal with the rough and ready village band.

All three waves brought new model professional guardians of the sacred, each with powerful authoritarian notions of how things should be, and a tendency to impose their will regardless. Each new wave recruited smallish groups of enthusiastic blue eyed boys & girls, but alienated all the others. As people moved to industrial towns in the 19th century, the village church was part of the social baggage they gratefully left behind.
Et Voilà! Any questions?

Telemarketers nemesis — guaranteed

Getting a few calls from 01792 761030. The phone never rings long enough to answer. This is presumably because the caller is paid for quantity not quality of communication. People who have replied tell dark tales of being pumped about mobile phone contracts. Fair do’s, unsolicited marketing calls are part of life, but the persistence of this one has put me in mind of a famous ripping wheeze connected with Mr Tom Mabe:

Revolutionary Road — to nowhere?

Kate Winslett and Leonardo deCaprio were last seen bobbing in the sea off Newfoundland. But what if they’d made it ashore? Surely they would have lived happily ever after, raised a big corn-fed premium family. Wouldn't they? Don’t bet on that.

In Revolutionary Road Kate & Leo are the Wheelers, exploring true love, locked-in frustration and ennui in 1953. There’s no way like the American way. The babies are booming and so are the ’burbs. Under the sink, however, various streptococci breed, and the worst ones eat you up, from the inside out. Gatsby showed us the toxic tender underbelly of the jazz age; Frank and April do the same for the McCarthy era.

Off and on, hopes raised in the Wheelers’ cute meeting scene seem teasingly capable of fulfilment. 95% of the time, however, the film pokes around the bend under the sink, where germs lurk. Frank works in a dead end job; April is bored out of her mind. Frank tries to impress a girl in the typing pool; April tumbles meaninglessly with a neighbour in the front bench seat of his Buick. This is not elegant, or even particularly erotic, but maintains Kate’s record of making out in a car once per blockbuster.

Enter John, the neighbours’ wacky spaced out son, fresh off a massive breakdown. John tells it like it is, like Lear’s fool. Life is suffocating, unbearable. It’s enough to make D. H. Lawrence run off into the woods, roll around naked in wet leaves and write a poem about it, but you can’t even do that in suburban Connecticut. Paris calls, in the form of a breakout that, in itself, would have made a jolly alternative movie. Cary Grant would have moved to Connecticut, but the Wheelers have already done that, with no place else to go and April newly pregnant with No 3. The Wheelers are now in big trouble...

Beneath Sam Mendes beautifully crafted well-scripted film lurk big questions. What is the relationship between love and the marriage bond? What are our masks good for and bad for? When things unravel, how does one level fill with hope, and the next deflate to absolute zero? How does happiness come, from outside in and inside out, and what is it anyway?

Tracking the Wheelers through their downward spiral, Kate Winslet in particular eases deeper into her character in a truly remarkable way. Banking down, she becomes, increasingly, a complete outsider to the honeytone fifties colour scheme. Everything stays intact around her as she catastrophically crumbles internally. Increasingly, the show feels like a horror film. The kids go curiously out of focus as all the wheels come off the wagon. Pleasantville, friends, is a sham.

Understsood or not quite understood, love or loathe the implicit message, this is a very good movie, just a squeak, perhaps, off a really great movie. Just do yourself a favour, and take your first date to a more optimisitc show, like Friday the 13th.

Twitter: The Compleat Twit

Social media seem to be catching the imaginagtions of some imaginative colleagues. It remains to be seen when they will begin to touch fogey untouchables, but from Obama to the Telegraph all sorts of people and organisations are on the game now. Twitter is becoming not so much a website, more a way of life — or, to use the jargon, a Platform.

Getting the best out of Twitter?
Take this lunchtime. Cooking with friends at half term furious disputation arose about feeding spring onion stalks to Lara, our neighbours’ rabbit. Do spring onions make rabbits, er, windy? Theories and counter-theories raged around the room, so I twittered it. Within 3 minutes reply came from Alexander Chow in Los Angeles, ably assisted by Mr Bunny & Pumpkin. Rabbits are OK with spring onion, friends, and unless you are kind to neighbours’ rabbits, the Great Rabbit Paw in the Sky may Finger you. All in under 140 characters.

Now thoroughly convinced of the power of Twitter, off you go. I’ve been on Twitter a wee while, and after a few wilderness weeks wondering what the point was, the penny dropped in December. People with an instinctive feeling that my Twittergrade may now be as high as 97·9 have been asking me about getting the best out of it.
What do I know? You just sign up, dive in, explore, network, have fun. That said, Trimmings have their uses, and I’ve got a few suggestions to help the curious make themselves into more compleat (or “Upper Class”) Twits.

Start with Twitter, and play much with its Twitter Search. Enter a subject that interests you, and pick stuff out of the Tweetstream, and follow the authors. Easy. Next, if you’re using Firefox, beef up your basic Twitterpage with PowerTwitter. This fluffs out the information (names, pictures, movies) and puts a bit more on the page; not necessary but perhaps desirable. Next, if you have a blog, head for Twitterfeed. That will automatically feed your blog posts into the twitterstream, and to Facebook (if you do that). Finally, you need to find a way to get Twitter onto your desktop without having the fag of opening a fresh page? (For Mac Users Twitterific will do this in an elegant occasional column, and it’s probably the best iPhone twitter client.)

This next bit is very important. Whatever you use, Mac, PC or Linux, head straight for TweetDeck and install it. T/D will allow you to filter tweets, search easily, handle replies, find people to follow. It also has a simple facility to shrink URL’s — very useful when you're stuffing them into your 140 character limit. Alternatively, try Twhirl: less resource hungry, if that’s an issue, single column, but better for multiple accounts.

After a while you wonder who’s following you. To find out, follow Mr Tweet, who will come back with suggestions based on your profile and recent record. Check out those elite influencers with Twidentify. TwitterCounter will tell you simply, but for deeper analysis and pretty diagrams, use Tweetstats. This also has a screen to alert you to general trends in what people are talking about in the twitterstream. If you get hooked and want historic data as well, check out Retweetradar.

But who are these people following you, really? Check their websites and blogs (given on their profile pages) when you get the email alerting you to the fact they’re following you. Or look for trends, and Round up your TwitterSheep. Are you getting any good at this? Find out on TwitterGrader. Do you come over as a miserable old so-and-so, or what? Find out with HappyTweets. Still in the Affective Zone, you can empty all your fears and worries into the dark, secret confidential dustbin of Secret Tweet (useful for illustrating talks on Prayer, too.) It's like confession, but without absolution, note. If you want to find out what people think of anything (“ask the audience”) use twtPoll.

Finally, the Top Shelf of twitter widgets. I do not really approve of all of these, but, heck, its half term... Half the fun of Twitter is the 140 character limit. Haiku is crude by comparison. However some playmates can’t bear to stop talking. Twitlonger allows you to churn out longer tweets. use with care. Tweetlater enables you to schedule future tweets; a marketer's dream, but if you annoy people by semi-spamming them, they will unfollow you.

There you go: 17 key twitter applications and widgets. You won’t want all of them, but you may well want most of them. The one to die for, the Must-have? Two, actually: Tweetdeck or Twhirl.
Enjoy, people, and may the Lord have mercy on your soul... !

Belated Valentine in the Snow

Saturday was almost the last day with enough snow in our back garden for play. Whilst our children were still abed, Lucy and I popped out the back for something of what I think UK tabloids used to call a Love Romp.

Valentine’s Day this year also brought a poem shared by poet Elspeth Murray (using Twitter) — short enough to write on a card, as she pointed out.

A Betrothal
E. J. Scovell

Put your hand on my heart, say that you love me as
The words upon the hills cleave to the hills’ contours

I will uphold you, trunk and shoot and flowering sheaf,
And I will hold you, roots and fruit and fallen leaf.

Chocolate heart from Hotel Chocolat in MK — highly recommended.
Heigh ho. That could well be it for another 18 years...
PS also a chance to play with the new iMovie, complete with cheesy effects.

...and just to see how the other half lives, for details of an expensove nightmare Valentine experience for poor Ben the Debt Monkey, click here.

Trading control for wholeness...

I’ve just had a spiritually refreshing conversation with Steve Bushell, Chaplain of our local Mental health NHS trust. Steve has studied Desert Spirituality closely, and together with excellent senior colleagues in the trust is working out a fascinating new integrated approach to Spiritual Care. As he talked about his work, I was reminded of Robin Skynner’s Institutes and how to survive them. There Dr Skynner proved the key contribution staff attitude makes to the health of the whole and the healing of patients. This closes the gap between Spirituality and Religion, which has been so disastrous in Western Christianity.

The key to good healthcare, we decided, was the willingness and ability of the hierarchs to give away control, to support and facilitate rather than direct people in what becomes a healing community, not a controlled-and-controlling bureaucracy. What the hierarchy does builds either understanding and respect, or cynicism, depending on its alignment with its professed values. This reminded me of a wise, experienced and perceptive Vicar telling me recently how he had observed that when he stopped forcing his initiatives on people and doing stuff, far more happened, and in a different, more spiritually significant way. More the Coach, less the professional Guardian of the Sacred; more the resourceful friend, less the eccentric drill sergeant. See Mark 10:42.

Steve and I scoped the role of of the Chaplain as someone who learns and listens carefully to the languages people use to express themselves, a spiritual interpreter, someone who can hold the lines and ask key questions of any and all, including themselves. The prime task is to help people identify where God is in their lives so that he can grow their Sacred Centre... Like Vicars?

Church of England: Why and How?

What is the C of E, and how does it keep going? Andrew Brown asks, pertinently,

Can the church of England, or even the Anglican Communion, ever split? Or is it simply too disorganised to lose a unity which it never actually had?

Not a cruel question — an obvious and sensible one, and the answer is basically “yes.” This answer shows up something special about the character and process of the Church of England. Just like the Apostolic Church in Corinth, it’s always going down the pan, always sneered at and despised, always dying, yet behold we live. The offscouring of all things it may be, but it doesn't go away. Why not? “Is it a good way to be a Christian, or even a stable one?” asks Andrew. It’s certainly a very down to earth one.

Nick Baines observes with great clarity how the Church hangs together, in human terms. Such behaviour, seldom described but often experienced, resonates through Church life like Brighton goes through Brighton rock. Parishes freely welcome, then gently cherish and nurture, challenging people. Clergy cry at strangers’ funerals, and try to think of new and entertaining school assemblies, with governing body in the evening. Ringers slide off to the pub at 6·30 and catch up with the gossip. Lambeth does Indaba, sustained disciplined cross cultural listening. being this kind of Church annoys imperialists and bullies of all stripes, but we stick with it. You find similar processes of listening, respect and accommodation, if you look for them, on every level and, to a great or lesser extent in every place:

The Church of England is perhaps the only church witnessing to the pain of holding together instead of taking the easy option and simply splitting and going where your mates are. It costs nothing to form yourself into a community of like-minded people among whom you won’t have to struggle with challenge or difference. But that is not the Church. Just like the first disciples of Jesus, our vocation is to follow Jesus together. Jesus did not give any of his disciples a veto over who else should or should not be called into the company of disciples.

Secondly, instead of doing it the way the world does it (that is, running away from the tensions into safe groups of the like-minded), perhaps the Church of England has no option but to wrestle openly with its tensions in a way that refuses to pretend to the watching world that every issue is easily resolved or reality ignored. I get as impatient as everyone else at some of the things I hear, but they don’t give me permission to walk away.

Yesterday’s synod debate on the Uniqueness of Christ, with its landslide result (wonderfully live-blogged by Peter Ould), shows something significant and often forgotten. What basically holds the C of E together is a sense of Christ, and reverence for Christ, addressed from many different personal directions but focussed simply on him. The Rest is Noise. The Church simply has no big organisational Salt-Lake-City/ Vatican coherence. Whenever it tries to develop one, because human nature is always more comfy that way, it makes a fool of itself. Its power is profoundly voluntary and humane, rather than institutional. We can be as passionate as we are inspired to be, but we don’t do doctrinal fascism. Our cultural milieu is not confessionally Liberal, but it is profoundly Libertarian in a John Milton sense (Areopagitica). The Church is almost the ultimate Starfish, rather than Spider organisation. This, in fact, is its strength, not its weakness. Go figure.

French without tears

I don’t know the source of this — probably a tea towel — but it caught my eye on a wall plaque at a friend’s house; someone with strong Francophone African connections...

(translation below)

Je te souhait du temps...

Prends le temps de penser, c'est la source de pouvoir.

Prends le temps de jouer, c'est la secret de la jeunesse.

Prends le temps de lire, c'est le source du savoir.

Prends le temps d'aimer et d'etre aimé c'est une grace de Dieu.

Prends le temps de te faire des amis, c'est la voie du bonheur.

Prends le temps de rire, c'est la musique de l'ame.

Prends le temps de donner, c'est le role de l'adulte.

Prends le temps de travailler, c'est le prix du succès.

Prends le temps de prier, c'est la force de l'homme.

Oh all right — In English:

I wish you the gift of Time...

Take time to think, it’s the source of power.

Take time to play, it’s the secret of youth.

Take time to read, it’s the source of knowledge.

Take time to love and be loved, It’s a gift from God.

Take time to make friends, It’s the way to happiness.

Take time to laugh, It’s the soul’s music.

Take time to give, It’s the grown-up thing to do

Take time to work, It’s the price of success.

Take time to pray, It’s the strength of humanity.

Gang of 4 Bankers Group self-criticism

Today Four Big Bankers were wheeled into the Treasury Select Committee for Ritual Humiliation and Group Self-Criticism. There they confessed publicly to various errors of judgment, crimes against the workers, and sundry false consciousness. I hope we all feel better. I’m slightly surprised these Titans had no idea anything like this might happen. People reading, for example Kevin Phillips’ Bad Money, appear to have been better informed about these comrades’ businesses than they were themseles. Cost? £17·39 for awareness these comrades couldn't manage on £4·4m a year. Why, Jon Molton warned them a year ago on national TV. Heigh-ho.

Simple minds thought the Gang of Four got paid telephone number sums of money every year because they took big risks. But apparently they didn’t. We did. They just got the money anyway. Big sorry. Surprisingly, I’m told none of the four had done any banking exams. Really? So they were only amateurs anyway. Big Multimillion pound Banking, like flower arranging, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Morris Dancing, turns out to have been a mainly amateur activity in the UK. Perhaps we should all have a go. Mary Poppins will be revolving in her grave.

I don’t think they will need to be beheaded. Instead someone like Mr Darling should be very cross with them. Furthermore he should write them a letter telling them he is very cross. Then, when we have all stumped up a few more billion pounds, it can start up all over again, and the good times will roll? or maybe not. Perhaps we will not be returning to 2007 again, any of us. Make no mistake. We have all been collectively foolish, fuelling what Andreas Whittam-Smith calls our banking “Doomsday Machine.” (h/t Ruth Gledhill, for a really helpful link) We’re all in this thing, like it or not. These were just ordinary people, doing their jobs as best they could; we mustn’t let their extraordinary wages blind us to that disturbing fact...

Humility: earthing, not grovelling

Daily readers of the Rule of Benedict today complete the great twelve steps of humility in chapter 6. Benedict brilliantly sees that community is made or broken by attitude, not achievement or conformity. Humility is the foundation of community.
Unfortunately, rather as the concept of obedience gets mechanised and debased into “Simon says,” humility gets mistaken for a perpetual state of grovelling.
What if humility, far more than grovelling, is actually about being earthed, feet on the ground, open eyed about self and everyone else? Embracing the way of humility means commitment to being radically realistic — “Don’t be afraid to see what you see” — a kind of holy pragmatism underlying everything. As often happens, Joan Chittister gets the matter bang to rights:

True humility is simply a measure of the self that is taken without exaggerated approval or exaggerated guilt. Humility is the ability to know ourselves as God knows us, and to know that it is the little we are that is precisely our claim on God. Humility, then, is the foundation for our relationship with God, our connectedness to others, our acceptance of ourselves, our way of using the goods of the earth and even our way of walking through the world, without arrogance, without domination, without scorn, without put-downs, without disdain, without self-centredness. The more we know ourselves, the gentler we will be with others...

The chapter on humility is a strangely wonderful and intriguingly distressing treatise on the process of the spiritual life. It does not say, "Be perfect." It says, "Be honest about what you are and you will come to know God." It does not say, "Be flawless and you will earn God." It says, "If you recognize the presence of God in life, you will soon become more and more perfect." But this perfection is not in the twentieth-century sense of impeccability. This perfection is in the biblical sense of having become matured, ripened, whole.

The entire chapter is such a nonmechanistic, totally human approach to God. If we reach out and meet God here where God is, if we accept God's will in life where our will does not prevail, if we are willing to learn from others, if we can see ourselves and accept ourselves for what we are and grow from that, if we can live simply, if we can respect others and reverence them, if we can be a trusting part of our world without having to strut around it controlling it, changing it, wrenching it to our own image and likeness, then we will have achieved "perfect love that casts out fear" (1 John 4:18). There will be nothing left to fear — not God's wrath, not the loss of human respect, not the absence of control, not the achievements of others greater than our own whose success we have had to smother with rejection or deride with scorn.

Humility, the lost virtue of the twentieth century, is crying to heaven for rediscovery. The development of nations, the preservation of the globe, the achievement of human community may well depend on it.