New Decade: Bearing up, Pressing on

Driving back from lunch with friends on new year’s eve, I can hardly believe ten years have now passed since the Millennium.

The bells rang it in at Sandhurst, accompanied by a bottle or two and various crashing whizz-bangs, the most amazing of them from old Army stocks in the various MOD establishments around Surrey Heath. Little did we know what lay ahead!

As the world spins on into an uncertain future, we need a little faith. Creation may be essentially good, but it is surely not complete. The Incarnation has happened in Christ, but the work of incarnation continues in us. As the world pulses forwards through the end of another decade and into a new year of grace, all human activity at every level, the lot, can be seen as in some way necessary to complete the work of God in Christ.

This thought brought to mind a rather telling couple of paragraphs by Teilhard de Chardin. He believed everything was somehow brewing together towards an “Omega point” at which all things would be gathered together in Christ — the goal of evolution, the final victory of Love in and through the universe.
He radically extends the logic of Philippians 1:29 throughout the Universe...

Closer and closer, stage by stage, everything increasingly links itself to the ultimate Centre, in whom everything holds together. The streams flowing out from this Centre do not only operate in the sublime heights of this world, where human activities take distinctly supernatural and worthy form. In order to redeem and pull together these sublime powers, the power of the incarnate Word irradiates the least eergies, to the most hidden depth. And the work of Incarnation will not be finished until the special matter locked up in every created thing, spiritualised originally in our souls, then again a second time with our souls in Jesus, has actually been reconnected to its definitive Centre of fulfillment. “Who is it who ascended, but he who first descended, in order to fulfill all things.” (Ephesians 4:10)

By our collaboration, which Christ stimulates, he is consummated and attains his fulness, starting from within all created things. That’s what St Paul himself tells us. We might think perhaps that the work of creation was completed long ago. Wrong! It continues ever more beautifully, and extends itself to the most sublime levels of the world. “All Creation, still groans and travails.” (Romans 8:22) And it is to complete this process that we labour, by even the most basic works of our hands. Such, ultimately, is the meaning and value of the things we do. Thanks to the interrelationship of matter, the soul and Christ, in the things that we do we bring back to God a small part of the being He loves. By each of the things we do, we labour — one by one but genuinely — to make up the fulness of everything, in other words to bring to Christ a small additional measure of fulfillment.

C’est à dire (original):

De proche en proche, de relais en relais, tout finit par se raccorder au Centre suprême “in quo omnia constant.” Les effleuves émanés de ce Centre n’agissent pas seulement dans les zones supérieures du monde, là où s’excercent les activités humaines sous une forme distinctement surnaturelle et méritoire. Pour sauver et constituer ces énergies sublimes, la puissance du Verbe incarné s’irradie jusq’au fond le plus obscur des puissances inférieures. Et l’Incarnation ne sera achevée que lorsque la part de substance élue que renferme tout objet, — spiritualisée une première fois dans nos âmes, et une seconde fois avec nos âmes en Jésus, — aura rejoint le Centre définitif de sa complétion. “Quid est quod ascendit, nisi quod prius descendit, ut repleret omnia.”

Par notre collaboration qu’il suscite, le Christ se consomme, atteint sa plénitude, à partir de toute créature.. C’est Saint Paul qui nous le dit. Nous nous imaginons puet-être que la Création est depuis longtemps finie. Erreur, elle se poursuit de plus belle, et dans les zones les plus élevées du Monde. “Omnis creatura adhuc ingemescit et parturit.” Et c’est à l’achever que nous servons, même par le travail le plus humble de nos mains. Tels sont, en définitive, le sense et le prix de nos actes. En vertu de l’interliaison Matière-Ame-Christ, quoi que nous fassons, nous ramenons à Dieu une parcelle de l’être qu’il désire. Par chacune de nos oevres, nous travaillons, atomiquement mais réelement, à construire le Plérôme, c’est-à-dire à apporter au Christ un peu d’achèvement.

Le Milieu Divin, 1957, I.iii.c, p 41-2

I haven’t got an English text. Corrections to the transation are very welcome!

How to read the Bible story fruitfully

Holy Week is built around multiple retellings of the passion story. As well as events in Church, round here that means listening to the whole of two Bach passions. To profit from this week’s activity, we need to hear the story in itself as for the first time, noticing fresh details, engaging our imaginations with the world around us and our personal circumstances, and listening for a sympathetc resonance between those realities.

We live in a world of powers and empires, of brands, logos and globalized world order. St Paul’s letter to the Colossians engages with the realities of empire, its principalities and powers, and reveals Christ above and beyond it all, yet also deep within us.

There’s a wonderful description of how the Church uses Scripture corporately for this purpose in a great, creative commentary on Colossians I have been reading recently:

In order to have vision we must have memory. Indeed forgetfulness or amnesia is precisely what strips us of vision — without the past there can be no future. So our contemporary improvisation must be informed and directed by both a profound indwelling of the biblical vision of life and a discerning attentiveness to the postbiblical scenes that have already been acted out in the history of the church.

There is a certain dynamic in this approach to Biblical authority that could be described as a dance between innovation and consistency. Our serious reading of Scripture must be characterized by fidelity to the thrust of the narrative and thus provide our life with a stability and consistency, a rootedness. At the same time, however, the Bible as an unfinished drama gives us freedom for historical innovation and thus a creative and imaginative flexibility in our historical responses. It is only by maintaining the essential relationship between stability and flexibility that we “may avoid the hazards” of both a rigid fossilization of our faith and “a deeper relativizing that gives up everything for a moment of contemporary relevance.”

As we read through the Biblical Story, it is clear that the Israelites themselves retold their stories with such fidelity and innovation. As the ancient Israelites encountered new situations, they remembered and interpreted their traditions in such a way that they engaged contemporary problems and concerns. Indeed without such dynamic interpretation, the texts and traditions contained within them were seen to be incomplete...

Stability and flexibility, fidelity and creativity, consistency and innovation — these are key if a narrative text is to have any current authority in our lives.

Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat
Colossians remixed — Subverting the Empire
pp 134-5

Thank God it’s Monday Morning?

Is your calling calling? I was deeply moved by this year’s Superbowl ad from Monster.com, an ad classic surely, that has not received the attention it deserves this side of the pond:

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:

Embryo Wars — five critical questions

What did I do in the great embryo war? — stay out of it is one possible answer, but if twentieth century science was driven by physics (leading to us going nuclear) the twenty-first is set fair to be driven by life sciences. Towards what? Hard to say, but it’s a vital question. I am very much an ordinary Joe, Historian not life scientist, but people have asked me for a view, so here are some preliminary critical questions (in ascending order of importance):

• Q1: Why whip people’s consciences?
  There is a political dimension, because politics is where laws come from. I like the idea of free votes, because it requires people to make out cases that persuade others rather than coerce them using the party machine. This is all the more true of a conscience question — Using whips looks like you know you really can't persuade them, and maybe you can’t.
• Q2: Is Every sperm sacred?
  It’s a simple modern idea that conception defines the logical top of the slippery slope. It’s one easy and obvious place to draw lines. Christian tradition, however, has taken a rather more “farmer Giles” view of these things. Augustine talked about embryo inanimatus, not yet endowed with a soul. Medieval Christians dated ensouled life from “Quickening.” Trying not be be too gross, Lucy and I once lost an early pregnancy and turned up to our surgery with what our doctor tactfully referred to as “matter of conception,” wrapped in a hanky. Was it within the purpose of God, whatever its precise status? Yes. Did I want to rush out and give it a Christian funeral? No. Ten weeks later I would have, and it would have mattered very much to me. Call me illogical. I’m with Saint Augustine on this one. A Blastocyst has the potential to become a baby. The vast majority don’t make it, within the purpose of God, including that one.
• Q3: What about Species bending?
  Well, producing Chimeras sounds much more frightening than breeding mules. We’ve been doing some degree of this since the Bronze age. But what about altering what it means to be human or animal? Genesis teaches a sacred ordering of nature. God asked the man to name what was already there — to order and steward all pragmatic possibilities. We have many more possibilities before us than Adam. How do we fulfil the charge and avoid the curse that was laid on us all in him? If I have a pig's valve put in my heart, does that make me a hybrid? technically, yes. Practically, even within the Jewish/ Christian view that you are a body rather than have a body, such hybrids obviously retain their full humanity. Cytoplasmic embryos are emphatically not the same thing as true (mixed gamete) hybrids. We already use transgenic embryos for medical purposes, but on the “One step at a time, and learn from it” principle I would oppose any proposal to put animal genes into human embryos. As to the matter under discussion, if we should be reluctant to monkey about with this stuff (and I feel we should be) use of Cytoplasmic embryos actually reduces the requirement for human embryos. There are thus pro-life arguments for allowing it. Radically different research options are coming up in the outside lanes, too, but we need to take every proposal very much on its own merits.
• Q4: We can do all sorts of things — does that make them right?
  No. Life is God-given. The Warnock report gave limited special protection to human embryos, and this is surely right, to honour the concept of humanity. I don’t buy the idea that something becomes right merely because we can do it. Lots of things we can do are emphatically wrong, and this lies at the heart of the classic nuclear dilemma. Far better if nukes had never been invented, but you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Saint Paul pointed out that Instrumentalism is not enough — something isn’t right merely because it can be done. If I have to err, I would do so on the conservative side of this argument. It’s easy to mock slippery slope arguments, but one thing does lead to another. We should keep in place strong legislative protection against, for example, the implantation of research lab embryos in a woman, or culture beyond the current 14 day limit. What we actually need far more is a map for the country around us as research proceeds — a major agreed framework within which to understand the implications. I can’t see we’ve yet quite got that, though Warnock was a start. Our lack of this worries me more than than anything proposed in the current bill, and I think serious ethics committee work needs to be done at a more theoretical level.
  
• Q5: What is our Moral duty here?
  Cherishing life is a plain moral duty, but part of cherishing life is to relieve suffering and help people, and this often involves radical intervention in natural processes. Dr Frankenstein and Nazi mad science are very different from what is being proposed and why. God gave us brains to use, and there is a clear moral and social objective in enhancing our capacity to understand and promote healing. Of course there is the principle of Double effect (no good should rest on a bad); but you can only know Cytoplasmic embryo research is inherently bad if you take the “every sperm is sacred” line, which, with Saint Augustine, I don’t.

Whatever we do is within the mercy of God. These are very much preliminary musings. I’d like to hear very much more from morally aware Christians within the research community — like you?

The Rudiments of Wisdom

I was at the toddler service at Buckingham Parish Church this Wednesday. Claire Wood was doing a wonderful storytelling job on the tale behind the famous icon you see everywhere (Left), explaining how Sarah really wanted a baby and couldn't seem to get one. She used this excellent Russian Doll (Right) for Sarah. And when the baby came, asked Claire, what kind of baby do you think it was? (boy? girl?) Quick as a flash young Eva replied, “One a lot less decorated than that one!”

Highway 61 Revisited

Indian driving is a social dance. English driving is largely an essay in suburban anger management and getting nowhere fast. What Mr Toad called “the joy of the open road,” the Easy Rider thing, is purer fantasy. To do it you need the Great American virtues — a big country, abundant gasoline, optimism, almost autistic self-absorption, resilience and a childlike capacity for wonder. If you really believe no-one else matters, Mister Kerouac, there’s a whole life to be made of it...

Parson says a sinner will
perish in the
flames (O parson
says a
sinner will perish
in the flames
Yes Parson says a sinner
will perish in the flames)But
i reckon that's better
than freez-
ing

Everybody's dying to be
someone
else(O every
body's
dying to be some
one else
Yes everybody's dying
to be someone else)But
i'll live my life if
it kills
me

- e.e. cummings

Creation and Creativity 2

Here, as the UN Secretary General has warned about global warning, is a piece of real creativity! h/t Martin Everitt for emailing me the original...

Creation and Creativity 1

Along the lines of someone who did the warmup slot at Willow Creek last year, Ilana Yahav, Sand Artist

Is that it?

A characteristically creative and catchy new advert for the Alpha Course — There’s a line in Fawlty Towers ‘That was your life. Do I get another? Sorry, mate...’ It 's a challenge to outsiders, but also a challenge to Christian insiders —
how much of a ‘factory’ is Church? Do we ever treat people like things, or standardize them, or homogenize them? if so, what are we doing to free the spirits involved — theirs, ours and God's?

One future for the Church of England?

Trampolining for Elephants. Here we go...

Orbiting the Giant Hairball

In both this year's priests’ ordination charges, I quoted this book, and promised to put a reference on the blog and didn’t — until now.

Gordon McKenzie was a creative at Hallmark Cards — a creative corporation (oxymoron?). Like “the Hewlett-Packard way”, every institution develops routines, traditions, assumptions and party lines that keep everything on the rails but can stifle creativity. Governments create schools that actually kill off Childrens’ capacity to imagine and create. Churches begin as revolutionary lifestyle movements and develop their own institutional “Giant Hairballs” that steal the show in the end.

One solution is just to blast off and start again, but that lonely path jettisons a lot of reality and connectedness. Alternatively, you can be trapped by the giant hairball, and surrender to its inevitability. There is another way — to orbit the giant hairball, valuing its core strength, yet refusing to allow it to kill of your imagination.

Here's another picture of organisations from Chapter 18:
Now,

1. newly ordained priests trying to survive with grace in the establishment,
2. Anglican Bishops trying to work out a viable globalized ecclesiology,
3. Emergent Church planters & growers, seeking new ways of being Church,
4. Traditionalists, trying to secure the faith once delivered to the saints,

Which is the Church supposed to be? the possibly surprising answer is BOTH. It isn’t an Either/or, but a both/and. Jesus talked of building towers, and growing trees secretly. Gordon McKenzie has an image of the plum tree growing out of the side of the pyramid.

What matters is to use pyramid methods on the pyramid so that it doesn't prevent the tree growing, and tree methods on the tree, so it grows without destroying the pyramid. Both at once. As appropriate. With Grace!

If this is what the Kingdom is and how it works, all “Conservatives versus Radicals” custard pie fights, in your parish, in your village in your communion, are, in themselves, as foolish as pretty much everyone knows in their heart of hearts they are, anyway. They're an invitation to grow up and get real. Hallelujah!

Love and Death...

Dr Randy Pausch (47) teaches computer science at Carnegie Mellon university, and is a world rated Virtual Reality Guru and Ubergeek. CMU challenges its professors, if you could only give one last lecture about the things that really matter, what would you say? Last Tuesday's “last lecture” was different. Dr Pausch is actually suffering from Pancreatic Cancer, and has only a few more months to live. He talks about his childhood dreams and what happened to them, and what's to live for, and how.
Have you got any “last words” for anyone? What would you say?
OK. If you've got more than six months to live, How are you going to live, and what for?

Above is a very brief extract of the lecture — Here's a higher quality video of the whole lecture, in context — The talk runs for about an hour from 10 minutes or so in — you can scroll through when it's running:

Beelzebub has a devil set aside for me

The Lord of the Flies is sporting a new Dame Edna look this autumn.
These 2mm wide glasses are a striking test piece for ultra precise fast pulse laser nanotechnology. As manufacturing processes follow the exponential development curve described for chips by Moore's Law, computing power grows. Most of us nestle far more raw computing power on our laps than existed in the world when we were born.

(Just) William would say, 'it stands to reason' that this increasing miniaturization can't go on indefinitely... or can it? What new and creative uses can you think of for this kind of nano-technology?

Is this the Truth? Could things really turn around?

Stick with the possibilities of this — There's a twist in it!

Kudos to Eric Bramlett, Creative Arts monkey @ Community Christian Church of Chicago.

Learning how to learn in Bierton

Bierton Combined Church of England school today. There's a great partnership with the Church here. Irene Corns and a young, very committed staff are doing some wonderful work with language development and special needs. The school's work with autistic children has been written up in the Times Ed, and it was good to see children with hearing and sight difficulties absolutely in the swing of things. The best schools make integrated education look easy, but of course it isn't. Bierton is a really caring school with very high standards.

In its buzzing learning environment, I also noticed the use the school was making of Mind Maps. I haven't seen these being used by children as young as year 3 before. They are part of a well thought-out strategy throughout the school to help children learn, not only information, but also how to learn, in ways that can really unlock greater creativity and potential in everyone — I was reminded of that great TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson.

My time there was a real joy, with an assembly theme of "ourselves" which alowed me to begin the revolution Raj Patel inaugurated at Greenbelt with his battle cry — That which God first created you to be that you must become. Sadly I couldn't (yet?) do it in Gujarati!

OK, what is your God like, then?

A fantastic animation to stimulate creative thinking about God — the Foxhole Manifesto, by a guy called Nick Fox-Gieg, off the Aussie Campfire film festival site I came across on Matt Glover's Blog.

Free your soul — journey together and break bread

A wonderful and thought provoking description on Mike Croghan's Rude Armchair Theology about worship with his community yesterday, with a Labyrinth, Mass and (I kid you not) Hasidic Reggae.

It's not a "how-to" for techies but a simple and deeply personal account of an encounter with God in community. If you're planning worship in new ways, and even if you're not, it's worth a careful read.

As we all go back to work, it's a challenge to think through creative and personal ways for any/ all of us to access grace in new ways which are also profoundly grounded in reality and tradition. Alleluia! Amen!

How can we learn to Think Different?

Thanks to Steve Whitmore for reminding me about the talk that alerted him to TED, which I looked up after he told me about it at Willow Creek.

In it Sir Ken Robinson talks about the effect of schooling systems around the world on Creativity, Do Schools kill Creativity? Sir Ken draws attention to the inherently multidisciplinary way the learning brain works, thriving on Diversity, Dynamically interactive and aware of acute Distinctions between sometimes incompatible things. He defines Creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value, and, boy, do we need some if we are to survive, let alone flourish in future.

An uncertain and increasingly complex world demands real liberation for the mind, possibility thinking and creativity, embracing paradox. We need to grow out of the kind of wooden Eagle Comic scientism of the modern age we're being peddled by some of today's secularists and the battened down cramming of the National Curiculum, or all we will end up doing is "strip-mining the earth" to destruction.

Whether you're a teacher, a thinker, a leader, or, actually a theologian, If you have an interest in survival you have an interest in Education and you need to drop what you're doing for the next 20 minutes and watch this!

Biovisions — Rich, beautiful Diversity in a single Cell

David Bolinsky is a medical illustrator, whose company, Xvivo, has been working to illustrate creatively the dynamics of life to Harvard students for a programme called Biovisions. Thanks to Patrick Mayfield and Steve Whitmore, as another spin off of this year's Leadership Summit I've been exploring TED Talks, creative ideas from some of the world's greatest thinkers sponsored by BMW. David's work (which he introduces in this video) is just incredible. A single cell contains all manner of diversity of form and activity within it. Christians can hold at the back of their mind the biological pictures of the Church in the NT. Static institutional images and models are pathetically inadequate, given the beautiful dynamic diversity and relatedness of everything God called 'good' because that's the way he wanted it, through and through!