On Waking up and Smelling Coffee

It’s hard to express the joy and relief, to those of us who often feel we live in the wilderness on such issues, of having an Archbishop who has woken up and shows real signs of being able to smell coffee. His much loved and revered predecessor, a scholar and saint, seemed to live on his own ecclesiastical planet, a place of bendy syllogisms, poetry and occasional weightlessness.

This produced an environment where it was a virtue for the Church to believe rather romantic stories about itself, for which synod became a massive recycling operation. Heavy in the air hung massive sententiousness about being the “National Church.” Its Nomenklatura shuffled around its hall of mirrors muttering to themselves mysterious self-referential Koans:

• Everything must change but continue to feel the same
• Theology was what really mattered, best done behind closed doors, and daily life was somewhere else
• A Church that acted as the sole arbiter of its own attitudes and behaviour could engage in Evangelism
• If everyone who looked out of the bubble and saw anything they shouldn't just shut up and switched off their computers it would all go away
• You could listen to people without hearing anything to change your life
• You could discriminate against gays and women without discriminating against gays and women as long as you always had and didn't mean to

To hear that it is absurd and impossible to pretend that nothing has changed is actually a massive relief.

In the old world the Church saw itself as the National Trust for Morals, especially about sex, driven by fear, especially about loss of control, and a sense of its own entitlement. Good news was good news in a desultory “Eat up your Brussels Sprouts” kind of way.

Where we are going the Church looks more like a movement, fuelled by faith, that can carry its institutional burdens honestly and lightly and not be bound by them. This kind of a Church is free to see what it sees. Its message is good news, not good news / bad news. This makes it Evangelical in the best sense of the term — genuinely engaged with the real world in a transformational way.

And the path to this new world, according to the parable of the prodigal son, is realism that leads to repentance, coming to its senses about itself, returning to the Father whose everlasting arms were always there underpinning everything. That leads to hope and, St Paul says, hope does not disappoint.

What does such a world offer those who are most invested in the old thing, who indeed have drawn much of their sense of identity and value from it? If the Peace Train is in the station, why should they climb aboard? We do not have to feel bad but we do have to think different. If we want a future without sexism and homophobic bullying, all we have to do is stop practicing those things, practice resurrection instead, and we are free.

We lose the whip hand, and the right to bully and hector people from the moral high ground. But we lost that anyway, years ago. What we gain is the dignity and loving respect that all are due. There is no shame in honest disagreement; but everybody’s ideas are subject to impact assessment from everybody else, mutually. Such a Church expresses unity held in tension between people whose outlooks are their own, not groupthink secured by manipulative mannerism.

In fact, nobody is going to lock anyone up in the Tower of London for holding retro-conventional views about women or gay people — that’s another self-aggrandizing hysterical story that has been doing the rounds. But those views will lose their privileged status, and unless people who hold them work to develop a new kind of discourse that does not have to rely on fear, disgust and autos da fé, they will find it increasingly difficult to be heard because of all the morally repellent white noise outsiders hear around their message. This would be a crying shame, because the world needs their wisdom and positive input across the spectrum of concerns, along with everyone else’s.

Engaged or marooned on their own island? It's a stark choice, after the Indian summer for churchy solipsism in the past few years. However, in fact, the eternal God is our refuge, all of us, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

The only way to prove it is to act as though it were true, and step out in faith...

Moral relativism is not enough...

Everyone will, like the Dalai Lama, find the death of Osama Bin Laden “understandable.” They will think his demise broadly desirable, and hope it draws a line under a particular strand of Fundamentalist militancy. But the manner of it, which is not entirely clear, raises disturbing questions for many people alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Given that Osama was more effective and dangerous totemically than operationally, have we, in fact, seen the last of him? Treating him as a warrior rather than a criminal could play dangerously into his followers’ fantasies about him. In a world where people deny the moon landings, 9/11, and the death of the Princess of Wales, we can look forward to a rich flourishing of conspiracy theories about it.

Nobody who was not in Osama’s bunker this time last week knows exactly what actually happened — indeed those who were present must have been in a state of mind very different from judge and jury. The troops themselves had to calculate their risks in real time, reacting to all the circumstances they found. The rest of us will be profoundly grateful we didn't have to make that call.

What the debate about Osama's death has revealed is a startling moral relativism in many reactionary journalists and a few of the politicians they phoned around as they strung together a story out of this.

We must respect humanity because it is an absolute created by God. He made human beings in his image and likeness. Humanity is not a privilege accorded by other creatures, but the Maker's Mark. My own sense of moral reference is a basic way of honouring God. My respect for the humanity of someone else is not a privilege for me to play God and give them, nor a reward for good behaviour. Furthermore, people are capable of all kinds of evil, all of us, Christians (Adam and Eve) believe. The Church calls realism about this the doctrine of the Fall, and it is the context of all human behaviour to a greater or lesser extent. This doctrine carefully preserves the truth that nobody is, in any simple sense, evil, although they can do massively evil things. God saw all that he had made and it was good.

It follows from this basic theology from page 1 of the Bible, that if I commit an act, like a lynching, that denies the image of God in another human being I not only act out my own fallen nature (thus losing the moral high ground), but I also behave in a way that compromises my own humanity — thank God he gave it as an absolute that no human being can take away, not even me.

The moral relativism of some journalists about this (“Normally, of course, we should respect life, but he didn't so we don't have to”) is a real slippery slope, morally. It betokens not Conservatism, but Pelagianism — one of the oldest heresies in the book. They must not be surprised if bishops, including the Archbishop, do not collude with their Pelagian views.

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...

Get real! Kill George Herbert!

At home I have a groaning shelf of books published since 1900 about ministry in the Church of England. Justin Lewis-Anthony’s If you meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him is the latest and, no mean feat, by far the best. The trouble with “how-to” books about ministry is that they can easily become part of an oppressive structure that keys into a significant vulnerability in sincere ministers. You woke up this morning with 25 things you hadn't done, and felt vaguely guilty about. You read the how-to book, and now you’ve got 35. Could be time to stick your head in a gas oven. Indulging in the wrong kind of how-to stuff, spiced with paperback Evangelical fisherman’s tales by the Successful, does not make you the best priest in the street (shades of the Father Ted “Golden Cleric”) but a nervous wreck. Its nursery slopes are the way to slow death — what some do call burn-out.

Justin’s excellent book does not play this how-to game, although it does end up talking Turkey, with excellent alternative strategies and tactics to help lower spiritual and personal blood pressure, and bring a Kill-George-Herbert priest back from the Church of the Planet Zog into the Church of England.

Justin’s thesis is that we in the C of E have indulged in harmful romanticism about ministry, focussed around a gentle bucolic fantasy about the ministry of George Herbert. Roman Catholic friends tell me of a similar phenomenon in their tradition about the Curé d’Ars. This ecumenical dimension, as well as a certain Cambridge historian’s reluctance to use any “-ism” except baptism, made me judder a bit over terms like “Herbertism” but the term does clarify the discussion and provides a tool to enable us to continue to enjoy Herbert’s sublime poetry without being sucked into a lot of crushing sentimentality and hype about his three year ministry as a parish priest in the seventeenth century, in a parish of under 500, with two curates to do the dirty work.

Back in the late eighties, when I was an urban vicar, I almost had a breakdown through the unsustainable and unrealistic expectations I was putting on myself. I can see it now, but it brought its own tunnel vision at the time. As well as lifebelts from spiritual advisers, teachers and friends, I read Bonhoeffer, then Vincent Donovan, then Martin Thornton, then Rowan Williams, then Sara Savage, as healing and hope gradually dawned. The analytical sections of this book reprised almost exactly the path I found towards recovery. Dame Edna would call it spooky. If I’d been able to read this book years ago it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Therefore I commend this book 110%.

The combination of high fantasy and self-expectations, an apparent duty to say yes to everybody all the time, a one-man-band mentality about ministry, historical romanticism and exhaustion almost got me. Care Bears who attenuate everything else about their lives get crocked. I don’t now mind admitting it, and the more we all admitted our need to be needed, got some boundaries in and stood up to our own fantasies and the cult of nice, the more we could all begin to be half the people God made us to be, as priests and ministers of the gospel.

This book is a vastly intelligent, compassionate, understanding and helpful resource. Some will find it a bit clever, so if you prefer your books stupid, you may be disappointed. Of course, if the cap does not fit you don’t have to wear it. It does fit many of us. The fact is that almost all of us vicars have been on this game for far too long. It has done us no favours. As crocked care bears we may even have sought a way off the not-so-merry-go-round. This book offers the most cogent escape route I know, historically and theologically, as well as practically. Take it, and get a life!

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.

Sufficient Grace. Power to change?

Joyce Kohl says “White signifies purity, joy and glory; red bravery, fire, blood, and charity.”

Combining the purity of white and the the passion of red gives us pink - the color of gentle love and desire... Pink signifies gentleness, and new birth.

Thank you for sharing that, Joyce. Gentleness and new birth may be tomorrow’s good news. Today, Canterbury Cathedral was a sea of red and white, paradise for Arsenal supporters, a world of languages and cultures, fears and hopes reaching out, as one, for the one true bread.

Like the liturgy, the Sermon was absolutely on the money. It didn’t not to duck the hard stuff, but invited us to break bread over it and gve it to God. Tomorrow we turn to the serious business of seeking a new way forward from God. The gospel principle is that if anyone has a problem with another Christian you talk it through with them, not at them or about them. Now we have the opportunity to talk directly together, exactly as Jesus told his disciples to do. In a broken world, perhaps working this way is a sign of hope. Duleep de Chickera, bishop of Colombo was speaking out of the experience of violence and intimidation, and Sri Lanka’s need to find another way.

The gospel for the day was the parable of the wheat and the tares — challenging the damaging fantasy of the “pure” church.

There can and there must be no uprooting, simply because if we attempt this game of uprooting the unrighteous then, my dear sisters and brothers, none of us will remain. We are all a mix of the wheat and the weeds. The wisdom of these words suggest that we stay together because we draw from a common soil, a common tradition, a common heritage. We are what we are regardless of our differences, because of our common life together and our origins. Transformation comes in this interaction, and transformation must come from within.

He left us with three practical challenges:

1. To be real about dsciplines of self scrutiny. I meet people who are tremendous experts on what is wrong with everybody else, and what is right about themselves. Away from here there’s been a lot of hostile terminology in the air — terms like “revisionist” and “fundamentalist” which people do not use of themselves voluntarily. Whenever you hear these terms you know the user is refusing to listen to the other person in their own terms, indulging in childish name calling. More significantly, there’s a great need to turn to where God is, whose authentic voice is characteristically heard in the silence than in the fire or the earthquake. We are all called to self-awareness.
2. To live unity in diversity, as symbolised in this liturgy. The world is dying of anger, party and faction. We are called to live the life of Pentecost in all its glorious diversity, not simply play the world’s game of faction, blame and spite.
3. To be prophetic. This means being real about things as they are, but refusing to give up hope God could remake them. It means being a voice for the voiceless, and not giving up. The key to prophecy is language that is God-inspired, not self serving.

So that’s the challenge. Time now to see if, as well as talk about this stuff, and be inspired by it, we can actually do it. God’s word says his grace is sufficient for us, and his power is made perfect in weakness.

Jesus reveals himself in... us?

Canterbury Cathedral’s community have been fantastically open and generous in making all the resources of the place available to us. Rowan has gven us two half hours of Bible teaching, to lead into a wandering, thoughtful, slightly arty, smorgasbord reflection and retreat experience in one of the most amazing holy places in the world.

In Galatians 1:15 Paul says God reveals himself not “to” me (safe option in most translations) but (Greek) “in” me. So every calling or vocation is an invitation to become, gradually, a place where God’s life is revealed, his promise and judgment. We sometimes meet fellow disciples who make us realise, with devastating clarity, how far we need to change. This is holiness. So we thank God for all who do this in their calling as Bishops, including (especially?) those unable to join us. The Christ we are all called to reveal is one whose body is real, in time and eternity, who gathers God’s Children from the corners of the earth into his kingdom. This is the prime vision we were called to represent and enact. II Corinthians 11:28-9 —

Besides other things I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for al the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble and I am not indignant?

So the only way of being a successful apostle is to be incapable of distancing oneself from the weakness of others. Bearing apostolic witness we have to speak of a new humanity in which we bear others burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ. Represent Jesus Christ and your defences will be down, and you will share in the weakness and loss of all, and your assumed loss will be part of the pain God takes upon himself in his infinite love. Paul sees the Church as the body called to actualise the death and resurrection of Christ in the world.

Therefore bishops can never, however much they’d like to be, become the spokesperson of a single nation, or cause, or group, however worthy they may be. Some will call it dithering — we have to find ways to make it prophetic. It would be much easier to be turn the church into an association of people who sign up to particular ideas, or reflect the nation in some vague way. What we actually have to do is express in our living the whole new humanity that is being gathered up in Christ. therefore we can never simply be servants to one subgroup. We have been taken hold of by Christ. We may of course want to affirm this person or that, but we cannot without also some note of challenge as well as affirmation. Therefore bishops have to prioiritse living and proclaiming the life of a Christ who gathers lost humanity into one in himself.

So Unity is not just everybody feeling good about each other, a quantitative thing, but a qualitative thing — each person impoverished by the another’s loss, each person enriched by others’ holiness. This is what Church is for, according to Saint Paul; and we’re off with some homework to reflect on what it means in our own lives and ministries. This isn’t, of course, what Rowan actually said — more what I heard him say. So, it’s time to go away and reflect...
I am massively looking forward to tomorrow.

Time to Think Different?

Confronted by the big problems of the real world, let alone the arcana of church politics, it is easy to reach sticking points where people simply dig in. In 1914 the fusion of spades, agricultural barbed wire and machine guns gave the world Trench warfare. The men who dug in thought it would all be over by Christmas, but they were wrong. Accidentally they had invented an all but unwinnable form of warfare.

The sober fact for all sides to contemplate is that, to quote Saint Albert himself, You cannot solve a problem on the level it was created. For everyone except the few lunatics who actualy enjoy warfare (boy, this is what I call Vahalla!) the formulation of impossible opposites is an invitation, not to dig in, but to start up the little grey cells. It’s time for fresh thinking, not trench warfare! So the question of the day becomes, reversing a slogan of 1914, Do you know a man digging trenches, when he should be digging your garden?

Whether you’re running the Lambeth conference, pathfinding for the Anglican Communion, getting life expectancy in Zimbabwe higher than it was in England in the 11th century, or finding how to be radically inclusive in a fully traditional church, the only method is not Power Play, Militant Entryism and Dumb-Boy Thuggery, but FAITH! And here is the perfect illustration of this principle, courtesy of Scott Gunn:

Sons of the Clergy strike again

I don’t do a lot of this sort of thing, but the 354th Festival of the Sons of the clergy in Saint Paul’s Cathedral yesterday was a blast. This charity started in 1655 as a testimonial and fundraiser for poor clergy who had lost everything by staying loyal and losing their jobs whilst the monarchy was abolished during the Commonwealth period.

The original Sons of the Clergy festival is a collaborative venture by the Church and the City of London. No fewer than three Cathedral choirs blast away in St Paul’s, then there’s a slap-up dinner in the Merchant Taylors Hall, with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London. Rowan did a brilliantly clear, simple and funny speech to say thank you, among others. These days the charity spends over £1m a year helping clergy and their family members in all kinds of hard places, often caused by illness, marriage breakdown, or debt.

It’s very good to be with the network of people who make all this happen, having often seen the practical value of the things they do to help clergy and their families behind the scenes. There is a great variety of needs and predicaments among working clergy, and I’ve been trying to sharpen up the focus of our own Bucks Clergy charity, so that it can help more effectively. I’m very keen to collect creative ideas, as well reacting to the obvious things. Need and debt, like death and taxes, don’t go away... How can others help?

How to inflame Passion...

To start a media firestorm, you need a media flamethrower. Say what you like about Archbishop Rowan, anyone who writes 146 word sentences ain't no media flamethrower. So how do you whip up a firestorm out of a law lecture? The Wardman Wire has been digging through some BBC dustbins, to find out exactly how the Archbishop was kebabed by BBC news editors before he even opened his mouth.

The moral? The looser the nickers, the easier it is to get them in a twist. You need them well twisted when you're hanging archbishops out to dry. Many Congratulations to Matt Wardman for digging this lot up. Plainly the process of sexing up dodgy dossiers is not confined to government — You have to, if you’re churning out what Nick Davies calls “flat earth news” I’m really sorry the BBC’s editors are now on the game. Perhaps this story isn't all doom and gloom. Making Fox look like a serious news organisation is some kind of an achievement.