What Grace is Not...

I’m gutted to hear of the tragic resignation of Margot Käßmann as Bishop of Hannover and Chair of the EKD Ratsvorsitzende, following a drink driving incident when she jumped a red light. Bishop Nick Baines’ account here, and DW press roundup (in English) here. The local TV headline was “Bearer of Hope explains her resignation.”

As leader of the Protestant Church in Germany, Käßmann has engaged passionately and intelligently with culture and society, and won much respect at home and abroad. The respect is undimmed by her resignation, indeed the journalists at her resignation press conference applauded her for her honesty, sense of responsibility, and dignity. We can only accept her decision, I suppose.

Still it leads me to ask, in Lent, what is grace, and what is it not?

When I worked in a prison I had to reflect for the first time in my life, if I’m honest, on how grace really worked among people who had often done criminal, some would say evil things. The colour, contrast and volume were certainly higher in prison, but amidst much that expressed the worst side of what we call human nature, I did also see some clear and present demonstrations of the Grace of God powerfully redeeming people and turning their lives around.

20 years ago, only the Chaplaincy and uniformed staff worked Saturdays, so the reception board that morning was always busy and somewhat mob-handed, with a crowd from Isleworth Crown Court the day before. Amongst them would be middle class prisoners, often with fraud or drink driving convictions, who had been bailed on remand and told they would never be imprisoned, and had honestly not believed they would be, until they found themselves in prison the night before.

Sometimes, in the night, I still recall these prisoners’ bewilderment, anxiety, embarrassment, rage and distress. It was no part of my job to pretend they had not done what was criminal, wrong and foolish. But neither was it my job to add to their shame or distress. Being deprived of your liberty is the punishment, not cruelty or disrespect whilst you are inside

Quite apart from the humiliation and pain of the moment, often careers or relationships were kicked into touch by the conviction. I was in absolutely no doubt what Jesus would do, and tried, stumbingly, to do likewise. So did the screws, in that sometimes hard but essentially humane world that is gone of Ronnie Barker Porridge.

So how real is Grace? Is it like borrowing money from a bank, where you only get it if you’re rich enough not to need it? Assuming Jesus being ironic when he talked of “righteous persons who have no need of repentance,” we may assume the idea is that the sick need the doctor not those glowing with health.

How do the sick receive the doctor’s help? And when Jesus implied hating someone was as bad as murdering them, lusting was as bad as adultery, was that “as bad as” or “as good as” or... both? And so what?

Over to you.

(Not) Knowing me, Knowing You...

Here, thanks to the legendary MadPriest, is evidence that some journalism in the UK is even more stupid and ignorant about religion than the legendary national average:

Apparently Sky’s Kay Burley believes that the 2·1 billion adherents of the largest religion in the world spend Ash Wednesday “having a go with one of those tea trays down the luge.” Ms Burley knows all about crime, as well as religion. In 2008 she came up with what has to be one of the most gormless and tacky journalistic questions in the history of the universe:

It’s slightly reassuring, as a male, to know you don’t have to be male to play Alan Partridge...

Six Days in Lent

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This year our diocese is encouraging everyone to rediscover ways to sustain the sacred centre. This could induce Narcissism and Tea Light Overdrive, but it’s an important task. Humanly speaking, the whole life of the Church is powered by passion, prayer and spiritual conviction. If faith becomes thin and stringy, we will soon lose the plot, and with it, the means to be a transformative community.

It’s an encouraging phrase, but how do we sustain the sacred centre? My archdeaconry close colleagues (Andrew, Caroline, Karen, Rosie and Roy) and I tried to think this through last autumn. There’s a lot of hype about spirituality, and we were trying to be realistic.

We needed to find something we could recommend, in the light of various complications:

1. Everyone is sustained in different ways by different things, being at different stages on their journey. Even if we could work out the perfect Universal Spiritual Centering Wheeze (shades of Monty Python’s funniest joke in the world) some would be more ready to take it on than others
   
   
2. Our colleagues are busy people. If we simply download one extra thing we think might help onto them we could actually be making the problem worse — This morning you had 45 things to do. Now you’ve got 46. This is hardly a spiritually energising prospect.
   
   
3. If bishop and archdeacon model extra overload people may think we think spiritual development is a job, or an optional extra job, or something that can be accomplished by doing even more of the same — A wise and experienced priest in another diocese told me his turning point was when he had realised that the less he did, the more of value seemed to happen. That’s not an absolute principle, but 99% of vicars err on the side of overwork not underwork.
   

So we came up with the notion of Six Days in Lent. This is official permission to spend one day a week in Lent out of your trench, doing something you believe will nourish your soul. Even if you’re wrong, it was worth the risk. You can block the day out as assiduously as you would a funeral or Church meeting, and write it into your schedule. What kinds of things? Karen, Andrew, Caroline and I brainstormed 40 starters to get the creative thoughts going:

In this spirit, this first week of Lent, I headed for somewhere I’d never been, Pelagos in Latimer. This is a new and innovative Spirituality development centre in the best countryside on the Underground, near the River Chess. Various events go on there, and it’s available to people and groups for all sorts of different purposes, including, last Saturday, a day exploring Jesus’ wilderness experience with 30 others. It struck me how much of our feeling and thinking is shaped by a crush of immediate externals. In a desert the externals are much more basic. I was interested by parallel between what happened to Jesus in the desert and Richard Rohr’s concept of how men to grow up, or don’t, which I’ve described elsewhere. The wilderness is a crucible in which we engage with greed, ego, and possessiveness, set apart from the toys and concerns that feed those old friends.

Next up? I’m taking a session to read The Horse and His Boy — the only Chronicles of Narnia children’s book I’ve never read. Then van Gogh or Chris Ofili, I wot... Watch this space.

Assisted dying, assisted Living

From the ridiculous to the sublime in the UK assisted dying debate. TV presenter Ray Gosling’s case is a matter for the police, but what’s claimed so far can only validate the “slippery slope” argument. If Mr Gosling did what he says he did, doubtless he meant well at the time. But how could this behaviour give rise to anything but criminal proceedings?

The legal implications of allowing any private individual to end someone else’s life with no accountability are terrifying. Harold Shipman may be chuckling in his grave. The present English approach may have what Baroness Finlay calls “a stern face and a kind heart,” but you don’t need a lot of imagination to see the pitfalls in turning the basic principle that protects people’s right to life into a mush.

Cut from there to Sir Terry Pratchett’s Dimbleby Lecture, a passionate and intelligent plea for a tribunal to adjudicate questions around the ending of life for terminally ill people. As someone who holds life to be, in principle, sacred according to the sixth commandment, I am very wary about this proposal. However his lecture deserves careful reading. Having had both parents die with various forms of dementia, it could well be me in a few years’ time. I can recognise the compassion in his approach, which is emphatically not “anything goes.” It comes from someone who obviously has a profound respect for, and joy in, life.

Right now a degree of clinical discretion is exercised, as it should be. This is done within a framework where the law basically protects life, the hippocratic oath applies, and anyone seeing a UK Doctor should be able to assume they will do their best to preserve their life. What I hear Sir Terry calling for is some body that could define such clinical discretion, and make it more accountable and substantial. I wonder who would want to serve on such a body, but I get the point.

Questions remain in my mind, especially about patients whose capacity to form judgments is compromised. Our worst 4 year run-in with dementia (short by many standards) involved all sorts of things being asked for, said, and felt by my mother. It was not an exact science or rational process. After asking to be turned off in the early stages, she actually recovered some taste for life in the last six months of her life, with excellent care. That might have been entirely different for someone else’s condition. Had she lived longer, she might have reverted to a depressive state. In reality, what seems perfectly simple would often be a complete minefield.

I am also disturbed by the social impact over years of anything that may tend to devalue life or collude with the depressive lie that old or disabled people are burdens in the way rather than fully valued. Some complex social and human purposes are better served by legally exercised discretion than legislation. If I ever came to a point of believing I needed to help a loved one die, I believe I should be fully accountable for that decision in all its particulars.

But Sir Terry wasn’t saying I shouldn't be — the exact opposite, in fact. Amidst various knee-jerk and rentaquote reactions I’ll be interested to see what people make of his proposal with a bit of mature reflection. I am not sure spreading clinical judgment to a committee is the best or only way, and I find any law that appears to confer less value on disabled people than others profoundly problematic, but I see the limitations of polemical absolutism in a complex area of moral decision making. Perhaps the real challenge is about old and ill people’s quality of life, not death.

True Fasting: fruit and effects

If all we think and do for God is provisional, how can we discern the spirits? A theologically based poiont of view cannot be validated merely because it uses God-talk and Scripture, appeals to conventional understanding from former ages, or is passionately and sincerely held. Apartheid endorsements from the eighties were all those things, but still wrong, indeed evil.

The mistake the wrong sort of Pharisee made, and St Paul’s opponents in Galatia, was to suppose Faith is some checklist thing that could be read off in advance. All we can ultimately test a proposition by are its fruit and its effects. The real tests of our most insistent Scripturally founded theological convictions are

1. Fruit — what fruit does a proposition bear in the lives of those who espouse it, and how is it good news for everyone concerned, and how does it fit into God’s purposes for the peace and salvation of all?
   
   
2. Effects — does it confront injustice, enrich the poor, set the prisoners free, minister healing, and turn the world upside down?
   

Activity that is literally fruitless, or even worse, bears bad fruit — anger, clamour, wrath, rivalry, emulations, factions — will probably serve nothing but itself.

So, contemplating the future of the Anglican communion with someone who wrote to me about it from overseas, I can see a positive future, if we have the courage to go for it. It came to me this morning, like a slap across the face, in the passage Maggi Dawn’s Lent book gives for today from Isaiah 58:

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of wickedness,
to undo the straps of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover him,
and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?

Then shall your light break forth like the dawn,
and your healing shall spring up speedily;
your righteousness shall go before you;
the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard.

Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer;
you shall cry, and he will say, “Here I am.”
If you take away the yoke from your midst,
the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,
if you pour yourself out for the hungry
and satisfy the desire of the afflicted,
then shall your light rise in the darkness
and your gloom be as the noonday.

And the LORD will guide you continually
and satisfy your desire in scorched places
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail.

And your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to dwell in.

Lent, Faith and Clarity

Our capacity to build conclusions on what we think we see is the most useful but also the most dangerous trick in the bag. We catch a perception of something that matters,then crystalise it mentally into something we think we know. All well and good, often. But when mental ruts grind deep, what we think we see becomes more real than what’s there. Mark Twain pointed out that what makes us dumb isn’t what we don’t know — It’s what we think we know, but it’s wrong.

Faith is the capacity to hold something that could be true at arms length, accepting its apparent reality but not at face vaue. Faith is looking deeper, and lookign around. Faith is comparing our experience to other people’s within the Catholicity of a whole company of people and the Scriptures. Then faith is acting, but fully aware of the provisionality of anything we can think we know, compared to the blazing reality of God.

So this Lent I’m using Maggi Dawn’s Lent guide, Giving it Up, as a daily read. She starts with some classic meanings and disciplines of the season, but then invites us to bring our various cheished notions about God, the world and everything back to some significant Biblical passages and characters for checking, cleansing and re-envisioning. Having used Maggi’s materials for Advent before, I am very much looking forward to the journey...

India: resilience and hope

It was surreal this evening to step from village India into a fine hotel in Hyderabad, after being on the road. We feel like we have just come ashore from a long journey, contrasts enhanced by the intensity of our programme of visits and meetings with educators, clergy and children. We have met some amazing, courageous people, and our group is beginning to see a new way forward for our link with schools in Nandyal.


There were moments it was hard not to choke up — blessing children at the children's centre in Kurnool was one. They are so vibrant, and funny and responsive. Yet the way of the world will strip them of hope unless someone finds a way to support them to achieve their hopes and dreams. Unless we know better and are prepared to work to make it so. The four of us (two teachers, two clergy) have been banging away scoping schemes for early years village education to prepare village children for English medium work later. We hope to be able to come up with something really usable by the end of the year, if we can find someone with the Telugu language and teaching skills to make these ideas fly.


Another particularly moving moment came when we visited Pastorate 7 in Kurnool, where the floods were worst, and spent time with people in a new Church that is rising up, which will include a children's centre underneath the sanctuary. I wish Lucy had been with me, because when we last visited she was such a natural at drawing out these children. After all the speeches and formal part people just came to be blessed and prayed with. I came away feeling there is so much to be hopeful for, as this community regenerates after the floods. I wasn’t going to write anything, but we're all full of India — all I wanted to post, as we prepare to fly home tomorrow, are some preliminary pictures from this visit...

The Sweet Taste of India

India for a few days, with all its beauty, colour, warmth (31 degrees!), need and vibrancy. I’m travelling with friends and colleagues from Chalfont St Peter, Charles the local Vicar, John the Head of our School, and Chris the school secretary. Chalfont has responded in a really exciting way to the schools development and networking project we went to Andhra Pradesh to inaugurate in 2007.

This isn’t just a money thing — although when floods struck Kurnool last winter I was thrilled by the almost instantaneous way our network was able to get thousands of pounds of aid straight out and onto the streets where it was needed. It reminded me of the way I was told many in Milton Keynes were able to throw themselves into support for Haiti with the help of RC nuns at Thornton College, who have working sisters there.

That kind of direct two-way relationship is really important. Of course we need big NGO’s and government agencies, but the guts of giving isn’t money, but a giving attitude, a focussed will, the good samaritan thing. The local Church is the hope of the world, in various ways, including the fact we have people on the ground. It’s a real joy to be hands-on in this work with Chalfont St Peter taking the lead.

There are four purposes in this very brief visit

1. to meet some of the people caught up in the floods, encourage them in the work of reconstructon and, if we can, to see if we can design a scheme for small school to school basic infrastructural support packages for which we hope to drum up support among our own 288 schools in the Thames Valley.
   
   
2. to scope the future of our Oxford/ Nandyal relationship, and see how it can be developed in the fields of sharing technology, passion and vision together with Bishop Lawrence and his colleagues.
   
   
3. to share an assembly, if we can manage it, between two schools, one in Nandyal and one in Chalfont — Chris has a bag of gubbins! It’s not only a dry run for the kinds of linkages we think could open up all sorts of possibilities for students in the UK and India, but it will bring the whole relationship to life,w e hope, on both ends.
   
   
4. to spend a very short, but I hope quality time praying and studying with clergy in Nandyal.
   
   
5. I hope we can really grow in ways that are mutually beneficial, and am much looking forward to renewing friendships and sharing visions with sisters and brothers in India.

As a colleague was asking me tentatively whether he could be excused from his parish to minster abroad as part of a parish link, I want to reiterate that I believe it’s a really good thing for clergy to commit a few days ministry regularly to the majority word Church. I know Bucks colleagues who are ministering in Nigeria, South Africa, Sweden, India, China, the Middle East, Germany, Sudan, Uganda, Pakistan and South America. If 150 Bucks clergy want do this kind of thing, I’m delighted. The growth of such activity among my colleagues really excites me. There are various ways of wiring up this kind of service, and for any PCC’s wondering what they will lose if their vicar commits to a regular element of this kind of ministry, I want to say there is no down side. It refreshes and renews people as well as giving tangible expression to the Catholicity of the Church. It takes a whole world to know Christ!