What Grace is Not...

I’m gutted to hear of the tragic resignation of Margot Käßmann as Bishop of Hannover and Chair of the EKD Ratsvorsitzende, following a drink driving incident when she jumped a red light. Bishop Nick Baines’ account here, and DW press roundup (in English) here. The local TV headline was “Bearer of Hope explains her resignation.”

As leader of the Protestant Church in Germany, Käßmann has engaged passionately and intelligently with culture and society, and won much respect at home and abroad. The respect is undimmed by her resignation, indeed the journalists at her resignation press conference applauded her for her honesty, sense of responsibility, and dignity. We can only accept her decision, I suppose.

Still it leads me to ask, in Lent, what is grace, and what is it not?

When I worked in a prison I had to reflect for the first time in my life, if I’m honest, on how grace really worked among people who had often done criminal, some would say evil things. The colour, contrast and volume were certainly higher in prison, but amidst much that expressed the worst side of what we call human nature, I did also see some clear and present demonstrations of the Grace of God powerfully redeeming people and turning their lives around.

20 years ago, only the Chaplaincy and uniformed staff worked Saturdays, so the reception board that morning was always busy and somewhat mob-handed, with a crowd from Isleworth Crown Court the day before. Amongst them would be middle class prisoners, often with fraud or drink driving convictions, who had been bailed on remand and told they would never be imprisoned, and had honestly not believed they would be, until they found themselves in prison the night before.

Sometimes, in the night, I still recall these prisoners’ bewilderment, anxiety, embarrassment, rage and distress. It was no part of my job to pretend they had not done what was criminal, wrong and foolish. But neither was it my job to add to their shame or distress. Being deprived of your liberty is the punishment, not cruelty or disrespect whilst you are inside

Quite apart from the humiliation and pain of the moment, often careers or relationships were kicked into touch by the conviction. I was in absolutely no doubt what Jesus would do, and tried, stumbingly, to do likewise. So did the screws, in that sometimes hard but essentially humane world that is gone of Ronnie Barker Porridge.

So how real is Grace? Is it like borrowing money from a bank, where you only get it if you’re rich enough not to need it? Assuming Jesus being ironic when he talked of “righteous persons who have no need of repentance,” we may assume the idea is that the sick need the doctor not those glowing with health.

How do the sick receive the doctor’s help? And when Jesus implied hating someone was as bad as murdering them, lusting was as bad as adultery, was that “as bad as” or “as good as” or... both? And so what?

Over to you.

Devil Gets Knotted in Stone

Whilst out leading the patronal festival at St John the Baptist, Stone, this morning, I couldn’t help noticing the font. Heavily restored as it has been, it is still one of the most remarkable pieces of Norman Carving I’ve ever seen.

As well as various characteristic rope patterns, it carries a strange picture of a man (Adam?), his son crushing the serpent’s head, and representations of the Holy Trinity with fish & dragons.

It came from Hampstead Norreys in Berkshire, and has only been in Stone since 1845. E. F. M. Watson described the design thus in 1906:

The Monster on the Left is the Evil One with open mouth and unknotted tail, free to destroy and hinder the free course of the Fish, that is the Christian Faith. On the right is the same Evil power, but a Hand is in its mouth and the tail is knotted; it is being subdued by the might of the Three Persons in the Holy Trinity, though it still holds in its claws a human head, whose expression is one of hopelessness and terror.

The Church guide is a bit more down to earth:

The font which is Norman is richly carved all around the bowl, with scenes thought to depict the conflict between Satan and the Trinity. A dragon representing Satan is baring his teeth and waving his tail. We then see him muzzled by the arm of the Father, pecked by the Spirit in the form of a Dove, and having had his tail knotted by the Son.

Reeling from this encounter with things fantastic, among other fine flower arrangements, I noticed a windowsill display containing Pitcher Plants — hardly your standard bunch of daffs, but they looked rather triffid-like and unusual. I imagine they also keep the flies down in the summer.

Fallen, frail: Holocaust Memorial Day

I was going to put up fascinating colour footage of Dachau shot by George Stevens in 1945, but could not bear to do it. This material is just too indecent to show, too painful to watch. “How can one human being do this to another human being?” was his question. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is one helpful contemporary take, in a year the focus is on children.

It matters that we remember, because the awful truth is that evil can take root anywhere, any time, given the facts Christians call Fall & Freewill. Political convictions, good intentions, progress, even religion or lack of it, all existed in Central Europe in 1941. They cannot innoculate against evil. Only truthful memory enables us to understand our own moral frailty and, perhaps, make better choices in future.

I can understand lack of belief in God. God does not compel faith, and honest doubt is worth more than feigned belief. I object, however, to lack of belief in evil, including the possibility of anyone being entangled by it, for that really is a pernicious, blinding thing.

How Unprincipled is God?

In yesterday’s Telegraph, Rowan Williams asked the question, quoting a Christmas sermon of 1931 by Karl Barth, a deeply principled man, who said we must “live with principles, but we must also be able to live without them.” One obvious parallel might be Edith Cavell, profoundly a patriot, famously saying she had learnt that “patriotism is not enough.”

Vituperative Telegraph Hacks, who seemingly don’t understand the stuff in their own paper, slapped on a provocative cliché from the Beatles for a headline, then twisted the whole piece, bizarrely, to suggest Rowan was recommending Nazi Germany as a role model for the credit crunch, in order to annoy Gordon Brown. Spiteful Contortion, or what?

For those of us back on Planet Earth, along with Rowan Williams and Karl Barth, God takes the initiative by taking flesh at Bethlehem — a personal risk, not an abstract proposition. God is not entirely uprincipled, with his ten (or 631) commandments. Neither is Jesus with his Golden Rule. However, both God and Jesus know that principles, as Nurse Cavell discovered, are not enough. The world by principles knew not God. St Paul, a Man of the Law to his fingertips, discovered on the Damascus Road that the law could be no more than the schoolmaster to bring us to Christ. That’s why Pelagianism, for all its good intentions and common sense logic, is not enough. We need Grace.

Jesus comes at Christmas, says St John, full of Grace and Truth. By comparison any set of principles can only reflect the light that shone in the stable, as the moon (indeed the whole earth) can only reflect the light of its Sun. The Sun of Righteousness rises, for our healing. In Karl Barth’s immortal phrase, the Eternal Light needs neither fuel nor candlestick. (Nor even Mangers Boiled Linseed Oil, seen in the Vestry at Little Kemble last Sunday)

So goodbye to the Pelagian duty to condemn everything that seemingly fails to meet my standards. I’m not God. I’m just the Vicar. Goodbye to the great abstract fears and fantasies that fuelled and licensed the holocausts of the last century. Goodbye to the silly notion that I can somehow make or unmake the Church, or the world, by politics or manipulation — even, perhaps especially, if I am right. Not by might, but by my Spirit, says the Lord. This is why we can hope. This is the Gospel of Christmas.

Evil through the eyes of a child

Way back, the Go Between explored how adult games look through the eyes of a child, vivid, simple, utterly pragmatic. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is Auschwitz through innocent eyes — good script, brilliantly cast, beautfully made, well acted, almost impossible to watch.

This film does not ham things up, preach, sentimentalise, or demonise. The unvarnished tale is more disturbing. The horror is in the substance not the way it’s served up. Conventional war movies, even compassionate ones like Sergeant Ryan, are all well and good, but all the wrong things steal the show. They’re like sermons where the circumstantial illustration smothers the point. This one is painfully right on the button.


The “Bloody Fool” school of history has answers to everything, but understands nothing. It’s too ready to believe that people in the past were just utterly different, that‘s all. Big labels like “Evil” do not answer the basic question that matters — “how do people do such things?”

Filling in faces of the holocaust is a painful necessity, or it simply becomes incomprehensible or, worse still, the stuff of prurient curiosity or myth. We have to try to understand what there is in us what blinds us to what we don’t want to know, our own capacity for “Don’t ask, don’t tell”.

The audience we were part of in Wycombe was slightly stunned. So we bloody well should be. I suspect this film will not pack the cinemas this autumn, but people who can bear to watch it, may understand a little bit more, and, in the end, be glad they did.