Zimbabwe — for God’s sake

Both English archbishops are calling for prayers this Sunday for Zimbabwe. I’ve no experience of Zim apart from guys at college, and seeing asylum / immigration papers with a priest who came to live in Wycombe after substantial persecution of him and his young family for whistleblowing about his profoundly corrupt bishop.

A couple of years ago I met a family member at a confirmation, who had been minister of Agriculture in post independence Zimbabwe. He was reduced almost to tears as he described his feelings about seeing one of the most fertile places on earth reduced to a dustbowl. The present corrupt and egotistical dictatorship blames everything on the people who used to run the country thirty years ago, when it was bountfiul and prosperous. This isn’t about politics, it’s about people. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe since 1994 has reduced from 57 to 34 for women and from 54 to 37 for men. That corresponds to the life expectancy in England in the 12th Century.

This Sunday, please pray for this beautiful country and its leaders and its future, as it struggles with racism and corruption, ego-politics and famine.

If disaster comes upon us, sword, judgment, pestilence, famine, we will stand before the house of God, and before you, whose name is in this house, and cry to you in our distress, and you will hear and save...

Turtles in a Bottle...

As Leslie Stephen and I put together our proposal document for Nandyal Schools development, I came across a brilliant 2004 analysis of globalisation issues in Bangalore and village India by a journalistic legend — NYT’s Thomas Friedman. Working through the Nandyal diocese we do, at any rate, have multilayered contextual awareness in the project. We had written into our document a Telugu dimension, but we'll need to think this stuff through carefully.

Perhaps one day the tongue twister they use to teach Indians how to sound like “Accent Neutralized Americans” will also be used to teach Americans how to sound Indian! Just for the record, in case you want to try it at home,

A bottle of bottled water held 30 little turtles. It didn't matter that each turtle had to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles, a total turtle delicacy. The problem was that there were many turtle battles for less than oodles of noodles.

India — La Vie en Masse

I could be getting this all wrong, and please help if I am, but... India is a crowd. From school assemblies for 2,000 to heaving streets and village roads, you see people everywhere at pretty much all times of day and night. Life is lived on the pavement. Sheer size leads to paradox — For example, Muslims are a small minority in this largest Muslim nation on earth. One training specialist points out that 8 people meeting actually have 56 interrelationships. Now pile a billion people into the room, and imagine the subtlety and complexity that results.

It's embarrassing to be helped in the shops by a helper. The Western Bourgeois response is to do it all yourself and “be helpful.” But actually this may not be as helpful as you think. People are amazingly tolerant of Western Cultural Imperialism and won’t hold it against you, but when you reject help offered, you are potentially rejecting the person in role and making them look like a klutz. Of course if you accepted all offers of help, you would go mad and end up broke. This calls for sensitivity and graciousness all round. Everyone is someone, but not quite what they seem to Western eyes.

In a crowded and complex society you relate personally to others in a million ways, and develop finely tuned social antennae. Dress is an important signal for others’ social antennae, not an expression of ego and taste, as in the West. Declassé clothes are foolish and insulting. It's a long way from the top of the pile to the bottom, and social placing matters, caste or family. The more the system becomes attenuated, the less well it works so that, for example, family arranged marriages work less well the more distributed the family becomes. As Indian cities develop they grow new kinds of abject poverty and bourgeois wealth, but most people still feel a higher level of attachment and belonging than in the West. Hospitality matters, along with curiosity (but not too much) and respect. The Indian politics of everything are almost infinitely refined and complex. India’s the most socially and technically ingenious place on earth, and most things get done in the end, but not in quite the way they would in Surbiton.

Back in the UK, crowds look less crowded, and public spaces look empty — people finding designer ways of not relating to each other, aloofness, families that don’t speak to each other. Most Indians, most of the time, have far less opportunity or inclination, to be self-centred or egotistical. Brits tend to be awkward and stand-offish about anything corporate — it's amazing we manage to do Church at all, really. We think this is a crowded island, but it feels as crowded or spacious as our capacity or inability to manage social space makes it for us. This, perhaps, lies somewhere near the root of our awkwardness about diversity and multicultural living. Well there’s a hypothesis, anyway...

Nigerian Archbishop implements Genesis 27:22

The comprehensive and informative Thinking Anglicans, carries a story from Pat Ashworth in the Church Times, based on Computer Data of a recent "personal" statement by Archbishop Peter Akinola. Most of it appears in fact to have been penned by US and UK Traditionalists. TA also gives US satirical comment. The statement on TA from a Nigerian press officer resorts to every junior brief's desperate last resort — the suggestion that his client may in fact have been circumstantially at the location, 3,000 miles away, using his friend's computer. Like you do. Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream posts instructions to prevent getting caught this way again. Not that they'd do it again, of course, but inquiring minds want to know.

The prima facie evidence is as sure as a speed camera. No point arguing the facts, but Does it matter?

Victorian politicos didn't have Microsoft Word, but experienced this predicament (left). Surely clergy, trained as we are on J, D E & P, should be able to cope — very few of us ever have a truly original thought. Archbishop Runcie, famously, used Gary Bennett (the mercurial tragic Oxford Don, not the back-up catcher for the St Louis Cardinals) for his stuff. An Australian RC Archbishop was caught earlier this year using Terry Eagleton's brilliant LRB review of Dawkins' book without, er, quite having time to acknowledge his source. We juniors, by and large, have to write our own stuff.

Historically, it's useful to know which "Global South" stuff really comes from the "Global (wild) West", but as a student of leadership I wonder, does getting other people to write your personal statements really matter, and if so, how?

Nigerian flying bishop for England?

We live in a jolly postmodern Teletubby world where if people object deeply enough to anything, they don't have to be stuck with it. Antsy Conservatives are as entitled to be like that as anyone else. Out on the streets, politics, focus groups and factions rule. The Church of England Newspaper reports an unnamed source saying there are plans to consecrate an English priest as a Nigerian flying bishop. So, to quote the great Barry Norman, "Why not?"

1. The whole mentality is against Scripture. I Corinthans 12: "What if the eye says to the hand I have no need of you?" There was all kinds of moral and theological fandango going on in Corinth, but St Paul did not send in his own clowns to sort it all out. The NT way of doing Church says apostles represent the gospel by grace, not factions by political choice. Church is a place of shared respect and accountability — mutual submission. A Church which forgets loses the plot.
   
   
2. The whole English flying bishop thing works, when it works, because of dedicated colleagues who are prayerful, discipled and charitable, with a profound lived sense of Catholic order. Attempts to run this geometry without that last factor can only be toxic.
   
   
3. History contains various partition schemes — 60 years ago in the Indian subcontinent, 86 in Ireland. We're still picking up the pieces. Perhaps these were the only way of containing lethal craziness at the time, but in the end people have to grow up and be reconciled, because that's the way of Jesus and you can't get away from it. One day he will be all in all. It's really sad if the Church forgets this and can't do better than the secular world about this sort of thing.
   
   
4. The postmodern Teletubby "Pick Your Own" thing promises so much but delivers so little. It achieves its narrow short term aim, but on the way mucks up bigger relationships and loses sight of long term realities. The way to Revelation 21 leads through I Corinthians 12, not around it! Do you have to go through Canterbury to get to Christ? Yes, of course: and Lagos, and Darfur, and Bangalore, and Rome, and Penge, and Chicago. God made the lot, and his mercy really is over all his works.