August Riots: Sous les pavés, la plage

I was visiting the US for the first time when the Brixton riots happened, so there's some element of déjà vu as I wonder what future historians will make of our current curiously British evènements. Perhaps it’s too early to say anything until after Thursdays grève generale, but here goes.

No excuses — Violence against innocent people and gang thuggery is a matter for the full rigour of the law, and no amount of sociologizing it away will help its innocent victims — vulnerable people of all ages whose lives are tarnished by fear, who have nothing to gain from what is going on, and whose anxieties and issues are of no interest to the probably surprisingly small gangs driving all this.

I feel very sorry for members of the Police Service, no crew of plaster saints, but by and large good and decent people whose function in British society seems to be either lightning conductors or ham in the sociological sandwich.The only thing worse for them to be seen to be dong than nothing, is anything; and everyone's a ruddy expert on what they ought to have done. So I'll rejoice in my ignorance about the localities and pragmatics, and just voice what I know the vast majority of people will offer, thoughts and prayers for those at the sharp end of sorting the whole bloody mess out.

Some historians of France point out that rioting in nineteenth century Paris sometimes happened because ripping up pavé stirred memories of earlier and more stirring times — a ghost image in the collective mind that bubbled up surprisingly often when the forces of law and order were out of town. But that of course is the French for you.

The adjective the English use is “mindless.” On one level it's true, of course. Generally low levels of intelligence are at work here, and misdirected youthful testosterone, catalysed by a desire for significance on any terms, no doubt. However, as a sage churchwarden used to remind me frequently, things do happen for reasons. Reasons do call for understanding. It seems there’s a youth and gang culture in some urban areas that is deeply disturbing and needs to be understood then challenged at a very basic level.

Two big historic structural questions marks lurk in the background.

One is about social purpose. In the last century, young men derived a sense of larger purpose from progress, then Empire, then war, then having saved Freedom, then the white heat of technology, then help yourself loadsamoney Thatcherism, then celebrity, then... ? There's a vacuum out there. Some wheels are wobbling on the axle if not clean off the wagon.

If the only point of being alive is to have designer things and feed your face and get away with it, and that’s pretty much the only public belief we own up to, people without stuff will pinch it when the constraints come down. Looting offers a radical form of selfishness, banality and materialism. British secular society is profoundly uninspiring. People see those in high places helping themselves, and leaders who have abandoned as obsolete the notion that “Thou shalt not steal” as part of the bedrock of life. If it is no more than a quaint conviction for a minority of religious people, here’s one result.

Secondly, the more unequal a society becomes, and we are currently shooting inequality rates that take us back to the nineteenth century, the more frustrated everybody becomes at one level or another — a point well made by The Spirit Level. Subterranean violence, born of boredom, social humiliation and frustration, will out in bad ways as well as ambitious ones.

When it does criminal behaviour should, of course, be met with the full rigour of the law. But is it too much to hope that someone will pick over the history of the past few days sometime when it becomes possible to do this, address the Moral Vacuum it indicates, and draw from it raw materials for a strategy of reinspiration as well as anger and mere containment?

Le Jour de Gloire est arivée!

New horizons in conflict on the streets of Paris, as the mayors of Levallois-Perret (Patrick Balkany, Conservative) and Clichy-la-Garenne (Gilles Catoire, Socialist) fall out, bigtime. As part of their feud, each has used his mayoral powers to turn his bit of the Rue Victor Hugo (D909) into a one-way street, but in opposite directions. Ze copper’s lot is not an ’appy one, as the Paris police try to work out what to do at the point one way traffic North to South suddenly meets one way traffic South to North. I remember something of the geometry, albeit somehat hazily, from being at school in Pontoise for a short while in 1969.

Slugging it out with one-way signs is a comparatively rational-bureaucratic form of warfare on the streets of Paris, when one considers 1789, 1831, 1848 or 1871. Perhaps thesis and antithesis will eventually yield synthesis, but how? As a young staff officer Charles de Gaulle was fascinated by the role of ego and Neitzsche’s Superman dogma in the course of the Great War. In La discorde chez l’ennemi (1924) he wrote:

Peut-etre enfin, en méditant sur ces événements, voudra-t-on mesurer quelle importance revêt la philosophie supérieure de la guerre qui anime les chefs, et qui le peut, tantôt rendre vains les plus rudes efforts d’un grand peuple, tantôt constituer la garantie la plus générale et la plus sûre des destinées de la Patrie...

Sometimes smaller scale logic, however consistent, is not enough and we need to pan out, n’est-ce pas? a rather Anglican thought for the day.

Above you’ll find two two versions of Delacroix’s famous La Liberté guidant le peuple. Which do you prefer? Left to right, or right to left? Or both simultaneously?

How healthy is your healthcare?

Max the Cat has been to Michelle the vet this week for an eye ulcer — cost £45 (drugs), & £45 for 3 consultations. But why use the same system as a basis for Human healthcare? There’s been all kinds of blogosphere buzz around the US healthcare debate, some of it comparing our own National Health Service.

Like any system it has its ups and downs, its challenges and pitfalls. Amongst its personal ups as I have experienced them over 54 years are Dr MacArthur, our GP when I was 12. He was an old fashioned Scots socialist who refused to take private patients, and got me a hospital bed in 10 minutes at a weekend because I needed it. He saved my life, and would have been insulted to be offered money over and above his pay for doing such a thing.

Stephanie’s birth as an undiagnosed extended breach in a strange hospital (she arrived early and unexpected on Christmas night) was supervised by one of the finest obstetricians in the world, who gave Lucy the choice, then delivered her faultlessly without a C-Section, using an old midwives’ routine called the Burns-Marshall technique. Both these ace bits of effective medical care were delivered with nary a credit card or insurance policy between them, and I would take a lot of persuading that the kind of medical system we use for Max the Cat would have served us any better.

But if you’re comparing healthcare systems across whole populations, the big statistics are the place to begin. Make no mistake, a system which allows people to die earlier and risks more children’s lives, across a whole population is not as effective as one that delivers higher life expectancy and low child mortality. Efficient use of people’s resources is a bonus, given the inherent and spiralling costs of modern healthcare.

So here are the figures, and the comparisons for the UK, France, Singapore and the USA.
No system is free of glitches, failures and compromises, Every system is challenged by spiralling costs, but what works best is surely an empirical, rather than ideological question. It’s unfortunate that the US faces tough basc choices about healthcare at a time politics has been so snarky and partisan. The basic systems of medicaid and medicare was put together at a time there was a higher level of bipartisan respect and public service ethic. All good systems involve public and private elements, but the clever bit is in how they are belnded for the good of all. With any luck something can be done — why should US babies suffer three times the mortality rates of their counterparts in Singapore?

Retreat notes 1: Community, stability

For much of last week, everything seemed to be on fire, with extraordinary light effects in the trees and all around the valley. Sometimes it all looked very much more dead, branches showing through, and no sunshine or blue sky to show off the autumn colours.

We have been talking in our diocese about “sustaining the sacred centre.” One wag at a recent diocesan synod suggested playfully that the sacred centre was Diocesan Church House! If I had to locate mine somewhere, it would probably be in the monastery. Not the place in itself, of course, but all it represents, with its vision of discipleship as an integrated way of life, founded on word and sacrament.
So what is real community? What principle to live by lies beyond private judgment? The old Tractarians pointed out that faith founded on private judgment can have no authority greater than that of the group members who exercise it. Faith which is simply private judgment writ large makes “Choice” itself a greater good than what is chosen can ever be. In healthcare, education, now even in finance, plenty of evidence is emerging that the great 20th Century God “Choice” is failing.

A monastery amounts to more than the sum of the individuals who comprise it, because it offers a means of living beyond private judgment; thus monks promise obedience. It is the front end of a far greater community stretching back in time, and its faith is offered with a reckless generosity to the whole world as part of a greater community of monastics, walking in the way of Christ under the guidance of Saint Benedict, committed to Conversion, Stability and Obedience.
The special element that lifts this kind of community way beyond a merely subjective existence and gives it authority, is Stability. Brought up in a consumer society, accustomed to pick our own friends and churches according to taste, life in a monastic community poses us a truly radical question: what would you do if you couldn’t simply change the other people for more congenial alternatives, or even change the other people into being the kind of other people you wanted? Or what if you could, and it turned out that the kind of people you wanted them to be and they became was not what you actually wanted or needed, or what they needed to be to fulfill their God-given potential?

Well then you would have to accept them, notionally, as they are, so that in fellowship with you they may become, and you might become, increasingly, what God would have you be, together. Commit yourself to them anyway, and see what happens; daring to believe that the faith you are called to exercise is more than private judgment, but is in some sense God’s gift to you and in you.
The foundation of such a Christian community, where such transformation can happen, is, ironically, stability. It can only work where its members are prepared to commit on a foundational level to stability of life. This is the argument against church hopping, even if you are (in any particular instance) right and they are wrong. But next time round they may be right and you may be wrong; and if you rejected them last time, where are they now? The only thing for it is to proceed together, turning the Church from a convenience into a school of Christ, founded on stability.

Therefore when disputes arise in Church, one primary question, alongside the rights and wrongs of the actual bone of contention, is about the quality of commitment of the people concerned to the community itself as their primary calling. As our life unfolds, you have to listen to those who are most committed to the stability of the whole community, as well as the most innovative, those who make most noise or are most skilled in politics. And when the further we adventure in faith, like a bungee jumper, the more important it is to be securely attached.
The more anchored we are in stability, the more adventurously and creatively we can, in fact, live.

Curse you, Ruth Gledhill... ?!

...as a direct result of your journalism, within hours of arriving back from France, where, among other excitements, the Boulogne harbour authorities arrested the cheapo ferry on which we were booked for allegedly not paying port dues, I feel I have to get straight back out to the pas de Calais to see the Anthony Caro Chapel of Light in Bourbourg.

... when you see what the 84-year-old former pupil of Henry Moore has done with light, water, steel and wood you appreciate the logic of the commission, for this is not so much a repair job as a work of art. The church was a victim of friendly fire: according to local legend, during the Second World War, a British pilot on his way home suddenly came to the awful realisation that his plane was going to crash. Rather than land on the houses, he steered his aircraft at the church, crashing into the choir end of the nave. The main body of the church was restored but the choir was left in ruins.

Ruth’s blog & video, references a fabulous Times article, interviewing Caro about the piece, his life and work. Rolls Royce journalists ask the questions you would want to, and open things out in a way which leaves you longing to know more.

I first encountered Anthony Caro’s work when preaching at Christ’s College Cambridge, where he studied engineering. I stumbled on a piece of his in a corridor; at the same time Tate Britain were running his Last Judgment, and I got hooked.

“We are living in an extremely materialistic world,” says Caro. “I think it is very important to help the spiritual side of our lives. So for this reason it is good to have a place where one can go and allow that side of one’s life to flourish. I hope people of all religions will use it to allow themselves to think and be tranquil and find that side of themselves.”

This wonderful commission was initiated (according to the French law of laicité) by Françoise Dubois of the Ministry of Culture. France has long had a very much more secular society than England, and, considered as a congregational entity, the Church there has terrible struggles and challenges compared to the C of E in the South of England. There are some very courageous and resilient Christians keeping faith alive in a secular cold climate. One local lay person described the comparative postion with England where she was as “half the numbers, and no fringe; most see the Church as little more than a eucharistic sect.” There is also a crisis about ordination numbers. It’s great to see some really creative work going on in this hard context; another green shoot from which God can renew his people.

Nothing for it, but a trip back to France on a day off sometime soon...

Cross channel? shopping channel!

A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine. But now you can control the weather. Many thanks to Huw Davies for news of the the gadget everyone’s talking about in Cana of Galilee. The over-the-top Shopping channel style transcends the limitations of language, too. Vintage. Is there no limit to what we expect of technology?

The thought we all want instant Wine at the click of a mouse also connects for me with this wonderful thread going right now on Maggi Dawn’s blog about new wine, old skins, tradition innovation and emergence. Go read.

Après-midi d’un(e) faune(tte)

Proud father of three daughters (like King Lear), I have to try and keep up with developments in Female Film, so I picked up Marie Antoinette off the post Christmas cheapie shelf. This could indeed have been the ultimate chick flick. Kirsten Dunst as an airhead Barbie princess should be a storming no-brainer, on a par with casting Skippy as a Kangaroo. Actually her performance is genuinely formidable, all the way from tearful teenager missing doggie to Ladette / Bo Peep young mum. Like Lady Di she’s a blonde bird in a gilded cage. Unlike Lady Di, she manages to keep her pecker up but flunks her charity work. It’s not her fault the movie fails. Design is wonderful. Sets, for once, are real and far better than CGI. Costumes are to die for. Soundtrack works brilliantly. The whole thing is seasoned by marvellous cameos, including Austrian Empress Marianne Faithfull (sans Mars Bar).

Unfortunately all this just isn’t enough. A lovingly accurate biopic about someone whose life was consumed tragically by Ennui can easily become rather boring. A great movie needs a great script, not just a collage of soundbites. There has to be conflict and/or tragedy. Actually this story contains plenty of both, but it’s so well hidden that few punters stuck around long enough to get enough of either — This movie was a box office bombe surprise.

Great movies also need strong enough characterisation for the audience to care what happens to the people on screen. Unfortunately, to cite one invidious comparison, there’s more hot human interest at teatime on a wet Thursday afternoon in your average Jane Austen Vicarage than the entire galactic court of Versailles seems to have been able to drum up in ten years. It’s a novel interpretation of the French Revolution, but perhaps the peasants just got desperate to make something interesting and different happen.

The decision to miss out any before and afters was a bad call. OK, you don't get anything about Marie Antoinette’s childhood because she was only a teenage bride, whose pedigree mattered more than her character. OK, Versailles was a bubble so she didn’t get to see any great events unfold in Paris — why should we? But just as one longs to see the whole thing unravel and a clotheshorse redeemed by mother courage, pride and resilience, the movie ends. Titanic would be less than half the movie it is, even with its sets and cinematography, if it ended with Rose saying to Jack over coffee and licquers “It'll be a bloody tragedy if this lot sinks tonight.” Without the ship actually going down, officers shooting toffs, decks flooding and lights fusing, there's something very fundamental missing from the whole experience.

Eat your heart out, Autrichienne. Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon remains the Guv’nor for Eighteenth Century Ennui fans. Although it unfolds at an obvious stately pace, there’s a story, and a variety of things happen to characters it’s possible to care about if you try hard enough. Best use for this one is wallpaper for a theme party. But perhaps that is the truth about Marie Antoinette.

La Vache qui rit — pourquoi?

Slightly weirded out because in France I appear to have experienced a Cow with one head and two bodies. Quoi?

1. French Farmers mega militancy?
   
2. CAP scheme for saving grass whilst doubling bulls**t to vache ratio?
   
3. Nuclear mutation? kind of China syndrome thing?
   
4. Schizophrenic mad cow disease?
5. Apocalyptic beast that wandered onto the set from the book of Ezekiel, with 2 udders, 4 ears, 8 legs, 8 stomachs?

All suggestions gratefully received. Inquiring minds want to know.

Pray together, stay together

Final notes from this year’s retreat — about worship. There's a natural tendency to think of worship as a programme based activity, like vacuum cleaning, or watching telly. Everything is projected on a screen before me, as entertainment or edification. Good worship requires Gear, either Muppett show electronic gizmos (Big Mixing Desk and Jumbo Projector), or a shedload of Twee Gear from the Mowbrays Catalogue (“randy for antique”).

If you stopped Joseph in the carpenter's shop and asked him about worship, life was worship, family meals were worship, the table he'd made yesterday was worship. Synagogue was part of it, and so was the temple occasionally. The roped off God zone was really rather minimal, and when Jesus died, the veil was torn and the ropes snapped. How silly to try and recreate it now , and call it a missional tool.

Furthermore 7% of communication is the script. That means 93% isn’t! Forty years long of faffing around with the words of worship in the C of E, and I reckon we've pretty much determined empirically what a place like Saint Wandrille, which has only changed the script once in the past 1300 years, knew all along — that the attitude with which we pray is infinitely more important than the words we use.

The Rule is a whole of life policy, that starts at the God end. What goes on in Church is an integral part of life and work, not a bolt on extra. You just do it and see what happens. The point is not to entertain yourselves, but to focus everything else, using the psalms in particular. All human life is there, all emotion, including nasty, tentative, lary, hopeful and thankful (sounds like the basis for seven brand new dwarfs). What goes on in the church is as integral to life as breathing. Sometimes air tastes good, and sometimes it's just air. By and large there's no point worrying about breathing, unless you're underwater. You just get on with it. In a very undecorated place like Saint Wandrille (where the church is, literally, an old barn) the community itself is the icon, and everything is radically simple and unselfconscious.

So where does this leave the whole language of “doing Church?” Worship as Muppett/ Antiques Road Show easily becomes rather stilted and artificial. Emergent churches are starting at the other end, creating community first. Worship ends up much less cheesy and artificial — an expression of who the community is before God and part of what they do, rather than an aspirational exercise. The measure of worship is not the words or gear we use, but how Pelagian or self-conscious we are in Church.