Church and churches

There’s been interesting discussion on Fr Milovan Katanic’s blog and elsewhere (including Steve Hayes’ wonderful blog) about hobnobbings between Roman Catholic and Orthodox leaders and the prospects for some kind of institutional merger. It may seem harsh to think everything ecclesiastical couldn’t simply be popped in the pot and boiled up into some great and glorious stew. However, because it has no externally imposed universal papcy, the Orthodox vision of God demands a kind of holistic coherence that calls for clarity and integrity on its own terms. Boiling up the stew would actually mush the ingredients to death.

So we come up against the mystery of the Church (in its broadest sense) as a clearly articulated but provisional reality. Every genuine expression of Christian discipleship carries within it the seeds of the whole, and one or two particular strands of glory. However, part of that inheritance is an awareness that its human expression is provisional (this side of glory). It does its job when, by its very limitations, it points beyond itself. The real glory of the Church lies wabeyond syncretism, and aly so beyond rational-bureaucratic imperialism.

An organic but limited and provisional awareness needs to inform any debate about the limits of national Churches. What rights does one church (small c) have to park its tanks on other churches’ lawns? Say “none,” and you compromise the totality of the vision that says we all belong to each other. Say “every right” and you walk the foothills of the toxic mess I’ve just called rational-bureaucratic imperialism. There has to be a better option than either of those.

One comment does stick in my mind from Fr Katanic’s blog, by Romanós.

All this smooching between hierarchs and popes is really quite comical, if not even tragic at a deeper level. I have long since personally given up hoping for as well as renouncing the kind of “unity” that this represents. For me, it is simply a non-issue. The unity which Christians share is above all a grace of Christ in the Holy Spirit, and we know that the Church has never been divided and never can be, but for those who battle it out on the external level. The canons of the Church are in place for good reason, and the lines have been drawn with good intentions, but all of these are temporal and fade away at the approach of Christ, for whose sake all who follow Him have given up all, and in whose presence all our righteousness, orthodoxy and orthopraxy, for all their “glory”, are still just filthy rags. Christ has saved us in spite of ourselves, so our best response is to love one another as He has loved us, without plucking each other’s eyebrows in the process.

Secretes, Shoots and Leaves

Once upon a time, all we had to prevent us eating each other in public places was Civic Virtue and the Old Bill. Now we have over 4 million surveillance cameras in the UK. We British really love ’em — New York gets by with a paltry 5,000, where London has more than 400,000. Keep smiling, because unless you are in Church or on the can, you can pretty much bet you're starring in someone’s real life Big Brother show. And they call it a liberal society.

Tate Modern is putting our ongoing Snoopy Show into context with a summer exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. I thought I’d go along to find out where it all began. The Victorians had a variety of gadgets, including cameras hidden in shoes and the tops of canes, to record the unwilling. Cartier-Bresson snapped his Leica around the streets of Paris with sublime results, some of which are in the exhibition.

Developing technology since the nineteenth century has delivered images to feed a growing culture of celebrity. Here is Garbo sheilding herself from the camera with a perfectly formed hand, and an utterly wonderful shot of Kim Novak trying to sit down discretely in a dining car whilst a row of men in homburgs sit and stare. The exhibition includes Weegee’s iconic shot of Marilyn Monroe accidentally on purpose flashing her thighs over a stream of hot air. All culminates in the Paparazzi martyrdom of the Princess of Wales, captured in some newspaper stories of the day. There was interesting work by Alison Jackson, who spoofs the whole idea by using lookalikes in a way that makes you think “surely it can’t be...” It isn’t.

There were some fine historical examples of Candid photography, in the Monty Python sense — Brassai’s images of 1930’s secret and scenes from mexican bordellos to travellers on the New York Sunway. Stripped of the accoutrements of glamour photography most people look surprisingly contemporary, simple and innocent.

There is a harrowing section on war, which takes us from the shocking images of carnage thrown up by the American Civil War to the human débris of concentration camps, Nick Ut’s Vietnam and various recent gulf wars. One image stays on the memory — Lee Miller’s shot of the fair-haired daughter of Leipzig’s Bürgermeister, draped exquisitely over a chair, hours after she had committed suicide with Nazi Germany collapsing around her.

The extraordinary mechanisation of snooping has not improved the quality of the images. The final rooms make you wonder who watches this stuff, and how close we are coming to an entirely surreal position where we are all constantly photographed for the amusement and edification of machines. Once nobody’s watching any more, what is the point? The almost complete elimination of privacy raises interesting questions about the integrity of the person, and the almost complete elimination of liberty by the control mechanisms required by unfettered liberalism. Time for a re-think?

If you want to get ahead get a hat

I return from a very busy week hosting Indian visitors, among other wonderful experiences too absorbing to allow time for blogging, to find great convulvulus in the Blogosphere over what some are already calling Mitregate.

Now that the Murdoch paywall has, tragically, cut Ruth Gledhill out of the conversation, the best source of information is Maggi Dawn.

This bizarre story indicates, as has been told, that unlike previous visiting female bishops from the US, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church was banned from wearing a Mitre in Southwark Cathedral. Forrest Gump’s mum used to say, stoopid is as stoopid does, and the whole mentality of such a request, if it was ever made, is profoundly stoopid. The whole thing smacks of hypocrisy. It bears the fingerprints of blind officialdom rather than the Archbishop himself.

I’m an optimist, however, and can see positive learning from such loonery:

1. The C of E has a lot of getting real and growing up to do. Seeing the problem presented in a stark form presents a good opportunity to recognise it and resolve to do better in future.
   
   
2. All God’s promises are “yes” and “amen” in Jesus Christ, who taught his disciples to say yes or no. Anything else comes from the evil one. The Spirit has always called the church to a form of ministry that was real within the sociology of the world we serve. Therefore we respond to the Spirit’s call obediently, not half-heartedly. The Puritans used to talk about the “Devil’s Martyrs” — people who lost out all round, because they messed with Mr In-Between, depriving themselves of the advantages of being Puritans, or Libertines. Simply framing the Spirit’s call to ordain women in terms of the problems it raises is boring, weedy and faithless, as well as hypocritical.
   
   
3. We’ve been reading recently in Church about Jesus in the house of Simon the Pharisee. We all have an inner self-important Scribe or Pharisee, and by his fruits ye will know him. Some exceptional people, however, manage on occasion to walk through the inner ring of Scribes and Pharisees with deftness and charity. It’s by doing this, ex opere operato, that such people demonstrate an important theological truth. Although the Church’s outer (institutional) form is rotting away, says St Paul, its inner being is constantly renewed by the spirit. The grace of God makes such things possible, and thus gives hope. What we have to ask ourselves is who, in this admittedly trivial but symbolically loaded tale, has acted in a Christlike way, and how? What do we learn from it?
   
   
4. As a bishop I learn that, loaded with creative potential and myth as my job can be, when all is said and done I am just a driver of the Lord’s Number 49 bus, and the more I can rememeber it’s his bus not mine, saints preserve me, the less likely I am to get too far up myself. This makes me easier to live with, and learning it daily is worth a day of anybody’s wages…

Lions and Unicorns, mods and rockers

One of the great highlights of last week was finally meeting Euan Semple. I’ve come across Euan as a thinker and educator (in the broadest sense), and have long been impressed by his pragmatic wisdom, systemic awareness, and ability to open rather than close down, or geek up, new media issues. Euan’s blogged our conversation here.

On the face of it I was after new ways to raise my colleagues’ capacity to engage in the new media landscape, and Euan is indeed a resourceful friend in this world.

Most interesting, however was to chew over how communication develops people and groups of people. We have entirely different world views when it comes to orgnaised religion anwyay, but some strongly congruent instincts and values — freedom, emergence, openness.

It seems there is a Right brain creative world of wacky possibilities to which the internet gives all kinds of flight. Now that anyone can communicate with anyone, hierarchies lie helpless — look at BP, for example, flailing around, trying to manage its image in the context of its present oil spill.

However there is also a minimal but essential Left brain rigorous standards world, without which the whole thing is imposible. A few infrastructural rules make the whole communications structure, possible. We saw a fundamental difference between blinkered rules that, taken too seriously, restrict human flourishing and others that enable it. One feature of good rules is that they don't draw attention to themselves, just serve a bigger infrastructure elegantly.

So the relationship between order and complete liberty sounds like a tussle between the authoritarian lion and free range unicorn. People get their security and meaning, the ability to articulate, from a settled order that revolutionaries then subvert by asking questions which initially irritate system professionals, but change the order of everything and eventually move the whole game up a notch.

For this to happen you need enough common framework for questions to be asked, but an anarchistic freedom in asking them. Put it another way — Jesus receives a Pharisaic / dogmatic education, then goes round from within it, asking Pharisees cheeky questions that subvert everything. So we deconstructed human communication as something almost like a religion.

It struck me how elements of the Christian tradition work this way — creeds, commandments, golden rule. Once people become self-conscious about them, however, and add their own powergaming, they soon become death warmed up; licenses for insanity.

It's a struggle reflected by everything from the war between Data managers and Creatives in industry to St Paul’s great struggles to locate the Jewish Law in its place for the infant Churches of Rome and Galatia. It mirrors our own internal conflict between painting by numbers and free expression.

Bad “religion,” in this sense, takes itself too seriously, frames issues too narrowly for forward movement, closes down fresh possibilities for meaning, and becomes a license for stuckness, paranoia and, ultimately, sociopathic insanity.
The law, as St Paul was wont to say, is fine as far as it goes. It just does not go as far as its most enthusiastic afficionados think

Good “religion” in this sense thakes the same raw materials, but encourages people to tell their personal and pragmatic stories. It frames discussion in a way that can fly, by holding creative, open articulations within a minimalist framework that exposes everything to human, empirical fit. Its truth is emergent rather than propositional; or, as the man said, by its fruits ye shall know it.

How the Swiss conquered the world...

...without anyone noticing. Design education for all! Had it come from Bristol not Basel it would have been called Helvetical, indeed it probably has been, but since 1957 Helvetica has become the Lingua Franca of print. And now it has its own Movie.

Helvetica is the finest design education documentary I have seen. It tells the tale of how the West was won — by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’ Schriftgiesserei in the Swiss village of Münchenstein (Basel).

The boys were trying to produce a clean modern interpretation of Akzidenz Grotesk, a classic Victorian Sanserif, for the Swiss market. Three years of development produced Neue Haas Grotesk, at around the time clean design was all the rage. Reflecting on the success of Univers, Artur Ritzel of Stempel picked up NHG, reworked and renamed it, cleaning up its characteristic horizontal endings. Enter Monotype and variants in variants in Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Vietnamese and hey presto! the boys soon conquered the world, in a characteristically understated Swiss way, without anyone noticing.
This wonderful film, which is nothing like as boring as I probably make it sound, shows how Helvetica fills the earth, from the NY subway to sports shirts, TV titles, Brass plates, prostitutes’ calling cards, Church bulletins, commercial logos, road signs...

It is the glory, and perhaps, curse, of type to be almost entirely implicit. Little things make all the difference. It works by not drawing attention to itself.

This film stars the John, Paul, George and Ringo of type design (Massimo Vignelli, Matthew Carter, Erik Spiekermann, and Wim Crouwell — and where’s Lars Müller? you ask). My eyes were opened to such things by Spiekermann’s fabulous book Stop Stealing Sheep, and hairs rose on the back of my neck as the Great Man, resplendent in bottle-thick glasses, held forth in a thick Teutonic accent:

Other people look at bottles of wine or girls’ bottoms. I look at type. It’s a very nerdish thing to do, but I am very much a work person, I think.

Go Erik! Modernism. That‘s the rub. Helvetica is characteristic of Modernism — clean, open, minimalistic. If you don’t like Modernism, you probably don’t like Helvetica. This film is not entirely reverential. However one look back at the tawdry, fudged up design of a fiftes Magazine was enough to convince me that 50 years of Helvetica is worth celebrating. If only it was as easy to clean up every other aspect of the New York Subway system!

Edyukayshun: How not to be topp

Here’s how John Abbott of the 21st Century Learning Initiative sees the story of English Education —
An uncertain and fast-changing world calls for new heights of creativity, lateral thinking, hard work and ability to reinvent ourselves.
Fortunately, adolescents are bursting with these things — programmed by evolution itself to want to make their mark, explore, acquire fresh insight and work hard in common causes.

Unfortunately, Abbot says, the English have spent the past twenty years turning their adolescents into superior battery chickens. Every school is now a crammer’s. Personally I can say that a fifteen year old complained to me recently about his geography teacher. What was wrong with her? I asked.The reply, quick as a flash, “she wastes our time by trying to teach us things that won't come up in the exam.” This is a fifteen year old, with a growing brain and a world before him, transformed by what we call education into a checkbox automaton. Abbott points out that our adolescents check the boxes they have been trained to check, but God, are they bored! He sees this as a disgusting betrayal of our young and, indeed, our own future. Jesus valued the child above all. The system treats ours as mascots and commodities.

Tony Blair sailed into Downing Street with priorities of “Education, Education, Education.” What have we to show for it? John Abbott’s Over-schooled but Undereducated is a scathing indictment of contemporary English educational dogma — not students and teachers, or even schools, who often work heroically to buck the system, but the centralized, top-down, target driven farrago of lost opportunity upon which billions of pounds has been showered since 1997.

In 2007 UNICEF published Report Card 7, examining the health and wellbeing of children in leading Industrialized nations. It studied 40 indicators and the UK result, in the fifth richest country in the world, was stunningly poor. British children came bottom for family relationships, sexual and substance abuse, happiness and mental health. They came top for bullying, depression and suicide. They scored high for ignorance, too, in comparison with their peers abroad. After 4 years of the Every Child Matters initiative, reading attainment slumped from seventh to seventeenth place, mathematics from twelfth to twenty-fourth.

Abbott examines the whole sorry tale since John Milton wrote:

I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man [this was 1644!] to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously, all the offices both public and private, of peace and war.

Judged by this standard Abbott tells the story of a skilful, ingenious and progressive people, with points of real excellence, but one tragic flaw — an obsession with class. Attempts to provide the kind of through schooling to age 16 that other European nations developed in the 1870’s came to grief in England because of a desire by the governing classes to ensure that the lower orders would be trained to know, above all, their place. Thus the great divide between grammar schools and the rest since 1879, reinforced in 1902.

The 1944 Education Act added to this error the now entirely discredited scientism of Cyril Burt who suggested intelligence was somehow objective and fixed by the age of 11. Everything we now know of brain science indicates that this notion is pernicious rubbish. Selective education parked the majority of English children in schools with pockets of genuine idealism, but a general culture based on containment rather than growth, where they were bored and switched off as often as inspired and equipped.

This was not entirely disastrous, especially for males, as long as they went on to appreticeships, where higher socialisation and education for life could still happen. The abandonment since the seventies of apprenticeships has been accompanied by bureaucratization, centralization, and the fatuous notion of performability — that you can somehow leverage human flourishing by standard targets, pulling the cabbages up towards the stars on elastic, rather than growing them organically by humanity, passion and compassion.

Many primary schools strive nobly, in spite of, incredible to report, lower per capita expenditure than secondaries, teaching the child not the subject. They also have to backfill a kindergarten experience that is impoverished by Northern European standards, against an increasngly ravenous desire by politicians since the eighties to dig up the cabbages every week to check that they are still growing. This activity, of course, inhibits their growth.

Add to these operational follies vacuous liberal utilitarianism which reduces the human being to an isolated production / consumption unit, and the assault of successive British governments since the seventies on the family and institutions of value, and it’s hardly surprising the whole system is lost at sea.

Abbott writes a fluent philippic. His longer term perspective is vital for those who act as though
“English education began in Nineteen Eighty-eight, with the innovation of Baker days and Section 28.” It didn’t, and the long-term results of the muddled and sometimes conflicting heritage of the past two hundred years in our schools are compounded by the larger forces of social disintegration in our own day, to indicate a need for real re-thinking all round. I’m not sure about all of Dr Abbott’s remedies, but it feels as though he has diagnosed a big disease with painful and unerring accuracy.

How papers feed bigotry about Islam

At the last census, High Wycombe’s population was 92,300, of whom 10,838 were Muslim (11·7 %). If you prick them, do they not bleed? Like the rest of us, Muslims die. Therefore it can come as no surprise that there is a demand for Muslim burials in High Wycombe. The Local Authority has to meet this. Population is growing, and room running out. It would suit Hysterical Islamophobics to be able to say space had been clawed back from consecrated ground in the local graveyard; but that would be barmy because the other 88% of the population also continue to die, so there's absolutely no sense in not extending the graveyard, and land is available.

Enter the Bucks Free Press with a story called “High Wycombe Cemetery Extension agreed for Muslim Burials.” This downpedals the fact that a cemetery extension was needed anyway, and points out Muslims like be buried facing Mecca whilst omitting, curiously, to point out

1. It doesn't cost any more to bury people in new ground facing any particular direction
   
   
2. The site in question snakes round a hillside in all directions, and where the majority orientation has been East, Mecca is basically East of High Wycombe anyway
   
   
3. Since 11·3% of the town’s ratepayers are Muslim, they surely have the same right to be buried according to their wishes, if possible, as everybody else.
   

Next, as is the way with Flat Earth News, this scoop (that Muslims in High Wycombe die like everybody else — Shock! Horror!) is routed, via This is Local London, to the Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph spins the story, by adding an anonymous local resident saying “Yet again many thousands of pounds [are] being spent pandering to the local Muslim community.” Apparently burying the dead is pandering to them.
I disagree. I don’t think High Wycombe is ready for Sky Burials quite yet.

The Telegraph also carries, final killer element, a quotation from the Bishop of Buckingham — oh, that’s me! — pointing out that people of all faiths and none are regularly buried in consecrated ground. This is hardly news, since it’s an obligation laid on the Church since time immemorial and legislated in the Burials Act 1880. The established church is delighted, of course, to fufil this basic civic obligation.

But, final link in the chain, the Telegraph story fulfils its purpose. On Saturday evening I receive a furious email from a gentleman in the North West. He had the character and decency to give his name, but can’t have expected me to use it publicly, so I won’t. I believe my correspondent is a good and decent man. This is his reding of the Telegraph:

Having just read an article where it states you are delighted to serve the Muslim community in allowing an extension of Muslim graves facing Mecca into the main graveyard in High Wycombe, Bucks. I would like to express my disgust at your support of such an action given how Christians throughout the world have and are still being persecuted by Muslims on the instruction of Islam.

I would ask you Sir, where was your support for Christians when Muslims desecrated the graveyard in St. Johns Church, Longsight, Manchester by destroying all the gravestones to make way for a mosque car park. The silence of the media and the Church on this issue, has been absolutely deafening.

By your appeasement and support for Islam you are feeding a hungry lion and when there is no more food to give it, it will turn on you, as can be seen in how Coptics are treated in their own cities in Egypt, a once Christian country. Not only are Muslims taken over our Churches they now want to invade our graveyards and the Church is sitting back and not only saying nothing but encouraging such actions.

It is an absolute disgrace and a very sad day for Christians in this once Christian country

I have to point out to him that I didn’t actually say what he thinks I did. This isn’t a churchyard so it’s none of my business who is buried there. But then my eye is caught by his tale of St John’s Longsight, which I had never heard of before, not being a recipient of Manchester BNP publicity. A video has been posted on the Internet of what I believe is called hard nogging being used as substrate for a carpark, with the strong implication that it is made up of Christian gravestones. This is the message my friend in the north West received, that Muslims have been “destroying all the gravestones to make way for a Mosque car park.”

Trouble is, the gravestones are still there. Indeed, you can see them here. The basic answer to my friend’s question (“where was my support for Christians...?) is that the whole story was a canard, a fiction designed to whip up inter-religious hatred. My correspondent, good and decent man that he is, bought the lie. The Daily Telegraph story in its sexed up form catalysed a response in him, and so the panjandrum of fear, suspicion and hatred gathers momentum.

I had to remind him, as the Christian he professes to be, that the Ninth Commandment is a Christian value. He does not care to admit that he bore false witness, although he patently did, and he goes on to suggest “the bottom line is not about this or any other story put out by the British press.” Really?

The Second Death: Porg-y and Best

There’s Black humour, and there’s real Black Black Humour. Neil LaBute’s remake of Dean Craig’s Death at a Funeral (2007) recycles an English original with Chris Rock, Danny Glover, and a large dysfunctional black clan gathering for a send-off of their paterfamilias. The schmalzy American Way of Death provides an excellent counterpoint to exuberant repartee oft associated with Mr Rock, and I think I will opt for the US version by a whisker, although some will prefer the more understated UK original.

Recasting a necro-tastic Charley’s Aunt farrago in a city with three columns of Jesus Christs in the phone book is no bad thing. It somehow increases the hit from a relentless succession of hellzapoppin gags involving caskets, funeral directors, mislabelled medication, wrongful identity, and family secrets and lies. There’s an excellent team of actors, and the director manages deftly to keep us abreast of exactly who is in which room with whom and why they shouldn’t be there — a basic skill for Farce. The tale’s crowning glory is the revelation of a gay dwarf (Person of Restricted Growth?) with a penchant for blackmail. You don’t want to be seen dead with one of those, not even in a Presidential casket. Perhaps I’ve said too much.

I am not proud to admit it but I, accompanied by a hundred or so good citizens and true of High Wycombe, had a rollicking good time chortling through this lot. The toilet joke was genuinely disgusting, though. Death at a Funeral ain’t no King Lear, but we liked it. There is something cathartic about laughing in the face of family and social hypocrisy, even, nay especially, about death.

I can recommend Cathartic Chortling to fans of the Tasteless Unspeakable, including, I suspect, a large number of medics, undertakers and vicars on their days off. The recently bereaved, Amish Uncles, and the Earnest would be better to pass on the experience. Plot slightly weak but gags good — four out of five.

Visitation: Where’s the Fire?

Visitation is an annual archdeacons’ outing. 400 years ago it was the “bawdy court” — churchwardens “presented” people for a variety of colourful transgressions including marital affairs and drunkenness. These days such matters are dealt with differently, if at all. All that remains of the court is the swearing in of Churchwardens to what is the most ancient elective community office in England (older than parliament). Every three years, by convention, bishops get to give the keynote.

I was really impressed by our 800+ clergy and churchwardens en masse, with a different kind of feel for what’s going on all over Bucks. Having completed all five events for this year, people have been asking me what I said! So here goes:

We have a problem — people admire Jesus, but not the Church or Christians. We need to take this very seriously. pPeople are supposed to see in Church the life of Christ, corporately lived out among them in acts of loving service, creativity and imaginative renewal. The breakdown of this linkage says something uncomfortable about us. So how, honestly, do we reconnect?

We need to touch the real world — Almost all churches have global links, ways to open hearts and minds to bigger reality. Karen and I recommend a growing trend among clergy, which we follow, to give a week’s ministry every year to somewhere completely different overseas — goes to South Africa and I go to India. As well as the diocese, Missionary societies and other organisations like SOMA are bursting with good ideas. Churches are also doing local events to build understanding of real world issues, and raising awareness of ecological challenges, like Think Local Food Fairs and Ecological events in the Chilterns.

The big resource to bridge the gap is vibrant community. Consider the questions that are asked at Church Council meetings:

• What have we always done?
  — good question for an organisation that lives faith in momentum, often in fabulous historic buildings
  
  
• What have we got to do?
  — get this one wrong and there’s nothing to pass on
  
  
• What do we want to do?
  — the Church has transformed from an arm of state into a voluntary organisation in the past fifty years. It matters very much to take account of the value we add to people’s lives
  
  
• What ought we to do?
  — we need to ask this because we aren’t here entirely to please ourselves, but to proclaim and enact a different way of life according to Jesus’ values
  
  
• What can we do?
  — a good question, because trying to do everything is a sure recipe for ending up doing nothing.
  

None of these questions, good as they are, will unlock the energy in Church or community. With all of them we need, seriously, to ask:

• Where’s the fire?
  — In the communities we serve, in our churches, in us?
  

Where we answer this question things grow fast — like the Wycombe Winter Night Shelter which has grown into one of the largest voluntary organisations in the town in only 3 years, after a year 1 curate got a bug to do something about a problem everybody cared about, but couldn’t somehow engage with. Ordinary Churches also grow — like in Slough where there’s been a remarkable and steady growth in attendance across most parishes these past five years.

In the Oxford Diocese we have been trying to picture what needs to be on church agendas.
Sustaining the Sacred Centre
— right at the middle of what we do
Making disciples
— a way of life, not an hour Sunday morning
Changing the World
— not chasing our tails
Building Vibrant Community
— radically inclusive, earthed and responsive
Shaping confident collaborative leadership
— so Goodbye to the Vicar as Fat Controller of Everything

These could be seen as additional chores — extra carrots on the pile. They don’t have to be that. Rather they are ways of understanding what we’re already doing, and focusing it. Thus Six Days in Lent — not extra stuff to do, but an opportunity to carve out extra free time to feed your soul. Many people had used this really fruitfully and joyfully, including churchwardens.

Putting the act together, I picked a story, which various people at the Visitations gave me parallels to from elsewhere in Bucks, from Turweston. It’s a small village (200 people) with a large medieval Church and, 3 years ago, a struggling small congregation. They have developed what they call “Village Worship” — a monthly meeting point with a decent breakfast, an opportunity to pray together, and simple worship. This brings between 30 and 60 people in, and has brought new heart to the village. Margaret, Andy and Harriet take up the story:

The budget, incidentally, was, er, Zero. Extraordinary things await those who ask “Where’s the Fire?”

He is the Way...
Follow Him through the land of Unlikeness,
You will see rare beasts, and have unique adventures.

He is the Truth.
Seek Him in the Kingdom of Anxiety;
You will come to a great city that has expected your return for years.

He is the Life!
Love Him in the World of the Flesh
And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy.

W. H. Auden:

So what are you waiting for?