Human Nature — image of God?

Why is it easier to conceive of people sharing their lives and aiming for excellence in a community like a symphony orchestra than in Church? Why does religion so often seem part of the problem, not the solution? I don’t know the answer, although I'm earnestly seeking it, but I want to press the question because answering better or worse it could radically change the quality, maybe even the quantity of our future.

Let’s start with Sam Norton’s very sharp diagnosis from yesterday:

“successful orchestras recruit people who can see the beauty in submitting to a larger vision, something beyond themselves, and it is the authority of that vision, rather than the authority of any individual, that binds them together to produce something marvellously beyond the sum of their parts.

The trouble with our church is that not enough people believe in that larger vision. Ironic really, given what it says on the tin.”

Many people in Church claim to have larger visions of God, but how large is our vision of human beings, supposedly made in his image?

There is a basic Darwinian model of nature as what Woody Allen called “a huge restaurant” — dog eat dog, competition, compulsion, survival.

In the human world this is reinforced by a Freud style account of what goes on in our heads. This is seen as a competitive world of basic instincts, a darkened cellar in which a gorilla and a sex maniac are locked in mortal combat every day, slugging it out over various notionally juicy bones in ways over which they have no control.

Is this vision of humanity adequate?

How could a roiling mass of individuals like that ever produce a decent society?

Or, theologically speaking, how does it reflect the image of God?

Here’s an alternative vision of what’s going on, and the kind of community that could be built on it, from US Economist and thinker Jeremy Rifkin, delivered in visual form by the Royal Society of Arts:

So, theologians, if we want to be art of the solution, not the problem, is it time to re-visit and refresh our understanding of “the Fall of Adam?”

Mahler Nights: Excellence and Equality

The almost transcendent experience of this week’s Berliner Philharmoniker concerts in London has got me thinking. Yesterday I wondered how Church could be as engaging, spiritually alive and focussed a community, producing hope as well as music.

Among other really helpful comments, Ray Barnes was back with a searching and pertinent question:

Since at least 80% of the success of the very best performances owe their high standard to the conductor, and since Simon Rattle is arguably one of the very best, the question is perhaps - where is the Simon Rattle of the Church?

The orchestra is ready and waiting!

I am happy to use the word leadership in Church, but rather suspect outside Leadership models, some of which we haven’t caught up with yet in practice, don’t really capture the beadth and depth of what is required. I want to be as accountable as any leader has to be in an excellent outfit today, but know there are other people involved as well.

Enter Fergus McWilliam, since 1985 a horn player for the Berliner Philharmoniker. He gave an excellent and thought provoking talk at the Festival Hall before Wednesday’s concert on how the sound of the orchestra relates to its members.

Afterwards he answered questions with some ideas that relate directly to Ray’s crucial line of questioning.

The band begins with a profound value of equality founded on mutual respect. It is a working democracy, in that it elects its musical director, and auditions are carried out principally by prospective colleagues. In other words it rejects artifical hierarchy and embraces personal fit — auditions, said Fergus, could assume technical competence and were thus not beauty contests, but more like marriage partner decisions.

In such a society there is little or no place for deference, often the English default position. As brilliant as Simon Rattle’s tenure has been, extended by request of the players, it has not been uncontroversial, nor would he or the band expect it to be. The idea of a hierarch high and lifted up sneering at people with whom he disagrees rather than listening to them would be absolute anathema, and kill the sound.

Fergus also called into serious question the idea of the Titanic Conductor, which he had encountered the other side of the Atlantic a few years ago — players produce the dots and the conductor will produce the music. As someone who works daily with the best conductors in the world he wasn’t rubbishing their work, but suggesting it ran on creative tension and relationships. Both band members and conductor mattered as much as each other. Mutual respect and understanding produced the best performances.

He also suggested that decisions to hire people for the orchestra were invitations to join a shared adventure. Risks are involved. There has to be a shared maturity and radical equality,continuous openness to what might be, and willingness to pursue it in a focussed way; a passionate focus around the music itself, andradiucal mutuality.

Levels of virtuousity are climbing all the time, but could, unbridled, lead to a band of soloists playing ego games. People have to want to join the band enough to transcend pure ego, for which you need a capacity that has to be acquired, without losing their personalities. But the real distinctives he looks for in new colleagues, he said, were

• Passion (a capacity to feel in the present moment)
  
  
• Sensuality (sensual awareness, not necessarily in a narrow sexual sense the term is often used in English)
  
  
• Viscerality (Connectedness between head, heart and guts — radical groundedness)

That’s how Fergus’ orchestra, that many hold to be the best in the world, produces music. His experience is lived, not an abstract ideal. How arrogant would it be for to we think we can aspire to excellence and produce hope without prizing and expressing some at least of those values and attitudes?

Mahler Nights: Cool Live Music

Very absorbed, me, in two amazing evenings with the Berliner Philharmoniker, currently visiting London, with its musical director Sir Simon Rattle. This meant Maher 4 on Monday and Mahler 3 on Wednesday, some 35 years since I last went to a Mahler symphony concert, at the Proms.

There is a fatal facility about recordings, fine as they are. The illusion, reinforced by the quality of the digital equipment on which we play them, is that they capture the music. Of course they don’t. They capture a sound impression of the music, but there’s so much more life and vibrancy in a live performance.

It is extrordinary to be in the same room as over a hundred of the finest musicians in the world, listening to each other, creating a joint pulse of something bigger than any of us or all of us, and feeling their way together through a shared adventure. I have no caustic critical words, not because evryting went perfectly, but because I was too absorbed to stand back and pass comment for fear of missing something. You can’t simultaneously swim a river and stand out on the bank commenting on the splashes and bumps.

And, frankly, there were no egregious splashes and bumps. Every voice in this orchestra has a wholeness and versatility to throw itself into different modes freely. Every voice that was a voice seemed like a musical instrument, free of intrusive ego, whether cool or soaring or cool supremely lyrical. Such mutual respect and understanding resolves the intensely activties of 120 soloists into more than the sum of its parts — a blended, poised, unity that is not uniformity, and brings out of each performer the best that they can be. The band is engaging not competitive, compelling but not coercive, and what it does feeds the soul.

Now how can our lives be made such music? When are we going to see a Church that does half those those things, half as well? And how?

Discriminatory Louse on Lady’s Bonnet

As Buckinghamshire experiences its annual Burns Night Kilt Hire peaktime, recitations will roll of Robbie Burns’ poem To a Louse, on seeing one on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church, 1786:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:

At a recent confirmation, I saw a louse in Church... It was a bonny evening with many candidates of all ages and a congregation of several hundred, and great joy and celebration. As I sat in the hall afterwards signing gifts and cards, a candidate in his late 20’s came up to me and, as often happens, we began talking about about his coming to Christ.

Formerly an atheist, he had found faith in a flourishing Evangelical church, but the biggest obstacle in his way had been what he called the Church of England’s sexist senior leadership structure and poor record on human rights. If his workplace behaved like that they'd be closed down. Here was a national institution claiming some kind of moral authority, but behaving in a way which he, and everyone in his office, found morally disgusting.

Steady on, I thought, and trotted out a line about tradition and variety. How could I say that? he asked. Everybody knows that in the workplace discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It’s no defence in an Equalities case to say you didn’t consider your discriminatory behaviour to be so, far less that the Pope told you to do it, or that you’d always done it, or that God does it. Anyway there was a happy ending, he said, because after four years’ delay, he had eventually found in his local Church a genuinely open and apostolic community. But when was the institutional national Church going to catch up?

As legislation for female bishops goes out for consultation, everything will be framed in terms of the problems experienced by a tiny minority of churchy dissidents. I don’t suppose anyone will speak up for those who don’t yet go to Church, like my confirmation candidate and his work colleagues. They don’t show up on our radar. Maybe that’s why there aren’t more of them being confirmed.

Great Soapy debates will be held in the next day or so, with much lather produced in good faith and many croc tears about mission and why congregations fail, and how sad it is that the average English Anglican is 61. It’s not going to change, though, is it, until we accept the hard truth that some of our cherished behaviour and attitudes can be a real stumbling block to those on the threshold of faith. The problem is with us and either we don’t really care that we are blocking the gospel, or we have to do something, perhaps the obvious, about it.

Are voting systems moral?

A fascinating experience, saying anything publicly about the UK voting system. We're all due to have a referendum, er, in about 3 months time. There seems to be an eerie silence on the subject in public places, however. This is probably because people regard it as an issue for political anoraks, and thus nothing to do with real life, let alone morality.

Hang on, though. I am sure good Christians have every right to take various points of view about the best voting system on offer, but I would be deeply disturbed if they just switched on their morality override as they did this. We are told that God is a God of justice, who loves equity (Psalm 11 and Psalm 33) The theme is reflected on many occasions in the Hebrew Scriptures. If it strikes them that the present system serves such values best, they should support it. But a purely pragmatic approach cannot be the best way to deal with the question.

But this is about politics, a generally dirty and shame-inducing word among the English who like to pretend they don't have politics, because that is generally the best cover for underhand politics. This is what Disraeli meant when he said “A British government is an organised hypocrisy.” Actually, Jesus had strong views about organised hypocrisy - why not us?

The fact is people sometimes misunderstand what Jesus was saying when he pulled out a coin and said “Render to Caesar...” He is sometimes thought to be saying there are two worlds, religion and politics and never the twain shall meet - a very convenient view for politicians. That's not, however, what he meant. He pulled out the coin and asked whose image it bore. Caesar’s - so it must be Caesar’s. But turning from your money to your life, whose image, we may ask, does the whole human being wear? God’s. We are to render to God the things that are God's — the whole of life that bears his image.

So by all means let's have a discussion about voting systems. I wonder what general moral principles we will be using as we take our positions. The answer “None, because this is about politics” strikes me as distinctly weedy, nasty people would suggest “sub-Christian.”