Scripture as Spiritual Reading

One of the great illusions about prayer is that you have to abstract yourself on your own from everything that really matters to you, light up a few tea lights, engage a soapy “spiritual” gear and hope for the best. Many would like to enrich their praying lives, in a way, but suspect they’ll never manage.

What we all need is a bit of encouragement and a few pointers that engage us where we are.

Fr William Mills is rector of an Orthodox parish in Charlotte, NC. His 30 Day Retreat, billed as “a personal guide to spiritual renewal” is a tool to get you going on Lectio Divina using a few minutes each day spread over a month. He takes well known Bible passages from the gospels and Paul, and invites the reader to slow down, chew over them and reflect. Each section ends with some practical questions and follow up Bible reading. This book could work very well for a group that read daily, whose members kept some personal notebooks, and met weekly like a book club.

Fr Mills’ approach is practical rather than narrowly academic, but its author does happen also to be an a professor of philosophy of religon. His experience with students gives extra resonance to his rather homsepun comment. Written by an Orthodox priest, published by a Roman Catholic publishing house, this book is broad guage classic Christianity rather than anything narrowly denominational. As a get-you-going guide for groups or individuals who want to explore well-known Scriptures as a Spiritual resource, what you see is very much what you get. There are some helpfully surprising questions, though, for a book aimed foursquare at Christian believers — “what irritates you about Jesus?” for example. The book should prove a significant help for those suffering from what the author calls Dusty Bible Syndrome, as well as people who’ve not engaged with Scripture as spiritual reading as much as they would like.

Reading for (Digital) Revolutionaries

Colleagues have been asking me about books to help them understand the communications revolution engulfing us.
Everyone is having to ascend a steep learning curve, steepest and most treacherous, perhaps, for those most accustomed to pre-digital communications. Many colleagues don’t have time to explore extensively online, but they are thoughftul people who realise that things are changing fundamentally, and would like to get their laughing gear round contemporary communication technology and its implications for their own work as pastors or Christian leaders.

How far should one get into this stuff, and how?
It rather depends on your learning style. Some assemble flat-pack furniture by getting it out and having a go: This learning style has a lot to commend it, for contemporary media. Other IKEA customers prefer to read the instructions first, to construct a framework within which they can understand what they are trying to achieve. Christian leaders will, rightly, be anxious about the risks of getting something very wrong whilst experimenting. There is value for all in including conventional reading in a journey of discovery.

There is an incredible variety and number of titles out there — this in itself adds confusion. Colleagues may have a particular interests, and I’d gather my top 17 titles around five frequent lines of inquiry. If you’re reading this, by definition, you’ve made it online, and are probably far more expert in these matters than I. Therefore I’d love to know what you think of my immediate suggestions...

(1) What is going on? How is our cultural context changing?

Begin, I would say with Clay Shirkey: Here comes everybody — How change happens when people come together. Alongside a general line of approach, people over 50 wonder how people under 30 habitually communicate and what kind of culture are they developing. For this, I’d turn to Don Tapscott: Grown Up Digital (following up an earlier survey of the net ge eration called Growing up Digital). To assist contemplation about the implications for institutions, I’d still recommend Ori Brafman and Rod A Beckstrom: The Starfish and the Spider — the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations.

(2) What is modern communications technology doing to the ways we get things done, our business practices and attitudes?

The classic strategic overview is Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics — How mass collaboration changes everthing. At a strategic level, leaders in any institution will need to take serious account of the map provided by Gary Hamel: The Future of Management. For a closer and more recent picture of the operational possibilties, I recommend Arthur L. Jue, Jackie Alcalde Marr & Mary Ellen Jassotakis: Social Media at Work: How networking tools propel organisational performance. I have been asked about books dealing specifically with Facebook, like Clara Shih: The Facebook Eras. If interested in the operational feld within which Facebook operates, you could do a lot worse than Lon Safko & David K. Brake: The Social Media Bible.

(3) What are the implications of all this for the Church as a communications outfit?

Shane Hipps: The Hidden Power of Electronic media: How media shapes Faith, the Gospel and Church starts with concepts first formulated by Marshall MacLuhan, drawing acutely from them challenges and benefits for the Church. The same pastor and theologian’s Flickering Pixels aks the $64K question “How far is this technology our servant, and how far our master?” Good for sermons...

(4) How do you put yourself or your product over in this environment: What’s it doing to Marketing?

Here I remain very impressed by the wisdom contained in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff: Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies. This is particularly helpful on how feedback can be set up and maintained in a complex and crowded environment. Many hundreds of books on the groaning shelves address marketing issues, but I like the people-focused treatment in Juliette Powell: 33 million people in the room. Eric Qualman is an interesting marketing writer, whose recently published Socialnomics assesses, on the basis of research, the impact of new media on marketing. If you get a taste for this stuff and want to strategise in the light of the above, I’d recommend Larry Weber: Marketing to the Social Web — although it’s a couple of years old, it proposes a clear iterative strategic approach which is easily transferable to many contexts.

(5) Should I start a blog, and if I do how do I write material for electronic media?

This is probably an area where it really is best just to click around the various blogs out there, but a very good overview of some excellent and innovative pratitioners of the medium can be found in Michael A. Banks: Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World’s top Bloggers. Getting down to brass tacks, how am I supposed to write material suitable for web communications? In a space full of words really good writing remains precious. Janice Redish: Letting go of the Words, deals with some stylistic particularities of new media, but I don’t think it’s worth worrying too much about these. What makes good writing interesting remains surprisingly constant. I wish I had read a good book like Angela Phillips: Good Writing for Journalists years ago, but if people don’t have time for that, I recommend George Orwell’s Essay “Politics and the English Language.” If really pushed for time, T. S. Eliot’s poem “Whispers of Immortality” says pretty much everything that needs to be said about writing style. I suspect the areas of communications in which clergy need most training is effective use of presentation software. Some the dreariest uses of PowerPoint to deliver design abortions that are merely the script reduced to headings make me want to stick my head in a gas oven... But that’s another tale.

Well that’s a preliminary list> What have I missed? What is now obsolete?

Swinging Sixties bring moral meltdown

Remember the sixties, when the rot set in? The white heat of new technologies began to transform Britain, but brought its own decadence and troubling signs of a moral meltdown. With young royals misbehaving themselves in public, new fashions transformed London into a world capital of chic, but the drug scene bloomed. Dodgy detectives began to swing round the City as a law unto themselves, and the public began, for the first time, to feel real disquiet about police and other public institutions. The Church lurched from crisis to crisis. Attendance slumped, and a quarter of the bishops boycotted the Lambeth Conference. The other side of the pond, the age was defined by an assassinated president. Terrible decade, the Eighteen Sixties.

The decadence started with the Road Hill House Murder, a dark tale of family breakdown, involving a toddler with his throat cut, hidden adultery and psychotic teenagers. The new media feeding frenzy that followed gripped the nation. Tractarianism played an integral part in the person of A. D. Wagner, the priest who made Anglo-Catholicism the London, Brighton and South Coast religion.

Kate Summerscale has now brought the whole sordid affair to life, with a deft hand and clear eye. Using contemporary records and later revelations over the next eighty years, she lifts the stone on the whole frightful business. Real Life makes the Woman in White look like a Sunday School Outing. It’s a rollicking good read, though unsuitable for urchins, lunaticks and domestic servants. Fortunately most of them can’t read anyway.

Cranmer (almost) gets his man

In the glory days of the Church of England, when Archbishop Fisher was on the throne, real vicars had leisure for two defining activities — playing with train sets and reading detective novels. In these dog days they have to spend much more time on the day job. I had a day off recently reading Revelation — the detective novel vicars can read without a conscience because the “Inspector Morse’s Boss” character is none other than Archbishop Cranmer himself. Those were the days, when Archbishops of Canterbury had leisure to superintend detectives who could appear in novels for the clergy to read.

C. J. Sansom has a fine eye for every nuance of the last days of Henry VIII. He spots the various complex subcurrents of post-dissolution England perfectly — heaving filthy streets, rising middle class, and upheaval all round. This, his fourth Tudor historical thriller, is set in 1543. Henry VIII is become an increasingly unstable old dog — irascible, toothless but prone to bite anyway. Various heads have been rolling. Mainline reformers are hanging on in there by their fingernails, whilst trying to shoo an understandably reluctant Catherine Parr into Hank’s marital house of horrors. Out on the streets “Bible Men” are workshopping various forms of “radical biblical” religion with more zeal than understanding, trying to turn the C of E onto a fundamentalist associational sect. Revelation is a Name of the Rose type romp through the stews and marshes of Tudor London in pursuit of a Biblicist nutter — Bizarre Cluedo with murder weapons like apocalyptic fish-oil and exploding Maggots. This book is Excellent Escapism from a world where religious nutters plan mayhem whilst radical Bible men try to turn the C of E into a Biblicist sect. Sleep Tight tonight. Under Cranmer’s supervision, Shardlake, a very Anglican slight underachiever, almost gets his man, and the evil is flushed away. It all comes of handling the poetry of the Apocalypse like a textbook. Reader beware...

as long as a piece of string

Looking ahead to Advent, which I’m going through this year with Maggi Dawn’s reflections Beginnings and Endings, the cover and blurb drew me into thinking about time; time (chronos — how long), and time (kairos — opportunity). And what about the context of both: beyond time what? — eternity? Infinity? world without end?

We can use a bit of Maths here. How long is the coastline of Britain? There’s an AA Road Atlas answer, which is good enough for most purposes, but there’s also a completely different Mathematical answer, which you could express by breaking down every line and mapping it as a set of points in a complex plane to form a fractal. Here’s a Mandelbrot set (not the coast of Britain). If the final frame were the width of your screen, the whole fractal would be larger than the known universe — it’s an interesting image to pray with... world without end?

Ever-rolling Stream...

Just Time, today, to tear the wrappings off an interesting looking new book, Endings and Beginnings, by Maggi Dawn, priest, poet, musician and theologian. That kind of Time is “Kairos.” But it isn't the only kind of time.

There's another word also for ‘Time’ in NT Greek. It’s Chronos — the stuff by which you set your watch. The second word in my first sentence, Kairos is “time in its human context,” opportunity. Chronos runs smooth and regular, like a vibrating quartz crystal. Kairos is far more subtle and complex. Can you say how long, strictly speaking, was your first Kiss? Labour? Driving Test? wait for a scan result? You can give a figure, without beginning to explain what it really meant or why.

Advent is the time when everything comes full circle — The old year dies, and the whole story begins again. As we follow it through, we are put back in the position of people who had never heard of Christ, so that we can live the whole story from scratch, and capture something of its freshness and vitality, as well as opening up new possibilities we didn't see last time round. Thus we journey onward towards the city of infinite day, one step, one cycle at a time, refreshed and renewed on our way.

Maggi's book takes us through some Bible passages that may help unlock this process. She tracks the story through Christmas itself and right up to twelfth Night; giving a focus for eleven days that often disappear from my life into a kind of Blue Haze. Not this year. I don't want to give this book a flat review as though it were an academic treatise, because that's not the way it was designed to be used. What I will try and do is use it myself through Advent, reporting back occasionally how I'm getting on. I'm looking forward to a good poke around the roots of our faith, and a chance to turn some attention to some of the last things I usually want to think about, all anchored into some classical texts of exile, restoration and hope.

The biblical accounts of beginnings and endings tell us that the Christian faith is a journey that starts somewhere and goes somewhere. It's a journey that develops through time, rather than simply going round and round in an endlessly repeating cycle. the season of Advent, too, reminds us that we come from somewhere and we are going somewhere, and thinking about beginnings and endings helps us to rediscover meaning and purpose as we live in these times that are ‘in between’.

Making Sense of the Troubles?

Interesting blog comment from Bishop David Chillingworth — Northern Irish bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld & Dunblane in Scotland — about reconciliation after the troubles and truth:

There is an interesting debate going on about how much truth the new Northern Ireland can cope with. The South African model of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests that progress is inextricably linked with the availability of truth. The question is how much truth the fragile political process and political institutions in Northern Ireland can cope with at this stage.

As Ian Paisley steps down from the leadership of the denomination he founded, +David also references what looks like a fascinating collection of resources for the painful process of reconciliation based on truth from the Centre for Contemporary Christianity in Ireland. Coming from mainly Evangelical roots, but with realism and a deep sense of the whole counsel of scripture, both the methods and content of CCCI's work look very significant indeed for contexts far beyond the province.

I have seen UK media stories about Northern Ireland most days for the past 40 years, but I have to confess and marvel at my ignorance about it. The best Noddy book to recap it all for me has been David McKitterick & David McVea's Making Sense of the Troubles. The same authors have produced another Correspondents' masterpiece, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died Through the Northern Ireland Troubles. When I picked it up in Waterstones in Lisburn this summer, I couldn't bear to read it. It's an aggregation of the stories of the 3697 people who died in the troubles since 1966 — a memorial as much as a history. Here is the pity of this war, and sketches of the faces behind those figures that most of us Brits got used to disregarding as they rolled by on the evening news for 40 years. 3697 people died and, by and large, this side of the water, we neither knew nor cared who they were or why.

Is that their problem, or ours?

One way ticket to a madman destination...

...will you stop or will you just keep going?" What has the "surge" achieved, and where is it all going anyway, now even George Bush is using the "V" word?

It's been a disturbing year. General Tony Zinni, led the US Marines ably and effectively in the gulf, and afterwards back home. Now retired, his Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy presentation at Duke (available for free on iTunes — just key in "Terry Sanford Zinni" to find a free audio or video podcast) tells it, pretty much, as it is from a military perspective — Iraq, failures, realities and the Future.

Thomas E. Ricks is the Washington Post Pentagon correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning military historian. His analysis is now in paperback, and the title says it all — Fiasco: the American Military adventure in Iraq. It's a terribly depressing read (people suffering from a surfeit of cheerfulness after the holidays can get it on Amazon in a job lot with Bob Woodward's State of denial: Bush at War part III).

In Ricks' view not only have many people died on all sides, many of them innocent bystanders, but the effect of the whole thing has been to destroy US credibility and stoke up terrorism. "Effective tactics harnessed to bad strategy equals military disaster." He investigates how the US could start a pre-emptive war based on false information (step forward Paul Wolfowitz, among others), and tracks carefully through the disastrous resulting imbroglio.

His Afterword ("Betting against History") suggests one of four denouements:

1. The best case scenario: the Philippines, 1899-1946 — thousands of troops there for many years to come while the place dials down and normalises
   
   
2. The middling secnario: France in Algeria or Israel in Lebanon — keeping a lid on low level civil war for as long as possible, whilst trying to keep casualties down to a publicly acceptable rate, until something can be cobbled together domestically. This took the Israelis 18 years in Lebanon.
   
   
3. A worse scenario: Civil war, partition and regional war. T. X. Hammes, the counterinsurgency expert says "We have lit multiple fuses. There will be multiple explosions. I'm thinking our grandkids could easily be there."
   
   
4. The nightmare scenario. This is where the 74% of Iraqis who say "it doesn't matter whom, the country needs a single strong leader" gets one. Then if the US bottles out for electoral reasons, you arrive at a profound irony: Iraq run by a real dictator (Caliph?), who really is all the things Bush & Blair said Saddam Hussein was, which SH was, but only in his dreams. Unlike SH this guy would be the real deal. Anti-Americanism would unite all kinds of people around him SH could never pull in. Thus (almost like Greek tragedy) the result of the war could be to bring about precisely the scenario it was intended to avoid, but in a much more virulent form.

Is there a 5th scenario?

Big or Dispersed Corporate? Hard or Fluid Lines? Starfish or Spider?

An interesting post on Mike Croghan's Rude Armchair Theology Blog, about open and closed social networks.

Social networks like Facebook and Myspace require you to sign up to participate and then keep you within their "walled gardens." Mike was railing against them, then became a Facebook addict! But not before reading this BBC piece by Canadian Networking Guru Michael Geist, suggesting the future belongs to walled gardens that manage to to pull down their walls a bit, if not a lot.

This got me going about Church. How grasping and imperialistic is the way people do Church? Some denomintions require a hell of a signing up to pass go, and others wall their gardens high, to the point that some of their members end up believing their denomination is the whole bang shoot, or at any rate the normative model. Incredible, but true.

Which brings me onto starfish and spiders. Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom describe two types of organisations. Spiders derive their strength from command 'n control and centralisation. They are powerful and mobile, but, here comes the catch, bash the body/head complex and the thing dies; so a lot of their energy goes into resourcing and defending the centre. Starfish are strong and powerful but in a different way. You chop one leg off, it scuttles off and becomes another starfish. There's a hilarious tale in the book about some beefy Aussies who charged off down the beach in their tiny speedos to go deal with the starfish on the reef. When they got the machetes out they had 300 starfish, and by the end of the day they had 3,000. That's the power of starfish, and to tap it you have to be a radically decentralised network, but strongly held.

The Church is obviously both starfish and spider. Viewed as a whole (sorry your holiness) the Christian Church is rather more starfish than spider. That's how the early Church grew in the face of persecution. That's why when Christians gather for conferences like, say, Kirchentag, Greenbelt or the Leadership Summit there's an obvious unity much bigger than any denomination. You don't have to work out the head office niceties to get you going. It just happens.

And the Church of England? By historical accident, whilst holding onto historic accountability lines, it has devolved authority radically, in a subtle and complex way — Incumbents and parishes have had tremendous autonomy, and Dioceses have traveled light. Right on, I say, but being starfish involves a high degree of trust... Do we have it within us to be the kind of (Starfish) organisation that, if Michael Geist is right, the world really needs, or are we going to put our energy into chasing after empire dreams, empire games?