as dying, yet behold, we live!

Xavier Beauvoir’s Of Gods and Men is a beautiful, extraordinary achievement. Understated at all times, highly sophisticated and understanding of its subject, beautifully scripted, it explores the life and death of the Tibhirine Trappist community in Algeria in 1996, during the civil war. The monks live a simple, self-sustaining life of prayer, kindness and service. As the political situation deteriorates, they find themselves caught in a shooting war, driven by Islamist fundamentalists. The army offers protection of a sort, but this raises other questions for the monks - questions of calling and integrity as well as a basic issue about whether life in an armed camp is actually compatible with what they believe their community should be. Do they stay or do they go?

Shrewdly, kindly observed and impeccably acted, this is a tale of tragedy and hope way beyond the scope of Hollywood blockbusters. Very few films about religion reveal as deep an understanding of their subjects as this.. Given our distribution system that gives fifteen screen multiplexes with the same film playing in 10 of them, you are unlikely now to catch the film at a proper cinema, but when it comes out on DVD in May you would be insane not to get it. Five out of five stars.
A couple of additional pieces for reflection. As he contemplated what may happen, the real Brother Christian composed in 1994 a letter to his family in case the worst should happen, that is worthy of careful reflection. Excuse my schoolboy French off the soundttrack album, but here goes:
If a day should come, and it could be today, to fall victim to the terrorism that seems to be engulfing foreigners in this country today, I would love my community, my Church, my family, to remember that my life was given to God and this country and also that the sole Giver of all life was no stranger to such a brutal ending. They should also associate my taking off with so many other equally violent but anonymous deaths. My life is no more valuable than any other, nor less. Anyway, it lacks the innocence of childhood. I have lived long enough to know that I myself am part of the evil which, sadly, seems to prevail in the world, even the evil that could suddenly befall me. I could not seek such a death, and I could not die happy to see these people, whom I love, indiscriminately blamed for my death. That would be too high a price to pay for what could be called the grace of martyrdom by an Algerian, whoever he may be, above all if he is motivated by what he may believe Islam to be. I know the contempt in which natives of this country are already held around the world. I also know caricatures of the kind of Islam that encourages Islamism. For me this country, and Islam, are something very different. They are body and soul. This is what I have always said publicly, as I believe it and have known and seen this theme in the gospel I learnt in my first Church, at my mother's knee. This I have practised in Algeria, and always from the start in respecting Muslim believers. My death could, plainly, give substance to the arguments of those who think I am just naive, or a starry-eyed idealist. But they need to know that this will finally liberate my most ardent curiosity, in that I may be able, God willing,to submerge my vision in that of the Father, in order to see his Muslim children just as he sees them. In this thank you letter, which says everything about my llife from now on, I want to include you all, friends of yesterday and today, and even you too, friend of my last moments, who will not understand what you are doing. Yes, even for you, I genuinely want to thank you and bid this Adieu, commendation to God, May we one day meet again, in Paradise, as happy thieves, if it pleases God, Father of us both. Amen.

Finally for contemplation, a summary of the teaching of St Paul from Richard Rohr: “Brothers and sisters, remember that your life situation will not last. It is only that which you fall through so that you can fall into your actual Life, and that Big Life ironically includes death (which is the falling).”

Leadership Secrets of Alastair Campbell

I have some trepidation about the cult of leadership, because the effectiveness of any outfit really does depend on the systemics and context as much as a single leader's gifts and commitment. However, continuing the discussion begun here yesterday, my eye was taken last week by some principles about leadership from an unlikely source — Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s great Spin Doctor in the Sky, whose diaries are now appearing in print.

These may well become the prime source for political historians of the Blair years in the way Alan Clark’s did for Thatcher. Some will like Mr Campbell more than others, indeed his partner says he’s been much nicer to live with since he finished work as a spin doctor, but he’s a perceptive information hound who observed world and goverment leaders closely for ten years. He pulls no punches. In a Times interview he concludes these are the qualities that make an effective leader in this day and age:

Clarity of objective and strategy. Only then go tactical.



The best team leaders are the best team players



Boldness



Adaptability



Staying calm in a crisis. Listen but lead, not listen and lead



Patience. Take your time if you have to.



Set the media agenda. Don’t let them set it for you.



Get your head above the parapet when the s***t’s flying



Encourage enterprise and ideas at all levels of your organisation in a non-blame culture.

Discuss?

Leadership and Lifeboats

A factfinding visit to the Middle East has led to a blogging break. As normal service resumes, my eye caught the Times obituary of Admiral Peter Branson (here, behind paywall).

In 1941 the young Midshipman Branson’s transport ship was torpedoed by U-1107 and he spent several days in tropical heat on half a pint of water a day in a lifeboat. He recorded an interesting tendency of men in lifeboats: “everybody was giving orders and nobody was listening.” As leaders in conventional Churches begin to see themselves as minorities in lifeboats, fed by a lot of twaddle about being persecuted in England, I wonder if this tendency is beginning to spread among us. He went on to conclude:

the best morale in the world is useless without discipline to back it up in such a case as this. Our morale was high but rendered useless through lack of discipline

This gives me a queasy feeling about the lack of alignment in a lot of what we do. Like Woody Allen’s joke description of God, the Church is often “someting of an under-achiever.” At every level, including Primatial shenanigans among people who should know better, there is a profound gap between sincere faith with enthusiasm and the discipline to turn the high energy, love and prayer among Christians into something transformational for the world. Discuss?

The Haplessness of King George

It is said that the late Roy Castle once sang, danced, trumpeted and juggled at the old Glasgow Empire, famous for its heckling. In the unaccustomed silence between segments 3 and 4 of his act, a reverential wee voice piped up “Is there no end to this man’s talents?” Thus I salute Colin Firth’s latest outing.

After a masterful, beautiful, extraordinary performance as a 1962 Gay professor in A Single Man, he has now scaled most triumphantly the toff end of the Repressed Brit spectrum with The King’s Speech, an everyday tale of 1930’s Palace Folk. It contains of galaxy of UK character actors playing historic personages they don’t actually look like, but do it so well you don’t notice. Timothy Spall’s Churchill shines out particularly, but Stanley Baldwin or Cosmo Gordon Lang fans will also be impressed. Helena Bonham-Carter’s Young Queen Mum (before she hit the betting shops and gin) is amazing. This is the character list as it should have looked, not as it did. Why even Westminster Abbey looks like Ely Cathedral. However it is faultlessly acted, carried off in real style, and atmospherically rendered with the kind of production values associated with the old Merchant Ivory brand.

Here’s the skinny. George is the overbearing “Spit it out, boy!” Emperor King, the only character in the film who does look like the original. His two sons are embarrassingly different. David has charisma, but some unfortunate bedtime habits, a selfish nature and a thin fascist streak. Bertie is profoundly honourable with the will and talent to represent and serve his people, a pretty useful life skill in a man who would be king.

However Bertie also projects zero charisma, largely because of his disabling stutter. For a 1920’s naval officer this was manageable, indeed in an age when most signalling was conducted by Morse code, it could even have been an advantage. With wireless in the home, however, it is not enough to look like a king. You have to sound like one in people’s living rooms. An embarrassing own-goal at Wembley reveals that making love to a microphone is something Bertie could sooner get pregnant than reliably manage to do.

Enter Mr, not Dr, Lionel Logue, an Australian self-taught speech therapist with no qualifications but some world war one experiences and a ton of breezy antipodean freshness. This enables him to address the real Bertie directly, and unlock his voice through the transformative medium of friendship.

At the heart of every legendary working partnership is honest friendship based on equality, even, nay especially, if one partner is the King. King and Commoner work at it together. On the big day Bertie scores a bulls eye and really earns a chaste but sincere peck on the cheek from his Mrs. Civilisation is saved. What’s not to like? I defy anyone to leave the cinema without a heart full of warm cockles.

Acting is spot on, execution and cinematography is extraordinary, story is strong, even though everyone knows how it’s gong to end. Commercially minded execs may point out there’s not much scope for a “King’s Speech 2” unless some jaded studio hack comes up with a storyline where Hitler develops a speech defect and personally sends the schmutzigedutzend to kidnap Mr Logue. This would yield more action, perhaps, but less human interest. Fervent republicans may simply dislike the subject matter, perhaps, which certainly belongs to another age. What you see is what you get. However this film is a wonderful achievement, and manifestly deserves a chestful of gongs, ribbons, gold rope, and silver elephants on chains every bit as impressive as his majesty’s. 4.99 out of 5.

Honest Community Feeds Fruiting

After yesterday’s appeal to keep the beginning of faith, the incarnation, in its true place at the front of our endeavours, I was mightily struck and moved at the early Prayer Book service today by the astonishing directness of its ancient Collect for the Epiphany:

O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles: Mercifully grant, that we, which know thee now by faith may after this life have the fruition of thy glorious Godhead; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

This journey, it says, for now, is about knowing God by faith — another chunky splat of mud in the eye for the childish concept of Christianity as trump suit supremacism.
And its point, after this life is over and we know as we have been known, is the fruition (before us, around us, ultimately in us) of God’s glorious godhead, the power that made the night shine and drew stargazers from the East.

Our work is not to light up the star, which, like most well bred stars can light itself up thank you very much. It is the tougher job of allowing ourselves, resistant materials all of us, to become a community of grace. Godhead fruits, slowly, in the kind of community that manures it well and allows it to fruit. The true task is at least as much about how we do what we do, as it is about what we do.

The prime role of the stewards of this holy mystery is not to be minders or managers, cheerleaders or indispensables, but simply people in whom this process is going on, as freely, honestly and unashamedly as we can manage.

Bearers of such grace build up fruitful community, which is known, not by its correctness or its media skill, but, er, by its fruit.

The number one priority for the year ahead, then, more important than concocting inspiring sermons or spine-tingling worship experiences, is the building up of a truthful, smelly, but fruitful community.

That way we all end up where we’re supposed to be, not stuck in a lay-by speaking only to ourselves and the others in our small car.

That way Epiphany happens.

Incarnation: Keep the beginning up front

A new decade begins on 1.1.11, with a wondrous gift made by Kim Walter and given me at Bierton primary School, where I went to lead a Christingle service and dedicate a hall extension before Christmas.

The stole simply tells the story that really matters, of God come among us as a child, accepting us the way we are but loving us far to much to leave us that way.This is the foundation of historic Christianity.

In the manger Jesus becomes entirely part of our world. Everything in the world that God loves is touched in some way. Therefore simple hardball divinity, defined over against humanity, is wrong. Jesus demonstrates the ultimate fatuity of a dualistic notion of what it means to be God. This is ultimately incomprehensible to people who can only believe there is a God who loves them on the basis of serious evidence that their God hates someone else, preferably someone they don’t like. Religion that takes itself more seriously than true humanity easily becomes self-referential and life-denying. The old supremacist religious narrative that sets God over against human nature as a kind of gnostic superman turns out to be a silly bit of idolatry.

Jesus honoured the Pharisees for their high ideals, but drew attention of a bad Pharisaic habit — straining at gnats and swallowing camels — letting the details of a sub-narrative obscure the glory of the big narrative. Christianity has always been about Jesus and the resurrection — and this biggest narrative of all begins with the Christmas story. The only true absolutes are the baby in the manger, the blood on the cross, the empty tomb on the third day. The glory of the Big Narrative shows up the inadequacy of three popular sub-narratives often mistaken for Christianity:

1. Christianity as an abstract, disembodied idea.
   The religion of the Incarnation cannot be this, however tempting the concept may be. It is tempting because people are able to grasp and promote their own ideas much more easily than to kneel in wonder at the crib. To absolutise some mental construct, including a nostalgic or historicist conceptualisation of what has been, as though God were not continuously engaged in the unfolding life of humanity, is idolatry.
   
   
2. Christianity as religion, or even Institutional Church.
   If the geekery of the professional guardians of the Sacred is absolutized, something Jesus condemned again and again in his teaching, the point of the incarnation is lost. Every expression of Faith, including institutional ones, has its own validity (by its fruits you know it), but also its own limitation. If my Water comes from Thames Water it is absolutely true, in a narrow sense, to depend on it as my whole supply. This does not mean all the water in the world comes from Thames Water, or that somebody who got theirs from somewhere else was necessarily a heretic, or even the possessor of an inferior supply. The old Evangelical preacher in the marketplace who used to say “You don’t need Churchianity, you need Christ” was absolutely right in what he affirmed, though possibly blinkered in what he denied — Christ is the judge, the standard and the aim, and his Kingdom is bigger than any subset of his followers. It literally takes a whole world to know Christ.
   
   
3. Christianity as mods v rockers — the war of the “Liberals” against “Orthodox.”
   The whole terminology is inadequate and puerile. Only a fool with a weak grasp of the Incarnation would think such language appropriate to describe anything more than a feeble projection of human anxiety, cheap Pharisaism, left or right wing, masquerading as faith. Best stay out of the whole silly argument, because it is a greedy row, and those who make a life of indulging in it never seem to grow up to anything like their own potential.