Nativity from Down Under

Here for Christmas Day, h/t Penny Nash, is a classically wonderful Nativity, performed by children from St Paul’s, Symonds Street, Auckland, New Zealand:

Nativity: God out of the Bottle

Tony Jordan knows a good story when he sees one. After twenty years and more scripting soaps, including EastEnders, he has an ear for how ordinary people communicate. Invited to pitch for a BBC Nativity, he tried a Mickeytake. Once he got the job, he buckled down to a bit of serious research, and a personal exploration of the story as a story, and its real background. The result has been mesmerizing — four half hour episodes of the Nativity on BBC1, that Lucy and I have been following avidly.

I notice the way in which a good scriptwriter allows the embarrassing, open-ended, confusional bits of the story that often get skated over in school or church nativities, to have their full weight in the characters’ lives. Joseph’s basic mistrust of Mary’s story lasts two episodes, but no scene takes longer than ninety seconds max. Every part of the story tells us something we needed to know more than we realised. Mr Jordan is no paid-up religionist, but he obviously feels the story’s power and draws us in accordingly.

So what did writing this stuff do for him? I was interested to hear his interview with Aled Jones on Radio 2. As well as challenging secularist complacency and stereotypes, he challenges religious equivalents. It would be worth the religious contemplating Tony Jordan’s comments about what we are communicating and how in the light of Christ:

I still have a hasty distrust of organised religion. I generally do and that’s the thing that hasn’t changed at all. My faith has changed and I have changed as a person because of the nativity, but not my feelings when I look at organised religion and different denominations all fighting about which foot his sandal’s on and blessed are the cheesemakers, I just think of the life of Brian, and it drives me insane and I dislike the thought of somebody saying to me “If you come through those doors and you walk down that aisle, and you sit on that wooden bench, quietly, and you sing these hymns in that order, and I've put the order up so you don't get it wrong, and you listen to what I’m saying, I’ve got God in a little bottle under the pulpit, and I’ll take the lid off and let you have a little look, and then I’ll put the lid back on and then I’ll see you again next week, and if you're good I’ll let you have another look. Christ doesn’t belong to them. I don’t have to go there to get him. And actually he told me to go away and pray in my wardrobe. That’s what he says, in his teachings. He says don't go to the Church to be seen, go and sit in your wardrobe and say “Daddy” because that’s what the relationship should be, and what’s really strange for me is the change in me was a tangible one because I suddenly realised, half way through my research I started arguing God’s corner, which is something I’d never thought I’d do...

Full interview:

Unto them that hash up small things...

...shall a Mighty Project be Given! Today’s the day for a big announcement — the route for HS2, a projected high speed London-Birmingham rail link through Buckinghamshire that has stirred strong feelings from our neighbours in the Chilterns, mainly on environmental grounds. Of course any large infrastructure project has to go somewhere, and there may be some tweaks in the mix after months of consultation, or not.

Historically, however annoyed people are, there have been thought to be few votes in transport. I remember a Community Forum years ago in Bracknell where groups were asked what really mattered to them and everyone was amazed that people said the main thing holding them back in their lives and businesses was the weakness and patchiness of UK transport in comparison with most other Western European nations.

There are some bright spots in the English transport firmament, but to achieve the kind of consistent system they have in Germany or Scandinavia you need to take a consistent approach over many years. Short-termism is the name of the UK game, in investment of all kinds.
This makes, inevitably, for a Great Car society, because at least people can get around that way even if is slow, expensive and ecologicaly questionable.

So is One Big Sexy project the answer? The fact is that any transport network is only as strong as its weakest link. There’s real weakness in English transport at its most local level, including lack of integration with infrequent and unreliable bus services. You can’t get to work five miles away in Wycombe from here for 9·00 a.m. by public transport because all the buses are dong the school run, so people jump in the car. If we really have £27Bn to spend, there are almost certainly other ways to increase the capacity of the network (double deckers, someone suggested) more dramatically, along existing lines.

Finally, the project seems to rely on the good times rolling again financially by 2016. They may, but rumbles abound about the Private Finance Initiative, a “privatisation good, government money bad” means the UK government has used for a while to finance infrastructure instead of public bonds.

The general effect is turning out much like trying to pay off your mortgage on your credit card.

For example a Christmas Tree for the Treasury costs £40 in cash, or £875 by PFI! The gross sums indicate that the UK has received benefit of £60BN from PFI for a cost to the Taxpayer of £260BN. The commitments extend in some cases thirty years into the future. Hmmm. And people wonder how we got into debt... Only from the most short-term of perspectives can it be that brilliant to pile on another £27BN of debt to our grandchildren for ten minutes off the time to Birmingham. You’d think.

Under the weather?

Today saw probably the most concentrated snow we have experienced here in our time. The best part of 12 inches has landed, and almost everything has ground to the usual halt such weather induces in Southern England. I know we don’t carry the gear because it’s only this bad a few days a year, but we lost about 30 days last year to such snow, and you’d think if the total losses were grossed up over a few years, it would be worth someone’s while to kit up for days such as this.

Just for the record, another feature of this week has been me staggering around like Frankenstein’s monster with a wooden leg, thanks to an enterprising Indian critter unspecified that managed to infect a sac in my rght knee. Sad Sac is not over blessed with blood supply, so two batches of big chunky antibiotics have gone down the hatch — come next Wednesday we may have a result. It’s the only time in my life my knee has had a temperature without the rest of me having it, too. Insane or what?

Radical Pastoral Reorganisation

How often do pastors want to take the whole Church with them on an important issue? In these ordinariate days, there are clergy out there wanting to change their denominations and take the buiding. Well now they can, in the rural Midwest anyway, thanks to a radical fresh approach, from John Deere and the incomparable Daniel Pemberton.

Revolting students?

Right-minded people will condemn unlawful violence on our streets by a minority of student demonstrators or anyone else. The Copper’s lot is still not a happy one, but it is part of the cost of our democracy. There is a historical tradition of robust public dissent in Britain, the shadow side to our more generally ordered culture.

There are, of course, reasonable arguments for a different student finance régime. Higher repayment thresholds and living allowance sounds like good news for students — higher indebtedness, up to £40K for some first degrees, and 3% interest, sounds worse. In the background simmer interesting issues and, possibly, two big casualties:

1. The Idea of the free public University in the UK, as it has been understood for the past 50 years, is twitching on the slab. We may be heading for something more like a US system, with more private universities and an even greater gap between élite and regular institutions. Students are increasingly studying locally, which changes the nature of the experience for them. Genuine polytechnic education has been entirely swallowed by Academic institutions. As class rears its ugly head in higher education in a way that has not been seen since the 1930’s, are universities still able to transform life-chances as effectively as they did in the 60’s?
   
   
2. The LibDems have for many years been a very popular voting choice among students. Albert Camus, who knew a thing or two about being a stroppy student, said “The whole life of a person is the slow trek to recover the two or three simple images 
in whose presence his heart first moved.” Banks, for example, pitch heavily for student accounts on the theory that once they’ve captured a customer they will stay long term, from inertia if not conviction. Part of the rise of the LibDems over previous years has been growing and consolidating support from people who first supported them as students. The party have appeared to be highly ethical, if unworldly. Compromising its reputation for good faith with its supporters, however necessary in government, could damage the party’s future prospects very seriously.
   

India Oscar Kilo

Ten very productive and profoundly moving days with colleagues working in the Nandyal Diocese in Andhra Pradesh. It’s now three years since Lucy and I first visited, and it was good now to be among recognizable friends in places that now mean very much to us. Our hosts looked after us wonderfully. The four of us were profoundly struck by the warmth, dignity, hospitality and commitment to Christ of our hosts, often in circumstances that would easily drive others insane. Working results still need to be agreed and actioned, but the country was, as ever, crowded, beautiful, raw, elusive and subtle...