Things to Come?

From Jesus to Church?

How did they get from the simple carpenter of Nazareth to the institutional Church, and why?

Over Easter various UK media have been preparing us breathlessly for the Archbishop of Canterbry to denounce the RC church as having lost all credibility in Ireland, indeed a 14 second soundbite implying this was carefully trailed by the BBC, and some of the ignorant and foolish fell for this advertising puff.

When Andrew Marr’s Start the Week symposium went out yesterday morning it became instantly obvious that one tiny soundbite had been culled for advertising purposes from a small section of a sentence in what was actually a highly intelligent discussion involving a fascinating cast of characters, masterfully chaired by Andrew Marr. In 45 minutes of radio, almost nothing was said about the RC Church and the travails of that particular denomination — I think I counted four sentences. The rest was a brilliant discussion of how a simple message becomes institutionalised, for good and evil — UK public radio, in fact, at its very best!

The notion that all institutionalisation is badis one core idea of Philip Pullman’s new book, and paticpants were Andrew Marr (Political commentator) Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury), Philip Pullman (novelist and atheist), Mona Siddiqui (Muslim and academic) and David Baddiel (comedian, who describes himself as “10/10 atheist”).

The debate, available for a week on iPlayer and, I believe as a podcast. I found this section fascinating — very much the money shot. It reflects ideas I remember sketching as a possible first chapter for a book twenty years ago, but being rather too busy in my day job of being an urban vicar for it to come to anything...

AM

In many ways Philip Pullman is novelizing or fictionalizing... the institution and the essence?

RW

I think one of the main themes to come out of Philip’s book is that very strong sense that the price you pay for transmitting a spiritual vision in institutional terms can be very high. And the question sometimes is not so much about the nature of the vision as about the price you want to pay for sustaining it. The argument of the book, if I read it rightly, is that Christianity has paid too high a price. I obviously think not, but..

PP
You’re absolutely right. That’s what I’m saying...

AM

Is it possible to have an effective transmitted religious life that doesn’t have large institutional structures around it?

RW
I think it’s quite hard to imagine because you look at movements which try quite systematically to avoid that, and fifty years down the line you see mysteriously that the surface is beginning to harden. You’re beginning to get institutional transmission. Look at even the history of the Society of Friends, which I suppose in the Christian spectrum is the most anti-institutional of all. It still swings inexorably towards that, because you need some way of recognizing from generation to generation that you’re taking about the same vision. What matters is not, to me, so much whether you have the institution or not as whether the institution has in it enough things to rein you in, to draw you back to where you started and give you a real ground for saying ‘wait a minute! That’s not it...’.

DB
It may be the case, though, that the urge to institutionalize is with all parts of human endeavor because even atheists have the Humanist Association... There are atheist schisms, there certainly are. People define themselves as agnostic or atheist or whatever. It might seem like the most individual choice, but there is a need to communicate whatever belief you have.

MS
There is a difference, however, between institutionalized expressions of religion which give context to religious expression and context to people and reference points, and then how sacred the people who are the leaders within that structure become, and I think we need to differentiate between that.

PP

The process seems to me always that there’s a great original visionary who says “a time is coming soon when heaven will be fulfilled and earth will be full of plenty and delight and wonder” and so on, and then it doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t happen and it goes on not happening and eventually the people who want to preserve this vision have to set up institutions to validate their own positions.

AM

but there also have to be rules, don’t there, because all religions have a vision of the good life and what is a good way of living and that requires rules, and therefore somebody to...

RW

That’s a vision that has a shape, and therefore you can’t say anything counts as a good life, but the temptation then is to push that more and more and more towards codes, where you can tick boxes, and.. present your score at the end, and that is one of the things that the Gospels do really try to undermine and, actually not just the gospels. I think that it’s a great fallacy to say that there’s a big difference between Jewish and Christian Scripture on this. Something of this is going on in a lot of what we call the Old Testament, as well.

PP

Bureaucracy always overcomes vision. It’s a tragedy, and it always will be a tragedy.

AM

But if you’ve got stories which have a strong moral or ethical content and people are forced to go back and reading the stories again and reinterpreting the stories, isn’t that part of the answer to the constant fossilization or hardening caused by the structures?

PP

Bureaucracy will always be undermined by stories, but int he end bureaucracy will always win. That’s why I think it’s a tragedy.

RW

In that sense you're saying a tragedy with no possible way out. the bureaucracy always wins. I think I’d say the stories are stronger than that. I hate saying that to a novelist! But I think stories are very very tough...

DB
But isn’t part of the point of Philip's book that the bureaucracy is set up, as it were, to inject another element into the original story. i.e. to preserve what Philip talked about as a greater truth that is nothing to do with history i.e. to take what might be a story of a man who just said some good things, and make it into a much much great more powerful thing. And that’s what the bureaucracy is set up to do.

RW

That seems to me a bit more intentional than the way a lot of these things work. What I see as I read the New Testament is a central event, the life of Jesus, the words of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and for me also the resurrection of Jesus, causing such an... explosion of ideas and puzzles that the language that already exists can’t cope with, that you have a very complicated period during which the language is settling down in new ways, and you then begin to see the emergence of what we’re calling a bureaucracy, an institutional structure to hold it all. But it’s not quite as though someone comes along and says, “That’s a really good idea here, I’ll market it for you...”


All I would add is that the authority of the Church does not lie in itself. There is a dangerous delusory tendency towards what Pullman calls the magisterium, and ultimately it can compromise and can even undermine the source of faith. The Church’s real authority is emergent, and lies in its capacity to transmit the story authentically.

The measure of its success is not that it swells into a mighty institutional empire, but that it is still possible, even after all the refractive and corrupting influence of the human beings who make up the transmission chain, to distinguish Jesus’ message from its original context, and to attempt to live it in another. The story continues to judge the medium through which it is transmitted. This is the key insight of the Reformation, and the essence a Reformed Catholic Church, to hold that the Church is always accountable to the Word and its original founder.

This programme struck me as a very much more interesting and significant dialogue between sincere atheists and Christians/ Muslims than stale idiotic sixth form knockabout...

Accounting for Everybody

Most of us like to think we believe that people matter more than things. Archbishop Rowan’s New Year message in 2009 challenged us to be more honest and consistent about this belief. Taking as his starting point the story of Laurence the Deacon, who told Roman authorities that the poor supported by the Church were its treasures, he asks

What would our life be like if we really believed that our wealth, our treasure, was our fellow human beings? Religious faith points to a God who takes most seriously, and values most extravagantly, the people who often look the least productive and successful — as if none of us could really be said to be doing well unless these people were secure. And as we look around in our own country as well as worldwide, this should trigger some hard questions...

This year’s takes a similar theme, and raises the stakes to a global scale: —

There are fewer and fewer problems in our world that are just local. Suffering and risk spread across boundaries, even that biggest of all boundaries between the rich and the poor. Crises don’t stop at national frontiers. That’s one thing terrorism, and environmental challenge and epidemic disease have taught us. We share the risks. The big question is “Can we share the hopes and create the possibilities?” Because it’s when we do share the hopes that we really see what it is to belong together as human beings, discovering our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others...

The challenge to discover our own humanity as we honour the human dignity of others raises its own hard questions for a society in which the gap between rich and poor has, almost unbelievably, been widening these past thirty years. It calls to mind a report produced late last year by the New Economics Foundation — A Bit Rich: calculating the real value to society of different professions. In the spirit of progressive economics, it’s available free as a .pdf.

The report examines the real value to society of six very different jobs. These professions come with big mythic perceptions and assumptions in the great game of Careers — City banker, nursery worker, advertising executive, hospital cleaner, tax accountant, waste recycling worker.
The result isn’t a simple game of goodies and baddies, but it does challenge the Great Golden Myth of eighties yuppiedom.

In its purest form, the GGM tells us that a tiny elite of pangalacticaly superior individuals create wealth for society, which largely consists of lumpen drones and wasters. Any silly nonsense that these self-designated “Wealth Creators” care to indulge is thus, ipso facto, OK. Fairness, like taxes, is strictly for the little people. And the lesson of the past year or so is that not only is life in the golden dome golden, but largely consequence-free as well. Nice work if you can get it.

NEF’s report does not call into question the right to private property, or fair reward for labours and risks, or differential remuneration. It does, however, suggest we push the envelope beyond considerations of the naked cash nexus in assessing the social and environmental costs and benefits of all jobs.

So how do we account human worth? How should we? It’s as much about what we notice and our methods as the conclusions we reach...

What hath Kampala to do with LA?

Image by Catholic Church (England and Wales) via Flickr

I can see why people compare the speedy Lambeth statement about the nomination of a gay bishop in Los Angeles unfavourably with its more apparently leisurely behind-the-scenes reaction to proposed draconian anti-gay laws in Uganda. As one Guardian commentator puts it.

I simply fail to understand how Rowan Williams can say to the liberals don't do that, you'll annoy the right, we must avoid schism at all costs, while saying to the right, um, yes, whatever, please don't go.

Of course there are boringly obvious reasons why the two questions at issue don’t quite square up alongside each other: The Los Angeles one is an in-house bishoppy thing, where the Ugandan issue involves weighing into a touchy foreign legislature, incredibly still on the rebound from Empire after 47 years. It would be a bit odd if both were responded to in the same way. Still, the squirmfulness of all this is unavoidable.

A part of me would love the Archbishop to swing in, Pope style, with quick auto-da-fés all round, preferably enforcing my own eminently reasonable views of both matters. Bang a few heads together. Send the Ugandans to Los Angeles for six months, and the Angelinos to Uganda. That may not be such a bizarre idea... However, bishops in autocephalous churches don’t do autos-da-fé. Back in the third century, one Bishop of Rome who tried it on got this flea in his ear from Firmilian of Caesarea:

I am justly indignant with Stephen’s obvious and manifest silliness, that he so boasts of his position...

That messy, mainly voluntarist place, is where the C of E has been since the Reformation, increasingly choosing the ecclesiastical methods of St Paul and the early Church rather than those of Pope Innocent III and the Holy Inquisition. It’s to be hoped, however, that all proceed with open eyes — remembering the simple fact that the motive for anti-discriminatory behaviour, as well as the deep revulsion people here feel about the Ugandan proposals, are moral objections with missional implications, not just some taste or lifestyle choice...

What kind of Unity? and of Church?

Rowan Williams’ lecture in Rome marks an interesting reframing of ecumenical futures. There is, of course, the conventional RC model. The Church achieves the Unity for which Jesus prayed when every Christian in the world submits to it as a Divinely sanctioned Imperium. Or try the Protestant version. Structural and organisational convergence will somehow produce a complex multiplanar hybrid. Everyone trades in their old but coherent structural and accountability models to the shining new one. Unity remains a future goal, and we all have to make it happen.

Those two notions have their finer points. The retro-RC one has the virtue of coherence and vertical accountabioity lines, allbeit a coherence that many of its own followers ignore. It does actually exist. The Liberal Protestant one respects the value of every strand and models mutuality, consent and fellowship but, here comes the twist, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, like its Roman colleague, it has a tendency to homogenise everything into what it wants them to be, rather than taking the trouble to understand the particularities which make up any Church. Surely these amount to more than simply a ghastly mistake on God’s part.

What the last thirty years has revealed, however, is that a simple binary unity based on Imperium or Liberal democracy raise questions as well as answering them. The great ecclesiologists of Vatican II have established a great deal of common ground theologically, but considerable divergence organisationally and politically. At which point, enter Cardinal Kasper with a model I think is fundamental to what we are trying to do in England today. In a vitally important address delivered in St Albans in 2002, Cardinal Kasper suggested we accept the old Structural/bureaucratic ecumenical quest had gone as far as it could in its own terms, and it was time for fresh thinking. He suggested what he called Receptive Ecumenism. This means that everyone lays gently on one side the dream of Homogenised unity, and concentrates on seeing how they can be a gift to the whole company of Christ’s faithful people. Equally tellingly, we try to develop attitudes and practice in receiving the others as gift not threat. Do that for a bit, and see where it gets us. So out go big merger schemes based on fudge, and quests for imperial hegemony. In come processes of Appreciative Inquiry and clarity.

How is Rowan sharpening up these questions? He’s asking what the great degree of theological convergence revealed by the work of the past thirty years amounts to. He’s diagnosing two principles inherent in the life of the baptized — a Conciliar horizontal plane, and an ordained vertical line of accountability. He’s asking how these integrate in the actual lives Churches and Christians live, as well as the notional sructures within which they find themselves. Catholic is both a macro-concept, but also an inherent dimension of local, micro Christian life. Playing one off against the other is foolish, wherever you’re coming from.

Catholic Unity isn’t something humans create by obiterating others. God created it on Good Friday, and it’s inherent in the Unity of Christ. Is Christ divided? When Jesus prayed for Unity, did God say “no?” or did God decide that the effectiveness of the whole enterprise depends on ecclesiastical politics come right? Or did he say yes, create a spiritual unity by the death and resurrection of Jesus, clothe Jesus’ followers in it by baptism, and ask them to make sense of Unity, not as a goal on the distant horizon to be achieved by diplomacy or conquest, but a resource to be realised in an emergent way by faithfulness in a multiplanar reality we call “communion.” The submission required is necessary but mutual, not one-way. The obedience is primarily to God in Scripture, mediated through the whole life of all the baptised...

Image via Wikipedia

All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

Easter is for life...

...and not just for Christmas. Archbishop Rowan’s YouTube messages are setting a consistently high standard of thoughtful comment. He explains simply what Christians do, and what it means to us. He pictures Holy Week and Easter as a journey, following the story with multiple subtexts and inner levels — Just add imagination and honesty, and you never know; you may get some personal revelation.

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.

Bank crisis: last gasp of a gilded age?

Reflecting of recent financial news, this weekend has produced two articles that have had me rocking on the seat crying “Amen, brother!” — Incisive, creative, and understanding reponses to the recent UK ban on Short Selling in the City.

Giles Fraser in the Church Times puts in a good word for the short sellers. We’ve all been on the game, and the easiest thing in the world is to fix on someone to blame, when, to use and abuse a metaphor from the world of choir training, we all need to tighten our underpants. “The Bubble needed to burst.”

... by blocking short-selling, all that the regulator does is to en­courage the value of stock to become over-inflated — and that is precisely the problem of our world markets. For instance, there is no way of short-selling the housing market. As a result, house prices have become absurd.

Householders may scream blue murder if the value of their property goes down, but it ought to be clear to most people that a great many houses are vastly overvalued. It is just this overvaluation that generated the sub-prime crisis in the first place.

Short-sellers are a vital corrective to the instinctive bullishness of most city traders. Sure, it is immoral to sell a stock, talk it down, then buy it for a large profit. But that is no different from buying a stock, talking it up, then selling it on at an inflated price — the “pump-and-dump” man­oeuvre.

Modernity has given us the myth of continual improvement; that technology and human advancement will lead us ever onward and upward. It is the philosophy of New Labour’s “things can only get better”.

And it is the naïve mantra of the city trader for whom the stockmarket always goes up. Such a philosophy encourages us to borrow money against our ever-rising fortunes. In such circum­stances, making money is easy: bor­row as much as you can, and invest. It is a proven recipe for boom and bust

My other weekend serendipity was Andrew Brown’s Guardian article. He starts from the twaddle the ignorant and foolish produce, painting Rowan as a crude Marxist (actually ludicrous, if you know anything at all about where he’s coming from) and draws attention to his work on Dosteyevsky, in which Rowan

...hates the consumerist ideology of limitless choice because he thinks it tears us way from our real and limited wants; and he sees it prefigured in some of Dostoevsky's villains, for whom "Everything depends on choice, and what is chosen today need have no relation to what is chosen tomorrow or what is chosen by anyone else". Reading these words detached from their context, it's obvious that they are also the perfect description of the workings of an untrammelled market, which may go up, down, or merely sideways depending entirely on the free choices of participants today. For Williams such a market is dehumanising and by extension diabolical:

What is depicted as The Devils moves towards its conclusion is the process by which the elevation of choice increasingly produces an evacuation of desire.

Bruce Springsteen put it in rather fewer words: "57 channels and nothing on".

...Williams's real objection to the market is that it turns its participants into things to one another – and that, he believes, is a blasphemy because we are not things, but, in some sense, images of God. Money allows us to treat other as impersonal means to an end, and this offends both his reactionary and his socialist instincts profoundly. In 19th-century Russian literature, it is almost always nobler to be a serf than a wage-slave. Though the relationship between a serf and his master is based ultimately on violence, it is personal violence, not the impersonal and invisible transaction of the market, and so it has more room for virtue, and for growth.

...There's a great deal that could be said about Williams's particular critique of the markets: although he's a very clever man, I don't suppose he knows any more about economics than all the other very clever people currently bewildered by the question "What should we do?"; and to know that the archbishop supports a ban on short-selling doesn't make it much clearer that this ban is a good thing.

But the one thing you can't say is that this is a knee-jerk response, or a piece of publicity seeking. The belief that capitalism tends towards evil is one of his deepest convictions.

This is not crude Marxism. The old puritans drew all their theology from what they called “total depravity”. The current bonfire of the vanties on Wall Street is its own critique of human tendencies to build castles in the air out of fantasy. Perhaps the whole sorry business started in the garden, when Adam and Eve chose “choice.” It’s no more realistic to point a grizzled finger at City Traders as though they were somehow qualitatively more selfish than the rest of us — Christian views of the human condition caution about idolising “choice”. We are all in need of redemption, including our fears and fantasies... interesting times!

Dostoevsky: How to Read Rowan

Day off, and a chance to open Rowan Williams’ book on Dostoevsky, which arrived yesterday. I’m wondering how to eat this particular elephant. It doesn’t look like an in-flight job. Russian novels can be a tad complicated anyway:

And then, of course, Dostoevsky is stuffed with added complex metaphysics:

Think about it. Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky could take longer to read than it did to write. Well, I hope I don’t have to read the entire works of Dostoevsky to pass go, but it’s been a few years, so I've loaded up the eBook Reader with some (free) prime juicy Dostoevsky. Then it’s down to my patent method for reading Rowan's more “clotted” stuff:

• He’s really a poet, therefore it's densely packed with images. Often the images, in themselves are simple but surprising. That’s half the fun. Like all forms of poetry you have to unpack it yourself. If you only ever do bleeding obvious level sudokus, I can reliably suggest Rowan is not the writer for you. But if you like a good puzzle and learning by discovery, it’s magical stuff. Ideas are often approached by the side entrance, not the front door. It’s usually better to take things a chapter at a time, slow down, switch off the speedreading circuits, and relax. Like a poem, go with the flow and see where it leads. Don’t analyse, or you lose the flow! Read the whole paragraph, then stop and think it through.
  
• The writing often works on more than one level simultaneously. The secret is to latch onto the level that’s caught your attention, follow it through consistently, then review the chapter. If you pick up another angle follow that through in its own terms. If you accidentally mix ’n match the levels, it gets like controlling SuperMario on several levels at once, and you go nuts by the end of the chapter. You are allowed to read the book more than once.
  
• It rarely works to try and read the book at one sitting. Pacing chapters between, say, one morning a month sessions works a treat. I did once read a Rowan book on why history matters on a plane in under 3 hours; but historiography is my thing, and that was a one off achievement I don’t ever expect to emulate again.

Similar things could be said, perhaps, of Dostoevsky. So this is either gong to be a resonant match of deep speaking to deep, or a clotted expressionists Godzilla-meets-the-beast experience. I’ll let you know in, er, about two years time?

The Learning from Lambeth

OK — now I'm back at work, what is clearer to me as a result of Lambeth?

1. The sheer scale of our communion in global terms. It was immensely moving to meet colleagues from around the world — Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Darfur — and learn directly about the human and gospel dimensions of their lives. Most moving was the experience of being in a huge congregation saying the Lords prayer together in over a hundred languages. Quoting a Tanzanian brother, God’s Word speaks to each of us in our own language as the people we are, where we are. I was often reminded of Max Warren’s saying “It takes a whole world to know Christ.”
   So? Get to know and prioritize time for the world Church
2. The experience of African led Bible studies in community was fantastic. Some of the more academic English felt it wasn’t quite their cup of tea. It was mine. I am ashamed at the comaratively modest amount of time I have spent down the years in teams and groups studying the scriptures personally together. Business always seemed more important. If only I had seen that corporate study of the scriptures was our business, I might have prioritised things rather differently!
   So? Direct, personal, corporate Bible study could be given a greater place in the engine room of our decision making processes.
3. Indaba is a considerable discipline that takes a while to master, but it’s worth it. We are so inculturated into parliamentary methods and tactics, with winners and losers, as the way to make decisions. Indaba is slower, and requires a higher order of listening skills. Imagine, say, the last General Synod, without all the locker room intrigue, hysterics and theatricals. I am still haunted by a Japanese colleague, who had needed continuous translation, thanking the group in broken English for “the beauty of being listened to.” It brings no glory to God that the same would be very improbable feedback from many of our church meetings.
   So? Be more aware about the negative effects of parliamentary processes on people, and work for more patient, open, mutual, emotionally inteligent ways of deciding things together.
4. Rowan’s big Lambeth strategy seemed to be about committing to personal and corporate holiness, and alowing our plans to grow out of that. I have no grand overarching command and control strategy for Bucks. Here’s my strategy: Grace through Faith — strive to become the kind of people God needs us to be, and he will show us, on the ground, what needs doing and, more importantly, how to do it. As we step out, with authenticity, in faith we grow; as we shrink back, our visions get bogged down in fear and trivial pursuits. Therefore, as well as looking outward, centering our team processes in Scripture and being rigorously self-critical of our methods, we will be richly rewarded by God as we prioritise faith over fear, realism over fantasy, personal and spiritual excellence over mediocrity.
   So? We need more Faith, more realism, more holiness!

Rowan: a word from the Sudan

I was immensely struck by Ruth Gledhill’s refreshingly self-aware account of a conversation today with a Sudanese Bishop here at Lambeth:

I met a bishop from Sudan. The Sudanese caught the attention of the world early on in the conference with their statement that Gene Robinson should resign.

“What are you planning to do now?” I asked the good bishop, meaning what cunning strategy did they have devised to make things go their way at Lambeth.

He looked at me thoughtfully.

“Now, we are planning to get on a train and go to London and go shopping with our eyes.”

I was not to be deterred.

“How has the Archbishop of Canterbury done here? What do you think of him?”

His eyes lit up.

“The Archbishop of Canterbury is like a saint. We are so impressed. We have never known anyone quite like him. He has had all these important people here, the Coptic archbishop, the Orthodox, the Chief Rabbi, all these Cardinals. Every time he puts them on the podium and lifts them up above himself. It is as if he is saying, listen to these people before you listen to me. Oh he is such a leader. He is a true Christian. He is so humble. His witness has been so powerful. That is the message we are taking back to Sudan.”

I have to say I have been moved, almost to tears at times, by stories from the Sudan in Indaba and elsewhere. Here are people whose faithfulness is tested every day by official and unofficial persecution, war, poverty, injustice and hardship. They have also been very clear that they value the Communion, and do not want to break it up. They have also absolutely clear in standing up for what they see as Biblical standards against Western interpretations. How those principles can be put together is something we have to work out; and how to offer the good bishop and his colleagues real solidarity.

I should also say that this bishop’s words about Rowan were echoed by a conversation I had last night with some of the stewards who have been looking after us, and had been similarly struck.

Rowan Williams: rabbit in the hat?

Much interesting discussion this morning about Rowan’s address last night. He laid out exactly what the position is, in terms of our people see each other from both sides of the divide. All I’d want to add is that the vast majority of people here are on neither side of a divide, but somewhere in between. Both in capturing the content of the various positions, and in his method, he seemed to have caught matters exactly correctly.

Under the surface I also took his method as a good one to copy, where you only speak of others using terms they would use of themselves, putting yourself in their position. This makes a refreshing change from some of the hostile suspicion and namecalling that has taken place, which is in itself unworthy of the people concerned.

Our group this morning felt we needed to begin with reality. We can all fixate on “if only’s” — if only the US bishops hadn’t proceeded, if only Lambeth 1998 hadn’t been so mismanaged and poorly led, if only the Nigerians had come. All this is fantasy. The Chief Rabbi’s holy pragmatism was a better starting point. Rowan is inviting us to be more humble, to listen, to repent, to enlarge our hearts. This means dying to our fantasy rallying points and hostile preconceptions, so that we attain a state of reality, responding to the call to life of the Lord who called Lazarus to life. If, on the other hand, we just cant let go of that stuff, then we stay in the tomb. The life of Anglicanism does not depend on the institutional wellbeing of Anglican structures, which will plainly have to morph, bend and perhaps even break. It’s a simple spiritual choice, really.

To think of Rowan as some master-technicial whose job is to develop some bolt-on solution, like perpetual motion or nuclear fusion, is a cop-out. What he can do is

1. to put us back in touch with the healing resources of Scripture and core Christian tradition
2. cast honest and godly visions,
3. bring home to people the realities of what they are really saying,
4. model the processes he commends,
5. scope the realities of this passing world for us, but also those of a world which will never end.

All these things he is dong trasparently honestly and effectively. Those who seem to prefer authoritarianism, sour puritans or fantasy Romanists, don’t know what a big opportunity we’re being given to get real, and so to see God revealed (as in Galatians text at the beginning of the retreat) in us...

Anglican Communion Meltdown — Official

According to Ruth Gledhill of the Times, the Anglican Communion was “melting down” a few Wednesdays ago. Unfortunately by the time my theology day at Lambeth was over it had, er, melted back up again, and it was all there. Yesterday I managed to be present for a more official meltdown. In 27 degree heat (unusual round here) Lambeth Conference bishops were lined up in close proximity. Bishop Kirk Smith of Arizona has captured the furious singing of Amazing Grace that preceded the spontaneous ovation we all gave Rowan to show how much we all dislike him.

It was hot work, and I await the official results with interest...

Benedictine Roots, Christlike fruits

Canterbury Cathedral has deep Benedictine roots; Communities following the rule established and nurtured it, and the present management explicitly avow Benedictine principles of Christ-centredness and hospitality. This spirit has certainly come acrosss to many of us sharing their hospitality these two days. It’s been a joy to meet up with other bishops nurtured and inspired in the rule.

In a throwaway coment this morning Rowan described bishops’ calling to be “Christlike strangers.” Apostles, he suggested, are people on the road, needing to listen and be real about where they are, but never taking on the entirety of anywhere particular, for the sake of sustaining the greater journey. They need developing stereophonic hearing — one ear for the Word and one, my phrase not his, for the world. I found myself asking Benedict’s prime question: “how, then do I prefer nothing to Christ?” Benedict shows us, from his rich experience of community life, the futility and destructiveness of egotism, faction, malicious talk, and the primacy of conversion, stability and obedience (Rule cap. 58).

So here’s my lightbulb moment of the afternoon: To be doing the work of God, we need the kind of radical obedience that is willing to become the kind of community of people God calls us to be. So we are formed in Christ as a community, and Christ in us, that the world may believe...