Lions and Unicorns, mods and rockers

One of the great highlights of last week was finally meeting Euan Semple. I’ve come across Euan as a thinker and educator (in the broadest sense), and have long been impressed by his pragmatic wisdom, systemic awareness, and ability to open rather than close down, or geek up, new media issues. Euan’s blogged our conversation here.

On the face of it I was after new ways to raise my colleagues’ capacity to engage in the new media landscape, and Euan is indeed a resourceful friend in this world.

Most interesting, however was to chew over how communication develops people and groups of people. We have entirely different world views when it comes to orgnaised religion anwyay, but some strongly congruent instincts and values — freedom, emergence, openness.

It seems there is a Right brain creative world of wacky possibilities to which the internet gives all kinds of flight. Now that anyone can communicate with anyone, hierarchies lie helpless — look at BP, for example, flailing around, trying to manage its image in the context of its present oil spill.

However there is also a minimal but essential Left brain rigorous standards world, without which the whole thing is imposible. A few infrastructural rules make the whole communications structure, possible. We saw a fundamental difference between blinkered rules that, taken too seriously, restrict human flourishing and others that enable it. One feature of good rules is that they don't draw attention to themselves, just serve a bigger infrastructure elegantly.

So the relationship between order and complete liberty sounds like a tussle between the authoritarian lion and free range unicorn. People get their security and meaning, the ability to articulate, from a settled order that revolutionaries then subvert by asking questions which initially irritate system professionals, but change the order of everything and eventually move the whole game up a notch.

For this to happen you need enough common framework for questions to be asked, but an anarchistic freedom in asking them. Put it another way — Jesus receives a Pharisaic / dogmatic education, then goes round from within it, asking Pharisees cheeky questions that subvert everything. So we deconstructed human communication as something almost like a religion.

It struck me how elements of the Christian tradition work this way — creeds, commandments, golden rule. Once people become self-conscious about them, however, and add their own powergaming, they soon become death warmed up; licenses for insanity.

It's a struggle reflected by everything from the war between Data managers and Creatives in industry to St Paul’s great struggles to locate the Jewish Law in its place for the infant Churches of Rome and Galatia. It mirrors our own internal conflict between painting by numbers and free expression.

Bad “religion,” in this sense, takes itself too seriously, frames issues too narrowly for forward movement, closes down fresh possibilities for meaning, and becomes a license for stuckness, paranoia and, ultimately, sociopathic insanity.
The law, as St Paul was wont to say, is fine as far as it goes. It just does not go as far as its most enthusiastic afficionados think

Good “religion” in this sense thakes the same raw materials, but encourages people to tell their personal and pragmatic stories. It frames discussion in a way that can fly, by holding creative, open articulations within a minimalist framework that exposes everything to human, empirical fit. Its truth is emergent rather than propositional; or, as the man said, by its fruits ye shall know it.

Poetry and Religion

Some people have been asking about the Les Murray Poem I quoted from in a Guardian CIF piece last week. I’ve had one fascinating conversation about why standard snarky atheists who show up always and everywhere with vituperative little digs about sky fairies stayed away for most of the week’s Question about poetry and religion on desert islands. I wouldn’t know why, but am reminded of a line by U. A. Fanthorpe, in another context, about the disciples. Perhaps it applies to all militant evangelists, even atheists:

My sheep and goats,
Virgins, pigs, figtrees, loaves and lepers
Confuse them. Fishing, whether for fish or men,
Has unfitted them for analogy.

Anyway, here, as food for thought, is Les Murray in all his glory on Poetry and Religion

Religion are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

Doubting Doubt

Much as I may disagree with many of Peter Tatchell’s views and methods, I respect his passion and sincerity. I’m interested (h/t Church Mouse) in his account of why he is a secular humanist:

Religion is the world’s single greatest fount of obscurantism, prejudice, superstition and oppression. It has caused misery to billions of people worldwide for millennia, and continues to do so in many parts of the world. As a human rights campaigner motivated by love and compassion for other people, I would be betraying my humanitarian values to embrace religious beliefs.
...
By the time I turned 20, rationality finally triumphed over superstition and dogma. I didn’t need God any more. I was intelligent, confident and mature enough to live without the security blanket of religion and its theological account of the universe. Accordingly, I renounced religion and embraced reason, science and an ethics based on love and compassion. I don’t need God to tell me what is right and wrong. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves.

What particularly interests me is that, coming from a similar generation but with a loving and decent (but not Evangelical Christian) upbringing, his description of his formation in atheism rings a bell for me. A similar process led me in precisely the opposite direction as a teenager, from atheism to faith. Bearing that in mind, I'd fill in a similar form, perhaps, a bit like this:

Religion, like politics or sex, is part of being human. There’s good religion and bad religion, some healthy, some toxic. Failing to realise that made atheism seem clever. I had high ideals, but a limited capacity to distinguish between my own passionate feelings and a higher truth and calling which I have not yet attained, but towards which I could still struggle. Faith in God prevents me always externalising the foe, and reminds me that I have to struggle within myself to be the kind of change I want to see in the world, or all my efforts will be no more than anger and opinionations self-righteously aimed at others.

As a teenager, I realised that although I didn’t need God, better people than me had searched seriously for him. He did not exist as an object, in the way I had crudely imagined as a child. I became intrigued by the elusive possibilities this raised. Following up this perception was rather like the 3-d image in a magic eye picture emerging from what had seemed a simple, if complex, 2-d one.

Thus it dawned on me that things are not, in fact, always what they seem, and reality has many planes and dimensions. In a universe where something as basic as number theory cannot be anchored entirely securely in rational axioms, I came to see that human reason could not possibly be the measure of everything, but pointed beyond itself. Grasping reality would require awareness of hermeneutics, and a sense of history, as well as my own opinions.

Accordingly, I searched beyond simplistic secularism and began to grasp the complexity of life. I studied history, and engaged with the languages and content of Biblical texts on an adult level. I don’t need God to tell me what is right. I do, however, find his spirit gives me more wisdom, grace and power to live than I can generate within myself. We humans are quite capable of figuring it out for ourselves, but frustratingly incapable of delivering the goods on the basis of passion, and our own time- and ego-bound reason and emtion.

(Not) Knowing me, Knowing You...

Here, thanks to the legendary MadPriest, is evidence that some journalism in the UK is even more stupid and ignorant about religion than the legendary national average:

Apparently Sky’s Kay Burley believes that the 2·1 billion adherents of the largest religion in the world spend Ash Wednesday “having a go with one of those tea trays down the luge.” Ms Burley knows all about crime, as well as religion. In 2008 she came up with what has to be one of the most gormless and tacky journalistic questions in the history of the universe:

It’s slightly reassuring, as a male, to know you don’t have to be male to play Alan Partridge...

Religion in the News

I’ve been away for a conference among media people at Cumberland Lodge. Everyone had brickbats and bouquets to throw, all of them sincerely, but I don’t actually think religion gets as raw a deal from the media as people sometimes fear. Yes, there’s a lot of ignorance and prejudice in the papers, but distortion applies to all complex activities in the Fleet Street hall of mirrors, and it’s ceasing to matter in the way it did. There is probably generally less nastiness than applies to sport and politics, and fractionally more understanding than they have of science and medicine. I remember diocesan conferences in the eighties where people actually ordered morning newspapers to read. Even on a media conference, the pristine, generally unread, condition of the Fleet Street titles laid out on the hall table was notable, even as late as lunchtime.

Make no mistake, there is big evolution going on. Look at it however you will, the game is now up for the 1938 Evelyn Waugh Daily Beast and all its works. The old media diplodoci are flailing around in a new kind of swamp they simply don’t understand, trying to get a foothold, and wondering if they might be able to float if they could only work out how to swim.
Unfortunately their bulk, limited vision, and small unadapted bigoted brains make them better adapted for floating, perhaps drowning, than swimming.

Intereactivity has made hand-me-down obsolete and the mushroms are beginning to realise they have the technology to bite back. Advertising value is leaching out of the newspaper trade in spring torrents. The best evolving media are probably those with genuine local traction — hard for Fleet Street, but easier for media like local radio, which live on their connectedness and travel light. They have for years had some degree of real interactivity built into their model.

Amidst very fine presentations, the money shot for me was Charlie Beckett’s excellent map of the outlook (read it all, but here’s a summary)

1. First assertion: this is a wonderful time for people who think media can promote understanding.

• There has never been more media - including quality media. Around the world people are richer and better educated and need more journalism to help cope with the information they need to live their lives...
• there are threats to traditional business model which may reduce the capacity for journalism - both good and bad.
• The media sphere is a contestable space - and that means it should be allowed to be imperfect and relatively uncontrolled.
  

2. Second assertion: this is a dreadful time for people who think the media is only there to promote what they think

3. Third assertion: in a complex world the media envioronment is getting more complex

• Issues such as migration, climate change, economics, science etc mean that the world is not getting any simpler. Individuals’ media consumption is now multi-layered, interactive, creative, passive, active
• Likewise, the production process is more complex - it is participatory & multiplatform
• there is much greater diversity. The challenge is to ensure that the variety and plurality is manifested in the content. There’s no point having hundreds of channels if they all show the same show.
• Mainstream media still dominates and will continue to do but it is getting more complex too. Think about how the BBC has become more diverse and how it will be encouraged to be more open and form partnerships

4. Fourth Assertion: the news media has to learn to be more networked to society as a whole

5. Fifth Assertion: institutions like organised faiths also have to learn to be better as networked organisations

1. Institutions will now have a different relationship with MSM -
2. they can have a direct relationship with the public too
3. they can be media organsiations creating their own channels and content
4. but just like MSM they have to go where the public is (social networks)
5. they have to be conversational - they have to listen as well as talk
6. they have to be more open, engaged, literate, interactive

6. Sixth Assertion: don’t get mad, get media

1. stop complaining and do something about your coverage - start connecting.
2. Most faiths are natural networks
3. Sometimes these can be dangerous - the most successful online faith-orientated organisation I know is Al Qeada
4. But if all you do is connect with your followers than obviously you are simply rebuilding ghettos in cyberspace
5. newspapers made the mistake of thinking that going online meant replicating their newsrooms and their pages online -
6. the analogy for the media is to shift from a fortress mentality and fortress insitutions to networks. For people of faith, the analogy is to stop building digital churches or mosques - it is about building networks and connectivity

To pick up on one of these fine points as it applies to the C of E, there is no such thing as the Church of England. You can talk about London Taxis, or even a notional “London Taxi Service,” but remember you are actually talking about 19,000 cabdrivers. That is not quite as large as the number of independent chartered public bodies that comprise the Church of England, but it is in the same ballpark for numbers.

Consider, for example 2 Oxford trusts. The governing bodies of Wycliffe Hall and St Stephen’s House are both independent trusts dating from within a year of each other, 1876 and 1877. They are in the same town, and the same business, training ordinands. They have common interests, but their policies sometimes diverge, sharply. Historically they have represented entirely different concepts of what an Anglican priest is and should be. The same Coral Reef level of variety, conceptual richness and passion is reflected across 16,000 odd parishes, many of them complex multilevel bundles of trusts. This will be very annoying to stupid poeople, who have no idea why it is that way, and would certainly have designed it differently themselves.

Since the 1960’s Diversity has always been seen as a Bad Thing for the C of E. The Holy Grail has been a kind of British Leyland Corporatism, with the Church of England compared unfavourably with the Roman Catholic Church which was supposed to be more of a single rational entity. That’s why every priest in a Dan Brown film has a hotline to the Vatican. In fact the Roman Church is every bit as multilayered and subtle, and on a radically international scale, too. So are Baptist Churches. Etcetera, etcetera. No surprise, then, that the whole coral reef is seldom analysed and understood, with a stress on the brightest coloured fish, not the whole structure of the reef.

But in the kind of media multiverse Charlie is describing, being the way churches are is actually an advantage. All that’s necessary is for authentic and interesting people to get out there, be themselves, stand up and engage interactively. Thus one message to angry vicars who feel misrepresented becomes “Forget Fleet Street. It simply doesn’t matter any more.”

A Case for God?

There’s a popular narrative some atheists trip out on that seems to think everybody alive before about 1960, certainly 1860, was simply a complete and utter bloody fool. They just believed in a big interventionist sky pixie called God on the basis of a completely literal reading of the Bible because they were too naïve and thick to know any better. Really? Did they not have brains?

New model atheists also sometimes play off soundbites from one religious tradition against another to prove they’re all rubbish. If there were anything in any of them, they would all say the same thing. To test this approach, you need someone who has actually studied more than one religion historically to find out what they actually have or haven’t said, and how, and why, as a matter of fact, they have developed.

Enter Karen Armstrong. You might agree or not with her conclusions, but she is unquestionably one of the most learned and perceptive historians of comparative religion in the world. She knows a bucketful of languages, history, philosophy and poetry. She is not particularly orthodox or signed up to anything, but she undoubtedly knows her stuff, and has a real knack for getting ideas across.

This is what she says:

We are talking far too much about God these days and what we say is often facile... In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody... There is also a tendency to assume that, even though we now live in a totally transformed world and have an entirely different world-view, people have always thought about God in exactly the same way as we do today. But despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our religious thinking is sometimes remarkably undeveloped, even primitive. In some ways the modern God resembles the High God of remote antiquity, a theology that was unanimously either jettisoned or radically reinterpreted because it was found to be inept.

She goes on to map out historically those images of God, old and new, that have developed within the world’s major religious traditions over the past 12,000 years. It’s a briliant compact work of historical description — I managed to read it in an 8 hour flight.

The basic idea is that all kinds of sophisticated visions, practises and subtleties flourished in the pre-modern world with a surprisingly high degree of mutual respect, understanding and flashes of emergent coherence. During the early modern period tooled up renaissance people fell in love with the idea of absolute certainty. When they couldn't quite attain it, they over compensated by constructing various formulations of provisional truth to be peddled as absolutes.

Thereby they lost much of the directness, openness, discipline, poetry and praxis of religion. All meanings were narrowed and noddied up for use as polemical rocks. Selective ignorance and paranoia bred fundamentalisms various, including atheistic ones. These are increasingly angry and desperate means of licensing the self to wallow in one, defined over and against all the others.

Taking this narrowed rationalistic approach is very limiting; like playing opera on tinny little speakers. We need to learn how to learn again and wake up to the possibilities for unlocking truth that is not intellectually reductionist and ultimately fascistic. It’s a plea for the recovery of something that wouldn't have needed saying until comparatively recently — that God’s a big lad, and he can look after himself, and we can enjoy the sutlety, poetry and joy of discovering him for ourselves best in communities that are logged in and logged on, not fundamentalist blockhouses.

God is greater than our religious idols

David Dark is one of the most engaging, perceptive and passionate young Evangelical writers around. David comes from Nashville, TN. He reads big literature as well as angry paperbacks, and he writes beautifully.

At Willow Creek in 2005 I came across his quirky but profound study The Gospel according to America — a meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-haunted Dream.

In it he noted an increasingly complacent but angry “Gott mit uns” tendency among fellow Evangelicals. The god in whom we say we trust is Great Uber-Politzist in the sky, who just happens to agree with us about all our hot button issues. We then hive off into angry little knots of the likeminded and flame lesser beings from our self-righteous stand on the top of the hill. This “god” starts out as the One to whom we were introduced at Sunday School, but as our focus hardens, his focus softens. It becomes increasingly difficult to recognise the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ in him — his religion can easily appear to others a form of licensed insanity. Is it I, O Lord? By their fruit ye shall know them, as the man said.

One chapter called “A Song of Ourselves: narcissism and its Discontents in a Bipolar Nation” pretty much conveys the heart of the thesis. We are so damn right, there is no room left for God, who is bigger than any mental image. If we fix too closely on what we think we know, we become intoxicated by the sound of our own constant angry talk, and crowd out the space in which the real living God could change us. Whilst obsessionally defending the notion of Scripture, we haven’t time listen to its still small voice. What should we do?

We can refuse knee-jerk defensiveness and opt for silence... Silence might sober us long enough that we’ll repent of the ways our tough talk presumes omniscience. It might deliver us from the death-grin of self-satisfied self-confidence. We might begin to see the ways the Gospel intersects with the news of the day and th ways the word of the Lord will make us see and speak differently. We won’t have to know all the details of salvation, redemption, and the end of history, but we will know that Jesus is never a separate issue. His story and the community he gathers around himself are political, a sacred community whose power is somehow louder than bombs. A radical remembrance belongs to these people, because they believe that Jesus’ career was the radical breakthrough of God’s kingdom. Any authority that tries to reduce this community to a “spiritual” zone is speaking with a false objectivity, because the kingdom to which this community tries to bear witness encompasses reality. And repentance is the word for the speech and action that acknowledges the distance between our proud little kingdoms and God’s larger order, power and glory, which are forever. It cannot be controlled, bought off, or ultimately silenced. And within it, our delusions are being subsumed. The Lord is risen.

His latest book has just come out in the UK — The Sacredness of Questioning Everything. I have been reading this as an e-Book, and find myself marking pretty much every page for a quote or thought-provoking idea. His big point about God is similar to Karl Barth’s in the face of the growing Nazi certainties and confidence of 1931 — “Eternal Light requires neither fuel nor candlestick.”

There’s a lot of bad religion about, and every religion should bear a health warning, like they put on chainsaws (Excellent for cutting down trees, dangerous for juggling, lethal for carving turkey). It’s easy to understand why some people invent their own religion of no or anti religion. The answer to a bad haircut is a good haircut, not baldness, which, when all is said and done, is just another haircut. However all religion needs redeeming — valuing with self-awareness from within, and openness to that beyond itself. Questioning is the classic way this is done. Thus questioning his elders in the temple was a sign of Jesus’ wisdom not his awkwardness or vanity.

David tells the story of his grandfather, an austere fundamentalist preacher who had, however, a sense that God was bigger than his certainties. He expressed this out of all his certainties by saying by saying “When necessary, move on.”

It’s tempting to characterise my grandfather’s advice to my father as a safety clause, an escape route from rleigious ideology, as if the only hope for the religious is the possibility that they might just get over it. But I don’t think I’d bedoing justice to my grandfather’s story if I tried to suggest that his advice was somehow separate from his religion. Like many people, my grandfather tried to be faithful to a particular story. He told it and retold it. He tried to make it add up rationally. He wanted to bend his will towards a life of obedience to it. And — this is where it gets compliated — he tried to persuade people that much of what they thought was acceptable to God wasn’t. He tried to call them, and himself, to repent. he felt compelled by the story as he understood it.

Most redemptively, he felt compelled to remember, as he told the story, that his own testimony wasn’t the whole story. he sought God but knew he would never have God in the way one holds a copyright or a piece of property. God would never be the object of his search because God, whatever God is, refuses to be objectified. My grandfather knew he was not a knower but only another pilgrim — a practitioner — of religious awe. Perhaps, in some fashion, this describes everyone...

Jesus spoke of old wineskins that couldn’t contain new wine and about losing your life to find it. The apostle Paul talked about Christ-followers as having died to the old self. In this sense, we should take advantage of every opportunity we have to lose our religion. As wonderful as our religion might feel, it’s never so fresh that we should settlefor it. A living religiosity will be sustained by questions, revelations, and a determination to be trasformed by the renewing of our mninds.

Southern writer Flannery O’Connor once remarked that people talk about religious faith as if it’s an electric blanket, cozy and available for quick and easy reassurance, an ever-present resource for avoiding the truth of the matter. In response to religion-as-sentimentality, she argued that a Christian faith is always more like a cross, a costly engagement with the world. The bearer of faith enters into the crisis of what’s wrong with the world rather than glossing over it. In this sense, O’Connor’s faith made her more, not less, determined to see things as they are, not as we’d prefer them to be.

O’Connor insisted that it was her Christian faith that kept her skeptical. She says that the cultivation of skepticism is a sacred obligation because skepticism keeps us asking questions. Against whatever flavor of brainwash is popular, skepticism “will keep you free — not free to do anything you please. but free to be formed by something larger than your own intellect or the intellects of those around you.” This redemptive skepticism is a religious commitment to avoid being swept up by bad ideas, especially ones that wear a godly guise and demand absolute, unquestioning allegiance. Sometimes you have to lose your religion to find it.

That’s enough quotes for today, but I find David’s work well worth a read. It’s a prophetic protest against idolatry, that should become a classic. God’s well able to look after himself, if only we will stand back, shut up, listen and let him...

Hazlemere: Remembering, Learning

Remembrance this year helping with a village war memorial service in Stewkley, orgainsed deftly by the very lively village Royal British Legion, ably led by Dusty Saunders. On the day itself, I was with children at Hazlemere CE Combined School, where years 5 and 6 put on a remarkable Remembrance community service, with guests including local councillors and members of the RAF, as well as RBL.

What really shone through was the depth of thinking and reflection behind the poems, songs and presentation. Children had written their own wartime “letters home”, and I had to check afterwards they hadn’t copied from originals! As well as a great all-age community event, the whole morning showed me the great value of “whole school” working. I know it demands amazing amounts of hard work and co-ordination from staff, but I could see how memorable and moving this all was for the pupils. Congratulations to Nick Waldron (Head) and especially Andrew Sykes and colleagues.

In passing, I also noticed some really engaging story boxes in year 4 (like storyboards but 3D). I was a numeracy governor at the time the numeracy hour came in, and I noticed how consistent working with number lines is producing a whole new quality of work in Maths, in this instance in year 4 (with Mr Rademacher). In the old days people just thought if you were good at notation you understood Maths (why? It’s like saying if you’re good at Crosswords you understand literature). Using number lines over extended periods really builds childrens’ feeling for, and understanding of number in itself. Here’s a subtraction exercise — I’ve blanked the name, but look at the way she’s really getting engaged with numbers, breaking them down, playing with the maths of it, and enjoying herself. This would never have happened in the bad old days, when maths was simply treated as voodoo for clever kids.

I may have disappeared down a slightly anoraky hole! But it’s wonderful to see children enjoying learning together in a great school with their friends. Hazlemere’s a real gem. It isn’t a small school, but somehow it feels like one when you’re there. It’s something about the good relationships, and the ways people treat each other.

As with other Church of England schools in the Thames Valley, it is our privilege to be trusted by many Muslim parents here with their children’s schooling. They don’t, of course, expect technical Quranic learning, just a broad and balanced RE syllabus that builds understanding of all religions. One Muslim parent told me how they appreciated their children to be somewhere God’s name was loved and honoured, so that their Muslim faith is simply respected, shared and nurtured as a way of life, rather than patronised or treated as an exotic hobby.

I asked, in Guardianspeak, “had they ever felt their children were being indoctrinated, narrowed or ghettoised by the experience of being in a faith school?” The parent just fell about laughing.

Faith speaks to Faith. That’s how you build understanding. That’s how schools help build community; and that’s where real hope lies. My Muslim parent did not want compulsory secularism shoved down their child’s throat as the only way, by people who won’t take responsiblity for doing this, and are sniggering at you behind their hands for believing anything more substantial than their own vapid secularism. It was quite an impassioned encounter, and made me realise how different things look in most of this country’s Church schools to how they are often portrayed by Metropolitan élite journalists, projecting their own fears and fantasies from the London experience...