Frail humanity’s solitary boast

Oxford Cathedral this morning, to celebrate Lady Day with trustees, office holders and members of the Mothers Union from around the diocese. MU works in 78 countries around the world, has 3·6 million members, and a representative to the United Nations Commission on the status of women. People seemed refreshingly focused on others and open to accepting them as they are, strengthening marriages by networking women all over the world, and a few men. The emphasis is on bringing about a world where God’s love is shown in loving, stable, respectful relationships.

The view from the pulpit in Christ Church is interesting (above). I took as our text for the annunciation a notion first planted in my mind at a Berkshire nativity play a few years ago by the seven year old who had landed the part of Mary — “everybody knows it’s much easier to be an angel than a virgin.”

And, as daffodils begin to bloom in these parts, a slightly off the wall but powerful poem by Carol Ann Duffy, based on Max Ernst’s painting of 1926, The Blessed Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses:

The Virgin Punishing the Infant

He spoke early. Not the goo goo goo of infancy,
but I am God. Joseph kept away, carving himself
a silent Pinocchio out in the workshed. He said
he was a simple man and hadn't dreamed of this.

She grew anxious in that second year, would stare
at stars saying Gabriel, Gabriel. Your guess.
The village gossiped in the sun. The child was solitary,
his wide and solemn eyes could fill your head.

After he walked, our normal children crawled. Our wives
were first resentful, then superior. Mary's child
would bring her sorrow ... better far to have a son
who gurgled nonsense at your breast. Googoo. Googoo.

But I am God. We heard him through the window,
heard the smacks which made us peep. What we saw
was commonplace enough. But afterwards, we wondered
why the infant did not cry, why the Mother did.

The Work of Incarnation Close up

In Church on Sunday, Rosie the Vicar walked us through the Magnificat as a woman’s voice amidst the overwhelmingly male sounds of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. At Christmas, I was moved and delighted with a greeting better than any card from Katherine Kaye in Oxford. She wrote:

This is a poem called "Not Art", by Kate Clanchy, an Oxford poet. It is one version of female experience which, as a man, you can only look in on, what it means to visit the place where women show one another wares, their handicrafts, and what is gain: so unspectacular, so unshowy, so not what the dominant ones notice, let alone "count" - and yet what makes us what we are. Our true home is in our childhood. That, and a recommendation that you listen to the three ages of women in Durufle's "Tota pulchra es" make up my Christmas gift to you: more perspectives still.

The image of Our Lady is from the Church at Saint-Wandrille — a final picture I took during this year’s stay. It is actually a nineteenth century iron casting (I kid you not) taken of an original in the Louvre.

Not Art

This is close work, this baby-stuff,
the intricate wiping and wrapping,
the slow unpicking of miniature fists;
village-work, a hand-craft, all bodges
and spit, the gains inchingly small
as the knotting of carpets, raw wool
rasping in the teeth of the comb.
The strewing and stooping, the prising
of muck from the grain of the floor -
I think of gleaners, ash-sifters, of tents
sewn with shoe soles, wedding veils, plaits,
how patchwork is stitched-up detritus,
how it circles on quilts like a house split
to bits when the typhoon has passed.
And the ache in the neck, in the back,
in the foot, are the knocks of wood looms,
narrow as cradles, borne from pasture
to valley to camp. I am learning
the art of mistakes, to accept
that the marks of each day are woven in
by evening too far back to pick out.
This is the work women draw from the river,
wet to the waist, singing in time,
the work we swing from our shoulders,
lay on the ground and let the crowd
hold and finger and value - the young girls
wondering, the laughing old women,
the bent, the milk-eyed, the blind.

What’s really going on out there

Timothy Garton Ash is one of the very few people around with the depth and breadth of historical understanding to produce genuine contemorary history. His new Book, Facts are Subversive, contains short essays, mostly originally written for newspapers, but far too good to let go for tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. At this year’s Kirchentag I was struck by the skill, good humour and perspective TGA brought to a shared seminar with Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. He knows his way round the issues of the age, and has real critical insight about Europe (“If the EU were to apply to join the EU it would be refused”) without losing his grasp on the positive achievements of the whole project.

These essays range from big questions of definition and identity (“Islam in Europe”) to well known flashpoints (“The strange toppling of Slobodan Milosevic”, “9/11”) and contemporary predicaments (“Beauty and the Beast in Burma”). His main interests, as Oxford professor of European Studies, have been foreign policy — there is an extraordinary insider’s account of an attempt to brief George W. Bush about Yoorp, and another about Obama’s inauguration. To every subject he brings deft precision, like a peanuts cartoon — inscape in context.

TGA’s standpoint is classically Liberal. He articulates what the word could and should mean as more than just a hysterical reactionaries’ catch-all ra-ra term of abuse.

Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practise what we preach.

TGA is also highly articulate about the difference between secularism and new model atheism.

I do not believe there is a God and therefore assume that some 2007 years ago a couple called Joseph and Mary just had a baby. But what a man he turned out to be! Like the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, I can’t get anywhere with Christ as God, but as a human being Jesus Christ seems to me a constant and wonderful inspiration — perhaps even, as Burckhardt put it, “the most beautiful figure in world history.” And some of his later imitators didn’t do so badly, either.

As historians get down to work on Bush foreign policy, TGA draws up a preliminary balance sheet, measured against the administration’s stated aims at the outset. He is no knee-jerk anti-Republican, indeed much of his journalism as I remember from the period tried to encourage people to stand back and give Bush what benefit of the doubt they could. As the roll begins to be called up yonder, however, as a former advisor to Bush, he has to conclude:

In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse

He then forensically sketches the whole “amazing bloody catastrophe ” —

• Afghanistan worse (more dangerous and hospitable to terrorists),
• Pakistan worse (even more unstable, radical and effective as a clearing station and training camp for terrorists from all over the world)
  
• Iraq worse (now radicalised and unstable),
• Iran worse (newly prestigious, confident and dabbling in WMD),
• Israel worse (more worried, less secure and self-confident),
• Palestine worse (with a new radical terrorist government)
• Lebanon worse (Bush scored an accidental early goal in the Cedar revolution, but latterly managed to muck it all up by undermining the very government he had supported, so, on balance, less stable).
• Egypt, the Islamists are now scoring at the ballot box as well as with their AK47’s: worse.
  

The score is 8-1, then. The 1 was Gaddafi. We can credit Bush with a phenomenal performance, especially when his team was the only superteam in the league, with no serious opposition. Again and again, he played blinders, kicking the ball into his own net, stunning the occasional goalkeeper in the process. Hucknall Town played Manchester United and after 90 minutes the score is 8-1 to the giantkillers, 7 of them own goals, and the Manchester goal itself is a cracked and wobbling ruin with bigger holes in the net. Such is the trainwreck courageous and innocent young men and women are now dying to try and recover, as, tragically, horribly, the coffins come home.

For me, the jewels in the crown of this collection, however, are TGA’s essays on Gunther Grass and George Orwell. Most of the pieces are very short. Keep this book for train journeys and occasional reading. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, it flags up the real issues, remarkably consistently for a collection of occasional pieces. TGA lays out in historical order the events and alarums of our age in a way nobody else has yet managed, and I salute it as a tremendous and surprisingly readable achievement.

Yom haShoah: Living Memory

International Holocaust Memorial Day has in recent years been observed on January 27, the date troops entered the camps. In Israel, Yom haShoah is timed around the anniversary of the rising in the Warsaw Ghetto of 1943, but its closeness to Pesach can lead to some variation. I was immensely honoured and moved to be a guest at the Council of Christians and Jews celebration of Yom haShoah yesterday in Oxford. The Oxford Jewish Congregation is a vibrant and extrordinary outfit which encompasses a wide range of expressions of Jewish practice under one roof.

Proceedings began with the simple but compelling voice of Max Bruch’s Kol Nidrei, played on the cello by Lynton Appel — music reflecting traditional chant from the eve of the Day of Atonement. Another unforgettable part of the evening was an address by Ruth Shire, a refugee from Nazi Germany, evacuated with other children in 1937. Ruth put everything in historical perspective, briefly, then told her story — of living with a family near Oxford, of the internment of her father during the war, and of the life she had built in this country.

Ruth’s story reminded us that amidst evil, the kindness of strangers and the resilience of the human spirit make for an everlasting remembrance. Her simple words reminded us that we all have stories that can bless us or curse us, by informing the decisions we make and the attitudes we take. Worst of all is to travel in ignorance of one’s own story. This being a Jewish community, there was, of course, a prodigious family party afterwards.

The memorial included the recitation together of the Kaddish, two minutes silence and the lighting of candles around which we placed stones. In Bible times graves were marked by cairns. Placing stones on them was a way of making them more permanent. Stones do not fade like flowers, and bear witness that others have visited and not forgotten. It was immensely significant to leave stones for those millions who were denied the basic dignity of a grave — an expression of the respect they were denied by their persecutors.

It is important to focus on the historical aspect of this, all the more as time passes. However it added a very special additional dimension to be a guest within a resonant community, in which memory is not a museum piece, but living consciousness. The evening was not simply about feeling sad, but also about identifying with those who died and those who suffer injustice and genocide in the world today:

We remember those who died in the Holocaust,
when madness ruled and evil dwelt on earth. We remember those of whom we know, and those whose very names are lost.

We cherish the memory of those who died as martyrs, those who died resisting, and those who died in terror.

We mourn for all that died with them; their goodness and their wisdom, which could have done so much to enoble and enrich humanity. We mourn for the genius and the wit that died, the learning and the laughter that were lost.

We stand in gratitude for their simple, decent lives. Their spiritual resistance remains an enduring testimony to a community where light persisted in darkness. Each person was unique, and we remember them all in love and compassion.

We salute those who had the courage to stand outside the mob, to save us, and to suffer with us. They too are God’s witnesses, and a source of hope when we are tempted to despair.

Because of the suffering, may such times never come again, and may their sacrifice not be in vain. In our daily fight against cruelty and prejudice, tyranny and persecution, their memory gives us strength.

In silence we remember those who sanctified God’s name.

Many thanks to Alison Ryde for the picture of candles and stones afterwards, and to the community of the Oxford Jewish Centre for their generosity and hard work.

Winter Lights Oxford: hysterical tosh

I'll put some retreat notes up next week, but couldn’t help noticing the first sign of Christmas in the UK is a press report about a council banning Christmas. First off this year is the Oxford Mail, which ran a story saying Christmas had been dubbed "Winter Lights" so as not to offend other religions. Zenit, the view from Rome, ran a suitably breathy piece of hufflepuff allegedly by an RC archbishop, no less, denouncing the inexorable march of secularism:

A decision by the Oxford City Council to abolish all references to Christmas in the name of being more "inclusive" is the next step in erasing history and Christian identity

Within the week, however, truth, began to seep out. Oxford City Council is, in fact, holding all its usual Christmas festivities, carols, Christmas tree, and trimmings. Nobody has renamed anything. It had never struck the arts charity Oxford InSpires that they could, let alone would, rename Christmas. Their programme runs for several weeks, including, nice touch for Christians, an Advent fair.

In other words, this story was just hysterical tosh for the gullible. The truth is on the Oxford Inspires website, and the Oxford Mail had the decency to own up. Like October snows, these tales always seem to melt on inspection, however much they appeal to simple-minded paranoia in the ignorant and gullible. They are fast becoming part of the great British Christmas, along with a story from somewhere about a Vicar who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus. Actually, as a bishop I would have serious anxiety about ordaining anyone who did, literally, believe in Santa Claus.Will that statement, in itself, make me “it” for 2008?

This stuff is like ground elder. The lone comment last night on the Oxford Mail story admitting the error said “I think that this is just the tip of a very large iceberg waiting to devour not just Christmas, but everything that goes with it.” So the Urban myth marches on, regardless of any attempt by the Oxford Mail to correct its original story. Guess which one will now be whizzing round the internet regardless, with added hilarious metaphor, powered by trolls? The last word on this subject belongs, I reckon, to the Muslim Butcher down the Earley Road in Reading who had a poster in his window three years ago, before I carried a blog camera at all times, saying “Halal Turkeys: Order now for Christmas.” Says it all, really.

Them and Us — The Truth

After a bit of a blockbuster about clergy bullying, with some very interesting comment, something profoundly relevant caught my eye yesterday at our senior staff Eucharist. We were in Christ Church Cathedral, using the millennium Altar commemorating George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, supporter of resistance against Hitler and courageous opponent of saturation bombing during World War II.

The Altar is from a single huge oak, blackened. Renewed humanity is hewn out of, and emerges from, a charred and defaced reality. It carries this quotation from Bell, framed in the context of calls for reprisals in 1945. Today, from parish breakdowns to Iraq, there’s a simplistic sense among otherwise intelligent people that we are OK and they are evil. Bell exposes the root of the matter. In reality, we are all complicit, and in need of redemption:

No Nation, no Church, no Individual is guiltless. Without Repentance, and without forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.

Santa says...

Give it a rest this year. At least this is what he was saying, in this very British Lord Kitchener incarnation I saw yesterday morning, sprayed onto a wall (tut tut) near a cash machine in Turl Street Oxford. This could be a good year to beware & think twice about what we're really doing. We'd all be happier if we went modest, and did less of the “Gadarene Swine down the shops” thing. The Canadian Mennonites are appealing to us all to rethink this one a bit. Adbusters tries to help people curb their spending habits and, surprise surprise, has real difficulty getting ads like this published:
This is worth pondering as we try to reclaim Christmas from the wreckage of the “holiday season.”

Sharing Jesus, Changing lives

A truly inspiring day as a guest at the dedication of CMS new mission centre in East Oxford. Strangely, the Church of England has never had an official institutional mission arm — just a network of voluntary societies driven by passion. CMS has been at the heart of mission for 210 years. We were reminded in today's service of the key role CMS’ early supporters like John Newton and William Wilberforce played in rolling back the slave trade and transforming society in those early days.

The centre includes a mission studies library and resource centre, named after Samuel Ajayi Crowther, former slave, translator of the Scriptures into Yoruba, and pioneer bishop in Nigeria. Last year CMS supported 704 people and 204 projects in mission all over the world, including the UK. Oxford’s increasingly a world city. There’s blessing for us locals in having close access to the heart of the CMS network in our diocese. It's a more than welcome development.

As well as serving the cutting edge of mission, CMS has been a hotbed of creative thinking for the whole Church, led by visionaries and big thinkers like Canon Max Warren and Bishop John V Taylor.

Max Warren said — “It takes a whole world to know Christ.” Go figure. Think of all those words mean and could mean in a rapidly globalising world that he foresaw sixty years ago, which is now our daily reality.

Today CMS is a key resource to the whole Church — a hotbed of praxis, prayer and reflection about discipleship across cultural frontiers. The early Church worked really well across frontiers, sharing Christ as he was reflected and refracted among disciples of different cultures in places like Corinth, Alexandria and Rome. Years of institutionalisation and control freakery have ossified this gospel process, but are now giving way, all over the world, to a vibrant sense of emerging kingdom. This, not institutional powergames rings a lot of bells for readers of the gospels, whatever their culture or background. Christianity is resuming its primal character as a way of life, a pilgrimage. In this kind of a world faith grows not by cultural or doctrinal imperialism, but virally. Because there really is a God who loves us, that’s OK. We can break our shackles, and transcend our Institutional silly B’s!
Two striking artistic expressions of such creativity caught my eye — paintings by Chinese theologian and painter in residence Dr He Qi, and an amazing sculpture out the front, “Light of the World” by Saga Arpino, a bronze with three kilometres of glass rods, hand cut into 10,000 sections.

Archbishop Rowan preached on the Light of the world. In 2 Corinthians 4, Saint Paul sees Light playing on and shining through the Christian Communityin a transcending way. It’s a transformational process from glory to glory “Until we have faces” (C. S. Lewis). Christ introduces us to ourselves, to each other, and to God. Then we can begin to glimpse what we all look like from God's point of view. God has a face, and to know him as he is enables us to wak in the light. It’s the route to true freedom, transformation and hope.