Adam: starting at the very beginning

I am looking forward to being part of the launch this evening of a Spiritual Art exhibition at Silbury Gallery in MK, curated by my dear friend and brother Anouar Kassim. Last year we celebrated and explored Spirituality and Mathematics — this year Adam.

Adam, whom Muslims think of as the first prophet, is the beginning. He defines the global scope of all the Abrahamic faiths. We are all of one flesh and blood int he final analysis. This is why sectarianism is never enough.

Western Christians have so emphasised Genesis as a story about guilt, and perhaps missed the fact that it is more about shame, and flawed coming of age. Lose touch with this story and we lose touch with the tragic and paradoxical dimension of what it means to be human.

Thinking about what is distinctive about the Christian vision of Adam brings to mind a hymn from 100 Hymns for Today (1969) by a man called Richard G. Jones. The language is that of forty years ago, but I'm sorry it has consistently failed to make it into hymnbooks since — especially if it implies the English are just too Pelagian for this kind of thing. I hope not.

God who created this Eden of Earth,
Giving to Adam and Eve their fresh birth,
What have we done with that wonderful tree
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Adam ambitious desires to be wise,
casts out obedience and lusts with his eyes,
Grasps his sweet fruit, "as God I shall be"
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Thirst after power is the sin of my shame,
Pride's ruthless thrust after status and fame,
Turning and stealing and cowering from thee,
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Cursed is the earth through this cancerous crime,
Symbol of man through all passage of time,
Put it all right, Lord, let Adam be free:
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Glory to God! What is this that I see?
Man made anew, second Adam is he,
Bleeding his love on another fine tree,
Lord forgive Adam, for Adam is me.

Rises that Adam the Master of death,
Pours out his spirit in glorious new breath;
Sheer Liberation! with him I am free!
Lives Second Adam, in mercy, in me.

Heaven 10 in Milton Keynes

Saturday morning at Heaven 10, a Music and Arts Festival organised by Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga-Steele artist adn priest, at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone in Milton Keynes. Anouar Kassim put together a celebration of Islamic Arts heritge and culture, incuding fascinating and beautiful stuff from Iran and Somalia, as well as work by a remarkable Muslim Caligrapher, Haji Noor Deen. He combines Arabic and Chinese writing in ingenious and thought-provoking ways, at all shapes and sizes including some giant originals that would test most caligraphers’ art to destruction.

I was also fascinated by an installation by Air-MK, which produces multimedia sensory zones to stimulate prayer and reflection. Howard Williams and friends transformed the small chapel at Cornerstone into a remarkable reflective space, with a screen on which people could react to questions about themselves and God, in their own time. There’s a great vibrancy and creativity in the air in MK, and the way the city is sucking in people from all over the world in interesting ways is becoming very apparent...

Charity and Daily Bread

A busy, foodie week, in the worlds of media, local charity, and academia. A lot of time has gone into work with my friend and colleague Carole Peters, devising and preparing the BBC Radio 4 Sunday morning service next week on Lammas — the original havest festival. Our theme has been Bread of heaven, with music, readings and a meditation — all UK insomniacs not in Church at 8·00 next Sunday welcome!

Meanwhile, yesterday, I spent a morning with Sue Wall, who runs Milton Keynes Food Bank. I’ve often noticed the food pantry ministryies of US Churches and wondered why they didn't happen more in the UK. Perhaps, I thought, it’s because the welfare state means the need is less. That’s a nice thought, but way off base with reality.

It’s a disturbng fact, but even in an outwardly prosperous city like MK, many ordinary people, especially at times of crisis, struggle to feed themselves and their families. We live in a welfare state, but the largest single cause of temporary need is delay in benefit payment; for example if someone on benefit gets a part time job, it can take two weeks and more whilst benefit is adjusted, whilst they have no money coming in at all.

MK Food Bank provides a limited number (up to 6) short term (3 day) packs of simple but high quality food, made up to a standard nutritional specification. It began as a ministry of MK Christian centre, a thriving non-denominational Church in the city, and now engages all sorts of volunteers, mainly but not exclusively from the whole range of churches.

People are referred through a variety of agencies, and parcels can be collected from various local collection points. The work began in a Church cupboard, moved into a sea container, and now has its own warehouse unit in Stacey Bushes. Food comes from donations, including some from leading supermarkets. Local businesses, especialy Mercedes Benz, whose HQ is in the city, have also backed the project with sponsorship and services. So far this year over 4,400 packs have gone out. MKFB began as part of, and still operates in close collaboration with the Trussell Trust, an Evangelical Christian chatity that fights Poverty, deprivation and despair in the UK and abroad. It was an immensely moving privilage to spend a morning with Sue and some members of her team, to see how many parallel lines our passion run along, and to pray together.

Finally, yesterday, an afternoon teaching in the Business School of the University of Buckingham, where a wonderful colleague, Andrew Lightbown, is conducting fascinating doctoral research with which I’ve been helping into the meaning and dynamic of Agape (Love). After my lecture we reviewed his work together, including an emerging working definition of Charity which struck me as relevant to MKFB, as to all expressions of Christian love in action:

To exercise Charity is to act intentionally to promote wellbeing in solidarity with, and reverential response to the other.

Holocaust Memorial Day in MK

A great honour to say a few words with others at this year’s MK City Holocaust Memorial Day celebration at Christ the Cornerstone. We were opening an exhibition of art principally by two artists, Edna Eguchi Read and Alicia Melamed Adams.

Edna’s work explored the legacy of war, including Afghanistan, as someone of partly Japanese ancestry. She encodes the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not as anger, but an errily ash-covered general and domestic world of stuff. Ordinary things are reduced to a kind of useless sterility, where all that is left is form, bereft of function. She does something similar in this exhibition with passport-sized images of troops killed in Afghanistan, flattened as a collage onto a wall. Drat! I didn’t take a picture... you’ll just have to go and catch the exhibition if you can. I had seen the same thing on Sunday at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre — a collage of ordinary people’s photographs greets you as you enter the historical displays area.

During the evening Arran Hartley and Georgia Bateman, presented a moving a/v collage reflecting on their school visit to Auschwitz. It took a fresh, powerful view. They had been especially shocked and moved by the piles of stuff, shoes, hair, artifical limbs. Alicia’s work as an artist who survived the holocaust puts faces to the story. This is very important because we are about the last generation to have the privilege of talking with and learning from holocaust survivors. All our grandhildren will have are the faces in art, or the Holocaust may be reduced to a mere topic in history, not an exposure of our own tragic capacity for evil.

Alicia’s work is fundamentally a statement of hope in the face of the unspeakable. She pulls no punches. Consider this picture, The Parting, and commentary:

My parents and I and a few relatives who had survived worked for a German, Victor Kremin, who set us up in a small camp where we collected iron and rags. On 24th July 1943 we were surrounded by Gestapo and taken to the local prison. It was their custom to keep people for three days without food until they were weak and then to load them onto lorries and shoot them outside Drohobycz in Bronica Woods. When we were brought into the prison I saw Poldek Weiss who was 17. We had met twice before in a friend’s house. His father was a tailor for the Gestapo. His father made a suit for the head of the Gestapo and the son was released from prison. He begged his father to intervene on my behalf. I was 14 at the time. His father made another suit and I was let out on the third day as Poldek’s wife. My whole family were shot the next day. This picture is called The Parting. It shows me parting from my family in prison.

Ultimately, though, what makes Alicia’s work so extraordinary is her capacity for hope and joy that was not entirely rubbed out. Her final painting was entitled Going up soon, but where? in which, Julia Weiner says:

the artist thinks about her own death. After the horrors of her childhood, death appears to offer little horror to Alicia, and this light-filled work with its radiant pink backround contrasts to the earlier works about death. There, she used dark colours and menacing shapes to evoke death by violence and at the hands of others. When death comes naturally it’s not to be feared.

Water Eaton: grass roots ministry

Water Eaton sounds like a chocolate box village, but mostly it is in fact “The Lakes” — a large 60’s London overspill housing estate in Milton Keynes. A Church was started on the estate way back, in what would at one time have been caled an Urban Priority Area, inhabiting a building shared for much of that time with Spurgeon Baptist Church. When Mandy Marriott left as vicar in 2005, the usual procedure for discerning future ministry needs kicked in. It came to some rather surprising conclusions, which all of us are following up as best we can.

Some wondered whether a closer relationship with older or larger parishes round about might be a good idea. There was a clear decision that the Church didn’t want to to do anything that might compromise its local ministry, and relationships with the Baptists. The crown jewels of the local Church are its networks and relationships in the area it serves. This thought led in more radical directions.

Trying to match clergy available to ministry was both fruitless and fruitful. No new vicar, but a new way of dong ministry. Having started the vacancy looking for a priest in charge, and met a few good people, it became increasingly plain that various people at St Frideswide’s, including the previous vicar, were right! The Church needed a priest, but not primarily as administrator-in-charge, so much as to serve and resource its sacramental life. There was considerable scope to share ministry locally, rather than centralising it into something teetering on the edge of a depdnency thing.

With enthusiastic help and support from various clergy, and an ecumenical group led by Tim Norwood, area dean, a scheme was put together for re-jiggering parish geometry around this vision. Legal and technical functions would be taken care of pragmatically, and the centre of gravity for ministry shifted from priest to people. Ironically, there are now, actually and provisionally, more clergy involved than ever, locally available, but in a different kind of role.

The Local Shared Minstry project is moving forwards, and is now in a position to work out a relationship with a prospective parish priest on a basis. Unusually, for a church after (technically) almost 3 years in a vacancy, numbers are now rising. I don‘t want to give a misleading impression of that fact, or the significance of it, but it shows the depth and quality of local engagement in the parish with everybody logged on.

Sharing their worship on Sunday, it struck me that the keys are faith, connectedness to God and each other, and a certain audacity. It's been a joy to be in and out of this church over the past couple of years, and see it grow organically to a point where it can make sense of having new clergy, but on a different set of assumtions.

The outlook reminds me of a lesson we were taught by our trip to Marrakech this year — If you get lost in the Suq, whatever you do, for Pete’s sake don’t stop and look lost: keep going and enjoy the journey. It’s the only way.

Would the Birdman do his Bird in MK?

Woodhill prison, chairing a board to appoint a new second chaplain. Alan Hodgetts and multifaith colelagues are doing great work together. I was also struck by the good humoured commitment of staff to running a safe and non-abusive, occasionally high stress environment.

The staff are magnificent. What’s wrong with our prisons is the fantasy surrounding them. Woodhill is sometimes ludicrously described in the media as “Britain’s own Alcatraz.” Just in case your editor is too dim to know the difference, Alcatraz is on the Left, & Woodhill below.

Perhaps the next phase of our glorious prison building programme could involve digging a replica of San Francisco Bay around it. We could import pelicans, fogs, and greased up Clints swimming up and down dodging the sharks, etc. It would only cost 2 or 3 billion pounds. Oh and we could mount severed heads on the gate — only you'd need crowscares, or the magpies get ’em — if that happens your heads are soon rubbish, and crime soars again. Oh and we could moor rotten hulks in the bay, with broadcast groaning day and night. Then it really would be Britain’s Alcatraz. State of the art in 1934, the real Alcatraz was obsolete by the mid sixties.

Ludicrous fantasy pretty much colours what Fleet Street imagines should go on in prison. Historical experience is that once you have prisons, you fill ’em. The UK government actually plans to build more; and now recidivism is back around its historic 70% rate in the system, this can only increase the amount of crime on the streets long term.

The only silver lining I can offer is the discovery, thanks to Maggi Dawn, of a fantastic blog by Anne Droid (The Reverend), Scottish prison chaplain teasingly called Get out of Jail Free. The names have been changed to protect the innocent. It’s a kind of reality checkpoint amidst all the idiot fantasy about prison. Go read it, particularly her stuff on forgiveness...

Dongles from the Geek Zone

Now Liberated by a Dongle, no less, which gives me broadband internet on my laptop pretty much anywhere for £15 a month — rather less than I’ve been spending recently sitting around Starbucks and chums at £5 an hour plus frappucinos. Yesterday’s blogpost was originated from the front (passenger) seat on the Linslade bypass. Apparently students and others are stoking up a wild dongle market. It all seems to work very well — oh and you get free use of Starbucks hotspots thrown in. T-Mobile setup instructions for my Mac were clunky, but sort of worked. Better use these; and Mac owners wanting full realtime usage info need a nifty Kiwi utility called Cheetahwatch.
I have already named the pinnacles of Bucks civilisation — Apple Store, Ikea, Lego store. Add to that a Hotel Chocolat, also in MK (where else), and your cup well and truly runneth over. Nothing geeky about that, anyway.