LinkedIn: Octopus’s garden?

I’ve been receiving a few invitations from friends on LinkedIn and have been responding positively, because I’m a positive person. I’ll be interested to see what LI adds or doesn’t to my life. Networking with trusted friends and colleagues is a great idea, but I’m not so sure about the “walled garden” concept that LI seems to represent. It feels somehow inherently clunky and restrictive. FaceBook handles that side of my life already.

Of course LinkedIn protects you against a tsunami of spam and sales pitches flooding your inbox. I find, however, I can just say no or ignore those reasonably easily. The point of LI is to set up significant working relationships and, in my line of job, many of those are set up anyway, in contrast to, say, the work of an IT freelance. Anyway, I’m up for seeing what it does for me. Adopt adapt, improve. I’d be interested to hear stories about the uses and value of LinkedIn (email me at bishopbucks@oxford.anglican.org).

Many thanks to those who responded in various ways. Including Scott Gunn:

LinkedIn was useful in my tech life for finding folks. But that was before facebook took off. Now I think it's mostly useful just for biz types who are scared off by fb.

LinkedIn is a rather odd animal. For example, it has decided that everyone in High Wycombe or Aylesbury actually comes from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, and won't allow you to say where you do come from. If it doesn’t matter where you are, why bother? If it does, why not allow people to put the correct location? Welcome to Clunk City, Arizona...



Octopus’ Garden quilt h/t Deb Richardson

Rebooting

Madness is doing something over, thinking it will yield different results next time:

If all you do is what you always done, all you’re ever going to have is what you always had. (Def Leppard)

Saturday’s Board of Social Responsibility reflected on the need to reboot, using excellent materials from the CTBI Conference in January. At the centre of these was a paper by Bob Goudzwaard, Dutch economics professor, on money and idolatry.

Even in narrow financial terms, some wondered why we are now loading money so freely into the top of a discredited system, rather than financing businesses on the streets, refloating the economy, as it were, from the bottom up. Perhaps it’s time to re-read our own Scriptures in the light of experience, including such concepts as Jubilee, Shalom, and household. This might even mean challenging usury — the making of money out of money alone, with no added work. This cornerstone of recent practice is consistently condemned in the Hebrew Scriptures as unjust, immoral and oppressive in itself.

We need to reboot. But how?With the question ringing in our ears, and the Scriptures at our right hand, it’s interesting to begin by remembering that everything impacts everything else in interesting ways:

It was thirty years ago today...

Mrs Thatcher taught the band to play. On this day in 1979 the Callaghan government lost a confidence motion in the house of commons (by 2 votes in over 600, I seem to remember) bringing to an end postwar concensus government — In Blairspeak, a pivotal point in British political history. The story may demonstrate the peril of delay in politics— it’s arguable that had Sunny Jim gone to the country the autumn before the winter of discontent, he might well have squeaked home on a sympathy vote. Still being counterfactual, had General Gaultieri managed to keep his army in his trousers and off the Falklands, the fortunes of the first Thatcher administration, deeply unpopular in 1982, might have been different. Who can say?

Thirty years on, the historical jury is out on what followed. One narrative says unions were tamed and the economy renewed as an enterprise engine, driven by financial wizards, unbridled by regulation. Another points out that social inequality soared, driven by a housing bubble and short-termism. Both narratives are right on their own buttons. Certainly banks ceased to be rather dowdy traditional “word is my bond” institutions, like the place Mary Poppins kept her umbrella.

Woody Allen once suggested all nature was a vast restaurant, everything eating everything. In that spirit Thatcherism released the genie that transformed all commerce into a vast betting shop. Recently, imagine if instead of bailing out banks from the top, government had helped people paying sub-prime mortgages from the other end. Could we have refloated the banks, through the micro-economy, bottom up? Of course not! That would be subsidizing fecklessness and irresponsibility.

So instead we've squirted billions into the banks from the top down to avert commercial kismet, hoping they’d start doing lovely things with the lolly. I do wonder what Mrs Thatcher’s old dad, a paragon of thrift and hard work, would have made of Fred the Shred, flying in fruit every day from Paris, replacing carpets rather than cleaning them, and sacking staff over the colour of the biscuits, whilst studiously ignoring abundant evidence that he was steering his liner over financial Niagara Falls. Apparently that was not feckless or irresponsible. It was wealth creating. Really?

If RBS had been allowed to go bust...? Among other things, Fred’s pension would have to have been be paid by the guarantee scheme, capped at £27,000. And if he had thought that sum insufficient he could, at the age of 51, have gone out and got a job. I can imagine Alderman Roberts wondering what would be so terribly wrong with that...

Obedience: being real and responsive

A community of transformation like Magdalene, or any recovery programme stands or falls on the Benedictine virtue of obedience. People can try out all kinds of ideals and programmes, goodwill gestures and apologies, but the battle is lost or one in what actually happens, and underlying trends of habitual response to reality and other people tell the real story for good or ill. Clichés about talking talk and walking walk come to mind. Underlying any serious community of grace has to be holy pragmatism.

The roots of the idea of obedience are, as is often pointed out, not conformity but radical listening. In a sense obedience takes in the whole rule of Benedict, whose first word is “Audite...” and last “...et pervenies.” (“Listen...” “...and you will make it.”). Habits of obedience are not about what you do in itself, but what you do as an expression of attitude to everybody else. Disobedience is not naughtiness, but failure of community.

It’s not, in fact, authoritarianism, but the antidote to authoritarianism, to be part of a community to which we hold ourselves mutualy accountable. This is the mutual submission spoken of in the Scriptures.

This all takes me back to the 17th century nursery rhyme we all had to learn at school forty years ago:

A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds
And when the weeds begin to grow
It's like a garden full of snow
And when the snow begins to fall
It's like a bird upon the wall
And when the bird away does fly
It's like an eagle in the sky
And when the sky begins to roar
It's like a lion at the door
And when the door begins to crack
It's like a stick across your back
And when your back begins to smart
It's like a penknife in your heart
And when your heart begins to bleed
You're dead, and dead, and dead indeed.

This is the third of three posts about the core Benedictine virtues of Conversion, Stability and Obedience, reflected in the Magdalene Community of Nashville, TN.

Stability: Eating your own dogfood

Build a house from the foundation up, not the roof down, right? The second great Benedictine Value is stability. “If everything is falling apart, what sort of people do you have to be?” asks II Peter. Life has always had its share of people who are just out for new experiences, driven by ego and vanity, running the demo but never the whole application.
To be discipled we need to commit to a life of stability in community.

This has various implications. Because I value stability, I will not throw my toys out of the pram when people disappoint me. I will not easily believe the worst of them. I will always recognise that I have more in common with them, in Christ, than separates us. Creatively, I will recognise that what irritates me most about them are my own vices mirrored — therefore by interacting with them rather than walking apart, I can learn and grow in grace.

Seeing the other person as gift, striving to see God within them, does not make people less irritating. It does help me grow up. A stable community rests on deeper foundations than its members short-term satisfaction, or the fears of its weakest members. It can take them beyond the places they could take themselves, but it is never authentic when it is steamrollers their differences. Stable community rejoices in difference and treats it as enrichment.

All this stands in stark contrast to the way of the world with its “Mr Angry” judgmentalism, Celebrity culture, ego-flattering consumerism, superficiality and tribalism. Just say no, because Christianity driven by these passions will always be a harsh and sour charicature of what it could be, with a commitment to stability. There are times you can be so right, you’re wrong.

God loved us with an everlasting love. That is the bedrock on which we build. Therefore we can freely commit to each other, and stick with each other, almost whatever our differences. The first principle of Magdalene is “Come Together” — Come as you are, but stick with one another. In the face of community friction, work it through and journey on anyway in hope. Wthin the community lie the God-given resources people need to grow in grace and hope — and if only they will commit to this life as a shared reality, there is hope.

This is the second of three posts about the core Benedictine virtues of Conversion, Stability and Obedience, reflected in the Magdalene Community of Nashville, TN.

Conversion: Seeing from Inside out

We see everything, even ourselves sometimes, from the outside in. God sees us from the inside out, knowing all we could be. Faith shows us ourselves from God’s point of view. Nice middle class people like me have relearned from Jade Goody that you have to see the person for all they are, and not be taken in by appearances. If she had never had Cancer, how would we have learnt to respect her? Only by questioning our own assumptions, and thinking different. Magdalene is

a two year residential and support community for women coming out of correctional facilities or off the street who have survived lives of abuse, prostitution or drug addiction. Begin in 1997 in Nashville TN, Magdalene offers women at no cost a safe, disciplined and compassionate community in which to recover and rebuild their lives.

Two things particularly interest me about this community.

1. This is not a Michael Palin “Missionary” or Lady Bountiful operation. The energy and resource come from within members themselves, released and developed in community. Thistle Farms is a business venture connected with it, but internally the strategy is not to get trained experts to engineer better outcomes, but to grow organic sustainable communities of grace, which provide a context in which members can grow and address their own particuar challenges.
2. Magdalene has taken as its model the Rule of Benedict. This doesn’t mean founding a Benedictine house, but finding a way to express the base Benedictine values of conversion, stability and obedience in an authentic but accessible way for women off the streets to use as part of the process of recovering what they could be from what is sometimes the wreckage of what they have been.

Magdalene was founed by Becca Stevens, a priest then working as a University chaplain at Vanderbilt. Now it’s run for 10 years, this work has things to teach us all about discipleship, community and personal transformation — in other words, the Gospel we profess, but realise so imperfectly. The community has boiled what they are about down into 24 basic principles, formulated in plain English and illustrated by experiences from members.

Everything begins with a willingness to see others, eventually even ourselves, differently. Doing this expresses the Benedictine Value of Conversion. The call to do this reminds me of an old poem by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

A Gentleman

“He has robbed two clubs. The judge at Salisbury
Can't give him more than he undoubtedly
Deserves. The scoundrel! Look at his photograph!
A lady-killer! Hanging's too good by half
For such as he.” So said the stranger, one
With crimes yet undiscovered or undone.
But at the inn the Gipsy dame began:
“Now he was what I call a gentleman.
He went along with Carrie, and when she
Had a baby he paid up so readily
His half a crown. Just like him. A crown'd have been
More like him. For I never knew him mean.
Oh! but he was such a nice gentleman. Oh!
Last time we met he said if me and Joe
Was anywhere near we must be sure and call.
He put his arms around our Amos all
As if he were his own son. I pray God
Save him from justice! Nicer man never trod.”

This is the first of three posts about the core Benedictine virtues of Conversion, Stability and Obedience, reflected in the Magdalene Community of Nashville, TN.
mirror photo: credit Michelle’s Photoblog

Thank God it’s Monday Morning?

Is your calling calling? I was deeply moved by this year’s Superbowl ad from Monster.com, an ad classic surely, that has not received the attention it deserves this side of the pond:

So farewell, then: Jade Goody RIP

Some may scoff at the considerable outpouring of warm feeling for Jade Goody, but her story has touched and inspired millions of people at a gut level. Why not respect love, courage and passion for life in someone else, just because they came to public attention as loud, brash and crude? The doctrines of the Incarnation and Grace, rightly understood, make it obvious that it is possible to be both.

The old Prayer Book Litany had us praying to be delivered from dying unprepared. As we have become increasingly insulated from death it has become the great taboo, something to pretend about, rather than inescapable reality. Surely anyone fair-minded will agree with Archbishop Cranmer, who usually pitches around the phlegmatic or even sour end of the Conservative blogosphere,in his conclusion that “in her living she was vibrant and in her dying she was authentic.” Mark Russell writes:

Like the late Pope, John Paul II, Jade Goody has lived and indeed lived out her death live before the world. In doing so, she has shown courage, fortitude, guts and sheer peace. As she stared death in the face, the world watched as she got her affairs in order, and put the financial arrangements in place for her little boys. I watched her wedding on tv, and found myself deeply moved by her sheer gutsy determination. She was a remarkable person, and I have prayed for her these past weeks. I was struck by her desire to be married, and to have both herself and her little boys baptised. Today, on Mothers Day, Jade has passed away. My thoughts and prayers are with Jack her husband, and her boys Bobby (5) and Freddie (4). I am sure they had their mothers cards ready for her. I hope today those little boys know how proud their mum was of them... and they should be very very proud of her.

I was struck by Ruth Gledhill’s thoughtful, humane and compassionate response, quoting a song by Anselm of Canterbury:

Jesus, like a mother you gather your people to you;
you are gentle with us as a mother with her children.

Often you weep over our sins and our pride,
tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgement.

You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds,
in sickness you nurse us, and with pure milk you feed us.

Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life;
by your anguish and labour we come forth in joy.

Despair turns to hope through your sweet goodness;
through your gentleness we find comfort in fear.

Your warmth gives life to the dead,
your touch makes sinners righteous.

Lord Jesus, in your mercy heal us;
in your love and tenderness remake us.

In your compassion bring grace and forgiveness,
for the beauty of heaven may your love prepare us.

This morning’s C of E gospel from John 20 pictures Mary standing by Jesus’ cross, wanting it to stop, but unable to do anything for her son, then being given away, as it were, into the care of Saint John. Cecil Day-Lewis descrbied such love like this:

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show --
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

So, a funny old Mothering Sunday, as we celebrate the love that over and around us lies. Life is, in fact, a precious gift, and the measure of it is the quality of our living, not external judgments or length of days.

Millions will also pray for Jade Goody, that she may rest in peace and rise in glory, and that God will give to those she leaves behind courage, hope and the precious gift of love strong as death.

Blood & Honey: Jacob's Ladder

Tony Robinson does the Old Testament. Having been shown some creative children’s bible stories this week, my mind turned to Blood and Honey — shorts that used to go out on Sunday mornings so I’ve only seen a couple, but they struck me as the best Bible storytelling I’ve ever seen. I love the way in which he manages to keep the pace going on various levels at once, and connect the story to his viewers without being preachy. Magic stuff — yea, the best ever. Sadly now almost unobtainable, though, even in our mediarich multiverse.

Change: How Turtles Turn

The preferred English method is one leg at a time, say every ten years, each leg elastically stretched backwards over the head for as long as possible, just to make sure. Actually, it’s agony, but it’s kindly intended to reassure those parts of the turtle that never wanted to turn in the first place that nothing’s really changed. Intellectually, it’s one way to express notional fairness to both sides.

But turtles could do far more than turn. Poems on the Underground, launched in 1986 by Judith Chernaik, brings poetry to London Transport. On a great working day with archdeaconry colleagues, I spotted this, from her collection Carnival of the Animals:

Under the mottled shell of the old tortoise
beats the heart of a young dancer.

She dreams of twirling on table-tops
turning cartwheels,
kicking up her heels at the Carnival ball.

“Oh, who will kiss my cold and wrinkled lips,
and set my dreaming spirit free?”

And, on St Joseph the Worker’s Day, still on the subject of change management, I see somebody the other side of the pond has been plotting the demise of a very dangerous, if influential, candidate for high office:

The International - Guns ’n Poses

Tom Tykwer’s thriller The International does for corporate bankers what The Firm did for corporate lawyers. Fact is, there are some really nasty people out there — If you are an Idi Amin lookalike with a big ego, alleycat morals and ambitions to take over Liberia, you don’t keep your spondulicks under the bed or in the Post Office. The Royal Bank of Scotland is a little unethical, but there’s always the International Bank of Bent Crooks (IBBC).

IBBC is run by a tasty geezer called Skarsen. He’s a (literally) bloody nightmare — like Fred the Shred, but competent. HQ is a cavernous Docklands Glasshouse in Strasbourg, containing no more than a squad of half a dozen suits who spend all day striding portentiously around the building, plus a girl on the front desk to make the coffees. From here various bent arms deals, political assassinations and devilish Whale Nuking expeditions are planned and executed, cynically ignoring all risks. The aim is to control everything by indebting everyone.

Clive Owen is Louis Salinger, an Interpol goodie, accompanied by a very nice but slightly underpowered Naomi Watts, the New York DA who does most of her best work on her blackberry. Clive is just the man for the part. In a Newsweek interview promoting the movie, he boasted about not being afraid of badgers, and drinking his afternoon tea solo “because He-men don't need biscuits.” Tough Guy. Jason Bourne isn’t afraid of badgers either, but he does nibble the occasional hobnob.

Pitted against the dynamic duo is the International Bank of Crooks and Conmen, aided and abbetted by some unpleasant Teutonic bent coppers with steelrimmed glasses and Gestapo Dentist manners. There could be badgers, too, but I didn’t notice them. Kind of underground fifth column. Or was that Narnia? Anyway, everyone becomes a busy bunny banging away at all the others with various shooters, including a shootout to die for in the Guggenheim, which zaps the entire building until it’s an oversize concrete Swiss cheese full of holes. Boring? I don’t think so.

Locations are well handled, from Haghia Sophia to an Italian Arms manufacturer’s Tracy Island HQ. The plot is complex, sometimes slightly in danger of disappearing up its own rear end, but just manages not to. You’ll have to discover its full complexity for yourself, but the basic dea is that big banks are run by ruthless greedy people, who enrich themselves by indebting others, whose hubris brings the whole lot crashing down without any regard for decency, ethics or international frontiers. How insane is that for a plotline?

Finally, I won’t spoil the ending, but Agent Salinger ends up as yet another self-sacrificing redeemer. So we’re good for passiontide. This is a kind of two-and-a-half out of five movie, best avoided by the squeamish. I suppose the big question I was left with as “If international Bankers are indeed crooks and conmen, why bother with shooters, when they could make far more dosh perfectly legally by just being their own selfish incompetent hubristic selves — they still get to control the world by indebting governments and the old ladies lose their pensions without a shot having been fired in anger?” It’s all a powerful argument for keeping your sponduliks under the bed or in the Post Office.

Church: Institution & Organisation

Two thoughts from our bishop’s staff reflection with Professor Martyn Percy, using Philip Selznik’s sociological concepts of Organisation/ Institution:

1. Movements become organisations and then additionally institutions, changing from a kind of second to third gear.
   
   An organisation is a technical machine for mobilizing energies and achieving aims by devising and enforcing rules, dividing up work and co-ordinating results. It needs managing, based on competence. It gets things done, mainly pragmatically, within the constraints of what can be done and the limitations of the human beings involved.
   
   An institution is an uber-organization, responsive, adaptive organism, with a script about surviving and flourishing long term. It needs leadership, based on values. In a mature body you need both, but if the long-term Institutional leadership breaks down, the organisation fails. Take football: the organisational needs are fulfilled by clubs and players. Without them there'd be no game. The institutional needs are fulfilled on a Meta level by the rules, referees and administrators. Effective management is no substitute for good reffing. Nor vice versa.
   
   
2. Many snafus with Church, including focus and identity probems among ordinands come from not understanding this distinction. People become frustrated when they expect the Institution to manage, and mostake the local management for the whole institution; which in a sense it is, but in another it isn’t. Neither strategy works, long-term. People who underestimate the organisational dimension lose practical capacity, and tend to fantasy. People who underestimate the institutional dimension tend to pure pragmatism, and easily lose spiritual and world-transforming focus.

I am fascinated by Willow Creek, as a laboratory of the spirit, which after 30 years is now trying to find its institutional feet as Bill Hybels returns to being senior pastor. Compare Michael Dell returning to Dell, or Steve Jobs returning to Apple. Or don’t?

Working in the Thirteenth Century

One of the things that’s helped me heavily into the notion of revolution by tradition is working in some fabulous medieval locations — like Charney Manor. Bishop’s Staff stayed there for a really productive overnight residential last week, where, as well as usual business, we spent some time exploring with Professor Martyn Percy what ministry education really has meant for us, and could mean in tomorrow’s church.
The house is owned by the Religious Society of Friends. It’s lovingly made available for groups with a basic commitment to peace, which I hope our Bishop’s staff is. Food is home-cooked and extraordinary. The house has a lived-in feel, not like a museum at all. Facilities are excellent — indeed they’re infinitely more homely but also stimulating than an average hotel-for-business-meetings site.

It’s good to work in a place where the Quaker tradition, that has played such a key role in British Christianity, is honoured and lived out. I was reminded of what it stands for by some words by her children about Joan Vokins, wife of Richard Vokins of West Challow, died 1690, after whom the annex in which I stayed is named:

She was one that did truly fear the Lord, and sought the prosperity of his precious Truth [“and” — surely a mistake] above all the glory and honour of this world. Whensoever the Lord was pleased to send her forth in his service, she went without murmuring, believing the Lord would carry her through it, though weak in body; who did enable her to bear a fathful living testimony to his Name, in this her native land, and in places remote beyond seas as in Barbados, and in other parts of America and in Ireland, through great exercises, in patience and cheerfulness, it being as meat and drink to her to do his will.

Toddler sees snow for first time

Thinking yesterday about childhood and innocence reminded me of an old family video Catherine made in 2001, showing our daughter Anna (then 2 yrs 4 months) seeing snow for the first time in her life. Having located it, I spent a merry time faffing about trying to port it to my laptop via a memory stick. When it wouldn't play, I suspected an obsolete format, and tried VLC and various other worthy applications recommended by fellow twitterers. In the end, in desperation, I manually set up an Ethernet network with an old hub from the loft, banged in a few RJ45s and ported it directly to my desktop. Result: Magic! Here, for the first time in 8 years, Anna’s first sight of snow from 2001.


(No blog entry yesterday because I was doing one for CBTI’s Sense Making Faith on Faith and Imagination)

Through the eyes of a child...

It was a joy to baptize a baby the other night at the Aylesbury confirmation, as I don’t get much chance to do that in this job. I am still amazed at the way babies look right at you. Very young children see the world fresh and clean, without assumptions or guile. Next day there was an interesting conversation twittering on the trian about “children as natural Zen masters...”

This led me to the seventeenth century Anglican mystic Thomas Traherne (1636/7-1674).
For Traherne, being saved is recovering innocence. It’s laying aside the varnish of the years; the crapping about and pretending and spin doctoring which is required of successful adults. Being saved is being given again, by God, the gift of wonder with which young children look at the world — the way you looked at the world, before you began to know the price of everything, the value of nothing:

All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys... All things were spotless and pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in all their splendour and glory... Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole World, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

photo h/t Tinah, c/o the MorgueFile