Passion Play in Great Missenden

Since the publication in 1986 of Lent Holy Week and Easter, churches have increasingly enriched their observances. Real ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palm processions, and the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday are now found all over the place where once they were rather top shelf activities.

This week Great Missenden Parish Church is putting on a simple Passion Play, locally produced, developed and resourced from scratch by a group of friends led by Brenda Harris. It’s certanly a fresh way of being drawn into the story. Being in the cast also draws people together, strengthens community, and enables everyone to experience the story from the inside out. What is lost in Broadway slickery is regained, and more, in impact when you know all the people on stage, and off. The short play comes with a simple meal in Church for those who want it, and 7·30 tonight is the last performance, for this year.

This is a brave and moving endeavour for a local Church. Holy Week is a time to explore the story personally, and this production certainly brought it to life.

The use of drama in Church grew through the middle ages, aided by Franciscan spirituality with its cribs and other visual aids. Plays became suspect, though, for their embellishments and, perhaps, their inherently hazardous blend of doctrinal creativity on the hoof and local colouring, seasoned by all the precariousness of a live show.

Afficionados of full-on Anglican Life and Literature cannot forget Reverend Wiggin’s Christmas Pageant at Christ Church Gravesend New Hampshire. This is one of the finest pieces of comic writing there is, in the Quintessential Anglican novel, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. The Christmas Pageant, recounted with undersattement and comic tension worthy of Joyce Grenfell, is an irrestible imbroglio from which Owen rises heroically

‘What’s wrong with the Christ-Child?’ Barb Wiggin asked.
‘ALL THOSE BABIES,’ Owen said. ‘JUST TO GET ONE TO LIE IN THE MANGER WITHOUT CRYING. DO WE HAVE TO HAVE ALL THOSE BABIES?’
‘But it’s like the song says, Owen,’ the Rector told him. “Little Lord Jesus no crying he makes.”
‘OKAY, OKAY,’ Owen said. ‘BUT ALL THOSE BABIES - YOU CAN HEAR THEM CRYING. EVEN OFFSTAGE YOU CAN HEAR THEM. AND ALL THOSE GROWN-UPS!’ he said. ‘ALL THOSE BIG MEN PASSING THE BABIES IN AND OUT. THEY’RE SO BIG - THEY LOOK RIDICULOUS. THEY MAKE US LOOK RIDICULOUS.’
‘You know a baby who won’t cry, Owen?’ Barb Wiggin asked him — and, of course, she knew as soon as she spoke... how he had trapped her.
‘I KNOW SOMEONE WHO CAN FIT IN THE CRIB,’ Owen said. ‘SOMEONE SMALL ENOUGH TO LOOK LIKE A BABY,’ he said. ‘SOMEONE OLD ENOUGH NOT TO CRY.’
Mary Beth Baird could not contain herself. ‘Owen can be the Baby Jesus!’ she yelled. Owen Meany smiled and shrugged.
‘I CAN FIT IN THE CRIB,’ he said modestly.
Harold Crosby could no longer contain himself, either; he vomited. He vomited often enough for it to pass almost unnoticed, especially now that Owen had our undivided attention...

I’m not sure people this side of the pond are yet ready for such glorious experiences, but, this worked better than that. Seeing neighbours and friends in the story helps us locate ourselves within the plot. The play was well-supported, and may well develop further in future years...

Doubting Doubt

Much as I may disagree with many of Peter Tatchell’s views and methods, I respect his passion and sincerity. I’m interested (h/t Church Mouse) in his account of why he is a secular humanist:

Religion is the world’s single greatest fount of obscurantism, prejudice, superstition and oppression. It has caused misery to billions of people worldwide for millennia, and continues to do so in many parts of the world. As a human rights campaigner motivated by love and compassion for other people, I would be betraying my humanitarian values to embrace religious beliefs.
...
By the time I turned 20, rationality finally triumphed over superstition and dogma. I didn’t need God any more. I was intelligent, confident and mature enough to live without the security blanket of religion and its theological account of the universe. Accordingly, I renounced religion and embraced reason, science and an ethics based on love and compassion. I don’t need God to tell me what is right and wrong. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves.

What particularly interests me is that, coming from a similar generation but with a loving and decent (but not Evangelical Christian) upbringing, his description of his formation in atheism rings a bell for me. A similar process led me in precisely the opposite direction as a teenager, from atheism to faith. Bearing that in mind, I'd fill in a similar form, perhaps, a bit like this:

Religion, like politics or sex, is part of being human. There’s good religion and bad religion, some healthy, some toxic. Failing to realise that made atheism seem clever. I had high ideals, but a limited capacity to distinguish between my own passionate feelings and a higher truth and calling which I have not yet attained, but towards which I could still struggle. Faith in God prevents me always externalising the foe, and reminds me that I have to struggle within myself to be the kind of change I want to see in the world, or all my efforts will be no more than anger and opinionations self-righteously aimed at others.

As a teenager, I realised that although I didn’t need God, better people than me had searched seriously for him. He did not exist as an object, in the way I had crudely imagined as a child. I became intrigued by the elusive possibilities this raised. Following up this perception was rather like the 3-d image in a magic eye picture emerging from what had seemed a simple, if complex, 2-d one.

Thus it dawned on me that things are not, in fact, always what they seem, and reality has many planes and dimensions. In a universe where something as basic as number theory cannot be anchored entirely securely in rational axioms, I came to see that human reason could not possibly be the measure of everything, but pointed beyond itself. Grasping reality would require awareness of hermeneutics, and a sense of history, as well as my own opinions.

Accordingly, I searched beyond simplistic secularism and began to grasp the complexity of life. I studied history, and engaged with the languages and content of Biblical texts on an adult level. I don’t need God to tell me what is right. I do, however, find his spirit gives me more wisdom, grace and power to live than I can generate within myself. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves, but frustratingly incapable of delivering the goods on the basis of passion, and our own time- and ego-bound reason and emtion.

Restricted Views still available...

...at a price. Rounding off an interesting media theme, kudos to the very wonderful Dan & Dan for their new and painfully accurate Daily Mail song. Paying careful attention to it will save you a lot of money you might otherwise have wasted on buying the paper.

h/t Phil Ritchie and The Media Blog. It’s available here as an mp3 for your iPod.

Revealed — the Facebook Disease!

Since its first diagnosis in 1530, fear has fuelled all kinds of theories about Syphilis. Italians and Germans called it the “French disease.” The French called it the “Italian disease.” The Dutch called it the “Spanish disease,” the Russians called it the “Polish disease,” the Turks called it the “Christian disease” and Tahitians the “British disease.”

Fleet Street can now reveal (h/t Ben Goldacre) that Syphilis is, in fact, the “Facebook Disease.” This hypothesis also accounts for the failure of our Tudor ancestors to be able to place it accurately. Stories in the Daily Telegraph, Mail, and Star all proclaim the great discovery. A public health scientist in Teeside warned of the rise of incidence in his region. This was stuck up against another survey suggesting use of social networking sites is high in the North East and, hey presto!

Those who find this suggestion risible may care to try another from this February, also in the Mail — that Facebook causes Cancer.

How does this tosh make the printed page, and why should anyone pay for it? Now there’s a real mystery. Others will remember from Monty Python that sheeps’ bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes. This new learning amazes me...

Frail humanity’s solitary boast

Oxford Cathedral this morning, to celebrate Lady Day with trustees, office holders and members of the Mothers Union from around the diocese. MU works in 78 countries around the world, has 3·6 million members, and a representative to the United Nations Commission on the status of women. People seemed refreshingly focused on others and open to accepting them as they are, strengthening marriages by networking women all over the world, and a few men. The emphasis is on bringing about a world where God’s love is shown in loving, stable, respectful relationships.

The view from the pulpit in Christ Church is interesting (above). I took as our text for the annunciation a notion first planted in my mind at a Berkshire nativity play a few years ago by the seven year old who had landed the part of Mary — “everybody knows it’s much easier to be an angel than a virgin.”

And, as daffodils begin to bloom in these parts, a slightly off the wall but powerful poem by Carol Ann Duffy, based on Max Ernst’s painting of 1926, The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses:

The Virgin Punishing the Infant

He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy,
but I am God. Joseph kept away, carving himself
a silent Pinocchio out in the workshed. He said
he was a simple man and hadn't dreamed of this.

She grew anxious in that second year, would stare
at stars saying Gabriel, Gabriel. Your guess.
The village gossiped in the sun. The child was solitary,
his wide and solemn eyes could fill your head.

After he walked, our normal children crawled. Our wives
were first resentful, then superior. Mary's child
would bring her sorrow ... better far to have a son
who gurgled nonsense at your breast. Googoo. Googoo.

But I am God. We heard him through the window,
heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw
was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered
why the infant did not cry, why the Mother did.

Murder in the Cathedral

30 years ago today day Archibishop Oscar Romero was shot at the altar. Like other martyred achbishops in history, he seems to have been appointed on one kind of prospectus, then discovered, in post, a new orientation to his ministry that brought him into solidarity with the poor. He also seems to have discovered there were no simple goodies and baddies, but a mass of complicated, compromised people caught up in evil, struggling for hope. Thus he was able to see the perpetrators as victims too, in their own way.

Romero taught “all history is God’s,” even in the face of appalling violence and evil. His loyal Roman Catholicism wasn’t self-righteous, defensive, paranoid, or institutionally blind: with few illusions about the Church, he loved it enough to long to see it renewed and reformed:

Prophets also denounce the internal sins of the Church. And why shouldn’t they? Bishops, the Pope, priests, papal nuncios, women religious, Catholic schools are formed by men and women, and men and women are sinners and need a prophet to call us to conversion, so that we don’t establish religion as though it were unchangeable. Religion needs prophets. Thank God we have them.
Because it would be very sad if a Church felt that it was in possession of the truth and rejected everything else. A church that only condemns, a Church that only looks at the sin in others, and doesn’t see the beam that it has in its eye, is not the authentic Church of God.

July 8, 1979

And to remind us of the cost of discipleship, this last week has seen the attempted shooting of the Episcopal Church Archbishop in El Salvador, Bishop Martín Barahona. Investigations are ongoing. Plenty for our prayers today then, for Bishop Martin and the community he serves, and the people who still suffer from violence and injustice in Central America.

Romero’s last words were spoken towards the end of the liturgy of a requiem mass on the year’s mind of Doña Sarita Pinto:

That this immolated Body and this Blood sacrificed for humankind may nourish our bodies and our blood in suffering and in pain, like Christ, not for its own sake, but rather to give the concepts of justice and peace to our people. Let us join together, then, intimately in faith and hope in this moment of prayer for Doña Sarita and for ourselves...

and then the shot rang out...

Chelmsford! Essex! You Lucky People!

Much spontaneous warmth, joy and prayer yesterday at our Bucks area deans meeting for +Stephen Cottrell, called to be Bishop of Chelmsford. Having had the odd enquiry from friends East of Eden about what they’re in for, I can say this. Stephen is one of the most enjoyable and supportive friends I’ve ever worked with, and as an erstwhile fellow enfant terrible I will seriously miss his clear sightedness, holy pragmatism, warmth and humour.

What kind of disciple? Well, like the Church of England is supposed to, he runs Gospel (or Evangelical) software on Catholic hardware. He is clearly focussed on the kingdom, and has a real knack for drawing people into Bible passages reflectively at a level you can take away and think about. He is an Evangelism nut. He’s shrewd, but far more interested in holiness than politics. This approach seems to cut through squabbling and ego dressed as faith like a knife through butter (I don't know whether Chelmsford keeps its butter in the fridge.)

This looks like a great match. Stephen’s proud of Essex and coming from Essex; he has absolutely no side to him, to use a rather old-fashioned phrase. I will miss him a lot, and follow his joint adventures with his new diocese with real expectancy that God can stir you up to all kinds of fruitful labour if you let him. O people of Essex (and the bits of East London that some people think are Essex really), you are blessed. You have got yourselves the right man.

Green Zone: Tigris Tales

As he steps off the Rugby Field, Matt Damon discovers how much less simple life is in Eye-Raq than it was in Clint's version of South Africa. Murky, devious so-and-so’s wheel and deal, and even the line between right and wrong has gone bendy. The CIA have a safe full of million dollar packs and they’re the good guys for a change. Young interns swagger and binge around the pool, and the walls of the palace are lined with silly political slogans designed to persuade everybody, against the evience of their own eyes, that the whole thing is a rightous, er, crusade.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran was Washington Post man in the Green Zone. In Imperial Life in the Emerald City, he knoweth whereof he speaketh. As the streets descend into anarchy and GI’s do increasingly dangerous and dirty work, fantasy reigns in Halliburton’s neocon disneyland. Where once Saddam’s republican guard strutted their stuff, George W. Bush’s, er republican guard is depicted in a thoroughly believable way, strutting its stuff around the pool. Occasional flashes of French door furniture indicate that in this film Iraq is played by Morocco.

This action caper is based on, rather than drawn from, Chandrasekaran’s factual book. Matt Damon is an clean-cut GI over there to clear up those pesky WMD’s, round up Saddam like a Raccoon, etc. etc. Much of this flm is shot on a not-so-steadycam yielding an occasionally dizzying documentary effect like a computer wargame. This technique will engage and please the young more than bifocal wearers. Saddam has legged it, but not his chum General Al-Rawi who, it turns out, has his own interesting past with the U. S. Government. A lot of doors get kicked in and henchpersons shot, but the good guys kinda win in the end.

I suspect that unless you are a complete wargaming nut, in which case, enjoy, your reactions to the film will line up around your take on the Iraq war. If you believe that it was a good idea, and the prospectus on which it was started was decent, legal honest and truthful you will feel affronted that such a film could be imagined, let alone made. Fox News, which believes everybody should ignore the government at home paradoxically also believes everything republican governments do abroad is, ipso facto, decent, legal, honest and truthful.

Back on planet earth, it is becoming evident as the enquiries unfold that you can argue with the details, but a squalid and confused fantasy-based computer game is not that far away from the way historians will view the Iraq War. There were no WMD’s twenty minutes away from Cyprus. In this regard Saddam’s brutal regime was all mouth and no trousers. The war’s whole prospectus was dishonest, and our politicans knew it but lied to us. Brave people took big risks, money flowed like water, and several hundred thousand innocent civilians died. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

On getting shot once

Twenty years ago Sir John Harvey Jones, the industrialist, used to go around troubleshooting businesses facing significant unpalateable change. He tried to understand their operations and scope ways forward which would both preserve the bloodline of the business and ensure its future. As scared managers explained exactly why their businesses could never change, Sir John used to enourage them to dive in by reminding them, with a cheery twinkle in his eye “You can only get shot once.”

As Churches struggle to follow God faithfully, rock to his people, but also river of the spirit, they need to distinguish core gospel imperatives from auld habits. Thus we trundle round increasingly sharp bends, close to the edge of high cliffs.

In which context I was recently reminded of the way in which some friends in Sweden see the whole C of E way of handling, for example, women’s ordination. Some think it an elegant and characteristically English way of keeping as many opponents as possible on board. Meanwhile others think we are maniacs who have somehow invented a way of making “getting shot” (assuming that’s what it is for those who lose the argument) take thrty years. The same dynamic operates for church reordering, changing hymnbooks, etc.

I wonder... Nobody does gradualism like the English — horray! but when you are turning a turtle is it actually kind to the poor beast to turn it one foot at a time? Both methods have their advantages, no doubt. Such as?

Turning round publishing

Some pubishers are understandably pretty apocalyptic about prospects for their industry. It’s ironic to read pieces about church attendance, which is almost static and rising in places, from newspapers whose own paper readership is collapsing through the floor.

The draining away of the power to communicate from the clique that owns the means of production could induce ever more desperate attempts to claw it back by re-establishing monopolies.

I suspect however, that as water will always find the water table, information will always out. Although there is scope for low point cost creativity in marketing, that won’t win the war. Desperate attempts to monetise the market by locking people into paying for stuff they basically don’t want — the aggregating strategy — is unlikely to do anything but hasten decline. This is as true for deprtment stores as for newspapers. One alternative is to embrace new technologies instead of fighting them, with a new focus on understanding readers, high quality content, and creativity about how to deliver it.

This seems to be the message of an interesting video that’s going around, produced by Dorling Kindersley (penguin). This started out as a high quality publishing house that established itself by producing beautifully designed children’s books. If they can do something similarly beyond the realms of the conventional, decline may be reversible.

Born-again Terrapin in Chesham Bois

Many schools used to have a 1960’s terrapin — It was a temporary building designed to accommodate a class, often without a toilet, in conditions that guaranteed cold in winter and sweltering heat in the summer.

Carrying water across the playground to supply it was an additional task for the milk monitor. In such places many people were said to be having the happiest days of their lives.

But all good things come to an end, and I was delighted to go to Chesham Bois C of E Combined School on Saturday to open a new classroom for reception children, repacing such a structure. Fundraising for it was all local, and the project to have it built has been running for a long time. Although the wait was tedious, the result is a building whose time has come — a superb suite of teaching and ancillary facilities, including a kitchen area, loos, storage and outdoor play area.

Best of all, this scheme combines various technologies to provide insulation and reduce power consumption to a point where there will be times at which it is self powering — PV / solar cells for hot water and electricity, with an air-source heatpump that extracts heat from air on its way in and out of the building. By jumping in early in the microgeneration cycle, the school will gain maximum benefit from its investment, and was able to secure a 50% grant to install the PV / solar cells. By monitoring use, awareness grows, and the school has very much got itself a reception classroom for tomorrow as well as today. Other schools who wish to have the benefit of such tasty worms need to be early birds...

Trouble Brewing — Stirring Times

Great Missenden’s Big Brew took place a couple of Saturdays ago in the Parish Church. Its context was Living Hope, an environmental day conference organised by the local Church. It brought together national and local leaders from green organizations like A Rocha, CAFOD, CCOW, Christian Aid, Christian Ecology Link, Tearfund and Traidcraft with an audience of 130 people. There were three keynotes to kick proceedings off:

1. Paula Clifford argued for a passionate realism about where we stand, including an awarenss that others around the world are paying a heavy price for our indecision. One thought for the day was that “politicians are a renewable resource”. She suggested three prime sources of hope in torubled times:
   — Community: The Body of Christ is a central NT concept, but can be an elusive ideal. We need to re-estabish what this means for ourselves locally, nationally and internationaly
   — Interdependence: is a pragmatic reality which is often underestimated or abused. How are we interdependent in a global world, and how shuld we be?
   — Mission: Christians have, since hte beginning, been turning the world upside down; but how would a carbon-neutral world look and feel, and how do we bring it about?
   
   
2. Chris Sunderland of Earth Abbey told us that in his lifetime world population had grown from 2.5 billion to 6.7 billion, and we need to re-imagine our way of life. Some people are sharing their land and working fewer days to reconnect with each other and the land, and he commended local projects and ideas like GrowZones.
   
   
3. Dave Bookless of A Rocha believed that since Copenhagen concern about climate change had slipped down the political agenda. We had also missed the opportunity of the financial crisis to reboot our banking system and returned to business as usual. The environment isn’t the problem — we are! Lord May, an atheist, wants Churches to invoke fear of a divine punisher to make people act. This aspiration is understandable, if a little nutty. Dave argued that, like St Francis, we need to open our eyes, minds and hearts to God, the Earth, and the other person.
   — We are fallen, with a propensity for idolatry. God’ first commission in Scripture was to steward the earth.
   — We need a Copernical reeconfiguration of our attitudes — earth doesn”t revolve around us.
   — The other is a significant figure in Scripture. The alien within our gates matters, and with the prospect of serious migration driven by climate change we need to get our heads and hearts arund the consequences.
   

There followed smaller meetings on a variety of topics from greening school buildings to liturgy, the practicalities of ground and air-source heating, to the latest climate science. This event certainly showed that local churches and groups can put on top notch training events around the issues facing us. Congratulations to Margaret Dixon and her local team for pulling it all together. The event has now gone on to a website for follow up and sharing of ideas — earthingfaith.org.

There’s no getting away from the fact that getting real about our environment involves choices for us all, and has an inevitable political dimension. Therefore, to wrap things up, I chaired an afternoon session with David Lidington, our local MP. His thought-provoking review of the major issues and realities brought in experience of the national and international scene and demonstrated, to my mind, courage and leadership in two potentially awkward areas:

1. David mentioned what would otherwise have been one dreaded elephant in the room — the new high speed rail link across the Chilterns. This issue could turn into ignorant armies clashing by night, stigmatising the other lot as NIMBY’s or Tree-huggers. We actually need some light as well as heat, here. There is no cost-free way of maintaining a high tech society, but by the same token there’s no point saving the environment by mucking up the local environment unnecessarily. There are some cute calls to be made. Public Consultation on the £17Bn scheme begins in earnest this autumn, and people need to lock onto the global and local realities closely and imaginatively.
   
   
2. David very helpfully discussed how the process of politics actually works for jobbing MP’s — genuinely personal communications arising from real experience are, inevitably, more helpful than name-calling bulk productions, which are more helpful than nothing, perhaps, but don't actually give MP’s much to go on. The message I heard was (my words not his) “Be personal, be real, and above all, get involved!”
   

This is a troubled time to be green. There is a fair amount of disappointment from Copenhagen. Powerful vested interests are manning the bar on the Titanic with glad tidings that the icebergs are illusory and the party must go on. What I don’t get is, even if it could be proved scientifically that pumping tons of needless crap into the sky doesn’t actually affect anything that matters, where’s the fun in dong that? Wouldn’t it be even more fun to tread lightly and with self-awarensss towards habits of living that go with the grain of life?