Bishop Alan’s Blog

I may be gone for some time

2009-11-23T01:56:00.003Z

...said Captain Oates.
But only, in fact, DV until Saturday.

As announced at Oriel College when preaching at Evensong, I’m off for the inside of a week’s retreat at the Benedictine house of Saint-Wandrille near Rouen. This is a wonderful place to reset the clocks and meditate. You can find out all about the monastery here. I will take the camera.

To blog or not to blog? Actually, am giving the internet a rest for a few days. I will post some reflections next weekend.

What kind of Unity? and of Church?

2009-11-19T19:04:00.008Z

Rowan Williams’ lecture in Rome marks an interesting reframing of ecumenical futures. There is, of course, the conventional RC model. The Church achieves the Unity for which Jesus prayed when every Christian in the world submits to it as a Divinely sanctioned Imperium. Or try the Protestant version. Structural and organisational convergence will somehow produce a complex multiplanar hybrid. Everyone trades in their old but coherent structural and accountability models to the shining new one. Unity remains a future goal, and we all have to make it happen.

Those two notions have their finer points. The retro-RC one has the virtue of coherence and vertical accountabioity lines, allbeit a coherence that many of its own followers ignore. It does actually exist. The Liberal Protestant one respects the value of every strand and models mutuality, consent and fellowship but, here comes the twist, it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, like its Roman colleague, it has a tendency to homogenise everything into what it wants them to be, rather than taking the trouble to understand the particularities which make up any Church. Surely these amount to more than simply a ghastly mistake on God’s part.

What the last thirty years has revealed, however, is that a simple binary unity based on Imperium or Liberal democracy raise questions as well as answering them. The great ecclesiologists of Vatican II have established a great deal of common ground theologically, but considerable divergence organisationally and politically. At which point, enter Cardinal Kasper with a model I think is fundamental to what we are trying to do in England today. In a vitally important address delivered in St Albans in 2002, Cardinal Kasper suggested we accept the old Structural/bureaucratic ecumenical quest had gone as far as it could in its own terms, and it was time for fresh thinking. He suggested what he called Receptive Ecumenism. This means that everyone lays gently on one side the dream of Homogenised unity, and concentrates on seeing how they can be a gift to the whole company of Christ’s faithful people. Equally tellingly, we try to develop attitudes and practice in receiving the others as gift not threat. Do that for a bit, and see where it gets us. So out go big merger schemes based on fudge, and quests for imperial hegemony. In come processes of Appreciative Inquiry and clarity.

How is Rowan sharpening up these questions? He’s asking what the great degree of theological convergence revealed by the work of the past thirty years amounts to. He’s diagnosing two principles inherent in the life of the baptized — a Conciliar horizontal plane, and an ordained vertical line of accountability. He’s asking how these integrate in the actual lives Churches and Christians live, as well as the notional sructures within which they find themselves. Catholic is both a macro-concept, but also an inherent dimension of local, micro Christian life. Playing one off against the other is foolish, wherever you’re coming from.

Catholic Unity isn’t something humans create by obiterating others. God created it on Good Friday, and it’s inherent in the Unity of Christ. Is Christ divided? When Jesus prayed for Unity, did God say “no?” or did God decide that the effectiveness of the whole enterprise depends on ecclesiastical politics come right? Or did he say yes, create a spiritual unity by the death and resurrection of Jesus, clothe Jesus’ followers in it by baptism, and ask them to make sense of Unity, not as a goal on the distant horizon to be achieved by diplomacy or conquest, but a resource to be realised in an emergent way by faithfulness in a multiplanar reality we call “communion.” The submission required is necessary but mutual, not one-way. The obedience is primarily to God in Scripture, mediated through the whole life of all the baptised...

Image via Wikipedia
All I have been attempting to say here is that the ecumenical glass is genuinely half-full – and then to ask about the character of the unfinished business between us. For many of us who are not Roman Catholics, the question we want to put, in a grateful and fraternal spirit, is whether this unfinished business is as fundamentally church-dividing as our Roman Catholic friends generally assume and maintain. And if it isn’t, can we all allow ourselves to be challenged to address the outstanding issues with the same methodological assumptions and the same overall spiritual and sacramental vision that has brought us thus far?

Seer Green: Global story, Local school

2009-11-18T19:30:00.014Z

Back to Seer Green Church of England Combined School where I had great fun with music a couple of years ago, for their 150th Anniversary celebration. Singing was great, and Olwyn Oakley, children, staff and friends seem to be enjoying life. Good to share the assembly with Gaenor Hockey, the local Vicar, who is well known and loved in school.

150 is a great age to be, along with Big Ben, the Red Cross, the Suez Canal, the Liberal Party, and the Royal Albert Bridge of the Great Western Railway. It was also the year John Brown was hanged at Harper’s Ferry, and the year of the Pennsylvania Oil Rush, when people began seriously to use oil from the ground rather than whale oil for their domestic lighting.

Well that’s enough history — how was school?
My eye was taken by some colourful Story Bags. These contain stories and all the gear you need to bring them to life with very young children. There was an interesting display of photos and records from the school, which has a very full set of logbooks, admissions registers and inspection reports. I loved a 1905 exercise book by a girl called Maude, describing the British Empire, the reign of King Josiah, and Queen Alexandra.

Attendance in those days was much worse than today, as children were often required to help their parents at work, specially at harvest. Reading through the records shows how innocent in some ways children were, but also how young they sometimes were when they first encountered death, poverty and disease. The logbooks lovingly record the joys and sorrows of school life, and circumstances of thier lives.

I was thrilled to see how this school and its Church are building links between Seer Green and Kisiizi in Western Uganda. Staff and friends, including a local doctor, have been out to Uganda to help in the hospital and school. The display of children's profiles and materials from Kisiizi was very moving, including some home made footballs and skipping ropes.

In an increasingly globalised world, the Christian Church is the greatest network on earth, and building relationships across it is something Church schools are wonderfully well placed to do. There’s an immediacy and closeness across cultures we feel in belonging together in one world, whether giving or receiving hospitality. It takes a whole world to know Christ. There is no down side, and I hope all our 281 schools will work in increasingly focussed ways to create and sustain these kinds of link, as they are doing at Seer Green.

Ministry: Rudiments of Wisdom

2009-11-17T09:06:00.007Z

30 years ordained this year, and someone asked me what I thought I’d learnt. That conversation gave birth to a few stray thoughts on the back of an envelope. It would be rather grand to call them laws of Vicaring, but here goes (in no particular order of importance):

If someone says Jesus has healed their wooden leg, rejoice, but be sure to kick them in the shins first, just to make sure.
If you get away with it and it works, fine. If it doesn’t and they catch you, just cough up cheerfully and enjoy all the times you got away with it
Do the job you’re doing now with all your heart, not the one you used to do in your last parish, or hope to do in your next. Time flies when you’re having fun...
Don't ask until you’ve worked out the question. Only ask people questions they are likely to answer in the way you want. Also, Don't ask when the baby is due until the new lady in Church has actually told you she is pregnant. Never ask a Lawyer “Can we do this?” The question is always “How can we do this?”
Pick up the bloody phone! (This applies to outgoing as well as incoming calls)
You do not have their P45's in your back pocket, so always explain, always apologise
Make the other lot line up with their own rulebook, and have a go at doing so yourself before you propose change
Be extremely loyal to your predecessors. They are your most powerful secret weapon, along with people who pray quietly at home.
Schedule your free time as zealously as you would a funeral. Your family are the closest members of the body of Christ. Strive not to be toxic to them, and remember they didn't ask to have you for a parent.
Beware Grand Designs, especially your own. Dolus latet in generalibus — the Devil's in the detail, along with the delight...
You can't argue with whining, but you can with anger. Damaged, angry people have their own reward. Bless ’em all.
Rigid faith is often brittle. In the Kingdom the first often come last and the last first. You are not God's minders, or managers, but guides who should strive to be reliable and trustworthy (I Corinthians 4)
You inherited far more than you realise. Before you go buy a new tool, check the old toolbox you seldom use and nine times out of ten you've already got one. Revolution by tradition!
All constructive change works from the inside out — “You can sleep in the Garage, but it don't make you an automobile” (Billy Graham?)
This job is about the how and why of people’s lives, including your own. You accomlish for more long term than you think, and far less in the here and now: “I think I've far exceeded what I ever thought I could possibly do. I'm almost shocked that I'm still around after all these years . . . and always grateful that I get another turn to do something.” (Billy Crystal)
“The Church doesn’t need new members half as much as it needs the old lot making over.” (Billy Sunday)

That’s enough Billies for now. I’m sure everyone has discovered their own rules — the floor is yours!

PS the rather wonderful window is in Aston Sandford, and shows two Churches, Aston Sandford on the Left and Thame on the Right. More about Aston Sandford another time, but my thanks to those who hosted a wonderful Sunday morning together last week, including lunch together. Above all, thanks for all you do the rest of the time...

Global Warming reality checkpoint

2009-11-16T21:49:00.004Z

Thanks to Martin Hodson, environmental scientist, for a tip off about the best book I’ve seen in the run-up to Copenhagen. There’s all kinds of srong views being expressed about global warming and our options about it. As something of a natural contrarian, I’m not comfortable with treating dissidents like medieval heretics. Truth should be big enought to stand up for itself. There’s a Benedictine principle that the least voice is always worth listening to, even if you disagree.

On the other hand, despite noble efforts by some elements in the right wing press to pretend there is no relationship between trashing the planet and the planet getting trashed, the science is basically in, and was years ago, and everybody actually knows we can’t just carry on the way we’ve been. Even if it were somehow proved that chucking stuff into the atmosphere isn’t dangerous, I’d still want to know what’s the joy in filthing the place up and wasting scarce resources? Why not think different and live cleaner lives?

So we all want to know how things stack up, but lack the information to work out how to evaluate the various claims and counter-claims in the air. David MacKay is Cambridge physicist, a competent mathematician, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His English is also fluent and fun. His book is called Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air.
In this book he does two invaluable things

He takes us through the way things stack up, both energy use and energy sources. Thus we can work out, for example, how big a role various renewables could or could not play in a sensible energy policy.
He’s concerned n ot only to give us rough and realistic figures, on a pragmatic, down and dirty rather than ideological basis. He also wants to help us develop for ourselves a greater numeracy about the various options and realities; what they mean and how good they might be for what.

Interestingly the book is available from conventional channels, but also free on his website here. If you disagree with his figures, he’s happy to consider others and correct his conclusions if necessary. All in all, this is the level and kind of information we need to understand our future options and make decisions which are realistic and effective about a subject which has hitherto generated far more heat than light.

Revision Committee: Tough Salami

2009-11-14T11:34:00.011Z

The latest from the rather dry and technical sounding Revision Committee on women in the Episcopate which met yesterday contains one ecclesiologically significant discovery:

After much discussion, the members of the Committee were unable to identify a basis for specifying particular functions for vesting which commanded sufficient support both from those in favour of the ordination of women as bishops and those unable to support that development. As a result all of the proposals for vesting particular functions by statute were defeated.
The effect of the Committee’s decision is therefore that such arrangements as are made for those unable to receive the episcopal ministry of women will need to be by way of delegation from the diocesan bishop rather than vesting.

It seems that the 19 members of the committee spent long hard hours trying to see if there was some way of producing some kind of new model episcopacy that simultaneously was and wasn’t complete in the ministry of every bishop. What they seem to have discovered by painful endeavour is that it just isn’t possible to salami slice what bishops’ ministry is within an autocephalous Church. St Cyrprian’s principle (“Episcopatus unus est cuius a singulis in solidum pars tenetur”) has, since the time of Archbishop Benson (1882-18891), been the keystone of Anglican theology of Episcopacy. Thus, ecclesiological first principles prove themselves.

So what? The choice now before Synod is for provision outside the legislation itself, or a statutory code of practice. The full synod will doutbless discuss these options and decide what they want to do between these options. There is, of course, always a third option of dong nothing (letting the measure fail). This is the kind of discussion and decision making the General Synod is for, really. February’s debates could well make interesting reading...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 2

2009-11-12T18:47:00.009Z

Reflecting on our Area Deans and Lay Chairs residential, the thought was that we could go away and talk in the abstract about how to sustain the sacred centre. Alternatively, we could instead go and sustain our sacred centre, with three creative spiritual guides to accompany our group and catalyse thoughts and prayers in ways that would deepen our awareness of God in our lives. I reccomend this approach highly for tired churches and groups.

Our Second guide was Dani Muñoz-Treviño, a wondrfully gifted, creative and reflective priest. Dani has done a curacy at Hazlemere, and is just coming to the end of a time in Marlow, during which he has built an emergent congregation and led a number of arts projects and activities involving hundreds, and sometimes thousands of people. He’s off soon to create a new project in Andalusia, Los Olivos — a two hundred year old hacienda, set in thirteen acres of national park. This will be Spain’s first Christian Art and Spirituality Retreat Centre, opening in the autumn of 2010.

Dani took us through a journey together around the ways people engage with God in a time of change, accompanied by movie clips and community art. His presentation built, very much, on Ernesto’s in which we entered an Old Testament narrative at depth, connected with the soundtrack of our lives in Christ, then crystallised th learning into an image. There’s a sense in which this is an area where the first are last and the last first. Some well established churchgoers have real difficulty engaging with God through art and creativity, where people everyone might think of as being complete outsiders sometimes get it instinctively.

I was also struck by the way that high energy arts projects such as Dani has been encouraging in Marlow seem to generate the energy to sustain themselves in new ways, sometimes by the seat of their pants, but well enough to survive. This said something powerful to me about the possibiities if we think we are short of resources; one response is to go round weeping need until someone feels sorry for us and shells out. Another is to kindle more energy at the heart of the project, so that a kind of mutual firestorm develops between people who understand and feel passionate about it. If nobody’s passionate about it, this could be divine guidance to give it your best shot, then try another project. If people get passionate about it, energy and all kinds of resources seem to flow from that shared commitment.

That’s the theory, and the gubbins of getting Los Olivos up and running will certainly test the theory. If Art is many people’s route to spiritual awareness, what matters is to unlock that potential in everybody, churchgoer or not. Gospel, good news, in an age where so much popular imagiation is locked down by sterile rationalism and superficial manipulation, is partly about refreshing the whole culture by releasing imagination. The Church’s role is not primarily to dogmatise at people from its own little bubble, but to celebrate and share images and experiences that create openings to God for hearts and minds and free the Spirit...

An Education: young, gifted and stuck

2009-11-11T19:16:00.009Z

Back in the 1590’s’s when Popes were Popes, Painters were Giants of the Italian renaissance who churned out jumbo ceilings and monumental walls heaving with large-as-life-and-twice-as-natural centaurs, heroes and gods, accompanied by chunky putti. The English, on the other hand, excelled at miniatures — tiny, intensely personal studies the size of passport photos. Titter ye not. It was a highly skilled art form.

Fast forward from the 1590’s to the 1950’s. An Education, like Michael Caine’s Is Anybody There? is a miniature. It's a closely observed study of growing up before the Chatterley Trial and the Beatles’ first LP. In 1961 God was still in his heaven, and all was right with the world. Suburban Surbiton was several thousand miles away from Zabriskie Point. Everything was just off the ration, but felt as though it was supposed to be still on it. In this drab universe, Cliff Richard was positively orgasmatronic. Sylvia Plath knew the real score:

Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.

On 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath stuck her head in a gas oven, in the house where W. B. Yeats had once lived. In the world she was leaving behind, aertex-clad Grammar school girls spent hours standing around in the rain with their cellos, walking down corridors with books on their heads, pretending to be old men in class Shakespeare read-throughs, and charging up and down frozen hockey pitches wondering why their legs were going puce. In the evenings they could relieve the boredom by learning irregular Latin verbs and cramming for Oxford. Life was almost as boring for 60’s schoolboys, but they had the goon show and Radio Luxembourg under the bedclothes.

Into this terminally grey world drives a flash geezer in a Bristol, a glamorous maroon roadster with three headlights and a glove compartment full of exotic cigarettes. Confused? You will be. Especially when your drab but well meaning parents start opening the sherry for him, months before Christmas. This is an intensely atmospheric, beautifully crafted film. It is brilliantly and subtly acted, finely observed down to the tentative way Carey Mulligan handles a cigarette, in exactly the way teenagers being naughty in the sixties did.

Nick Hornby’s screenplay is precisely right, managing to be substantial without being preachy. That’s a relief because otherwise the whole show could easily turn into a high class sex education morality play. It doesn’t, thanks to the consummate skill and lightness of touch of the actors, great direction, and casting the film in a flat natural light that conveys the feel of the story and its context precisely. Never again will you make the mistake of thinking the UK in the sixties was some kind of continuous full-on acid trip. Not in Surbiton it wasn’t.

So, If you like intense, atmospheric beatufully crafted, personal films, An Education will be one of the secret delights of the year. Vin Diesel fans may prefer to sit this one out. 4·5 stars out of 5.

Building the future at Frieth School

2009-11-10T23:10:00.009Z

Good to open a new classroom extension at Frieth School. Nice to see how well the Revd Jeremy Mais is settling into the valley, and to go round with John Wigram, the highly effective local vicar. An excellent staff, led by Lindsay Phillips, is backed by superb parental support, numbers have been growing. The computer suite had become a kind of Piccadilly Circus. Now there’s a new extension every learning group has its own work space, and it was good to see how naturally the new build fitted in with the rest of the school buildings. There was real craftsmanship in the new knapped flint work. Real care had gone into moving the old gable and window rather than junking it.

Children were full of life, and had been working on various projects and displays, including some spectacular fireworks that seemed to fizz away in the wall. There was a great assembly, telling the story from Genesis of God building the world, singing building songs, sharing poems and reactions to the school environment. It was fun to be in an assembly where every child in the room took part.

“Half form per year” entry makes for a school size of about 130 children. This allows for a degree of natural vertical streaming in all sorts of learning groups, and staff had some really elegant ways of leading busy small groups where children enjoy learning together from everyone of different sizes. Perhaps we stack children too firmly in notional year groups, rather than helping them access the different levels of experience and imagination you get with mixed ages. The staff were making handling the potential differentiation issues arising really well, and the children seemed delighted with the result.

Even after 14o years, Frieth has a vibrant, bustling school community. It draws together children from various villages in the Hambleden valley. It’s not PC to go on about the buildings, but the excellence of the new work that’s been done, underwritten by real generosity from the parents and friends of the school, is part of a really creative and committed approach to managing the school buildings. Tom Nixey, chair of governors, showed me a staff room cunningly clawed back from a roof space, and shared plans to enhance the hall and to cover outdoor play facilities for foundation stage children.

It’s always good to find really vibrant village schools. There is some degree of anxietiy around the place about numbers and rolls. The key strategy has to be to build a really strong school community, invest for the future, and look to sensible alliances and communities of interest.

Afghanistan and Remembrance

2009-11-08T14:10:00.024Z

Strong feelings were expressed, and questions asked, at Remembrance this year. I was at St Paul’s Bledlow Ridge, a lovingly looked after village church which is (wonderfully) kept open in the day. There’s a John Piper West window which some see as a vision of heaven. Some people present knew well the village names on the war memorial, and it was good to have a crowd there to keep faith with the dead of the last century’s wars, and show their gratitude for the basics we all easily take for granted, as well as express our pride in the dedication and professionalism of our armed services today.

This year, however, with news reports of a British soldier killed yesterday in Afghanistan, and seven others in the past week, people were asking questions. Remembrance felt very much more immediate than has often been the case in previous years. The people of Wooton Basset have evolved a mark of remembrance and respect, almost weekly of late, to dead service personnel as their bodies are repatriated. Millions of ordinary people are united in their respect and admiration for those who serve in our forces, putting their lives at risk daily for the rest of us.

Everyone this morning very much expressed this admiration, and wanted to show solidarity with our troops and their families in the UK. However, people are seriously uncertain as to the aims of the current exercise. It’s not that they doubt the war is winnable, because nobody seems to know what “winning” would amount to. Many who are entirely supportive of our service personnel feel they owe it to those who are risking their lives daily for us to ask our politicians hard questions the troops can’t.

On a micro- scale our forces are doing what they are being asked to do, whatever the cost. However, the bigger macro aim is unclear, and nobody is hearing a clear or convincing answer to the question of what our macro-aims might be from the politicians who put our troops in danger in the first place. Simply asserting it’s all somehow vaguely necessary, without explaining what and why, is not enough. Those making big sacrifices, along with the rest of us, deserve better. Perhaps greater clarity is unachievable for as long as the Americans don’t know what they’re trying to achieve there either.

It was interesting to be asked, as someone who has studied Victorian history, about our previous three wars in Afghanistan, and what might be learnt from them.

1839-42 (First Afghan War)
This proved that there is no such country as Afghanistan, just a ragbag of local loyalties and warlords. Therefore any attempt to turn it into a conventional buffer state between the Indian empire and Russia did nothing but stimulate Russian interest in the region, and inaugurate a new phase of what came to be known as the “Great Game.” The war proved there’s no such “nation” as Afghanistan except in the vaguest notional terms, and it was an easier place to get into than out of.

1878-1880 (Second Afghan War)
This was the war in which literary fans may recall Sherlock Holmes’ chum Dr Watson served. It demonstrated clearly the utter hostility of the terrain, the limited usefulness of modern arms technology, and the utter impossilibility of imposing coherent government on it, along with the lack of any real British interest in the place.

The British concluded that as long as it was that hostile to Western culture and mores it would be equally hostile to the Russians. The way the treaty of Gandamak broke down, showing itself unnecessary as well as unenforceable, showed the perils of backing any one local leader too closely. Eventually, the British withdrew their resident from Kabul. There was nothing to be gained by interference in the complex internal dynamics of the place, for Britain or Russia.

1919 (Third Afghan War)
This was the shortest Afghan war yet, and yielded only one major additional conclusion of value. What was learnt was that in any operations in Afghanistan ground communications were unnecessarily hazardous. The RAF should therefore be the lead service in any future operations that might need to be carried out in the mountains.

You might think that a flood of ground troops (what some call a surge) could somehow sort everything and transform the place into something other than it has consistently proved to be, in military terms, over the past 170 years. I’m not sure the Russians would agree with you there, after their experiences on the ground in the late eighties. Of course in the eighties the West was arming and resourcing the local mujahideen, but it’s hard to think that was the only reason the Russian occupation failed.

So, it’s time for the politicians who started this war to tell us, and especially the troops whose lives they are risking daily, where and how they think it should end. Osama and chums legged it to Pakistan years ago now, and most money and resource for terrorism comes from Pakistan and Saudi. So what are doing in Afghanistan, and how are going to know when we’ve done it? We’re all ears, and very much hoping the current ceremonies at Wooton Basset will not become a permanent fixture of our national life...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 1

2009-11-05T20:18:00.011Z

What kind of business do we think we’re in? The Church’s business is as much to know God and enjoy him for ever, delighting in Scripture and prayer, as it is to undertake organisational and administrative indoor games. The latter matter too, but only in relation to the former, because if all we ever do in Church business meetings is secular Church business, we lose our capacity to do anything after a while.

Our first diocesan prioirity for next year is what we call “sustaining the sacred centre” — nourishing our roots of faith, cultivating our imagination and openness to God, using poetry, song and and art, and releasing creative energy that can only come from deep encounter. Therefore, recently, inspired and organised by Archdeacon Karen Gorham, we replaced a regular area deans/lay chairs business meeting with a day enneagram workshop together.

This revealed the extent to which we have gotten into the habit of trying to transact complex business together with a less than adequate understanding of each person’s God-given humanity to sustain our process. Getting to recognise, articulate and enjoy our differences and particularities has helped us forward immensely. Suddenly we found we could frame and reframe our business questions in appropriate personal as well as theoretical terms. Thus more productive gets done.

Building on Karen’s brilliant idea, therefore, we have just been away with 22 area deans and lay chairs to Glenfall House, Cheltenham, for a 24 hour residential. We took with us some resource clergy — Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga Steele, Dani Muñoz-Treviño, and Ian Adams. All content was fantastically rich, and I’ll try and get to blog all three, but I’ve just got space for one today. Twenty Four hours seemed like a much longer time (in a good way!), and we all left feeling energised and revitalised spiritually.

Ernesto serves in Milton Keynes, and is an artist and priest. He has developed a knack for leading others into biblical stories, especially from the Old Testament, to explore them and enjoy them, then open themselves to creative possibilities in them. We took two stories — Jacob’s Ladder and Jacob wrestling an angel. Interacting individually and together with the text, themes of Solidarity and Struggle began to emerge, and really got us humming as we began to recognise resonances in our own stories from which we identified songs from the backing track of our lives. Using this we tried to identify, personally, symbolic objects and experiences that seemed to capture what God was saying to us about faith as solidarity and struggle. Tim Norwood’s doodle, here, captured some of the images that were spelled out around the room b y the end of our time together.

This may sound slightly weird, but it really opened a lot of spiritual doors for our group. You just explore the text in its own terms, suspending the question “what does it mean?” until you have really interacted with the story at a deep level in its own terms, and played with it and entered into it emotionally and imaginatively. Then you identify a song from the backing track of your own life and experience, and see what images God opens in your mind in response.

For anyone wanting to try this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home, Ernesto has a new book out, Five Stones and a burnt Stick. This takes the reader imaginatively into the Moses story, exploring his intimacy God against the counterpoint of his relationship with his wife. It made me realise how rich the Biblical tradition is, especially once we release it from the tyranny of being rationalised off into abstract ideas, and just let the narrative work on us, like the people did who originally told these stories around iron age campfires...

Automotive Sacre du Printemps

2009-11-04T07:48:00.009Z

(Assuming a muted reverential David Attenborough Tone)
The Bull BMW has attained full manhood, and lusts for the outdoors, bursting with frustration about his dull suburban life. He spies a petite doe-like white Hyundai, grazing on the tarmac of a Toronto parking lot with an older blue Toyota girlfriend. There is no controlling his seasonal urges, which cannot be denied.
Thus, we observe a rarely seen mating ritual:

h/t mmmikeey . Who tells us the driver is due in Court on 1 December.

Get real! Kill George Herbert!

2009-11-03T07:41:00.017Z

At home I have a groaning shelf of books published since 1900 about ministry in the Church of England. Justin Lewis-Anthony’s If you meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him is the latest and, no mean feat, by far the best. The trouble with “how-to” books about ministry is that they can easily become part of an oppressive structure that keys into a significant vulnerability in sincere ministers. You woke up this morning with 25 things you hadn't done, and felt vaguely guilty about. You read the how-to book, and now you’ve got 35. Could be time to stick your head in a gas oven. Indulging in the wrong kind of how-to stuff, spiced with paperback Evangelical fisherman’s tales by the Successful, does not make you the best priest in the street (shades of the Father Ted “Golden Cleric”) but a nervous wreck. Its nursery slopes are the way to slow death — what some do call burn-out.

Justin’s excellent book does not play this how-to game, although it does end up talking Turkey, with excellent alternative strategies and tactics to help lower spiritual and personal blood pressure, and bring a Kill-George-Herbert priest back from the Church of the Planet Zog into the Church of England.

Justin’s thesis is that we in the C of E have indulged in harmful romanticism about ministry, focussed around a gentle bucolic fantasy about the ministry of George Herbert. Roman Catholic friends tell me of a similar phenomenon in their tradition about the Curé d’Ars. This ecumenical dimension, as well as a certain Cambridge historian’s reluctance to use any “-ism” except baptism, made me judder a bit over terms like “Herbertism” but the term does clarify the discussion and provides a tool to enable us to continue to enjoy Herbert’s sublime poetry without being sucked into a lot of crushing sentimentality and hype about his three year ministry as a parish priest in the seventeenth century, in a parish of under 500, with two curates to do the dirty work.

Back in the late eighties, when I was an urban vicar, I almost had a breakdown through the unsustainable and unrealistic expectations I was putting on myself. I can see it now, but it brought its own tunnel vision at the time. As well as lifebelts from spiritual advisers, teachers and friends, I read Bonhoeffer, then Vincent Donovan, then Martin Thornton, then Rowan Williams, then Sara Savage, as healing and hope gradually dawned. The analytical sections of this book reprised almost exactly the path I found towards recovery. Dame Edna would call it spooky. If I’d been able to read this book years ago it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Therefore I commend this book 110%.

The combination of high fantasy and self-expectations, an apparent duty to say yes to everybody all the time, a one-man-band mentality about ministry, historical romanticism and exhaustion almost got me. Care Bears who attenuate everything else about their lives get crocked. I don’t now mind admitting it, and the more we all admitted our need to be needed, got some boundaries in and stood up to our own fantasies and the cult of nice, the more we could all begin to be half the people God made us to be, as priests and ministers of the gospel.

This book is a vastly intelligent, compassionate, understanding and helpful resource. Some will find it a bit clever, so if you prefer your books stupid, you may be disappointed. Of course, if the cap does not fit you don’t have to wear it. It does fit many of us. The fact is that almost all of us vicars have been on this game for far too long. It has done us no favours. As crocked care bears we may even have sought a way off the not-so-merry-go-round. This book offers the most cogent escape route I know, historically and theologically, as well as practically. Take it, and get a life!

News: the March of Time

2009-11-02T12:17:00.004Z

I’m delighted to catch Ruth Gledhill’s characteristically clear, honest and illuminating talk from Religion and the News at Cumberland Lodge online — sadly I wasn’t able to join the consultation until the session after hers, and it’s good to catch up. Ruth observes, hitting a very important nail on the head, that the plane that crashes is inevitably a bigger news story than the thousands that land safely. Back in the sixties the BBC, beseiged by letters complaining that only bad news made the headlines, tried to run a programme called “The Positive World” that majored on good news stories. It lasted all of six weeks, if that, before bombing out, via the world service in the wee small hours. Sad, you may say, but this truth reflects human nature.

This ugly something about ourselves sometimes gets blamed on journalists, unfairly. You might as well blame criminal lawyers for crime. Without it they’d be out of a job, but that hardly makes them criminals. There is, however, a severe temptation for people selling stories — “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” was Randolph Hearst’s legendary response to a correspondent’s report that Cubans were not, in fact, murdering and raping Americans left right and centre in 1898. The power Hurst weilded to shape the news was the direct result of the fact that in 1898 only press barons like him had the resources to get someone out to Cuba with a camera, and inflamatory pix back onto the streets of New York in hours. He had the steam press — the only technology to deliver news to ordinary people affordably.

Now turn the clock forward. Pretty much everybody now has the technology to read or tell their own story; and there is no longer any need, or increasingly desire, to pay money for newsprint. I wonder what the new found ability of news targets to answer back does to the exclusivity of any story in conventional media, and what kind of accountability it will require of them.

Looking at online newspaper sites, I wonder how they can raise the quality of outside comment on religious stories, rather than the rubbishy weary procession of same-ish comments from, e.g., about a dozen snarky atheists going on about sky fairies, with equally silly rejoinders. Many newspaper comments seem to come from small coteries of fans and people with axes to grind. Are the crown jewels of journalism changing — no longer the Hearst style news stories of the past century, but what conventionally would have been labeled op-ed?

The journalist whose work people may increasingly be bothered to pay to read will be anyone who manages to draw interesting comment out of ordinary life, rather than the person who zeroes in on potential conflict and drums up a war to go with it. Plane crashes will continue to make the news, but sexing up flights that land safely and pretending they were plane crashes just looks silly. Don’t sex up the material — go for depth, colour and connections. Don’t be anonymous, be yourself and own up to your biases. Above all slow down and reflect.

I was at a London mainline station at 2220 recently, surrounded by piles of newsprint waiting for the pulper. Someone offered me an Evening Standard, now a freesheet. Was I bovvered? The Daily Telegraph (£1) was giving away a bottle of mineral water free with each copy. This was a not inconsiderable offer, as the bottle itself cost £1·55 without a Telegraph. Reading the morning’s news fourteen hours on, noticing the only story I know anything about, the RC ordinariates one, the line between news and comment was so confused, the content so thin, slanted and childishly inflamatory, I thought “If this is supposed to be quality, why would I pay for these people’s take on stuff I don’t know anything about? I’d rather read people who do understand what they’re talking about...”

Human beings are insatiably interested in information. It’s perfectly possible to sell something people actually want or need on its own merits. You can, for example, buy a packet of Nurofen without having to give away a free DVD with it. But the fact people can only shift conventional newsprint with prodigous freebies says everything. If media barons had invested as much in quality journalism, as marketing ploys and production economies, they might now have rather more to offer. But good correspondent journalism takes time and immersion. It costs.

As it was, I had a very good book to read, and bought a hot drink instead, before getting onto a crowded night train home. 4 out of 65 people in the carriage were reading papers, all freesheets.

The delivery of information and news is pretty much down to search engines and the like, spiced by social media and with hundreds of channels of conventional radio and TV, led in the UK by the BBC.

So what business should newspapers actually consider themselves to be in today? Comment and Review, à la Huffington Post? If so they’d need to invest substantially more in journalists and quality. If it’s publishing, iTunes and Amazon are becoming lead repositories of all kinds of media, with increasingly blurry lines between them. Could newspaper groups invent new website activities to add as yet undreamt of value to our lives, within their clouds? Trouble is, Facebook and MySpace are leading the way on that one... Time for newspaper editors to get thinking caps on and start justifying their up to 1·6 million pound salaries, I would think...

Amazon Kindle Preliminary review

2009-10-31T08:40:00.009Z

amidst a postal strike, illustrating how Royal Mail and their staff are tragically putting their own bsiness down the toilet just now, UPS delivers an Amazon Kindle. As you can see, every Kindle delivered to the UK comes with a free promotional English lady novelist. You just add water or something. I got Charlotte Bronte. Buy 4 Kindles and you get the whole Cowan Bridge clergy daughters’ school, complete with willowy maidens, bread and water and your own Semaphore kit. Just add Crinoline.

Anyway, I haven’t quite worked out how to access all the promotional stuff, but I have been reading a substantial book with the Kindle, Hilary Mantel’s excellent Booker prize winning novel Wolf Hall. The hero is pictured, left, with his own leather-bound reading device.

Some preliminary observations about the kit:

The screen is brilliant. There are five sizes of text, all very clear, and you can adjust the gaps between words as well as the size. I have been reading the smallest size perfectly comfortably. e-ink is very restful to read, and quite clear enough with a small reading light at night, for those who like to read their novels under the bedclothes overnight.
Content Delivery: The 3G mobile signal, which is slightly questionable in these parts on mobiles, is strong and good on the Kindle. Hilary Mantel’s substantial opus downloaded in just under two minutes.I didn’t think it would make much difference, but the whole acquiring of information is pleasantly smooth and uncomplicated. Buying a book in the conventional way from the Kindle store is also remarkably painless. You just do what you always did on Amazon, and the book appears within a couple of minutes by magic on your Kindle.
Controls, apart from the keyboard, are ergonomically sound and, although I am not proud of the fact, the left hand second control for thumbing through pages is immensely useful if you're reading in bed. Some operations take longer than others, but the general feel for most operations is smooth and non-kludgy. I wish there were a “history” shortcut back to the latest 100 pages read, like on the Sony Reader, though. Maybe there is...
The Keyboard is a bit more of a pickle, though it may be that those with more developed Blackerry Thumb would find it more convenient. I am not convinced an iPhone like screen based keyboard wouldn’t have been faster to use. It does however do what it says. Perhaps all such entry devices take a few weeks before they feel natural to use, but I suspect I would be finding the keyboard more ergonomic if I were a spider than as a human being.
Design of books themselves does seem rather easier than on my Sony Reader. I like the system for telling you instantly how far through a text you are (percentage, paragraph number and a bar that fills up), and the system is free of the rather annoying occasional random line breaks that I have hitherto experienced in e-Books.
Content: We Brits are currently allowed US content licensed for the UK market — a goodly but not infinite selection. It's funny what you can and can’t get in a Kindle edition just now. As someone who likes an occasional read in French or German, I do wonder when some of the publishing industry’s copyright walls will be readjusted to allow proper paid access across national boundaries — all it would mean for them is increased trade. I can currently get physical books from amazon.fr or amazon.de, but not Kindle editions. Bah! Humbug!

Charlotte has now dissolved into the ether, to be replaced by a plan of the Villa Palladio. Not quite sure what that means.

I will, however, try and post a more detailed review comparing the Kindle experience to the Sony Reader one, sooner rather than later.

Ministry Development Review ahoy

2009-10-30T11:30:00.008Z

A slightly busy and intense time, including a two night residential learning event at Whirlow Grange, Sheffield’s retreat and spirituality centre, exploring Ministry Development Review. National interim guidance consistent with the new Terms and Conditions of Service being implemented in 2010 has brought together the whole ragbag of schemes that have grown up around England in the past 20 years. This event brought together a dozen of us — bishops, archdeacons ministry development officers and a lay reviewer with commercial HR experience, from various dioceses around the country, from Manchester to Truro.

Events like this are rather like a sit-down meal — a lot depends on who you get on your table. Fortunately, this group represented a wide variety of people with different experiences in all kinds of circumstances, with a real commitment to learning together. Excellently led and enabled by Tim Ling, Paul Wright and Karen West, this course took a notional for-instance MDR and slowed it down, giving us space and time to try it for ourselves, then analyse the key issues and opportunities arising, playing with possibilities and backing up our experience alongside national guidelines and local practice.

As Ministry Development Review becomes mandatory across the Church, and different dioceses roll out new schemes, it’s going to be really important to work at making this tool a real enrichment and support to colleagues in their ministry. That will involve conscious work by all of us, as the reviewees and reviewers we all are.

I can understand some clergy fearing MDR as a bit of secular managerialism they could do without. The only way to win their confidence will be to offer people really helpful, spiritually focussed and honest reviews. This won’t happen automatically. The one thing I learned from this event, above all, was how much there is for us all to learn, especially if we have been in and around ministry review processes for years. For example, I came away realising how much I need to raise my game around defining goals that really are goals, not just worthy bits of work.

I very much hope excellent training like this will be made available everywhere to all clergy and lay people delivering MDR.

Doing this properly will, of course, cost — but it will also benefit everyone especially the people we serve in our day to day ministries, as well as each other and, of course, ourselves.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

2009-10-26T06:41:00.006Z

Are 400,000 Church of England laypeople, 2,000 clergy and 50 Bishops imminently going to go RC, just to capture the predicted numbers in various Fleet Street Organs? I very much doubt anything like that number are sufficiently into fear, surprise and and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, but we’ll see in a couple of years time.

Ben Hecht once suggested

trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Indeed. One interesting take has come, not from a journalist, but Oxford Church History professor Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Observer:

John Paul II and Benedict have created the most centralised regime that Catholicism has ever known – a far cry from its state in either the medieval period or the Counter-Reformation. It is with an anxious ear for those alternative voices, not much different from those of mainstream wishy-washy liberal Anglicans, that Pope Benedict seeks to encourage those who think like him beyond the walls, and to bring them inside the fortifications.
Much is left unsaid amid the present triumphalist crowings of those Catholics who see this as a victory over a feeble, tottering Anglicanism, since Anglicans are temperamentally disinclined to blow their own trumpets. The Church of England is not about to disintegrate, as anyone who knows its day-to-day life, rather than listening to what journalists say about it, will be aware. Most Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals are fed up with all the name-calling, intolerance and calls for revolt...
There is one killer fact about the pope's present move. "Traditionalist" Anglicanism is a shotgun marriage between incompatible groups: extreme Anglo-Catholics and extreme evangelicals...
Their alliance with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics has been one of convenience, because both sides cannot stomach women in positions of clerical authority (for entirely opposite reasons) and hate the idea that homosexuals might be just part of the spectrum of boring normality in God's creation. (Anglo-Catholics are more muffled in their outrage on this one, given how many of them are gay themselves.) So the pope's move will split the traditionalists down the middle and reveal how fragile their alliance is. The best law in church history is the law of unintended consequences.
In one sense, this is a storm in a teacup, stirred by an elderly cleric in the Vatican with a private agenda and a track record of ill-thought-out policy moves. In another, it is a fascinating moment in a confrontation as much a struggle for the soul of the Church of Rome as of the Church of England. Once we have got past the screaming headlines, we should keep an eye open for the real story.

The Church of England has always functioned as more of a coral reef than a model trainset, mainly because that’s how Christianity was usually done in these islands before the sixteenth century, and the English were characteristically averse to clericalism and control. For Protestants unsatisfied by such pragmatism, there were New World colonies. The people with get-up-and-go got up and went, especially after the Civil War, leaving the rest of us a rather pragmatic, unassuming, and messy lump. Since the 1830’s, those sufficiently scared of the modern world to be attracted by New Model Ultramontanism usually ended up by becoming Roman Catholics. Thus all the Vatican politics behind the denunciation of Anglican orders in 1893 — a quaint marketing ploy for a different, positivist, age.

Anglo-Papalism, an idea that first appeared in the last quarter of the 19th Century, only takes in a small section of Anglo-Catholics in the C of E. They may be colourful people, but any historical assessment has to take into account everybody else. Something similar could be said of extreme Prods. The vast bulk of the Church of England has always been more multifaceted, its Protestants closer to Richard Hooker than Walter Travers — boring, but true.

It could be that a Coral Reef Church, with an open and creative base in the Creeds, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, might eventually turn out to be as sound a home for faith and holiness, as one predicated on Imperialism and control. Like Professor MacCulloch, I suspect this question will be answered over the next hundred years or so bottom-up, rather than top-down.

Let’s squish our fruit together!

2009-10-25T09:27:00.006Z

In a world of division, this latest bit of public loonery from ImprovEverywhere has Broadway class, and a heartwarming Ecumenical theme:

Faith, Ministry, and Human Kindness

2009-10-24T13:50:00.012+01:00

As someone who spent my thirties burying people in an urban parish with a crematorium in it, on one occasion 13 a week, I was really moved by Martin Samuel’s piece in the Daily Mail about his uncle Sid’s funeral.
It certainly took me back to what my job seemed to be all about in those days,

Sid was a whisky man and he liked it straight. He regarded water with suspicion, as if it were a particularly inadequate mixer.
During one spectacular coughing fit caused by his choice of solids to accompany the whisky - 40 cigarettes daily - he was offered a glass from the tap. 'No thanks, son,' he said between wheezes. 'I tried water once, tasted of nothing.'

And that is what some people think about the Church of England, too. That it tastes of nothing. They would prefer something stronger, with a bit of oomph, a little more fire and brimstone, a greater commitment to the cause. Yet no religion could have given Sid a better send-off than he had that day.

The vicar held a service for a man who never set foot inside a church unless he had to, yet did so with dignity and humour. He introduced faith for those that sought comfort from it, and displayed humanity and respect for those who were there just for Sid. And, in doing so, he converted a room of people, not to the beliefs of the Church of England, but to the idea of it.
The very modern, very civilised, concept of a faith that can be all things to all men with a common decency that may come from the teachings of God, or the teachings of Man on subjects as wide-ranging as conservation and contraception. A faith that embraces the Bible and Dean Martin, Charles Wesley and Sid.

Can any good thing come out of the Daily Mail? Apparently, yes. The fact that Martin’s experience goes on all over England any day of the week, goes a long way to explain where the real energy lies in the Church of England, and the very serious way the vast majority of my colleagues try, not always successfully, to take their responsibility, as an established Church, to be there for anyone.

Jesus preached a kingdom where the first were sometimes last and the last first. He said the real kingdom was hidden deep within, like a seed or yeast. Our job isn’t to manipulate, bully or coerce people, just pray for them, whoever they are, be there for them, and, based on trying to grow a Eucharistic community in every community, bear witness as best we can (being all of us sinners) to the way home to God. It may not sound like much, but it’s we’re there for...

[the] Church is not redundant, but more relevant than ever, precisely because it resists dogma, hectoring or the fanatical, because it does not move people to acts of violence or cruelty.
The Pope proposes to welcome Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church, but the ones most eager to take him up on the offer will be those out of step with society, who vehemently oppose the ordination of women as priests, for example.
They see the Church of England as feeble and compromised, they hear Dean Martin where a church organ should be and think it has lost its place in society. They are wrong.
There is great modernity in the inclusiveness of the Anglican Church because it places human kindness to the fore. And that simple grace should never be mistaken for weakness...

I have to say, however, I contest any impression the papers have been giving that Fr Ed Tomlinson is some kind of twisted misanthropic oldie. Fr Ed and I come from different ends of the candle, and disagree fundamentally about women’s ordained ministry, but when I visited his parish earlier this year it was obvious that his work, about which he cares passionately and sincerely, is very outward focussed in a community which hasn’t had many advantages in the past. Catholic in every sense of the term, it encompassed prayer, hospitality, a commuity play, and the renewal of a school and playgroup, among other big pieces of outward focussed hard work.

I don’t know what his local paper’s on, or maybe they were just sexing up a story to sell it, but grateful as I am for the discussion the story stimulated, and much as I agree with Martin’s conclusion that the simple inclusive grace of the C of E (where it can manage it) is its greatest strength, not a weakness, I’m uncomfortable about any injustice about the priest whose blog it was orignally based on.

Britwell Rising

2009-10-22T07:02:00.001+01:00

Last time I was in St George’s Britwell, it was a building site. Last night I was there for baptism and confirmation, and The Princess Royal will be round to open the new Church formally next week. The new baptismal pool was in use, and the building performed really well packed out with 250 people. This project shows what can be accomplished with a lot of prayer, help from friends and some inspirational leadership from John Chorlton, vicar, and others. John has logged the various stages of building on YouTube.

The challenge with this kind of building is to accommodate all the various things that go on in a busy urban Church flexibly, but without it feeling like an old-fashioned scout hut. This means a conscious choice not to cut corners, to include various designated areas among a lot of versatile space, to include first class social infrastructure (WC’s, kitchens, etc), and not to skimp on materials. This last point was especially relevant at St George’s, because it had a 1960’s Church which had to come down because it was build of various miracle substances of the 1960’s, including Sick Concrete and asbestos. That all seems a long time ago now, and it’s especially good to see a growing congregation usually nudging three figures of a Sunday where all was, certainly in the early years of this century, blood and guts.

Two immediate thoughts struck me, seeing it all up and running:

Lighting makes an enormous difference to a building. This one has all sorts of bells and whistles built in, including solar power generation off the roof, and the ability to light the areas you are using properly brings the whole place alive in use, along with high quality wired-in services.
We often say, in new housing areas, “of course we shouldn’t be thinking of new build because the Church is people not buildings.” Theologically this is fine — we don’t need to build, but the half truth looks slightly hollow when you see first class building in a context that had been branded a failing estate. It may seem noble and somehow incarnational not to invest in buildings, but they can be endeavours that catalyse faith, generate as well as spend energy, and bring people together. It is also incarnational to invest sacrificially in an area’s renewal. Failing to consider at least the possibility of such investment in a challenging urban parish runs the risk of colluding with the whole culture of failure, grot and crappada that stalks the streets anyway. Christianity is not a religion, as much as a process of social and personal transformation, and it is good to see a distinctive sign of this transformation, corporately and concretely, at work on the streets.

Small Earthquake in Rome?

2009-10-21T08:31:00.016+01:00

Serving in a part of the Lord’s vineyard with a valued but proportionately tiny Anglo-Catholic strand (for the past four hundred years, anyway), I am surrounded by silence about the latest Vatican scheme for special Angican ordinariates. I have to admit I don’t know what an “ordinariate” is, but some of my Anglo-Catholic friends who claim they do are delighted, so I’m glad to share their joy.

Not being of a Chauvinistic/ Imperialistic bent about religion, I’ve always thought people should serve within the denomination in which they can best be discipled. All denominations are only delivery systems for the Kingdom, after all.

This new scheme has some rather odd resonances — if a clergy colleague came to see me to say they believed God was calling them to be a Baptist, if that’s discipled, I’d be delighted. If the Baptists then announced they had a special scheme for Anglicans where you could be a Baptist but also, as a former Anglican, you could carry on doing infant baptisms, my eyebrows would raise.

How jolly postmodern of them, I’d think, but wait a minute. Assimilating a lot of people who perhaps have struggled, and some might even say haven’t made a raging success of living within their own tradition, you’ll get two sorts of “convert”:

people who really should try out and perhaps are called by God to be part of the Roman tradition. Becoming Roman Catholics will enable them to be better disciples, so the whole Church of God, every denomination, is enriched — the wealth of one Christian expression is the resource of all: Hip, hip, hooray!
people who aren’t terribly good at living in any tradition on anything but their own terms. “The disciplines and relationships of Community are for the little people...”

This second sort of “convert,” often has what St Benedict called the Gyrovague personality. The symptom, says the Rule, is a compulsive habit of “murmuring.” Gyrovagues will carry on inexorably being as they are, because their aproach to authority is personality based and they can’t help it.

The latest special offer may not be good news for the Pope’s own people. There are, for example, genuine Roman Catholic clergy who have faithfully and heroicially struggled and somehow managed to live sacrificially within their Church’s discipline, because they sincerely believed it was necessary. Where does it leave them to know that Auntie in Rome is now doing a PostModern family promotion for married Anglicans, but they’re not invited? However delighted I might be, were this me, that Auntie is now being jolly and Post-Modern to the Anglicans, I’d hope she manages to find some way, after all these years, of being jolly and Post-Modern to me…

Anish Kapoor: Goo and Mirrors

2009-10-20T08:35:00.015+01:00

Arty types will recognise from my blog header my respect for the work of Anish Kapoor. It was a great joy to spent a day off yesterday at his latest, largest and most absorbing exhbition at the Royal Academy. He’s still fascinated with space, bigtime, playing with mirrors and reflections. Vistors are greeted by a socking great pile of 76 mirrored bubbles in the courtyard outside which, like Cloud Gate, entertains all day.

Inside, there’s a good selection of dense colour works — strangely deep and absorbing even in poster paint primary colours. Somehow he manages to make the spindliest and sharpest geometry look as though it was simply powder that could blow away at any moment. As ever, he’s interesed in the plane as well as the shape, with a pregnant wall, hinting at things to come — a wall of pure sunshine orange that turns out to have depth when you get close to it (denser of not quite as monumental as the sun in Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project at the Tate the other year).

So far, Kapoor been before. The new dimension is goo. There’s dusty scatalogical goo, that being intestinally shaped coils and turns of concrete loaded on pallets like piles of guts or one of those snake scenes in an Indiana Jones movie. “Greyman Cries, Shaman Dies, Billowing Smoke, Beauty Evoked” is the finished resentable title. Many fellow visitors were drawn into the texture of various squigglies loaded on the pallets, longing to touch.

But the most spectacular way Kapoor claims his space, blasting it out or dominating everything, is with shimmering waxy scarlet goo. For those who like their goo monumental, Svayambh (Sanskrit for “self-generated”) is a 40 ton slow train that takes one and a half hours to scour its way through five galleries, splashing blood-red wax and vaseline on the high imperial gilded arches as it goes. Like the original juggernaut it slides noiselessly through the huge space, drawing children of all ages back again and again to check on its progress.

If you prefer indoor fireworks, there’s Shooting into the Corner. Every twenty minutes a ritual is enacted by which a shell shaped red wadge is fired at the wall of the next gallery, filling the smaller room gradually with goo. Even though it’s powered on compressed air, I would guess, and there’s no conventional explosive bang, the whole thing makes a predictably intense indoor game. Various people near me were holding their ears, and somebody near me jumped. The kids loved it.

The show manages to be a monumental, dynamic and playful workout for the imagination. I shall certainly be back before December.

Cardboard Craft and Cutouts

2009-10-18T21:20:00.006+01:00

A triumphantly original animation comes across to my attention — Cardboard, a graduation project from Dutch anomator Sjors Verwoort. More of his work here. I love the originality of his design idea, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways it has been brought to life against a crowded urban backdrop. It’s a bit of fun for a busy Sunday, and definitely from a designer to watch.

Only the men up front get to dress up...

2009-10-17T17:22:00.009+01:00

I enjoyed doing a short introduction for an All-Age worship training day at Worminghall put together by David Kaboleh, the Vicar. Main sessions were led by Nick Harding — Children’s Ministry Officer in the Diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, a wonderful and inspiring trainer who somehow managed to draw a mainly adult audience into various all ages experiences to illustrate his various points. Nick also led a session on a very interesting question about which he’s written a booklet, Boys, God and the Church (can be downloaded here)

One highlight of the day for me, however, was the following notional letter to Grandma Nick shared with us, written back in the nineties by Judith Wigley, from the Bradford diocese, guesstimating how a Sunday Church Service might be described by a child from a toddler group:

Dear Grandma,

This morning Mummy took me to Church for the very first time. I thought we were going to Rainbow Toddlers because we went through the big giant’s door, but we weren’t because the room was different and much bigger. It was cold, with nothing on the floor, and we didn’t take our coats off all the time we were there.

There was a man at the door who didn’t know Mummy but he sort of smiled at her. She got a book and piece of paper. I don’t think he saw me because I didn’t get anything. Only the grown ups did.

Auntie Joan was there from toddlers and my special friend Lucy. Lucy wasn’t allowed to sit by me because she was with her Daddy and big sister. Our Daddy didn’t want to come. I stood up on the seat to wave to Lucy but her Daddy told her to sit down and be good. I only wanted to wave. The lady behind us asked Mummy to take me off the seat because I was making it dirty so she carried me. I wanted to see the man who was talking.

Soon we started to play games. First it was dressing up, but only the Men at the Front were allowed to play. It wasn’t fair really because I wanted to put on a big dress like them. We all played hide and seek though, Grandma, even the grown ups. You get down and hide behind the seat, and when the man says the magic word “Amen” you jump up again. They played that three times!

Singing time was good fun, but I didn’t know all of the songs. They sang some that we sing in Rainbow Toddlers, clapping and dancing songs. There was a big space for dancing and jumping right between the seats but nobody used it. It was hard to dance in Mummy’s arms but I made a big noise clapping. Lucy did too but her Daddy told her to be quiet. Grandma, can you clap quietly? The grown-ups were very good at it in Church.

You have to pay to go Church, Grandma. Two men came round with big big plates and collected all your money. Some people didn’t have any money so they gave them an envelope instead. But you know something, Grandma, you didn’t get any drinks and biscuits even though you’d paid. They just gave it all to the Man at the Front. I think he must be very rich.

Later the Man at the Front said that all the children had to go out. I think he was fed up with us. Mummy took me to the room where we have Rainbow Toddlers but it wasn’t the same. Mummy wanted to go back into Church to listen to the man talk about Jesus. Poor mummy — I’m sure it would be nicer for her to read my book about him. I played with Lucy for a while but then I wanted Mummy to come back. The lady said that she wouldn’t be long, but she was. I cried because I missed my mummy but Lucy kissed me better.

At the end, the dressed up man was standing by the door. He asked Mummy if she had been before and said he hoped that she would come again. He shook Mummy’s hand. He didn’t speak to me. I don’t think he wants me to come again. Perhaps it’s because I can’t clap quietly or because I wanted to wave to Lucy. I didn’t mean to dirty their seat, Grandma — I only wanted to see.

I slept all afternoon when we got home. Daddy said I can go every week if it makes me sleepy, but Grandma, I’m not sure I want to go again.

Truth, First Casualty of War

2009-10-15T07:54:00.016+01:00

What’s propaganda and what’s news? One of the great texts to map the question is Arthur Ponsonby’s Fasehood in War-Time (1928) (h/t Jolyon Mitchell). The subtitle says it all — “an amazing collection of carefully documented lies circulated in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and America during the Great War.” Wartime requires lies, but when peace breaks out people should wise up to what has been done to them.

It’s a treasure trove of fantasies and deceptions, great and small — Russian troops marching through Crewe with snow on their boots, babies with their hands cut off, mutilated nurses and branded nuns, corpse factories, enamelled adverts with secret spy info hidden on the back.
One enterprising Austrian firm supplied atrocity photographs to both sides, ready for captioning as required.

In among the small fry swim mighty Koi — great Lies of State. As late as 1913, Hansard records fervent, lofty denials of any understanding with France that could lead to a British Expeditionary Force being sent to war on the continent. As well as lies of commission came lies of ommission. The violation of the “scrap of paper” that resulted in the invasion of Belgian was true, but less heinous when one remembers the French had laid eerily similar plans to do the same thing if necessary. All nations were on the game, fuelled by fear and hysteria:

When Antwerp Fell [Köln] Church Bells were rung — Kölnische Zeitung

According to the Kölnische Zeitung, the clergy of Antwerp were compelled to ring the Church bells when the fortress fell — Le Matin

According to what Le Matin has heard from Cologne, the Belgian priests who refused to ring the Church Bells when Antwerp was taken have been driven away from their places — The Times

According to what The Times has learnt from Cologne via Paris, the unfortunate Belgian priests who refused to ring the church bells when Antwerp was taken have been sentenced to hard labour — Corriére della Sera

According to information to the Corriére della Sera from Cologne via London it is confirmed that the barbaric conquerors of Antwerp punished the unfortunate Belgian priests for their heroic refusal to ring the church bells by hanging them as living clappers to the bells with their heads down — Le Matin

As Wartime rationing induced permanent change in the food industry, wartime distortion and manipulation transformed the media game. One product of the Great War was Lord Northcliffe’s propaganda department at Crewe House, which made “you provide the pictures, I’ll provide the war” methods of what had been called the yellow press acceptable in the mainstream media of the day. In the more direct media landscape we now inhabit (some call it “disintermediated”) Chinese Whispers are higher power, but also far easier to check and challenge from the source. We need to get our heads around the diference between being media consumers and participants...