New Decade: Bearing up, Pressing on

Driving back from lunch with friends on new year’s eve, I can hardly believe ten years have now passed since the Millennium.

The bells rang it in at Sandhurst, accompanied by a bottle or two and various crashing whizz-bangs, the most amazing of them from old Army stocks in the various MOD establishments around Surrey Heath. Little did we know what lay ahead!

As the world spins on into an uncertain future, we need a little faith. Creation may be essentially good, but it is surely not complete. The Incarnation has happened in Christ, but the work of incarnation continues in us. As the world pulses forwards through the end of another decade and into a new year of grace, all human activity at every level, the lot, can be seen as in some way necessary to complete the work of God in Christ.

This thought brought to mind a rather telling couple of paragraphs by Teilhard de Chardin. He believed everything was somehow brewing together towards an “Omega point” at which all things would be gathered together in Christ — the goal of evolution, the final victory of Love in and through the universe.
He radically extends the logic of Philippians 1:29 throughout the Universe...

Closer and closer, stage by stage, everything increasingly links itself to the ultimate Centre, in whom everything holds together. The streams flowing out from this Centre do not only operate in the sublime heights of this world, where human activities take distinctly supernatural and worthy form. In order to redeem and pull together these sublime powers, the power of the incarnate Word irradiates the least eergies, to the most hidden depth. And the work of Incarnation will not be finished until the special matter locked up in every created thing, spiritualised originally in our souls, then again a second time with our souls in Jesus, has actually been reconnected to its definitive Centre of fulfillment. “Who is it who ascended, but he who first descended, in order to fulfill all things.” (Ephesians 4:10)

By our collaboration, which Christ stimulates, he is consummated and attains his fulness, starting from within all created things. That’s what St Paul himself tells us. We might think perhaps that the work of creation was completed long ago. Wrong! It continues ever more beautifully, and extends itself to the most sublime levels of the world. “All Creation, still groans and travails.” (Romans 8:22) And it is to complete this process that we labour, by even the most basic works of our hands. Such, ultimately, is the meaning and value of the things we do. Thanks to the interrelationship of matter, the soul and Christ, in the things that we do we bring back to God a small part of the being He loves. By each of the things we do, we labour — one by one but genuinely — to make up the fulness of everything, in other words to bring to Christ a small additional measure of fulfillment.

C’est à dire (original):

De proche en proche, de relais en relais, tout finit par se raccorder au Centre suprême “in quo omnia constant.” Les effleuves émanés de ce Centre n’agissent pas seulement dans les zones supérieures du monde, là où s’excercent les activités humaines sous une forme distinctement surnaturelle et méritoire. Pour sauver et constituer ces énergies sublimes, la puissance du Verbe incarné s’irradie jusq’au fond le plus obscur des puissances inférieures. Et l’Incarnation ne sera achevée que lorsque la part de substance élue que renferme tout objet, — spiritualisée une première fois dans nos âmes, et une seconde fois avec nos âmes en Jésus, — aura rejoint le Centre définitif de sa complétion. “Quid est quod ascendit, nisi quod prius descendit, ut repleret omnia.”

Par notre collaboration qu’il suscite, le Christ se consomme, atteint sa plénitude, à partir de toute créature.. C’est Saint Paul qui nous le dit. Nous nous imaginons puet-être que la Création est depuis longtemps finie. Erreur, elle se poursuit de plus belle, et dans les zones les plus élevées du Monde. “Omnis creatura adhuc ingemescit et parturit.” Et c’est à l’achever que nous servons, même par le travail le plus humble de nos mains. Tels sont, en définitive, le sense et le prix de nos actes. En vertu de l’interliaison Matière-Ame-Christ, quoi que nous fassons, nous ramenons à Dieu une parcelle de l’être qu’il désire. Par chacune de nos oevres, nous travaillons, atomiquement mais réelement, à construire le Plérôme, c’est-à-dire à apporter au Christ un peu d’achèvement.

Le Milieu Divin, 1957, I.iii.c, p 41-2

I haven’t got an English text. Corrections to the transation are very welcome!

Reading for (Digital) Revolutionaries

Colleagues have been asking me about books to help them understand the communications revolution engulfing us.
Everyone is having to ascend a steep learning curve, steepest and most treacherous, perhaps, for those most accustomed to pre-digital communications. Many colleagues don’t have time to explore extensively online, but they are thoughftul people who realise that things are changing fundamentally, and would like to get their laughing gear round contemporary communication technology and its implications for their own work as pastors or Christian leaders.

How far should one get into this stuff, and how?
It rather depends on your learning style. Some assemble flat-pack furniture by getting it out and having a go: This learning style has a lot to commend it, for contemporary media. Other IKEA customers prefer to read the instructions first, to construct a framework within which they can understand what they are trying to achieve. Christian leaders will, rightly, be anxious about the risks of getting something very wrong whilst experimenting. There is value for all in including conventional reading in a journey of discovery.

There is an incredible variety and number of titles out there — this in itself adds confusion. Colleagues may have a particular interests, and I’d gather my top 17 titles around five frequent lines of inquiry. If you’re reading this, by definition, you’ve made it online, and are probably far more expert in these matters than I. Therefore I’d love to know what you think of my immediate suggestions...

(1) What is going on? How is our cultural context changing?

Begin, I would say with Clay Shirkey: Here comes everybody — How change happens when people come together. Alongside a general line of approach, people over 50 wonder how people under 30 habitually communicate and what kind of culture are they developing. For this, I’d turn to Don Tapscott: Grown Up Digital (following up an earlier survey of the net ge eration called Growing up Digital). To assist contemplation about the implications for institutions, I’d still recommend Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom: The Starfish and the Spider — the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.

(2) What is modern communications technology doing to the ways we get things done, our business practices and attitudes?

The classic strategic overview is Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics — How mass collaboration changes everthing. At a strategic level, leaders in any institution will need to take serious account of the map provided by Gary Hamel: The Future of Management. For a closer and more recent picture of the operational possibilties, I recommend Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr & Mary Ellen Jassotakis: Social Media at Work: How networking tools propel organisational performance. I have been asked about books dealing specifically with Facebook, like Clara Shih: The Facebook Eras. If interested in the operational feld within which Facebook operates, you could do a lot worse than Lon Safko & David K. Brake: The Social Media Bible.

(3) What are the implications of all this for the Church as a communications outfit?

Shane Hipps: The Hidden Power of Electronic media: How media shapes Faith, the Gospel and Church starts with concepts first formulated by Marshall MacLuhan, drawing acutely from them challenges and benefits for the Church. The same pastor and theologian’s Flickering Pixels aks the $64K question “How far is this technology our servant, and how far our master?” Good for sermons...

(4) How do you put yourself or your product over in this environment: What’s it doing to Marketing?

Here I remain very impressed by the wisdom contained in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff: Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. This is particularly helpful on how feedback can be set up and maintained in a complex and crowded environment. Many hundreds of books on the groaning shelves address marketing issues, but I like the people-focused treatment in Juliette Powell: 33 million people in the room. Eric Qualman is an interesting marketing writer, whose recently published Socialnomics assesses, on the basis of research, the impact of new media on marketing. If you get a taste for this stuff and want to strategise in the light of the above, I’d recommend Larry Weber: Marketing to the Social Web — although it’s a couple of years old, it proposes a clear iterative strategic approach which is easily transferable to many contexts.

(5) Should I start a blog, and if I do how do I write material for electronic media?

This is probably an area where it really is best just to click around the various blogs out there, but a very good overview of some excellent and innovative pratitioners of the medium can be found in Michael A. Banks: Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s top Bloggers. Getting down to brass tacks, how am I supposed to write material suitable for web communications? In a space full of words really good writing remains precious. Janice Redish: Letting go of the Words, deals with some stylistic particularities of new media, but I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about these. What makes good writing interesting remains surprisingly constant. I wish I had read a good book like Angela Phillips: Good Writing for Journalists years ago, but if people don’t have time for that, I recommend George Orwell’s Essay “Politics and the English Language.” If really pushed for time, T. S. Eliot’s poem “Whispers of Immortality” says pretty much everything that needs to be said about writing style. I suspect the areas of communications in which clergy need most training is effective use of presentation software. Some the dreariest uses of PowerPoint to deliver design abortions that are merely the script reduced to headings make me want to stick my head in a gas oven... But that’s another tale.

Well that’s a preliminary list> What have I missed? What is now obsolete?

Blind Rage Slays Children

One dark, disturbing part stood out for medieval carollers among the stories connected with Jesus’ birth:

Herod, the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His soldiers in their strength and might,
All children young to slay.

For the original readers of St Matthew’s gospel, however, the story was very much less shocking than it is to us, with our post-Christendom sensibilities and Christ derived values:

1. This incident was very much business as usual in the ancient world. In any political, social or environmental crisis, guess who bears the heaviest burden? The poor and vulnerable... it’s not the way things should be, by Christian standards, but it’s the way they usually have been. It is still, disturbingly, more the case than we would want to think...
   
   
2. Pre Christian people shared the almost universal fatalism about the activity of tyrants. What they got up to was largely their own affair, and without a sense that history was heading anywehere in particular, let alone the coming of Christ as universal judge, there was no ultimate bar to which they could be held to account. So you simply accepted that they got up to some funny old things. The vulnerable didn’t matter by comparison.
   
   
3. Most ancients saw the child as, at best, a half-formed adult. Dumping of excess children was commonplace in most ancient societies, sweetened only, on occasion, by a vague hope of kindly fate. The then radical notion that the child was a complete person, entitled to full respect, was very much a Christian thing in the ancient mediterranean world. It stemmed directly from the shockingly new way Jesus had treated children and talked about them, and taught his disciples to think of them.
   
   
4. The pre-Christian mediterranean world was no place for the squeamish: from public crucifixion to the use of condemned prisoners as playthings in the arena, life was cheap and expendable in a way you would have to go to the great atheist states of the twentieth century (Stalin’s and Mao’s) to parallel.

This story stands witness to a reverence for life that is still disturbingly absent, and that many people, including the institutional Churches, still struggle to express fully. So...

1. How readily do we tolerate the environmental and financial injustices of our age which magnify the miseries of the poor and vulnerable? From lack of clean water to environmental disaster, from Child poverty to twaddle about trickledown, we live with this stuff far too easily, if not quite as easily as ancients did with Herod and his ilk.
   
   
2. How do we, Christians or not, treat the vulnerable and marginalised? Do we take them seriously? Are people ever blamed and persecuted for simply being how they are? It was rage that slew the innocents — the role of anger in our discourse is well worth reflecting upon in the light of this disturbing fact.
   
   
3. The value Christ sets on children makes the work of protecting Children especially central. This is why betrayal of children by their pastors, or any attempt by any institutional church to cover up what is going on, is so shameful. It’s possible, as child protection bishop for this diocese, to see this high volume job (for example we hold the process for about 6,000 CRB registrations) as a mainly administrative matter. It’s not. It means nothing without a culture of openness and mutual knowledge within which anomalies show up as anomalies, and are followed up. And when you go beyond preventative child protection, we may ask ask what gifts and attitudes are we giving to our children as resources for living, how much of our time, or are they mainly seen as problems merely to be tolerated, personal trophies for their parents, or teeny consumers?
   
   
4. It’s fascinating how often outsiders, including atheists, radically critique Christians on radically Christian grounds. We are berated not for excesses of compassion, understanding and the values of the Sermon on the Mount, but for deficiencies in them. Philosophically that’s an interesting backhand complement, you may say. But it poses a read challenge. It simply will not do to underestimate such critique because of the source — To the extent it’s true, it’s true and requires our urgent attention.
   

Holy Hyperactivity, Sherlock!

Crash, bang, wallop, what a picture! Guy Ritchie has transformed Dick van Dykes’ Hollywood London Town into a schlock horror Gotham City for his hyperactive Sherlock Holmes. Gone are the dancing chimneysweeps, to be replaced by low life slimy rodents, many of them human, and plastic bats. The walls glisten and the streets heave with shifty urchins and cheeky beggars. The weather is crap. That bit, at least, is profoundly authentic.

The Doyen of screen Sherlock Holmeses, so far, has been Jeremy Brett, who spent most of his time in a darkened room being feline and aloof, taxing his brain. This made it possible to believe he could actually deduce from the dirt under a girl’s fingernails that her stepfather was a Cavalry sergeant who had served in the Indian Mutiny, played the bassoon, and married his housemaid.

Robert Downey Jr’s Holmes is shallower, I fear — “less cocaine, more speed.” I ended up wishing he’d try Ritalin. When not tripping, this Great Detective comes over as a bit of a layabout. He must pop out to the gym on the quiet, for at least the occasional trip on nandrolone. I deduce this from his generally ripped appearance when, Ladies watch out, he removes his shirt for a spot of bare knuckle boxing. Even then, though, he’s so tripped out that his slow-mo Hong Kong click-click-click bits occur before they’ve actually happened. So, Sherlock Holmes is an 007 paced action romp, with direction that’s rather itchy and scratchy, annoying even at times, but, as they say in Newcastle, it gets yer there.

Universal Education means the criminal classes can now read. Pentonville Prison thus bears the legend “Pentonville Prison” in six foot high letters. The same bloke’s probably painted “Hangings Tonite” round the back in three foot letters, with a big sign on the chimney saying “This Way Up,” for really thick crooks. The general effect of all this public signage is rather Mel Brooks. Frankly, if I were Professor Moriarty, greatest criminal mind of my generation, I’d feel slightly patronised. I’d do something really dastardly, like going to the London Hospital for War Heroes (labelled “London Hospital for War Heroes”) and turning the last “o” into a “p.” But I digress.

Tower Bridge is a-building and all London’s aghast at the sadistic antics of Lord Blackwood, who indulges in “I don’t expect you to talk, Mr Bond: I expect you to die” fun with bandsaws in a Porky Scratchings factory in Southwark. He maintains a shedload of Black Magic gear, and what Arlo Guthrie used to call Implements of Destruction, in a creepy crypt underneath Parliament. Blackwood has gathered a band of prominent baddies, à la Da Vinci Code, and, guess what, for their next trick they are planning to take over the world. This is especially spooky because back at the beginning of the first reel Lord B was actuallly hanged at Pentonville (in a hanging shed labelled “Hanging Shed”) and certified dead, by Dr Watson, no less.

In spite of a faintly Hammer film ambiance, this film is all good fun, and pacy enough to keep most people awake, if not on the edge of their seats. What’s not to like? Well, the CGI is superb, and although I don’t think Downey will redefine the character, Holmes himself is just believable. Rachel McAdams pouts and puzzles her way through over two hours as a sultry action heroine. Unfortunately I’m not sure anyone, her included, has quite worked out what she’s doing there, or indeed, whether she’s a goodie or baddie. Bit of both, really. Anyway the movie ends (without giving everything away) with the most blatant pitch for a second series since Alan Partridge went for a BBC lunch, so we may yet discover new depths in the character on her next outing. Seven out of Ten.

The Work of Incarnation Close up

In Church on Sunday, Rosie the Vicar walked us through the Magnificat as a woman’s voice amidst the overwhelmingly male sounds of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. At Christmas, I was moved and delighted with a greeting better than any card from Katherine Kaye in Oxford. She wrote:

This is a poem called "Not Art", by Kate Clanchy, an Oxford poet. It is one version of female experience which, as a man, you can only look in on, what it means to visit the place where women show one another wares, their handicrafts, and what is gain: so unspectacular, so unshowy, so not what the dominant ones notice, let alone "count" - and yet what makes us what we are. Our true home is in our childhood. That, and a recommendation that you listen to the three ages of women in Durufle's "Tota pulchra es" make up my Christmas gift to you: more perspectives still.

The image of Our Lady is from the Church at Saint-Wandrille — a final picture I took during this year’s stay. It is actually a nineteenth century iron casting (I kid you not) taken of an original in the Louvre.

Not Art

This is close work, this baby-stuff,
the intricate wiping and wrapping,
the slow unpicking of miniature fists;
village-work, a hand-craft, all bodges
and spit, the gains inchingly small
as the knotting of carpets, raw wool
rasping in the teeth of the comb.
The strewing and stooping, the prising
of muck from the grain of the floor -
I think of gleaners, ash-sifters, of tents
sewn with shoe soles, wedding veils, plaits,
how patchwork is stitched-up detritus,
how it circles on quilts like a house split
to bits when the typhoon has passed.
And the ache in the neck, in the back,
in the foot, are the knocks of wood looms,
narrow as cradles, borne from pasture
to valley to camp. I am learning
the art of mistakes, to accept
that the marks of each day are woven in
by evening too far back to pick out.
This is the work women draw from the river,
wet to the waist, singing in time,
the work we swing from our shoulders,
lay on the ground and let the crowd
hold and finger and value - the young girls
wondering, the laughing old women,
the bent, the milk-eyed, the blind.

HT Walton — Passion for Life

Holy Trinity Walton, Aylesbury, has long been a flourishing Evangelical Church. Since the 1860’s as a mission to workers on the nearby Grand Union Canal, it has grown disciples who wanted to make a difference in the world. It’s had various particular mountains to climb in the past few years. Not least among these has been a deeply problematic building.

People look at Victorian Churches and think they'll last for ever, but check the foundations first — often the Victorians rather skimped on these whilst reaching for the sky in rubble-filled knapped flint. This is a particularly serious problem when the ground underneath is dodgy as well, with underground streams and other chalky downland delights. Real architectural creativity and technological skill have gone into this project to make good some of the proboems about the site and existing building.

At one time the only option looked like a complete rebuild. Still, with inspirational leadership from Andrew Blyth, the Vicar, the building is now structurally sorted, with some real enhancements to the whole site tying things together and providing extra facilities for Ht’s many people and groups. There’s still substantial internal fitting out and reordering to be done, but the structural horror story is sorted. Like the best structural projects this one was tithed for overseas projects, and the local campaign to raise £900K has built new Churches in Pakistan and the Sudan, along with as other spin-off benefits.
The vibrant sense of hope, joy and community spirit in was overwhelming when I went to reopen the building the other week. We placed stones, as signs of faith and hope, in a well which has come to light under the new reception area — a rather symbolic unexpected find. So, for Walton, this year’s Christmas present is a structurally refurbed building for Church, playgroups, community organisations and passers by — I noticed a shower suite in what used to be the porch for the use of people off the streets.

With substantial new building of all kinds in the Holy Trinity parish, it’s good to see a flourishing, growing local parish Church doing what it’s there for with real passion, prayer and commitment. Get the internal relationships and processes working together, say your prayers, grow a culture of generosity, and very good things can happen...

Siberia on the Misbourne

Be careful what you pray for, because you might just get it. I dedicate this Seasonal cheesy snack of an observation to anyone who’s been praying for a white Christmas. This year, in our little pocket of the Chilterns, we seem to be about to get one. Like King George V in 1932, it is only through one of the marvels of modern Science I am enabled to communicate. All other media have fallen over.

Bing Crosby used to reckon a snowy whiteout was ideal for Christmas cards. Really? With iced up roads, and a flaky rail service, I beg to differ, Mr so-called Crosby. Furthermore we have a seasonal tradition of trouble and strife at the Royal Mail. This august organisation seems to be managed with all the finesse of the 1920‘s foreign legion. Simple rational command and control breeds irrational anger. Floggings will continue until the workforce become a caring sharing integrated team of skilled 21st Century professionals. I should Cocoa.

An impending white Christmas is not comfortable but it brings some simple joys — beauty, a house full of effervescent teenagers, the joy of sledging down the road, passing on my way, with schadenfreude, some poor geezer in a giant Merc trying to drive it forwards and finding his trusty steed will only go sideways. Large Mercedes do that, I’m told. Yet another reason not to pop out and buy one. Not that anyone’s popping anywhere right now.

We are staggering around in slightly undersized wellies through a very British winter wonderland. We wonder what’s happened to the gritting lorries, and whether the plumbing will hold. We wonder why our public transport is such a shambles. We see Cancelled services — Church as well as buses — abandoned cars on every hill, the cat up to its stomach in snow wondering where to take a dump. 100 stranded staff and customers slept last night in our Wycombe John Lewis store. Today, Lucy offered emergency accommodation to some people sranded in the village, but they managed to get out, in the end, under their own steam.