Why so Crypto?

Before leaving the question of politics, I have been wondering why some of the English have such a fascination with secrecy, and such a horror of public discussion? What’s wrong with vigorous public discussion of points of difference?

Why so much crypto and secrecy?

The Bible is full of open disputation. In Galatians Peter and Paul have a technicolor public row. In the Acts various apostles fall out with each other and take their separate ways. In the gospels disciples vie with one another in front of all the others (or at any rate their mothers do) for hot spots in the Kingdom of Heaven.

All this is done without shame, or any particular feeling that it would have been very much better if the elite had stitched everything up behind closed doors. The only attempt to do this (the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15) was a brilliant day out, but its conclusions didn't last five minutes — soon enough Christians were eating non-kosher food anyway, and Peter and Paul arguing as forcibly as ever.

We all, of course, have deeply personal, random and inconsequential thoughts that don’t belong in public. Privacy is precious because it enables us to achieve intimacy and friendship with our friends and families, in a privileged environment where much can be taken for granted. Depth is sometimes only accessible to the solo scholar slogging away in the stacks. we all need space for meditation, solitude and desert experiences.

Also, it is only really possible for to allow particular friends into our full confidence with the security that comes from having invited them. A hot blazing eyeballs world of full exposure disallows this very important aspect of human friendship. So I am not against proper privacy.

However, I suspect we Home Counties Anglicans could allow ourselves a little bit more room for openness, especially about publicly significant issues. Here are some distinct advantages to public discussion, especially if it can be conducted by people who listen to each other with mutual respect and a longing to understand:

• Openness prevents people treating questions as settled before, in fact, they are. Premature closure breeds immaturity in a community, and privileges reductionism.
  
  
• As we discover with open source software, openness is the precondition of collaboration. When I am open I trust others with thoughts that matter to me, and, if they do the same with me, our relationship grows. Modelling a world where you can like and value people with whom you disagree witnesses to the possibility of a kingdom based on transformed relationships.
  
  
• Openness stops people taking hierarchy seriously in the wrong kind of way. In a public discussion peopl's last idea is as good as their last job, which pricks the bubble of hierarchy and gives opportunity to shine to the person with the best idea, which can then be acknowledged
  
  
• As Benedict points out in the rule, the youngest and most improbable person sometimes has the best idea — without being open to this the whole community is stunted.
  
  
• Being open forces me to try and be consistent. If I go round saying to one closed clique that I think the C of E is all washed up and morally bankrupt and to another that I think it’s a marvellous national mission with a big moral message for society, I suggest both cliques going out for a drink together to prick the bubble of hypocrisy and force me to say what I really think to both.
  
  
• being open forces theoretical thinkers to earth their wisdom in human reality, and test it in an open forum. It brings together people who are big on ideas and those big on pragmatism.
  
  
• Open discussion privileges the kinds of people who like to think out loud, indeed cannot develop ideas without sharpening them up in a group discussion. That means it disciminates against reflective learners, who need space to develop their thinking before they feel it worth brining into the light of day. That’s why you need some conventions, disciplines and routines; to protect thinking space, and prevent either kind of thinker from stealing the show.
  
  
• The Holy Spirit sometimes reveals his will, Quaker style, in a gathering of people, when a deep conviction emerges among them through processes of open debate. This communal activity transcends the arrogance of individual primacy, and expresses the corporate nature of authority in the Christian tradition.
  
  
• Public debate builds trust. Stitch ups breed cynicism.
  
  
• What is public belongs to the public. If a community knows not only what was decided but how it came to that conclusion, it can move on to the next decision with understanding, and own what has happened.
  
  
• Public life destroys the myths of perfection. People interacting publicly show their weaknesses and absurdities as well as their shining intellectual process, or lack of it. In a Hungarian public bath earlier this year, splashing around with the family and several hundred people of all sizes, ages, shapes and proclivities, I noticed how everybody is absurd, but everybody is also, in their own way beautiful.
  

Holiness and (Church) Politics

Anything involving people interacting means politics — one of the most suspect words in the English language. Latin cultures have much less suspicion, historically, of the talking, plotting and shenanigan that goes on in the public square of the polis. Yet things must be decided and done, and this means some element of power among any group of people, hopefully mainly elective. Vote for the best people. But how do you decide who they are?

You could say you vote entirely for the person not the policy, so it doesn't matter what the latter is as long as the former is holy, committed and humble. This can easily turn into the secular game of voting for the politician who shows best evidence that s/he loves puppies and hates mean things, regardless of the crazy notions they would implement if elected.

Anyway, as Erika pointed out in the comments yesterday, the two realities, person and policy, are connected, however tenuously. I agree. I couldn't, for example, vote for a fascist candidate just because of their supposed personal qualities; nor could I easily imagine a candidate with the kind of qualities I’m looking for in my representatives wanting to be a fasist in the first place.

What then are we to say? That the only people you should ever vote for are people who would be too humble, reflective and other worldly to stand in the first place — landing us up with an assembly of people who are inadequate in all of those vital departments. See the problem?

I was puzzling through all this, and wondering how to square the necessary demands of holiness and politics, when I came across these words of Richard Rohr, which I find helpful:

Remember this: there are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret is how can you live in both for a while, which gradually allows you to loosen your grip on the first, as you see the inadequacy and weakness of power as domination.

However, you normally have to have a bit of power to let go of that very power.

Actual powerlessness is never an asset, except in the way that the Twelve-Step program speaks of it. Power apart from love leads to brutality and evil; but love that does not engage with power—and become a whole new kind of power—is mere sentimentality. It often becomes a destructive kind of powerlessness. True love is not naïve, but is a conscious and intelligent gift of the self.

Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for a New World, p. 41

General Synod: Karma Chameleons?

I have now spent two evenings hearing election adddresses from candidates for houses of Clergy and Laity. Lesley Fellows’ top ten tips for General Synod Election Addresses strike deep chords within me

1. I'm dyslexic, do me a favour, keep it to one side of A4, use a font like Arial and font size 12. Simple. Oh, and I like pictures.

2. Be open and honest. If you are against Women Bishops, say it, don't make me glean it out of clever phrases.

3. Tell me what five or six issues you feel will come up at the next synod, and which way you are inclined to vote. (Without lots of words as to why, and what a jolly good chap you are).

4. If you want, tell me one legislation that you would like to see come up and why.

5. If you can, give me evidence that you are good at politics and lobbying.

6. Tell me if you are associated with any groups that aid you in your politics and lobbying.

7. Don't give me 25 points of things that are important to you. Just tell me your top three (and make it real rather than bull shitty). I will roll my eyes if you say you are passionate about mission - what does that mean?

8. I don't care whether your hobbies are paragliding or stamp collecting - really - I don't care.

9. I don't care whether you have been a priest 100 years or you are a curate.

10. I don't care whether you are single, divorced, married with 17 children.

In both local meetings there has been a lot of talking dirty about mission and Extreme Being Nice. “Can two walk together except they be agreed?” asks the Prophet Amos. Well, apparently they can, in England anyway. That’s nice.

Like Lesley, I looked for trenchant Conservative conviction, and have to say I picked up a curious mood music from semi-professional church politicians, appealing to rather than contesting inclusivity as a value. Better late than never, I suppose. A visitor from another planet would never have known, on the basis of what was said, that any candidate did not bleed for radical inclusivity.

Mindful of Lesley’s top ten tips, one speech stood out head and shoulders for me. It suggested what synod is about apart from Extreme Being Nice — a place to become aligned to our gospel values, and to articulate them to outsiders. In sheer hard headed terms I found this very much the Gettysburg Address of both evenings, from my learned friend, chaplain, and local Vicar Rosie Harper. Having covered Lesley’s points (3) (4) and (6) in her written paper, this is what she said:

Good evening. I’m Rosie Harper, the incumbent here and also Bishop Alan’s chaplain. I had a real wake-up call a couple of weeks ago.

A group of us were working with a very senior consultant around the nature of our institutional processes. It fell to me to give him a lift to the station at the end of the session -so of course I asked him what he made of what he had learnt about us.

This is what he said: ‘It seems to me that you are working as if you didn’t actually believe in what you are doing.’

Scary or what?

We all know that fabulous stuff is going on at the local parish level, and here in Bucks we are trying to be an Archdeaconry which models a very high degree of actually doing what we believe.

But………

General Synod undoubtedly sets the tone in the country -mostly because of its fairly high media profile. What the country hears are not our gospel values; they hear that we don’t do equality, we are locked into archaic financial systems, and there is still a considerable lack of transparency.

But, you might want to say -we are all equal in the church -well yes -so long as you are white, middle class, straight, male and preferable with at least one degree. Whilst this remains the case our integrity is so severely compromised that –to be frank -anyone with any sense struggles to take us seriously.

The good news is that we can change all that. We can preach a gospel that is good news for Everyone. We can get grown up about the way we do money and we can begin to put our passion and energy in to what the Lord requires: to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with our God.’ Micah 6.8

I would like to be one of the sensible people at General synod — forward looking, a bit radical and full of faith that God will continue to build his church. To do that I need your vote. Please!

General Synod Election Address

For the General Synod of the Church of England, most English of Legislative Institutions, a Ruritanian Mask hides the curious fact that all three houses have completely different forms of franchise:

• Licensed or beneficed Clergy all get a vote — fish and chips common or garden democracy. The sort of thing they did in ancient Athens. One Person One Vote. Radical Stuff.
  
  
• Laity are elected indirectly (making it possible to be a candidate whilst not being an elector). Such a system was used for the US Senate before the 17th Amendment (1913?)... Curiously enough, primitive Anarcho-Syndicalists were keen on indirect elections too.
  
  
• Diocesan bishops are elected by Cathedral Chapters instructed to elect them by Her Majesty the Queen. This ardently Royalist elective system, which fills the majority of the upper house, will renind some of Mogens Jallberg’s pithy comment: “In Democracy: it's your vote that counts. In Feudalism it's your count that votes.”
  
  
• Southern Suffragan Bishops like me have our own clergy-style mini elction, with a tiny electorate of around 50 and 9 candidates for 4 places, so anything could happen. This is a grassroots kind of election appropriate to, say, a smallish parent teacher association.
  

People with no sense of fun or soul might think this is all a right old mess, and ripe for reform so everyone gets a vote on some consistent set of principles. People with soul, however will enjoy the way this way of operating gives the Holy Spirit an opportunity, in true English fashion, to hedge his bets on three different systems simultaneously.

The Bishop of Fulham has been telling the New York Times what this all adds up to –“The trouble with the Anglican Church is that it has adopted a parliamentary model and one that presumes change and presumes everyone can have a say. I think it’s become a kind of fascist democracy.” After years of being rather snooty and invertedly snobbish about the General Synod, I observe that change does happen, and God is usually in it somewhere (but where?), and I believe to the bottom of my boots that everyone should have a say, because to deny them really is a kind of fascism. Was it time to climb off the fence and get involved?

As Her Majesty has not instructed a Cathedral Chapter to elect me on pain of imprisonment for prae munire, the only way to find out out what it would be like to be part of a fascist democracy has involved asking my colleagues to vote for me, among others. Mind you, this is pretty much what happens in most elections. This involved producing an election address. If you're not a suffragan bishop you haven't a vote anyway, but if you are, vote early! vote often!

Before becoming bishop of Buckingham is 2003, I worked for 23 years as a parish priest, with some prison ministry, teaching and design work. This summer I found myself encouraging friends to stand for General Synod, feeling a hypocrite because of my own long-standing cynicism about it; There’s an obvious answer, and I’m very grateful to +Lee Rayfield of Swindon and +Christopher Chessun of Woolwich for kindly proposing and seconding me. What are my issues, and what might I bring, as a new member, to the General Synod?

Church Culture

I have played a leading role in the implementation of Common Tenure in our diocese. I believe we can work out our procedures in a helpful way, but I hope it’s done within a theological vision for Christ-centred servant ministry. CT must promote vocation in ministers. Beyond the clergy, many parishes are feeling poor and downhearted. All kinds of growth happen when churches seek out the energy around them and work with that — an analogy with air source heating comes to mind.

Communications

I am not techie for the sake of tech, but really enjoy being part of the C of E’s discernment process about new media, as well as having my own blog, which has had over 380,000 hits. Social media can painfully expose our weaknesses, especially if the Church is boring, weedy and faithless. People in a flatter, globalised social order seek loving service, not conventional authority figures. Authenticity and Interactivity count for more than the effortlessly superior Olympian heights which past Anglican bishops have commanded. People are often surprisingly open, and we can exercise real influence, but it must be earned not assumed. Christians often have real depth and authenticity, but I also encounter fear and denial among episcopal colleagues and others. We need to learn how to change, not only to engage more clearly with people for the gospel, but for our own souls’ health.

Education

At a time many in the schools trade are casting around for a vision, anyone with a clear idea of what it means to be truly child centred, anchored in confidently held values, has much to contribute. As chair of one of the largest Boards of Education in the country, I can see in our 288 schools everything to play for, and much to gain... or lose!

Ecclesiology

With deep Evangelical roots, I wrote a doctorate on Anglo-Catholic Ecclesiology. My view of the Church, Catholic and Reformed, is shaped by spending regular time over many years with a French Benedictine Community. Conversion, Stability and Obedience strike me as vital tools in discipleship and community building. I’m a historian. I think our tradition is often fuller of resource and hope than we realise. Covenant? I can see why the Archbishops want some basis for the Communion better than the fading Cheshire-Cat smile of the British Empire, but wish it would go on one side of A4.

The next Synod is about far more than the ordination of women to the episcopate, which I joyfully support. Christ transcends gender. The sociological geometry of Christian ministry has always reflected the society we serve, and I see this as part of our incarnational calling. A two-speed episcopate seems to me a long way from Catholic order. It’s embarrassingly obvious that further wobble and faff will just annoy everyone and make us look even sillier than we already do.

If there’s anything you’d like to check back with me about, please do. I’m delighted that many much-liked and valued colleagues are standing for GS this time round. If you think I can bring anything particular that you value to the party in a helpful way, please vote for me.

Tale from the Crypt

Whilst licensing Paul Hinckley as Team Vicar in Marlow on Friday night, a very joyful thing to be doing, I was delighted to see what’s been going on recently in the crypt under All Saints. In place of Victorian Studded coffins, spiders and common or garden dust, the space has been done up by local Anglicans and Methodists working inpartnership as a Crypt Café for young people to gather.

Previous occupants have been moved to suitably tasteful consecrated local accommodation, and much creative thinking has gone into the remodelling of the building.The space has been superbly decorated and equipped, largely by volunteer labour, but with specialist advice and labour from the particpating congregations.

The aim is to provide a safe, friendly place for young people to gather for various activities. Stylish lighting makes the place really inviting, and the scale of the spaces under the arches is warm and welcoming, even if you're not dead. It’s very gratifying to see living community flourish in what was, literally, dead space. It makes me wonder what other hiden places there may around Bucks that could find a new lease of life

Hottest thing since sliced bread?

Annual College of Bishops meeting kicks off with a reflective day, the first half led by Brother Samuel SSF. We contemplate the need to be hungry if we are to be fed, that is to have empty space in our lives (including our diaries). Amazing varieties of fresh bread are possible. Aerated, non-nutritional, sanitized loaves rather obscure the possibilities.

Samuel brought us a poem written by David Scott for Hillfield Friary Families’ Camp:

A Long way from Bread

We have come so far from bread.
Rarely do we hear the clatter of the mill wheel;
see the flour in every cranny,
the shaking down of the sack, the chalk on the door,
the rats, the race, the pool,
baking day, and the old loaves:
cob, cottage, plaited, brick.

We have come so far from bread.
Once the crock said ‘BREAD’
and the bread was what was there,
and the family’s arm went deeper doen each day
to find it, and the crust was favoured.

We have come so far from Bread.
terrifying is the breach between wheat and table,
wheat and bread, bread and what goes for bread.
Loaves now come in regiments, so that loaf
is not the word. Hlaf
is one of the oldest words we have.

I go on about bread
because it was to bread
that jesus trusted
the meaning he had of himself.
It was an honour for the bread
to be the knot in the Lord’s handkerchief
reminding him about himself. So,
O bread, breakable;
O bread, given;
O bread, a blessing;
count yourself lucky bread.

Not that I am against wafers,
especially the ones produced under steam
from some hidden nunnery
with our lord crucified into them.
They are at least unleavened, and fit the hand,
without remainder, but it is still
a long way from bread.
better for each household to have its own bread,
daily, enough and to spare,
dough the size of a rolled towel,
for feeding angels unawares.
Then if the bread is holy,
All that has to do with bread is holy;
Board, knife, cupboard,
So that the gap between all things is closed
In our attention to the bread of the day.’

I know that
“man cannot live on bread alone.”
I say, let us get the bread right.

Biking with Boris

Time to take the plunge and try the new Cycle Hire Scheme for London. Ken’s Koncept, but the Bikes are Boris’ if not Barclays Bank’s.
Yesterday I had a meeting at Lambeth and half an hour to get there from Marylebone Station. According to the Transport for London calculator it should take 27 minutes to cycle the route. I had nothing to lose but my chains. Lose one of mine, and gain one of Boris’ Cycle Chains...

Well, my first 27 minute journey took 33 minutes, but mainly because I took a couple of wrong turns and had to hoof my bike down some steps near Carlton House Terrace. I'm glad my dear mama brought us up to know our way round London, because you do have to have some idea of where you're going. You can generally use bus lanes, and even car lanes, and when desperate can pick up thy bike and walk. This is slightly weird, but it works as long as you have some idea of your way round London. If you have no idea where you are tryinug to go, you have a problem — but there's only one way to learn.

It was so much fun that I happily dropped off my bike and, after my meeting, went off to Tate Modern, which is not easily accessible by tube. I then picked up my third bike of the day, and headed back to Marylebone — another half hour trip up Fleet Street and through Covent Garden. With a stand every 600 feet across the centre of London you will usually be closer to your destination than bus or tube would have got you, and finding the last place you wanted taken on the stand is no more annoying than just missing the tube would have been.

On a slightly muggy day, with a coat on because it looked like rain, furious pedaling does slightly raise the heartbeat in good and bad ways. It’s all very invigorating, but if Ladies glow, bishops sweat like pigs. If in doubt, take your coat off and stow it. You certainly get around at a similar speed to other forms of transport, and probably faster than you would be car. London is not an especially cycle-friendly city (yet...?), and there are occasions on every London cycle ride when you need balls of steel (or female equivalent) if you don't want to end up as a high class hedgehog on the tarmac. Those who hesitate are lost.

Confession. I didn’t wear a helmet. I just didn’t have one in my laptop bag. But soft! The CTC reports research by Dr Ian Walker of the University of Bath. Apparently, motorists give cyclists more room when they don’t wear a helmet than when they do. They give the widest berth of all to cyclists wearing big blonde wigs. So perhaps I should carry, not a helmet, but a Big Dusty Springfield Wig. That said, there are other reasons to steer well clear of a bearded fifty-something man wearing someone else’s Big Hair, even if he is not riding a bike. I don’t know. The jury’s out on that one.

But I digress. With no cycle clips, I tucked my trousers into my socks. You would need a substantial rain cape on some days — for various reasons holding an umbrella off the front of the bike is unlikely to be a winner.
Snow will pose more serious particular challenges, but all forms of transport experience difficuty when it snows. It wouldn't be British to have a fully functional system on snow days.

The whole régime around charging and paying is good in parts, and could be superb once it’s fully up and running. Registering on the internet was easy. Activating my key was glitchy because after ten minutes of listening to music and selecting items off a seven item menu, whilst being reassured my call was important, the operator the other end still failed to work the magic he promised to work for me. As a result all I got was a red light when I tried to use it. I phoned the number at the stand, and they got me going, but again, after ten minutes of listening to Miles Davis etc. etc. The second time round, it worked. So I learn, if in doubt, phone them up. It's also a good idea to set your preferences to automatically deduct access charges, so you don’t have to go on the internet between trips.

The bikes themselves are rugged and pleasing to drive. The 3 gears are basic but rugged. The storage for a laptop bag is excellent. It’s rather jolly zipping up between columns of traffic dodging wing mirrors. Health benefits are obvious, but with two major caveats that could be particularly upsetting to anyone with paranoid tendencies

• some vehicles aim special jets of warm smelly diesel fumes down your lungs until you feel like you're on sixty a day. The whole thing is a massive commercial for Barclays Bank and some will object so profundly to that they’ll be holding their noses anyway. The only answer is not to breathe at traffic lights, but this solution is only good for a couple of minutes or so.
  
  
• Some motorists seem hell bent on killing you. If successful, this would surely damage your health.
  

I came away from a sunny day feeling surprisingly positive about the whole expirience. There are doubtless developments to come which will further refine the service, but it's perfectly usable, and reasonable fun. Would I do it again? You bet.

Akathistos Hymn

Celebrating the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary today with friends at Bishop's Staff, Archdeacon Karen brought us a poem by Denise Levertov, about the faith, openness, and Mary.

I hadn’t come across DL since reading her Penguin Modern Poets sub-collection (with Kenneth Rexroth and Wiliam Carlos Williams) which records indicate I read in May 1971! After that she did all sorts of fabulous things, including discovering Christianity for herself in 1984, and her poem from 1989 is inspired by a line from the 6th Century Greek Orthodox Akathisthos, from which it takes its title:

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’

We know the scene:
the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book;
always the tall lily.

Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador,
standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.
But we are told of meek obedience.
No one mentions courage.

The engendering Spirit did not
enter her without consent.

God waited. She was free to accept or to refuse,
choice integral to humanness.

Aren’t there annunciations of one sort or another in most lives? Some unwillingly undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride, uncomprehending.

More often those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from in dread,
in a wave of weakness,
in despair and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

She had been a child who played, ate,
slept like any other child –
but unlike others, wept only for pity,
laughed in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence fused in her,
indivisible.
Called to a destiny more momentous than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

only asked a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly the astounding ministry she was offered:
to bear in her womb Infinite weight and lightness;
to carry in hidden, finite inwardness, nine months of Eternity;
to contain in slender vase of being, the sum of power –
in narrow flesh, the sum of light.

Then bring to birth, push out into air,
a Man-child needing, like any other,
milk and love –
but who was God.
This was the minute no one speaks of,
when she could still refuse.
A breath unbreathed,

Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.

She did not cry, "I cannot,
I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light, the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.

Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

Six commandments of Isaiah

It is wonderful to be part of a large tradition of Biblical interpretation that is so much bigger than the latest paperback, or the shallows of Fundamentalism. It is a joyful thing to swim in deep water, which we do when we engage with the Hebrew Scriptures in depth, accompanied by the rabbis.

Licensing my friend and colleague Jo Gallant at Flaunden on Friday, the call of Isaiah came up. Someone has been asking me for the reference to the “Jewish Book” I used.
People have asked where it came from, it was from the Gemara of Chapter 3 of the Fifth Tractate (Makkoth) of the Fourth order (Neziqin) of the Babylonian Talmud.

It relates to the Mishnah of Rabbi Hanania ben Aqashya on Isaiah 42 about the number of mitzvoth the Eternal has commanded. If you wanted to have a passage of the Hebrew scriptures handy, it would be Isaiah 33:15-16. It looks as though this particular segment of Gemara is ascribed to Rav. Hamnuna, a fourth century Babylonian rabbi — “Isaiah came and reduced the number of commandments to six.”
I’ve put my comments from Friday in italics!

1. Walk in righteousness (Like Abraham in Genesis 18:19) — we are called to something much bigger than a way of life, not a religion
   
   
2. Speak uprightly, and do not provoke your neighbour in public — It is always sad if people get into habits of speaking behind their hands about others in the house of God. Let everyone speak the truth. Or to put this the way Jesus did, let your yes be yes, and your no no. Anything else comes from the enemy.
   
   
3. Spurn profit gained from injustice — The first claim of love is justice (MLK). That’s not me, that’s Martin Luther King. The man was right! So if you must fight, fight fair.
   
   
4. Wave away a Bribe —We live in a society where nobody will do anything if there isn’t something in it for them. But you all will, won’t you. Love seeks not its own. It’s all about the good of the person you love. Bribery is the ultimate transaction — I can get you to scratch my back by scratching yours first. God is all about grace, undeserved gift, a generous eye, and a free heart.
   
5. Stop your ears against hearing of blood — or as we call it in the trade, gossip. Some parishes degenerate into a kind of ongoing soap opera of he said this and she said that. But you don’t have to be like that. Just say no.
   
   
6. Stop your eyes against looking on Evil — Look for the positive in others, and the wonderfully positive in yourself, because that is where you will find what is of God. That should give you enough to be going on with.
   

How (not?) to sink without a trace

Jim Collins, having studied over many years the difference between good and great business undertakings, presented at this year’s Willow Creek Leadership Summit on the decline and fall of the great. He says “whether you prevail or not depends a lot more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”

Remember Titanic? — the supposedly unsinkable is holed below the waterline and denies it; the cap’n carefully checks the lightbulbs, to avoid the uncomfortable truth that the whole ship could be going down. Meanwhile the passengers apply themselves to ballroom dancing, not finding things that float. Major functionaries begin to behave like minor functionaries, obsessing about how to protect the White Star Line’s property, when they ought to be inspiring and resourcing people to find effective means of survival. As the ship’s prow rotates downward, the officers grasp at silver bullet solutions, perhaps even a radical new cap’n. By the end of the night the “unsinkable” lies broken on the ocean floor anyway.

He diagnosed five phases of mighty falling:

1. Arrogance / Hubris — “We are just not the kind of outfit that could ever sink without a trace... anyway, our troubles are basically down to other people.”
   
   
2. Sense of entitlement — “We have a right to carry on in our own way, regardless of what others think... Here’s to us — who’s like us?”
   
   
3. Denial of risk and peril — “After all, more people go to Church than footie...”
   
   
4. Game is up — “but with a really big new idea/ initiative/ leader we can still make it...”
   
   
5. Game Over — “glug, glug, glug, [“I’m an officer!!”] glug, glug, glug [“Hey, that’s White Star Line property!”] glug, glug, glug... glug.
   

Jim suggested ten basic disciplines which can help an organisation avoid such a fate, especially during phases 1-4:

1. Careful diagnostics — the facts are your friends, even unpleasant ones
   
   
2. Count your Blessings — you are blessed by large numbers of good things you didn’t cause, and these will help keep you real and resource you
   
   
3. Increase (Double?) your leaders’ Questions : Statements ratio
   
   
4. Recruit fantastic people — and if your organisation can’t recruit or retain them, ask hard why.
   
   
5. Apply your diagnostics to your teams
   
   
6. Take inventory of the most brutal facts
   
   
7. Get a good “Stop Doing” List. get out of stuff that’s draining you for nothing, even venerable habits and sacred cows
   
   
8. Define results — clicks on the flywheel that indicate progress. This staves off depression.
   
   
9. Extend your reach to young people — Change your practices, but never your essential values
   
   
10. Find a Big Hairy Audacious Goal rooted in your purpose and values — not some silly little target setting thing, but something everybody would recognise as real victory
    

As a bishop of the Church of England who learnt in the playground that “if the cap fits, wear it,” I wondered, “Does he mean us?” And if he does, what does our diocese/ parish do about it?

Hungarian with Tears

Revisiting Hungary after 34 years has brought poignant glints of recognition — So much was muttered behind hands in the Communist Era. When I was a boy I asked, for example, what was on the big saluting base in the Városliget. One relative replied “Stalin’s ghost.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “Stalin the Atheist is waiting for Christmas.” This gnomic comment refered to the fact that the 8 metre statue of Stalin atop the podium had been torn down by the crowd in 1956, and all that was left were his boots (Hungarian childen leave their boots out as present receptacles for St Nicholas). At the time I had no concrete idea what all this kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink was about. Now I know better.

Budapest is now capital of a democratic, progressive European nation. Especially when current urban renewal is complete, this will suit it well. I suspect it’s what the inhabitants wanted all along — only 7%, after all, voted Communist in 1945. Other votes were invalidated.

Hungarian history is essentially tragic. The nation has, unavoidably and often lethally, been the ham in other people’s sandwiches. 300,000 Hungarians died on the Eastern Front, and 80,000 civilians in the final year of World War II. Primo Levi noted that Hungarian was the predominant language in Auschwitz. 600,000 Hungarians perished there, and after 1945, 700,000 were deported to Soviet labour camps. The last returnee came home from the gulags in 2000. Around the fifties thousands died or were imprisoned at the hands of the ÁVO/ÁVH, often minority leftists. Don’t forget those who died as a result of forced land collectivisation, or the 200,000 who fled the country in 1956. Given there were only 10 million Hungarians in the first place, Left and right, rural or urban, whatever the race, all suffered.

My mother was cross that she was unable to return to Hungary in 1939, but it almost certainly saved her life. Many things said and unsaid in the family come to mind, but some facts of life emerge with hindsight:

• Even the most superficial contemplation of what people went through in the 20th century in Central Europe sets Western victim culture in a larger more vivid perspective.
  
  
• Every cultural subgroup, pretty well, had its victims and perpetrators at different times. There is no simple matrix of goodies and baddies, except simple humanity or lack of it. The priest who brought the Sacrament to Christine Arnothy’s cellar, recorded in her memoir of the Budapest Seige of 1944, put it like this: “As to the dead who are all about us here, don’t imagine that they accuse us; on the contrary they are sorry for us...” Thus the Jewish atheist who gave his dead son’s suit to a German soldier to help him escape, and was shot soon after by a Russian soldier, was as righteous as the priest who helped Arnothy’s family escape in 1948, because “Justice and Charity come before everything.”
  
  
• Many things were not said, and probably should not be. Others can now be heard and understood. There is a bizarre humour in every situation, and a high degree of randomness, both of which may elude people in more rational societies and ages. It says something about the resilience of the human spirit, after all people over a certain age have been through, to see souvenir shops selling Russian gas masks, and a CD of rousing party marches called The Best of Communism, available also as a Club Mix.

Most national anthems proclaim the glory, beauty, or prowess of the Nation. The Hungarian Himnusz doesn’t. Written in 1823, it’s a heartfelt prayer to God above to bless the Hungarian with grace and a good spirit, for all the suffering s/he has undergone at the hands of strangers. This can surely atone for the sins of past or future. That’s really all it says. It speaks of an essentially tragic national history.

The Communist régime, for all its robust, self-conscious Atheistic basis, could not replace the Himnusz. It was too truthful to experience to be replaced by a march. The Himnusz, and the context in which it has been sung aloud or in people’s hearts, is a haunting reminder that ideology is not enough. We are all human together. People may be liquidated, but humanity shines out, especially perhaps amidst acts of inhumanity. The priest was correct. In the final analysis, Charity and Justice alone are irreducible.