Blind Rage Slays Children

One dark, disturbing part stood out for medieval carollers among the stories connected with Jesus’ birth:

Herod, the King, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day
His soldiers in their strength and might,
All children young to slay.

For the original readers of St Matthew’s gospel, however, the story was very much less shocking than it is to us, with our post-Christendom sensibilities and Christ derived values:

1. This incident was very much business as usual in the ancient world. In any political, social or environmental crisis, guess who bears the heaviest burden? The poor and vulnerable... it’s not the way things should be, by Christian standards, but it’s the way they usually have been. It is still, disturbingly, more the case than we would want to think...
   
   
2. Pre Christian people shared the almost universal fatalism about the activity of tyrants. What they got up to was largely their own affair, and without a sense that history was heading anywehere in particular, let alone the coming of Christ as universal judge, there was no ultimate bar to which they could be held to account. So you simply accepted that they got up to some funny old things. The vulnerable didn’t matter by comparison.
   
   
3. Most ancients saw the child as, at best, a half-formed adult. Dumping of excess children was commonplace in most ancient societies, sweetened only, on occasion, by a vague hope of kindly fate. The then radical notion that the child was a complete person, entitled to full respect, was very much a Christian thing in the ancient mediterranean world. It stemmed directly from the shockingly new way Jesus had treated children and talked about them, and taught his disciples to think of them.
   
   
4. The pre-Christian mediterranean world was no place for the squeamish: from public crucifixion to the use of condemned prisoners as playthings in the arena, life was cheap and expendable in a way you would have to go to the great atheist states of the twentieth century (Stalin’s and Mao’s) to parallel.

This story stands witness to a reverence for life that is still disturbingly absent, and that many people, including the institutional Churches, still struggle to express fully. So...

1. How readily do we tolerate the environmental and financial injustices of our age which magnify the miseries of the poor and vulnerable? From lack of clean water to environmental disaster, from Child poverty to twaddle about trickledown, we live with this stuff far too easily, if not quite as easily as ancients did with Herod and his ilk.
   
   
2. How do we, Christians or not, treat the vulnerable and marginalised? Do we take them seriously? Are people ever blamed and persecuted for simply being how they are? It was rage that slew the innocents — the role of anger in our discourse is well worth reflecting upon in the light of this disturbing fact.
   
   
3. The value Christ sets on children makes the work of protecting Children especially central. This is why betrayal of children by their pastors, or any attempt by any institutional church to cover up what is going on, is so shameful. It’s possible, as child protection bishop for this diocese, to see this high volume job (for example we hold the process for about 6,000 CRB registrations) as a mainly administrative matter. It’s not. It means nothing without a culture of openness and mutual knowledge within which anomalies show up as anomalies, and are followed up. And when you go beyond preventative child protection, we may ask ask what gifts and attitudes are we giving to our children as resources for living, how much of our time, or are they mainly seen as problems merely to be tolerated, personal trophies for their parents, or teeny consumers?
   
   
4. It’s fascinating how often outsiders, including atheists, radically critique Christians on radically Christian grounds. We are berated not for excesses of compassion, understanding and the values of the Sermon on the Mount, but for deficiencies in them. Philosophically that’s an interesting backhand complement, you may say. But it poses a read challenge. It simply will not do to underestimate such critique because of the source — To the extent it’s true, it’s true and requires our urgent attention.
   

Life, Jim, but not as we know it...

The Telegraph carries an interview with Archbishop Vincent Nicholls in which he is represented as suggesting Social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace can lead children to commit suicide. I am not sure whether this was the main point, or indeed any point he was trying to make, but we can only go on what we’ve got. My first reaction is that this piece belongs in the noble company of newspaper pieces since John Robinson’s “Our Image of God must go” (1963), where the subeditor’s racy headline stood out clearer than the author’s deeper intention.

What is there to say? Well, for a start, if the Archbishop had his own blog of course, we could see what he had to say, without having to try and figure it out through the refracting lens of the Telegraph, with its own agenda. We could dialogue with him directly and come to a clearer understanding of his perception and discuss it until we had teased out its most constructive use. As it is, all we’ve got is the Telegraph.

As to the moral, human and social values underlying Archbishop Nicholls’ reported words, I am completely in agreement. A clear sense comes over that the Archbishop, like any instructed Christian, believes people should be decent, respectful, nurturing and constructive in their dealings with one another. Christianity teaches love, strong as death, as self-giving — our highest human purpose is to love God and love our neighbour as ourself. This applies to all ages, but as every pastor knows, each of the seven ages of humanity has its own particular challenges and stumbling blocks, from the innocence of childhood to the gnarled cynicism of old age.

Where do social media fit into this landscape? One might be tempted to cross out “Facebook and MySpace” and substitute “letters and telephone” or even “communication and miscommunication.” I don’t know how many young people have been driven to despair by either a love letter, or lack of it, or as a result of a telephone conversation, but I’d guess there have been a few down the years. I agree strongly with the Archbishop, too, when he implies that the family provides a holding framework within which people can most easily live together and grow up safely and fruitfully. Playing fast and loose with that personal and social capital, however fashionable among the chattering classes, does nobody any favours.

The problem, like the joy, isn’t the media, but the human beings. Bullying is bullying, whatever the medium. There are people whose would say their quality of life has been spoiled, with zero accountability, by, say, the activities of Daily Mail reporters. Do teenagers pile up superficial relationships only to become devastated when they let them down? I’m not so sure this problem is getting worse. My children are considerably better socialised than I was, as a middle class boy the same age. They generally care far more about relationships and humanity, and the time they spend MSN-ing or whatever is time I would have spent with my nose in a book — not exactly the best way to build nourishing relationships, either.

I don’t believe our young peoples’ interest in people is waning. It seems unstoppable. What I fear for is their understanding of the concept of privacy, and, like any parent, their ability to protect themselves. I wonder if people of my generation sometimes remember what our parents said to us when they rationed our TV, and somehow transfer the warning to any screen based media? This ignores the fact that today’s screens offer interactive, rather than entirely predigested experience. TV is wallpaper not the Boob tube and Oracle it used to be.

Young people I meet around have often developed a very sharp critical nose about the information they see around them. That’s why they don’t usually go anywhere near newspapers — partly because the print comes off, but mainly because they reject the tyranny of relying on one, once-a-day, source. They are often fascinated by the concept of Truth, but for them it is emergent, rather than inductive. That raises serious difficulties for anyone with a message to sell, whether Church or Media Mogul.

What do Churches have to offer?

1. interactive localised community, rooted in a place and tradition which is not, at its best, synthetic, but organic, growing naturally from experience of God and people.
   
   
2. a pooled range of ages, cultures and expectations which has always been genuinely globalised and transcultural. I am frequently moved, even in small congregations, by the wide variety of people present, one of everyone, from babes in arms to nonagenarians.
   
   
3. a shared framework of stories and narratives within which to set personal perceptions, connected to ancient wisdom and transcendent morality.
   
   
4. an open offer to participate in sacred liturgy, ritual, music, poetry and dance, whereby people enter into spiritual experience for themselves with increasing confidence, connecting with possibilities way beyond ego, individualism or mere ideas.
   
   
5. a connected spirituality, contemplation, silence and rest; call it “sanctuary.” The sabbath principle privileges offline downtime. It also sets a perspective around immediate experience, from which it can be critiqued.
   
   
6. the challenge to trascend ego and consumerism, and live for others, wrapped up in the teaching of Jesus.

Unfortunately, if local church communities themselves does not particularly enjoy, ceebrate and share these things, there’s a problem — the salt has lost its savour. The problem, however is not Facebook, but with the Church failing to be what it is called t be.

Through the eyes of a child...

It was a joy to baptize a baby the other night at the Aylesbury confirmation, as I don’t get much chance to do that in this job. I am still amazed at the way babies look right at you. Very young children see the world fresh and clean, without assumptions or guile. Next day there was an interesting conversation twittering on the trian about “children as natural Zen masters...”

This led me to the seventeenth century Anglican mystic Thomas Traherne (1636/7-1674).
For Traherne, being saved is recovering innocence. It’s laying aside the varnish of the years; the crapping about and pretending and spin doctoring which is required of successful adults. Being saved is being given again, by God, the gift of wonder with which young children look at the world — the way you looked at the world, before you began to know the price of everything, the value of nothing:

All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger, which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys... All things were spotless and pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in all their splendour and glory... Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole World, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?

photo h/t Tinah, c/o the MorgueFile