Crowds, majorities, development

Palm Sunday shows the fickleness of crowds, and the limitation of group dynamics. Pilate took a straw poll, acting out of fear, and used the result to make his decision for him, against his best instinct... Thank God he did, you may say, but it was not exactly role modelling how we should undertake Change management. So how should the Church handle its decision making in the light of this experience?

Make no mistake, Every Church has group dynamics, and no Church can survive without changing. J. H. Newman pointed out in 1845 that the only way Christianity renews itself is as new ideas arise and are expressed within its common life:

whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. ... In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms.

thus a living Church, says Newman, “changes in order to remain the same.” How do we decide which changes are corruptions, and which instruments of renewal?

In secular life, you take a vote. The majority stampedes; the minority becomes roadkill. But hang on, Christians are called to think differently — to recognise and respond to Christ in each other. That’s why some Christian traditions, like the Quakers, make decisions by concensus, not votes with majority wins, reframing the question until a solution emerges. Taken as an absolute principle, however, that could produce total gridlock.

Of course, everyone is right from their own point of view. But that’s just the point at which it’s vital not to focus on being right so tightly as to forget the whole picture. It is not healthy to push things through without understanding the resistance. It is a mistake to undervaue relationships, and to risk ignoring missing, if difficultly shaped, pieces in the puzzle. It’s easy to believe that if only the other lot, whoever they are, changed, everything would come right. All of these assumptions, however understandable, are dangerous and unhealthy. Resistance is, potentially, a resource to the whole Church; a radical form of feedback. Engaging with it helps test innovation, clarify goals, and improve processes. The meeting of resistance is no time to dig in with the like minded. It’s the ideal time, however counterintuitively, to stand back from the issues and engage with the people.

The question for the Church in the face of Change, whether it’s about worship or music styles, patterns of ministry, or new technologies, is not to be found in machine age binary thinking, “who wins?” but the meta level question of how both sides can better measure up to the whole stature of the fulness of Christ. In the meanwhile, the most arrant and foolish worldliness is to accept in our own processes the blame culture, cynicism, anger, intolerance and facility for talking past those we don’t understand, of the secular world.

Right or Left, progressive or traditional, to twist an old World War I slogan, do our Churches have men digging trenches, when they should be digging gardens?

Cardinal Newman’s Grave

There’s a veritable starburst of factual religious reporting going on in the Times, about the decomposition of Cardinal Newman’s body — many thanks to Ruth Gledhill and Libby Purves. Before Lord Northcliffe, Randolph Hearst, and “the yellow press,” newspaper reports were highly factual, like contemporary local coverage of village dog shows with all names — boring, perhaps, but a real record. As a research student, I found Victorian newspapers to be serious sources of fact as well as lurid opinion, very different from today’s press.

Julian Litten has done wonderful research on the English Funeral. The 1890’s marked the heyday of Victorian funerals, before the first world war cast the whole culture of the English funeral into a different, more modest, key. Middle class aspirations, reinforced perhaps by fear of premature burials had popularised embalming and show. Newman, like other personally devout believers, eschewed all this, reasserting the scriptural principle of “dust to dust.” The use of moss is well attested for funerals which involved transporting coffins by cart, as cushioning. It seems suitably pre-raphaelite — they lined the hearse with it for William Morris’ funeral in 1896.

I am not surprised to find Newman’s wishes for his own funeral reflect the images of Keble’s Christian Year. Moss, for Keble is the sign of verdant spring even in Autumn and thus the hope of resurrection. In one poem he describes the kind of place Tractarians would want to be seen dead:

Within some circling woodland wall,
Where bright leaves, reddening ere they fall,
Wave gaily o’er the waters brown.
And let some graceful arch be there
With wreathed mullions proud,
With burnished ivy for its screen,
and moss, that glows as fresh and green
As thought beneath an April cloud —

There is absolutely no significance in the use of the word “gaily” in line three, not even for Newman and Ambrose St John. Sorry, Peter...

Cardinal Newman on development...

...no bones about it. Best weekend story has to be Ruth Gledhill’s, that after 118 years there’s nothing recoverable in Cardinal Newman’s grave. Andy the gravedigger once told me human remains last 80 years in a hardwood coffin, 25 in MDF. Andy was right.

Some saint stories feature incorruptible bodies — not this one. I have to confess that relics put me off not on; When I learn that one medieval collection contained “a piece of bread eaten at the last supper” I rather agree with Luther in thinking that by 1517 the relics business had reached a kind of silly vanishing point. Newman will have to be a culturally English rather than Mexican saint.
The Cardinal himself, being dead, yet speaks.

And what does he say? His 1845 Essay on Development, almost Copernican in its impact, asserts that in the providence of God the only way to do real theology is live, contextual and dirty — Skip to the fundamental last sentence if you like:

whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. Nor does it escape the collision of opinion even in its earlier years, nor does it remain truer to itself, and with a better claim to be considered one and the same, though externally protected from vicissitude and change. It is indeed sometimes said that the stream is clearest near the spring. Whatever use may fairly be made of this image, it does not apply to the history of a philosophy or belief, which on the contrary is more equable, and purer, and stronger, when its bed has become deep, and broad, and full. It necessarily rises out of an existing state of things, and for a time savours of the soil. Its vital element needs disengaging from what is foreign and temporary, and is employed in efforts after freedom which become wore vigorous and hopeful as its years increase. Its beginnings are no measure of its capabilities, nor of its scope. At first no one knows what it is, or what it is worth. It remains perhaps for a time quiescent; it tries, as it were, its limbs, and proves the ground under it, and feels its way. From time to time it makes essays which fail, and are in consequence abandoned. It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. In time it enters upon strange territory; points of controversy alter their bearing; parties rise and around it; dangers and hopes appear in new relations; and old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same.
In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.

If Newman is correct about this, measuring orthodoxy by simple conformity to what has been said or done in the past, becomes impossible. “Traditionalists” take note, and “Progressives,” too —
all your notions can only be proved in the crucible of real shared discipleship over extended time.

My second favourite Newman quote? It’s the epitaph he devised for his memorial:

Ex Umbris et Imaginibus, in Veritatem

“out of shadows and fantasies, into the Truth...”