Anonymous Tosh?

Every now and then an envelope arrives like this one from Slough yesterday. I tear it open expectantly, and the first thing I look for is the address at the top and the name at the bottom...

Oh dear! I am disappointed because, to put it as kindly as I can, although the writer has rather trenchant views about a Vicar in Bucks, s/he seems to have forgotten to give a name or address.

I used actually to read letters like this, but these days I don’t. Out the back of the Chaplain’s office lives a good and faithful servant called Erik the Shred. These days I invariably take letters which people have forgotten to put their names or addresses on out to Erik. He shreds them so that they can be turned into compost and Lucy uses that to grow delicious runner beans. We find that is a life-giving use for anonymous letters.

This may seem like a slightly extreme thing to do. After all, I’m a nosy person and would love to know what everyone has to say, surely. The trouble is I can’t not know what I do know, even if it’s wrong, if you get my drift.

I believe I owe my colleagues a basic loyalty where if someone was ashamed to put their name to their letter, that’s the end of the matter.

I remember people saying to me when I was a parish priest “Rector I shouldn’t be telling you this.” The simple answer, which accords with my Scots Presbyterian genes, is “well don’t, then.” Bitterness, slander, gossip, words that say “Raca” arising from thoughts that breach the ninth commandment, grow from such roots. best strangle them at birth.

It may be that the letter I never read was the sort of letter that made the writer feel better to have written, but should, in fact, never be read in its original form. There are letters like that. I hope this is one of them. It may be that they really want to draw to my attention to something with words for which that they can take responsibility, in which case I’d be delighted to hear from them. It’ll get here even quicker with the correct postcode (“9BG” not “9BD”)

Erik is a hungry lad. He has only had two such snacks in the past five years, which, given the amount of mail we get, is high testimony to the basic character and decency of people out there. I wonder if my “straight to the shredder unread” policy is a bit hard-nosed, but suspect it’s the correct thing to do... surely?

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.

Judging Clergy misconduct

An HR day out in London training for the implementation of Common Tenure, and an Ecclesiastical Law Society meeting at Lincoln’s Inn, which included a characteristically wise, just and humane presentation by Sir John Mummery, Lord Justice of Appeal, President of the Council of Inns of Court and Chair of Tribunals appointed under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003. Sir John came to this work with considerable experience of appeals and disciplinary procedures in the legal profession having in the 1990’s headed various tribunals relating to employment appeals, the security services and investigatory powers.

CDM 2003 came into force in 2006, replacing a costly and obscure hotch-potch that had evolved down the years for complaints about the clergy in matters other than worship or doctrine. Some 22,000 people are subject to it. The 2009 report is due out soon, but in 2008 there were 69 formal complaints about their behaviour, 65% of them from ordinary members of the public rather than archdeacons or churchwardens. 3 were referred to tribunal, all of them resulting in a finding of guilt.

CDM is the only mechanism for dealing with clergy professional misconduct or abuse of trust and office, and anyone can access it by simply downloading the forms from the internet, complete with guidance notes (here). Transparency and fairness are paramount, though not everyone involved will always agree they have been served perfectly because, frankly, they aren’t aways. All legal procedures need to be subject to continuous vigilance and improvement to serve justice the way they are designed to. The system doesn’t deliver in and of itself. People operating the system try to.

CDM is emphatically NOT:

• for questions of doctrine or ceremony, which are provided for in other ways more appropriate to the complexity of the subject and the ancient liberties of the clergy
  
  
• a mechanism for grumpy people or bullies to attack clergy they don’t like. There are safeguards and rules of evidence for everyone built into it to prevent not only abuse of office by clergy but also abuse of the legal system by compainants. If the people soncerned agree to be reconciled the system encourages this, but if they require their day in court, this is where they get it. They have the right to decide.
  
  
• what HR people call a capabiity procedure — a way of getting individual clergy to raise their games. Among other places, capability’s being worked out in the new terms and conditions of service guidelines going to General Synod next month, not CDM.
  
  
• a mechanism for preventing pastoral breakdown. Indeed if there has been a breakdown of relationships going to court usually just winds things up and raises the stakes. Everyone can come out of it more cross than they went in. This is coercive and disciplinary, not a substitute for honest communication and relational gitches. Jesus taught the wisdom of dealing with relationahl matters directly and honestly, and being sparing about court proceedings.
  
  
• a way of preventing anyone (especially bishops) dong anything. There are good procedural reasons why in the early stages, if there is possibility of it being used, bishops need to protect complainants, complainees, and themselves by not weighing in and fouling the procedures up, but especially if no finding of guilt is made (as in the majority of cases) that emphatically does not mean there is nothing to be done — the so-called “Black Hole problem.” You can do all sorts of things with people apart from sacking them and depriving them of their homes, indeed in the vast majority of cases something else will probably turn out in the end to be the right thing to do.
  
  
• The question of parallel proceedings needs to be worked out carefully case by case, but CDM is not in any way a substitute for criminal or civil proceedings, or a gratuitous supplement to them in order to make them especially nasty for members of the clergy.
  

CDM Is a way of punshing serious misconduct, that is specific provable blameworthy behaviour that would lose your your job in any other line of work. Like all legal decisions, it is a matter of fact and degree. The system also aims to prevent repeat occurrences, and deter others.

Therefore actions for changing service times, parking in a disabled bay, sunbathing in your back garden (whence the complainant had to stand on tiptoe to see you), and “looking at someone in a funny way” (all of which have been atempted) are unlikely to succeed. Complaints about inappropriate relationships, improper management of Church funds, and anything damaging the welfare of a minor, if proved, are far more likely to result in findings.

Like any legal system it is and should be, as it seems to be, wide open to learning about its own shortcomings, constantly seeking to improve its capacity to deliver justice. The attitude is “Every day I learn something I didn’t know before and am often surprised I didn’t know before.” It’s prosection not persecution. It’s designed to help everyone as much as legal proceedings can help everyone (which is not always and everywhere possible). I was encouraged to find that it is served, with great humility and realism, by one of the finest and most experienced legal practitioners in the country. That’s good news for everyone.

Herding cats and counting sheep

Whilst away Church of England attendance figures for the year were released, triggering the usual ritual Groundhog Day for terminal decline, renaissance, or business as usual, depending almost entirely on the prejudices and agendas of the people doing the prognosticating. It doesn't seem to matter much what they actually say. Everybody, of course, is abslutely right from their own point of view, especially when it’s buttressed by hard figures.

As it happens, however, yesterday Kevin Ryan, diocesan ICT manager came yesterday to explain to Bucks area deans and lay chairs the use of Tableau, a new statistical tool we are making available for deanery planning. This enables people to drill down easily into local statitsics. As well as Kevin, we were lucky that one of our lay chairs is a professional in the field of marketing statistics, and was able to correct many basic errors of perception and interpretation among our group of 21 people. From this exercise we learn a few home truths:

1. The interpretation of statistics for serious marketing purposes is a fne art. What you are looking for affects what you find, and all kinds of allowances have to be made, with local knowledge, before you can arrive at a real answer to pretty much any particular question. It can be done, but not without a lot of work and qualification. Look at two examples from Bucks of explosive growth, more than doubling numbers over five years. One is caused by the fact that it is a reopened former redundant church near new housing.The other is caused by significant Evanglism more than doubling the size of an already large congregsation in five years. Make what you will of either, but to make sense of data you need to consider contextual and local realities.
   
   
2. Figures usually look enticingly accurate and absolute simply because they are figures, and only very occasionally because of the precision with which they describe particular realities. Go to any school governors' meeting in the league tables season, and you'll see what I mean.
   
   
3. Everything depends on the accuracy of the data that went in to begin with. Church statistics, especially attendance ones go through three significantly wobbly layers of filtration which cannot be avoided... starting with the fact that they are collected largely by volunteers.
   
   
4. Level 1: One is the significant differences in counting methods and consistency, which vary from never to regular, as well as from scrupulous to megasloppy. When I was an incumbent I once took a Sunday out to check our numbers. I physically counted 242 people on the premises. The number in the book was 127. This led to two significant discoveries about my parish. (a) the greatest variable factor was usually, in fact, which verger had done the counting. The more otpimistic ones tended to count higher, the more pessimistic lower, and some always the same kind of figure by a process of dead reckoning whereby they would go to the vestry, check the figure they'd put in last time, ask themselves whether the service felt fuller or not this week, and then stick something in the book. I’m not proud of this doscovery, but it was the way I discovered things were generally done. Accuracy was higher for smaller services simply because it was very much easier to count 16 people at evensong than 242 at the main morning service.
   
   Level 2: To derive the usual Sunday attendance figures, you need to average four Sundays in October noting any exceptions (like, say a baptism in the main service). This, along with the mathematical abilities of clergy and wardens, reveals a cornucopia of results, some more compliant with the theory of how they should be collected than others.
   
   Level 3: Returns rates vary. Only one deanery out of ten had an almost complete dataset and for another it was almost non-existent. Those who want to count sheep need first to herd cats.
   
   
5. As a result of all these realities, the grossed up statistical picture may, surprisingly, be the most “accurate.” I don’t mean the figures are actually correct, they surely aren’t, but grossed out across a field through a few years, trends may well appear, with the inaccuracies cancelling each other out a bit. The big story seems to be one of significant and fundamental erosion in the nineties, and a generally flatlining pattern this century. It’s a good way of disappointing everyone with an axe to grind, but it seems to be the truth. It’s is probably the least promising straw from which to make bricks to load into coshes, but I'm sure noble attempts were made last week.
   
   
6. The best use of these figures is local, because that's where people have the contextual knowledge to make sense of them. Thus our use of Tableau.
   
   
7. These figures are like reported crime rates. Other oft-quoted data, for example, the English Church Census, is of the nature of the Home Office Crime Survey — the dataset behind it is very much more partial and any extrapolation from it very much more an expert game, like long range weather forecasting. Caveat Emptor.
   
   
8. The figures we drilled down into, with some degree of local knowledge, revealed a huge variation, from the kind of classic decline patterns Fleet Street assumes, which do exist occasionally, to a far more egneral static pattern, and one or two examples of swift decline or explosive growth. More growth than devcline among these last. There are a handful of Bucks Churches which have experienced the kind of growth where they have had to double up shifts to fit everybody in, and one deanery in which, across almost thirty parishes, numbers have more than doubled over the past five years. What are you likely to experience in any of our 288 places of worship in Bucks? If you really want to know you’ll just have to go and see...
   

South Africa: Rubber necks, stiff backs

We flew out of Cape Town at 22:40, 22 degrees, into a typical January London morning — 3 degrees, dense low cloud, people shuffling around trying to hold their colds at bay. Now back in the UK, and wallowing in seemingly unimited bandwidth, it seems the main problem about South Africa is also its greatest joy — it's a long way away.

It’s been a wonderful experience for us both, out of which it would be good this week to share a few photos and some larger questions South Africa raised for me. Today, hacking through a forest of emails and gunk, a few orientation pictures of the Cape Peninsular, including some animate and inainamte animals, that demonstrate how everything seems technicolor in clean air, especially in midsummer.

Rubbernecking the Rainbow Nation

About fifteen months ago, Lucy and I were bounced off a flight to Chicago by overbooking. But being jolly decent people, Virgin Atlantic offered us a deal. Go next day, and they offered us two tickets anywhere in the world, except Australia (They don’t own Australia, the lady said. Murdoch does? I wondered). If not our Oyster, the world was to be, for a week, perhaps, some other kind of rubbernecked bivalve mollusc.

2009 was our silver wedding anniversary year, and the kids put on a brilliant do for us at home. We could go somewhere together on our own, for the third time in 25 years.

We had two nights away from home for our tenth anniversary, with a working trip to India for Schools development in 2007.


So, with a world to choose from (except Australia), we chose Cape Town. Two of the most influential people in my young life (he said unpretentiously) had strong associations with Cape Town — the teacher who taught me how to read a poem, and my research supervisor at Oxford. We’d never been. Now we had nothing to lose but our children... for a week. Witha little help from our friends, Bob was our Uncle. Or Richard, perhaps. This week finds us rubbernecking, not writing postcards (too lazy) but with the opportunity to put an few pictures on the blog.

We begin almost overwhelmed by a beautiful country in midsummer, still very much under construction, but with everything to play for. There's a lot of beauty around us, and a vibrancy in the air.

The challenges are considerable, though, including the way it’s becoming a magnet, or lightning conductor, or something like that for all of Africa — its refugees, its resources, its challenges.

Surprises await around every corner. I’ve never seen a harbour as full of seals, not only rolling around just under the surface, but sitting only a few feet away from people, slobbing about. They also do a particularly nifty line in what looks like Synchronised Swimming, sticking their flippers in the air in a kind of mock-Jaws impersonation that probably cools them down, or warm them up, or something. It entertained us anyway...

Haiti: Sorrow + Anger = Resolve?

First and foremost, here are agencies many thousands of people in the diocese are using:
TearFund:
http://www.tearfund.org/News/Haiti+earthquake/
Christian Aid:
http://www.christianaid.org.uk/emergencies/current/haiti-earthquake-appeal/index.aspx?gclid=CPvvjemgq58CFVVu4wodEw3o0w
World Vision:
http://www.worldvision.org/worldvision/eappeal.nsf/egift-haiti-quake-relief?OpenForm
Disasters Emergency Committee:
https://www.donate.bt.com/dec_form_haiti.html
In addition, microfinance sites like Kiva.org, will well worth a visit once the dust has settled from the immediate impact of the disaster. That way you can keep up a chronic stream of giving into the system for the next few months and years to help people rebuild economic activity from the ground up.

All these agencies have people already on the ground and a strong track record with disasters. World Vision is US based, if that seems most direct. DEC are the UK co-ordinating agency for materiel. Christian Aid and Tearfund have good UK specific contacts both ends, and most churches have worked for years with one or the other. As they used to say on those old pension ads, it doesn’t matter which you choose. Just choose something...

Most upsetting is the steamhammer impact of this disaster on some of the poorest and most marginalised people in the world. As people and materiel arrive, the infrastructure and network just isn't there to deploy resources as effectively as could be. More disturbingly, I have to wonder, in all my ignorance of these things, when a major earthquake struck Los Angeles in 1994 72 people, tragically died. Much the same thing happened in Haiti last week, and, estimates vary, but perhaps: : 300 times as many people have died already.

Please tell me what I’ve missed in making this comparison. A disaster like this exposes, in a gut wrenching way, something we live with surprisingly easily as long it’s kept in its place on the back burner — the impact of inequality in the world.

To my shame I had little concept of Haiti before this happened, beyond having read Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians in 1974. Even then, like Papa Doc himself, I took it largely as a personal indictment of Duvalier, and didn't really register how great was the systemic future burden such governance imposes on a nation. This now declares itself as poverty, injustice and corruption compound the suffering caused by the earthquake in a million ways.

Bullying, Bureaucracy, Vague Values?

Do we need a load of bureaucracy to tackle workplace injustice? At heart I am a swashbuckling Cavalier, who would like everything as easy as possible. Too much bureaucracy can actually foul up a process with excess semi-relevant information, and procedures that paralyse action. Ask any police officer. Maybe Bureaucracy is just a standard human activity, like politics, cooking, sex, or religion. If so, there’s good bureaucracy and bad bureaucracy. Small and effective beats big and cumbersone every time. At its best, like electricty in a home, you should be unaware of bureaucracy as a thing in itself. It should just be working away in the background. Ye shall know how good or bad it is by its fruits.

There’s something disturbing about playing off trust against audit trails. Up to the 1850’s you could be a doctor in England by self-definition. Today doctors have to go to medical school and pass exams. There’s far more than a bit of paper involved in the healing art, of course, but the paperwork actually increases, not reduces, my trust when I go to the surgery, as well as reminding my doctor of the story so far. Medical standardization mustn’t stifle creative research, or, even more importantly awareness of the patient as a person, but without some standardization we’d be back where we were in the 1850’s.

How vague are the positive values I suggested were the antidote to cultures of fear and intimidation — diversity, equality, respect? Call them anything you like, but

1. the logic of the Day of Pentecost implies the Church isn’t meant to be definitively homogenized around any particular culture, but incarnate in many cultures. It takes a whole world truly to know Christ.
   
   
2. Jesus had strong views on equality: “call no man Father, for you have one Father and you are brothers.” This was no incidental soundbite, but the cornerstone of a new philosophy of leadership that was not optional. Where the institutional Church has not been wholehearted or disciplined at implemeting that philosophy, it has suffered.
   
   
3. Respect, or the Golden Rule, is the centrepiece of the Sermon on the Mount. Niceness and good intentnions are no kind of substitute for justice. Ask the prophet Amos. His standard is the plumb line, and applying that standard doesn’t happen by accident.

Actually, I don’t see anything vague about these values at all. Life is full of practical opportunities to apply them. What’s truly vague is assuming “anything we do is bound to be OK because we are, after all, the Church, and we’ve been doing it for years...” A Church that is always being reformed has to be healthier than one that thinks it’s arrived.

I think the best way of defending the Church is for it to be authentically and recognizably walking in the way of Jesus Christ.

That means putting in serious, intentional work to focus on and apply these simple gospel values, in ways that can be measured. This involves rejecting deceit, self-deception, corruption and manipulation in our life together, in any practical way that presents itself. And a Church which is always being reformed will, by grace, come closer to being what it was called to be. It will be more missionally attractive than one that is content simply to coast on, with occasional kicking and screaming when it’s caught out.

Punky Business with Ian Dury

Musical biopics are a funny old genre. Song of Norway is a nice film. People who hate that one, however, may enjoy Mat Whitecross’ Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll. This chaotic picaresque romp contains lashings of all three — exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a 1980’s Hogarth — like Gin Lane 250 years ago, a riot of grotesque caricatures, much exaggerated swearing and snarling rending the air, sordid and messed up relationships.
Very Punk.

If you hate Punk music (and be honest, that’s what you’re meant to do) you will probably think this film is no more than a filthy old mess. The script is a coarse riot. Crude rumbustuous jumble is relieved by curiously clinical flashbacks to a nasty 1950’s Spastics School. This stands for a succession of Establishments against which Dury rebelled in his youth, including Wycombe Royal Grammar School, briefly attended in the fifties. Various iconic moments, such as Dury’s punchup with Omar Sharif, are alluded to but not portrayed.

So what of Ian Dury? He caught polio at age seven, he believed from a swimming pool. His schooldays were nasty, brutish and degrading, kindling lifelong rage and a rejection of all adult authority. His grown days were one perpetual run-in with the bottle. Especially after he’d had a few, he saw himself as a kind of Spartacus figure for disabled people. He pioneered wearing of razor blades as ear rings. While his band was based in Aylesbury he drove a maroon van bearing the words “Danger — Inflammable.” Bus full of nutters.

Dury was capable of moments of great affection, but fundamentally incapable of sustaining a grown-up relationship. He was an atrocious husband and father, but one who raised atrociousness to an art form. One sub-theme of this film parallells his parenting performance with that of his own old dad. Dury was very clever with words, and his furiously alienated stance made him a kind of mirror for the rest of us from somewhere way beyond decent society.

The film’s highlights are its occasional set piece numbers, includng such unexpected surrealistic pleasures as Hit Me with your Rhythm Stick performed underwater in a swimming pool, delivered with blazing energy and freewheeling anarchy. The film’s climax, though, is a riproaring Cover of Ian Dury’s contribution to the International Year of Disabled people (1981, you remember) — tastefully entitled Spasticus Autisticus:

I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus
I'm spasticus autisticus
I wibble when I piddle
Cos my middle is a riddle...
Hello to you out there in Normal Land
You may not comprehend my tale or understand
As I crawl past your window give me lucky looks
You can be my body but you'll never read my books...
I'm knobbled on the cobbles
Cos I hobble when I wobble
Swim!
So place your hard-earned peanuts in my tin
And thank the Creator you're not in the state I'm in
So long have I been languished on the shelf
I must give all proceedings to myself...
54 appliances in leather and elastic
100 000 thank yous from 27 spastics...

Ian Dury himself would have loved the look and feel of this film, probably as much as, if not more than, Grieg would have enjoyed Song of Norway. Andy Serkis does an energetic, more than capable job of impersonating the Diamond Geezer, assisted by authentic Blockheads. This is quality casting and acting, ladies and gentlemen. If you’ve given up reading this in disgust, Mr Dury would be tickled pink. If you haven’t, you probably should try and catch this film while it’s going by. I suspect, however, that its blend of blazing anger, pungent irony, verbal tiddlywinks, and angry toilet humour will not easily travel far beyond these shores.

Dury’s basic questions about how exceptional people are seen in society, their room for freedom not to be helped by well-meaning people, a notional right for anyone to define themselves however they damn well want, disability and autonomy, could still do with answering, thirty years on. And punk? Like most fashions it probably wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It seems little more than a rabid “Mr Angry” protest against the stifling conventionality of Britain in the fifties and sixties. Its incoherence makes it more like a burp in the face of the Establishment than an alternative way of life. Take away the object of its loathing, and all that is left is sound and fury, signifying, er, not a lot. But Dury’s fury was profoundly authentic, and this film is worth a look, especially if you are intrigued by the raw energy of Punk. I wouldn’t, however, take my mother in law. Seven out of Ten stars.