Bishop Alan’s Blog

Thatcher: Puccini or Sylvie Krin?

2012-01-10T12:50:00.000Z

It’s always fascinating but unsettling to see living people walking around on the big screen — Stephen Frears’ masterful portrait of The Queen springs to mind.

It’s disturbing to think that the person concerned, along with their nearest and dearest, must be watching this.

I gather the Thatcher clan sat this one out, wisely I think, but they may have sneaked a few peeks through the cracks between their fingers.

This is non-political non-historical Thatcher; indeed all that is missing is music by Signor Puccini to accompany the verismo libretto of “Signora Thatcher e Denis”. The curtain rises to discover our heroine in a Pooter-Chic apartment full of pictures of herself, the sort ordinary people would have to had to Photoshop, mulling over her glory years. Age has wearied her, and the years condemn. June, a maid, hovers cheerfully in the background, whilst her slightly dog-eared daughter Carol performs the functions of a faintly exasperated maid. Meanwhile, 6,000 miles away, the adored Boy Mark drifts on, heedless.

The other principal in the tale, is the shade of Denis, who is not entirely buffo. He flits in and out between arias with kindly but piquant saloon-bar comment.

There goes the Falklands war, and in a furioso aria, La Thatcher tongue-lashes an Argentine dictator, a US Secretary of State, and her own lily-livered crew.

As the aria fades, Denis slides gently onto the sofa behind MT and says something like “well, that saved your bacon, didn’t it old girl.”

You get the idea.

At heart la Thatcher is an ordinary human being with a penchant for occasional Churchillian verbal spasms. Early on she stages an epic breakout, and gets as far as the paper shop where she discovers, horrore! milk is now 49p a pint. This treatment is kindly to the point of patronising, a kindness for those of us still traumatised by her Spitting Image. It’s free with the facts but that could be its greatest strength.

What about Thatcherism, though?

Well what about it? Nothing to it, really. That could be why, in real life, her foundation went bust a few years ago.

Mrs Thatcher’s lifetime achievement turns out to have been holding on tight to the memory of a much-admired father, and living up to his instincts and slogans courageously through an escalating variety of challenges — a thoroughly decent thing to do, but hardly the basis for a new kind of world government.

In 1964 Geoffrey Barraclough observed

contemporary history can only justify its claim to be a serious intellectual discipline and more than a desultory and superficial review of the contemporary scene, if it sets out to clarify the basic structural changes which have shaped the modern world. These changes are fundamental because they fix the skeleton or framework within which political action takes place.

This film is no work of contemporary history. It does not clarify the structural changes that have shaped the modern world. As various chickens come home to roost, sending the wheels flying off the whole neo-liberal free market panjandrum Mrs Thatcher and her friends honestly believed in and represented, perhaps the same can be said of “Thatcherism” itself. But that’s a judgement for historians a few years hence. For now, just enjoy the show.

Meryl Streep's performance is as amazing as everybody says, and if your taste runs to opera verismo in a Barret Home, Signora Thatcher e Denis could well be the production of a lifetime.

St Paul’s: Writing on the subway wall?

2012-01-06T09:00:00.000Z

What can leaders in the Church of England, like me, learn about our operation from last year’s experience outside St Pauls? I wanted to capture three bits of feedback about the Church of England from sympathetic voices. Their words are not comfortable, but we have to pinch ourselves and remember the Facts are our Friends. They can be changed, but doing so will require change in us.

Voice 1:
The chair of our local council, a member of the Conservative party, wrote to the Archbishop to

jolt the leadership of the Church of England to become more vocal and effective in offering moral guidance based on the Gospel to a society where the vast majority are fumbling to find their way to a place where the world’s resources are more evenly shared and where the poor and weak are both supported and respected. ....It is absolutely appropriate for you to comment on the ethics of particular financial structures, taxation and economic policy. However, in arguing for three specific financial solutions in your first public response to the concerns highlighted by the protesters you sounded like yet another economist or politician rather than an Archbishop. Even if each of the suggestions proved to be a brilliant idea would they solve the fundamental problem? No!

You state that the demands of the protesters have been vague.

That, I suggest, is a symptom of their inability to collectively articulate their desire for a fairer world.

Had your response been to answer simply and directly the question on the banner most frequently featured in the media coverage outside St Paul’s “What would Jesus do?” you may have been able to help them.

Present concerns about the future of life, work and money transcend political stereotypes. Mammon is the god that failed, but remains enticing. Right now he has us by the short and curlies. People are desperate to go beyond the assumptions and processes that got us into this mess. They want spiritual guides to engage with the real big issue not tinker with silver bullets and quick fixes. What would Jesus do? Over to us...

Voice 2:
I was lucky enough to have a conversation in the week of all the resignations with a French Monastic friend I much admire.

With the bodies piling up on the bed like the final act of a Jacobean tragedy, he told me:

There was no need to resign
— only to repent!

Our faith is one of repentance, renewal and hope. This isn’t always well understood in England, natural home of Pelagianism — the religion of dyb-dyb-dyb/dob-dob-dob and pulling your socks up. The world we are entering is an ever more risky place. To make fools of ourselves may be embarrassing, but if it’s only our pride on the line, that shouldn’t be the end of the world. A faith in grace breeds courage, including the courage to risk failure. Every day, we can start again. We become what we could be by the grace of God, not corporate planning.

Voice 3:
Last word goes a US banker working in London. I wish I knew his name. He came up to me on the street outside the Cathedral that first weekend. With the press asking me what bishops think of bankers, I found it especially valuable to hear what bankers think of bishops. He saw my collar and asked if St Paul's was “my Church.” “Yes, and no,” I said. But I am a Church of England bishop. And he said...

Ah! Church of England! — a lot of what you do in your churches is beautiful. Your downside is your top people. Their heads are stuck so far up their own asses they can't see the light any more!

Excuse my friend’s American. They talk like that, especially the bankers. I hate to think our good and decent College of Bishops comes over like this. But it does.

The facts are our friends. And the fact is there is a world out there rocking on its bearings, looking to Jesus Christ, among others, for wisdom and hope.

An institution that’s absorbed in anxiety about itself, and gets hung up on, for example, arcana like “the gay issue” as currently framed, or discriminatory behaviour towards women, doesn’t inspire wisdom or hope in anyone outside itself.

This is painful to admit, but it’s the truth on the street. Most local parishes are far more recognisable as the Body of Christ than the anxious fading institution wringing its hands at the centre.

The time has come, not to resign but to re-engage — and to repent on the way. Change is possible, but we need to want to get real. That’s what metanoia is. How can we expect the bankers to do something we find so damned difficult ourselves? By grace, through faith. Same as everyone else. Who knows? our struggles to get real may resource them on their parallel journey.

But only if we do it.

How about the particular role of leaders in institutions? Can they do more than whistle for the wind, telling everybody how magnificent the Emperor’s new clothes are, pour encourager les autres? Let me throw in a final soundbite. I’m currently reading a wonderful book by Euan Semple about the realities of communication. I hope to review it when I’ve finished reading it. Reflecting on his hands-on experience of many corporate entities including the BBC, he says

We are used to thinking of the world in terms of mass. Big things like nation states, religions, society, the media. We are used to expecting those big things to look after us and protect us. But the internet splits those up and breaks them apart. It is made up of networks of individuals, each with their own voice. If we are going to survive the changes we need to see in our institutions we need to help them find that voice. We need to help them grow up.

Dark Crusading in rural Sweden

2012-01-04T09:49:00.001Z

On our first date nite of 2012 we try out David Fincher’s Hollywood remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It’s a pacy stylish two and half hours, with one or two slightly sicko undertones, but time flies when you’re having fun.

Daniel Craig plays a disgraced journalist, if you can imagine such a thing, who takes refuge from the slings and arrows of a libel conviction by sorting out the dirty linen of Sweden’s most dysfunctional family.
They live on their own private island that they’ve turned into a Fraggle Rock of murder, mystery and intrigue. Everyone nurses their own dark Nazi, misogynistic or Oedipal secrets, sometimes all three simultaneously, as mist curls off the lake towards deserted boathouses past the mangled corpses of beheaded cats.
Pretty standard stuff, but is the killer still be at large? That would be telling.

There’s a dark arthouse feel about this take on the tale, and Rooney Mara’s Lisbeth heads the charge. In the good old days a trainee secret agent used to swing provocatively across English TV screens with a box of Milk Tray for the lady. Now the Lady is doing the swinging, tattoed like a sailor, abetted by several pounds of chunky metalware installed in unusual ways around her person.

She’s a dark, lean, mean street machine, who melds with her machinery as she locks on motorbike or laptop. She zaps through action like a steely robotic whippet but is she emotionally engaging enough? Probably not for some, but it is a considerable achievement to have evolved an action heroine who makes Angelina’s Lara Croft look like Mary Poppins.

Finally, brethren, the wackiest wacko on this Fraggle Rock murders women according to prescriptions derived literally from the Book of Leviticus.

So, what price literalism?

It’s easy to bang on about “biblical” attitudes and practices in a way that bears no relationship at all to what’s actually written in the Bible.

Let the reader beware...

All Clear: O Frabjous Day!

2012-01-02T21:18:00.000Z

Alarm over. This site is now pure and wholesome and lovely and safe, with an almost lemony freshness. No techie, me, but I’ve been tinkering deep in the works this evening, struggling to eliminate the cause of a warning that was coming up when it was opened with the Chrome browser, proclaiming that, although essentially harmless, it could damage people's computers if opened, because of Malware sourced from another site.

Many thanks to Alan Crawley and others for helping me pin this down and eliminate any appearance of foul play or sordid beastliness. Job done. Unless anyone out there knows better, in which case please say.

In the meanwhile I have also taken steps to simplify radically the blog design, retaining one or two of the bits people actually seemed to use, but eliminating a large number of tools, markers and badges that had growed like Topsy since 2007. The purpose of many had slipped into the mists of time, and I had been warned by some readers that the site was taking longer to load than it should.

In that spirit, I hope we are all clear to proceed to more interesting subjects. I am aware, however that there are still mimsy borogroves out there. Please email me at the first sign of anything untoward, or if you miss any feature of the old site that could do with being ported to this one.

New Year Resolutions?

2012-01-01T19:39:00.009Z

2012 — the year the world ends? I sincerely hope not; there’s work to be done, and I wish anyone reading this all good faith, hope and love in the coming year.

Among many cards and messages recently, a fair few friends have asked after this blog. After four heavy years, December has been my month off blogging, aided by three realities — an extended educational development trip to India, the need to do a bit more work elsewhere, and curiosity about taking a break. That and the Day job.

Any result? This is how things are shaping up, at the start of a new year of Grace...

Over the autumn I have put more time into Facebook, as a more interactive space in which it has been possible to explore some in depth conversations.

I've certainly decided that having a very open policy on responding to friend requests on FB is an excellent wheeze, and much of the goof-about stuff I had been using this blog for as a kind of commonplace book, is probably better done through FaceBook. Friend me, and I will friend you, er, friend.

I have finally disconnected from Fleet Street. When the Times paywall came in, I subscribed, mainly because someone’s got to pay for journalism and it could have been a fruitful way to go. I've let the sub go now, mainly because it was adding little value to my life. The upside was occasional pieces of themost superb journalism — Simon Barnes, I will miss you, sir. The downside was a tedious sense of being trapped at a fundamentally narrow andsuperficial party, surrounded by low grade right wing bores, stories spun up in a hurry, often lifted from the internet or agencies anyway, a dreadfully sparse and low standard of scientific, historical, educational and religious reporting. By December I noticed I could only be bothered to download the Times once a fortnight, out of a sense of duty. Why? I wondered. So I stopped. Mr Murdoch, I sucked it and saw. Now I’m out of here.

Twitter has been my space of choice for immediate news, keeping up with events and opinions, and reportage.

The odd meeting or event, anything with potential news value, has proved to be well worth tweeting, and I have been using Twitter to trawl reactions and opinions all over the place.

If I worked at a desktop rather than being out and about so much, I might use Twitter even more, but certainly it remains my best immediate reaction and comment source, to listen as much as to talk. I use Echofon to thread conversations on iPad and iPhone.

What is best done on this blog, however, are short comment pieces with the opportunity for follow-up conversations. As to frequency, I had been writing a piece then seeing through conversations arising from it until they dried up then sticking another on.

And in the meanwhile I'm also experimenting with a far cleaner simpler design. Some have been telling me they find the old one took ages to load, and had even produced the odd malware warning. I'd love to know reactions, especially if anyone misses any of the elements I've eliminated in the interest of de-cluttering.

That seems to me the way to go. Twice a week? Let’s see...

Showing off? shutting shop? showing up?

2011-10-28T09:41:00.011+01:00

Even amid a forest of high towers, St Paul’s Cathedral remains, architecturally, the heart of the City of London.

It could be a key place for people to confront anxiety and seek a new vision for the future of humanity, money, and power. This process, that is goinog on around the world, has to take in all interested parties — Limiting it to the elite who got us into this mess is insane.

After visiting the OLSX camp yesterday, I have no idea why St Paul's shut up shop last week. The appearance of a large handful, but still only a handful, of cheap tents fifty yards from the front door would be possible to manage, one would think. If, as Woody Allen suggests, 80% of success is showing up, at least now St Paul’s has reopened it is back in the game.

But what game?

Once upon a time an Urban PCC in theSouth of England was interviewing candidates for the post of Vicar. One willowy Anglo-Catholic youth made a big pitch for a shift up the candle — recalling the grand tradition of Anglo-Catholic slum clergy he said “what this place needs isn’t a leader, but a Priest!” Stirring stuff... until, quarter of an hour later a local bag lady with a skinful of cider but a heart of gold, crashed through the doors crowing, as was her wont, her signature line - “Help! I need a Priest!” Willowy Anglo-Catholic youth disappeared to the Toilet. He did not get the job.

And, as St Paul’s reopens its doors, this tale raises a question for its managers. Can they redeem their initial hysterical over-reaction? Do they want to draw all voices into a vital public debate, or will they clear the site as tactfully and soon as possible, probably in the middle of the night — when Caiaphas and chums used to do their business?

In other words do they have the stomach to engage in the real world at the crest of a tidal race between people, money and power, or are they just overgrown public schoolboys playing indoor games in their own self-important Tourist Disneyland?

Over to them...

Jobs: He being dead yet speaketh

2011-10-06T08:19:00.008+01:00

Ever since I went on telly suggesting Apple was in some sociological respects a religion, people have asked me about Steve Jobs as Messiah. So today’s sad news does call for some comment, perhaps.

This may be time to stop all the clocks and disconnect the telephone, but I do not anticipate a literal resurrection.

Howbeit, quite apart from anything of historic import Mr Jobs may have achieved in his garage with Woz back in the eighties, he did resurrect a corporation.

I sometimes encounter the idolisation of business leadership, even among those appointing vicars. I never quite want to drink this particular kool-aid. When I was a lad the UK had the third or fourth greatest trading economy in the world. Its slippage to the low twenties has to have something to do with the quality of its business leadership since the sixties, that has not always been stellar. The Church hath little need for more of the UK's often class-ridden, stale, vain, self-indulgent business leadership. It’s already riddled with that stuff.

Furthermore what passes for business leadership often turns out to be no more than grumpy old men sounding off about their control fantasies, or low grade Pelagian boasting about their deservings, or saying nice things about a religion that is no more than top dressing for their own greed and prejudices.

Not so Mr Jobs. As well as providing a creative context in which the world’s greatest designers, men like Jonathan Ive, could flourish he did provide genuine moral leadership on occasion, rooted in his own experience, and free for all. In the often murky world of business leadership it shines out, as a Monty Python character once said of Oscar Wilde’s wit and wisdom, like a stream of silver bats’ pee in a dark cave.

So here, in memoriam, are two passages for pondering from Mr Jobs’ famous Stanford Commencement Address:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart..

Not to labour the point, he went on to discuss his own diagnosis of terminal cancer and say:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Bullying of and by clergy: a way ahead?

2011-09-29T08:48:00.007+01:00

Many thanks to people who have posted stories and comments on clergy bullying. This is no more than an open discussion, not a therapy point, but any posting of information and ideas helps break the culture of silence around the subject. I did promise to say what we were doing in our diocese.

Archdeacon Karen and Poli Shajko, our HR Lead, have been scoping a new policy and procedures in the light of the Dignity at Work national documentation, in collaboration with Anne Lee, an Oxford psychologist who specialises in this area. We are going to recruit two confidential non-hierarchical listeners in each archdeaconry, the Parish Development Advisor (who already works and is known by any clergy) plus one - a mixed gender team with access available from any to all. This includes congregational members who say clergy are bullying them, as well as clergy who say congregational members are bullies. We are working with an independent partnership to develop training both for awareness and implementation of a new dignity at work policy, with documents to go to Bishop's Council, then out. I'm not sure how and when this is published around deaneries, but that's got to happen well — a comms job.

It seems to me, along with some comments earlier this month, that everyone knows what bullying is, and when they feel bullied, but the description needs to be in terms of the behaviour that has to change. If we don't do that the onus stays in the wrong place, and things will never improve. The vast majority of claims I have drilled into dissolve into mutual recrimination. So I have to say that the perception of "bullying" boils down to a symptom of organisational malaise, the abuse of power.

We need procedures in place, as for whistleblowing, available to individuals; but this is not enough.

The key to progress is to have a public framework describing the proper use of power against which all behaviour can be measured.

Such a framework makes any anomaly look like an anomaly, rather than just a random incidence of "shit happens."

One final frontier remains, however. Church culture, deferential, hierarchical and often inclined to hypocrisy, breeds an alignment gap between aspiration and active accountability at the top. The Church is full of good intentions but some bishops, forgive me for saying but it's the truth, fear and loathe that kind of open accountability. Confronted recently with a proposed standard policy on appointments, out poured reasons why this was an impossible bureaucratic imposition to clip their wings. Ironically, much practice is consistent with what was proposed, and the law will probably carry my Lords kicking and screaming where they don't want to go.

Why does it have to be like this? Perhaps the Great Sacred Cow of diocesan exceptionalism belongs to good and decent people who think they are doing their best, so where could the problem be? "parked on the candidate, not them" is the answer. The problem is this: Candidates applying for jobs need to have confidence that their applications will be treated consistently and fairly, and that the rules of the game are being observed by everybody involved - or why should they waste their time offering their work and ministry in the first place? Without some public standard applicants will inevitably suspect stitch-ups all over the place without this elementary accountability — even where they aren't happening! So culture has to change at every level in the organisation, if our practice is to align with our values. The problem is not, of course unique to the Church, but this may be the next area in which us Don Quixotes need to grab Sancho and buckle up.

Clergy Bullying revisited

2011-09-12T08:20:00.000+01:00

I fully appreciate why this comment, left yesterday, was anonymous — Many thanks for it. Bullying is a subject to which I've returned again and again because, Christian siblings, there’s a lot of it about. This should not be. We are meant to be a community whose love shows the world the best that life could be. Bullying is a betrayal of all the Church stands for. So who do you tell? A part of me says, “It doesn’t matter, in a way, as long as you tell someone.” Traditional C of E cultures of secrecy and deference will not do. Openness is a Gospel Value — the open proclamation of the truth, the city set on a hill. So is mutual accountability, or submission of our work to each other - a discipline that cuts all ways.

Many (but emphatically not all) accusations of bullying mirror each other. A says B is bullying them. I go to B who then tells me that A is in fact the bully. This calls for definitions and metrics, but don't be put off. What the B word does indicate is a possible abuse of power, that’s all; so ask “what sort of power is being exercised how?” Go on to ask “by what standard can this be measured? human rights? codes of practice? the ordinal?” Don't get angry, don’t turn yourself into a designer victim, just tell someone. This whole thing thrives on fear, deference, and Voodoo. Remember the Wizard of Oz. Then ask “to whom is the perpetrator, as you see it, accountable to, and how?” Armed with that information, go deploy your information strategically.

One thing’s for sure. Doing nothing will make the problem worse, and you will increasingly internalise it until it becomes business as usual. To paraphrase Jesus, Once the light within you becomes darkness, said Jesus, you are well and truly stuffed. And so are all the rest of us.

Forgiveness and Healing

2011-09-11T11:44:00.003+01:00

God's word is the hammer that shatters rocks in pieces, even or perhaps especially on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. This Sunday many of my colleagues may have been sucking their pencils and feeling blank, but some of them will preach the sermon of their lives. By “sheer coincidence” the Lectionary serves up readings today about forgiveness.

Romans 14 is about the handling of profound conscientious difference that produce strong mutual antagonism among Christians— something they experienced in the first century, too:

we will all stand before the judgment seat of God... then, each of us will be accountable to God. Let us therefore no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of another. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself; but it is unclean for anyone who thinks it unclean...

This approach has not generally been taken by the top brass of the Anglican Communion in the last ten years. Their occasional eschewings of judgment have ministered grace, but their fondest strategies for dodging the embarrassment of sexuality issues, or devising an ingenious lawyer’s band aid, have simply backfired and compounded the hurt. Go figure. Romans 14 really is the only way. Sooner rather than later, I hope.

And then Matthew 18, the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who uncompromisingly told his followers to love their enemies, kicks in, straight to the solar plexus

Peter came and said to him, "Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?" Jesus said to him, "Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times.

Jesus goes on to tell the story of the unforgiving servant, that exposes the complete idiocy of our wraths and sorrows. How do we love our enemies, though?

Here in Great Missenden, Rosie the Vicar explored with tremendous clarity what forgiveness is and isn’t. The thief hanging on the cross was unquestionably guilty, and Jesus unquestionably innocent. Their interaction is outrageously simple.

This made me reflect that if we try to forgive out of our own supposed resources of niceness, we will only compound the anger and hurt. All we can work out of, fruitfully, is our own receiving of forgiveness, love as strong as death, love with open eyes.

Her sermon went on to say true forgiveness is the hardest thing in the world. It is NOT

Forgetting — it doesn't change the past, or choose to ignore it
Reconciliation — it takes two to be reconciled, but only one to forgive
Condoning — it is not about excusing bad behaviour
Dismissing — saying it doesn’t matter when it does
Pardoning — which is legal release from the penalty or other legal consequences of having done wrong

It is a personal transaction that releases the one offended against from the offence. That’s all.

She went on to quote the Roman Catholic psychiatrist Dr Jack Dominian, one of the Church’s greatest and wisest teachers about the reality of being human. He was talking here about marriage breakdown:

Forgiveness is not enough. We need to go beyond forgiveness and do as Christ did, who knew what it was to be man. We must try to understand what lies behind the act of aggression. One set of reasons is that the aggressor himself is hurt, insecure, vulnerable, bored, tired, depressed, confused, under stress and is seeking help through aggression. If that is the case, it is not good enough to forgive. We have to do something about remedying the cause of the aggression.

Even more important, the cause may be ourselves. There is nothing more hypocritical in Christian life than to forgive the aggressor with magnanimity when in fact we are responsible for his aggression.

The woman who forgives her husband for having an affair when she denies him love and affection is no saint. The parent who forgives the errant child who is not allowed their independence and is constantly devalued and undermined is no saint. the friend who forgives while driving their companion to distraction is no saint.

She went on to say

You have to be pretty honest with yourself to recognise your own culpability when you have always thought of yourself as the victim — but being able to think in such a way can be the key to unlocking hurts that have rumbled on for years

I wondered, leaving Church, whether the same skill of costly forgiveness that Jesus commanded his followers to exercise an infinite number of times when they fell out, the grace to let go, is not also necessary if we are to be released from idols, especially those we have inherited from the past, and so become what God is calling us to be as we embrace his future.

Media, Schmedia

2011-08-31T08:19:00.009+01:00

This has been my year for pushing social media and learning — developing use of Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter.

Diary function and sharing snippets is probably best done by Facebook, news by Twitter, recce information about places for exploring by Foursquare.

Where does that leave the humble Blog?

As what people used to call a commonplace book, with occasional comment, it’s unbeatable. I need to invest more in it. Some of the comment threads it stimulates turn are fascinating, and it becomes a focus for a form of community. It’s brought great joy this summer to meet a few of the people whose comments I most respect and like. That and the occasional diary or policy reflection does make it worth some effort.

The key to them all is interactivity and human value. Up on my electronic watchtower three convictions have stood out this summer:

(1) There is no such thing as “Cyberspace.” Value comes from people interacting, not trips into space. The technology is hidden to most practitioners. The speed and availability of new media have implications, but the silly old idea there is a place somewhere beyond the blue called “Cyberspace” flies in the face of McLuhan’s observation that any form of human expression is a “medium.” The whole notion may just be the place memory of the obsolete commercialised information kitchen we used to call “the media.” Like the Urban Spaceman, it don’t exist.

(2) Interactivity and relationships have driven the crumbling of old media power. What contemporary media do give us, along with an invitation to waste time, is multiple small opportunities to add value to each others’ lives. Everyone is more naked now, for good or bad, but attentiveness encourages, heals and strengthens people. Facebook is more immediately effective for this than a blog.

(3) Quality stands out. Unexpectedly perhaps, old fashioned correspondent virtues of accuracy and painstaking research carry a premium. The role of professional journalists is to check facts and assure information quality, not to spin titillating or terrifying stories out of thin air. Good information sources prioritise researchers and journalists not marketing. That's why the FT and BBC have heads above water, and Murdoch doesn’t.

What we each need to work out is how much time we’re willing to invest in what particular media when...

August Riots: Sous les pavés, la plage

2011-08-10T12:09:00.007+01:00

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

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

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

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

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

Two big historic structural questions marks lurk in the background.

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

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

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

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

Presuming to Criticise the Great Oz

2011-07-21T07:23:00.009+01:00

Is he a very bad man, or just a good man who's been a very bad wizard? MP's added a session to their schedules to hail the morrow, as after travelling all the way from, er, Oz, Rupert Murdoch, who does not instinctively do humility, announced that Tuesday was the most “humble” day of his life. A new message is coming through loud and clear — “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” This and the truth of Corporal Jones‘ immortal observation “They don’t mind dishin’ it out, but they don’t like it up the rear.”

This is a critical turning point for everyone. For years we have all believed in a monolithic puissant Behemoth called “The Media.” The power that drove its steely flanks was terrible and swift, and derived from owning the means of production — Scott's old joke about a free press in England, as long as you happen to own a press. Now we all own a press, and carry it around in our pockets, and if we don’t like Mr Murdoch and his works he may not listen, but he can't prevent us expressing ourselves, or manipulate the stories we tell without us being able to do anything about it. His value came from a monopoly on the means of production, and that monopoly is busted.

The digital reformation that drives this change has been afoot for a long time. Ironically the Murdoch Bunker in Wapping is a concrete monument to its first wave, when, three decades ago, he rode into town on the tail of Eddie Shah and cleared out old Fleet Street of its quaint Spanish Practices. Now his empire is as obsolete as the older order it displaced. Mr Murdoch has even more humble days to come, no doubt.

As dramatic and iconic as the NI tale may be, don’t let's obsess on Mr Murdoch. For a start, as Rebekah Brooks hinted darkly on Tuesday, the word on the street was that other titles have behaved equally, if not more, unethically than the News of the World. Her attempt to suggest the Home of Dity Tricks was the Observer hardly stacked up, when everybody knows the Daily Mail has led the ruthless pack. The principle holds, however, that the scope of this deflation is far broader than just NI.

So what wll the news title of the future look like, and how will hacks make a living? I suggest, ont heir wit, like they always did. Human beings have an insatiable appetite for words and information — they just don't want it controlled by unaccountable Big Beasts. The market will segment into a variety of models, of which the Huffington Post and Financial Times seem to represent two. HP draws in writing talent from wherever and aggregates it, whilst the FT contains information that’s actually worth the money for its (specialised) audience.

What of the Murdoch staff? They have various dates down the station, whilst the politicians gyrate to dodge the bullets flying around this story. There is a global dimension, of course, given the 9/11 hacks if for no other reason. There is the question of compensation to 9,000 victims who may not feel as obliging and negotable as the first handful did when Rebekah Brooks paid them off, thinking, she says, they were the only ones.

As to the Dinosaur press, I have a Times sub, but if I'm honest must confess I seldom bother to download it any more. It's a reasonable production and I can look back to half a dozen articles this year I have much valued but frankly I find the whining editorial tone, the monochrome thinking and narrow selectivity of narratives the paper brings to every issue boring, lifeless and mediochre. I wade through a load of padding to get to a few nuggets of gold, when my browser would find me stuff I actually wanted to read in a fraction of the time, free to boot. So I keep the subscription going out of a blend of guilt and optimism, but my heart's not in it.

You may say that I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. The future will be different, and I for one will not miss the former contents of the crumpled and deflated green robes over in the corner.

Hacked off or up? News International

2011-07-09T06:39:00.009+01:00

One day crisis management textbooks will analyse the flurry on the bridge of News International this weekend. As truth everybody suspected but nobody could pin down slowly emerges, rubbing its eyes, NI’s whole strategy — lying and deceit with an occasional tub to the whale — is increasingly feeling like Niedergang if not Götterdämmerung.

The News of the World closure was a desperate attept at damage limitation, and the question for Ttanic watchers everywhere will have to be whether, in the present media environment, the watertight doors within the ship can hold against increasing water pressure.

This week has seen the dramatic slamming of a big watertight door on the biggest section on board, a title that in its glory days could boast the largest English language circulation on earth. As hapless hacks drown in their section, many of them are bound to harbour less than kindly thoughts towards the Cap’n on the bridge and his senior officers.

They are, after all, the people who went down there to clean everything up after the Glenn Mulcaire hacking scandal of 2006. René Girard says that wherever human beings gather there is an inexorable scapegoat script at work, but why them? They were the good guys. Well, Monsieur Girard would say, in a real scapegoat script the good guys always do get it in the neck.

There was a simple commercial logic to closing the News of the Screws. The brand was sinking fast, as advertisers bailed out, feeling rather slimed by its behaviour. Some of them may be unintelligent enough to think a Sun on Sunday would be wildly different. Many will suspect this is a case of change the name and do the same again.

Conspiracy theories abound. One journalistic friend told me yesterday that the whole thing could be a strategy to confuse investigators by closing down a crime scene. Another explained Murdoch never gets it wrong and was looking for a way out of this particular medium as its circulation wilted, along with that of all conventional dinosaur powermedia.

Well, I don’t know. I do know that as the Police swoop on Andy Coulson and Clive Goodman the position of Rebekah Brooks becomes increasingly untenable. Here is a good and gifted journalist whose newsroom was apparently perpetrating some 4,000 crimes over a few years, the principal evidence for which was the content of stories being published every week. Yet she asks us to believe she, unlike her four million readers, knew nothing. Where on earth did she think all those revelations were coming from. Mystic Meg?

As to the rest of News Internatonal they have just, James Murdoch tells us, given the police evidence of serious wrongdoing down the years. Where did that come from? If they had it why did they not give it to the police earlier? Or even read it themselves and do anything about it apart from shooting the sergeant? The News Internatonal brand is certainly rotten from the head down and nobody outside the organisation yet knows how far down the rot reaches.

Although I have had other things to do with my Sundays down the years, I shall miss the Screws. Its cheeky chappie antics were essentially end-of-the-pier stuff, although politicians quivered before its chickenshit right wing hufflepuff, and that of the Sun, in all kinds of subtle and no-so-subtle ways. Shame on them that they walked in fear of it, but that can hardly be blamed entirely on the papers. Big media used to be very powerful, we all believed.

There is a sting in the tail, like the final scene of Roman Polanski’s Night of the Vampires, where the nubile miss he has rescued from all the vampires in Transylvania bites the vampire slayer. Readers of Flat Earth News will remember Neil Davies section on this kind of carry on, in which he reveals that the involvement of the Daily Mail in such dark arts was, in the teeming summer of such behaviour, probably more extensive than that of News Internatonal Titles.

Yesterday’s Mail openly defied the Fleet Street convention that dogs never eat other dogs. Its headline crowed over the demise of “The Newspaper that Died of Shame.” This could be the Acme of the Daily Mail’s famous hypocrisy. The soft but insistent niff of rotten rat in its own basement is better concealed, but no less inherently pungent.

Dickens Lives! Bullies Rule OK!

2011-06-07T06:59:00.009+01:00

Back home from Germany to distressing telly — Paul Kenyon’s BBC Panorama Undercover Care: the Abuse Exposed. Joe Casey spent five weeks undercover as a care assistant at a private hospital for people with learning difficulties seemingly run along similar lines to Guantanamo Bay.

Watching it was not easy, but the film demonstrates exactly what public service investigative journalism is for, and deserves major recognition:

The project was planned after a professional nurse blew the whistle on bullying behaviour among some of the care assistants at Winterbourne View, near Bristol. Particular attention focused on a great bullying bear of a carer who had seemingly built a whole culture of harassing those weaker than himself for his own amusement. Let none be deceived. The assessment of oft very limited service users can be challenging work, involving occasional need for physical restraint. This, however, was simply torture.

What do we learn?

About Bullies
There is deep in some people a need to exploit others' weaknesses for their own gratification — to wind people up until they snap and then bring down the panoply of the rules upon them. There is a cruel, bullying streak in our culture at every level. An archbishop of the last century was told his broadcast on the subject of the abdication of Edward VIII had not gone down well with the public because it had appeared to be kicking a man when he was down. “But what’s the point of kicking him if he isn’t?” mused his Grace. Bullying behaviour, even in Church, happens on various levels, and should always be called out for what it is. Go along with the bully and you create the culture in which such behaviour thrives. Indulge them and you will have hell to pay. Remain silent and you collude.
About Hospitals
The hospital’s owners had a large chest of what turn out to be fatuous awards and service gongs. You cannot legislate compassion and humanity by guidelines and targets. Whilst it’s good to know Wayne and some of his cohorts are currently helping the police with their inquiries, and shooting the sergeant is a classic response to failure, the systemics of their own operation allowed the owners to ignore clear distress signals from their own whistleblowing employee, employ several wildly unsuitable care workers, remain ignorant about what happens on their own property, ignore several injuries amongst the service users — all of these are management and governance failures, in which Wayne played but a walk-on part.
About Regulation and Safeguarding
The same whistleblower approached the Care Quality Commission — the Government’s regulatory body — and they also ignored him. This raises profound concerns that, again, transcend one official’s judgment in this case, poor as it obviously was. CQC had inspected Winterbourne View three times in the past two years. How did they miss all evidence of wrongdoing, and how can we know that there is not widespread undetected abuse going on elsewhere?

Time to pull up the Drawbridge?

2011-06-04T16:26:00.014+01:00

Dresden has been a good place to pursue hot issues that don’t seem to be able to air so openly in the UK. On Friday the Frauenkirche saw one of the world’s leading academic experts on Migration, Professor Klaus Bade, unpack the grounds of the fear some Germans feel about his subject.

This fear, Bade calls it “Hysteria,” finds many forms of expression from skinheads to the NPD, but its most public exponent of late has been former railway administrator and SPD Senator, now Bundesbank board member, Thilo Sarrazin. Last year he published a book called Deutschland schafft sich ab (“Germany abolishes itself”) claiming that immigrant Muslims don’t want to integrate and habitually depend on social services rather than honest t

oil. He calculates that in a few generations the Muslim population will grow and overwhelm Germany.

But there’s more. Sarrazin dives from

there into a murkier cellar when he suggests that Muslims are in some undefined way genetically less intelligent. The only answer, apart from pulling up the drawbridge, is to take away the social benefits that feed them. Offended? It’s hard not to be, especially if you remember the evolutionary eugenic theory that underpinned twentieth century Anti-Semitism. It cannot be wise to dance on the edge of this particular abyss.

Hysteria is a form of fear, the most powerful drive in the reptile brain that underlies everything we think. So this stuff matters. It is not enough simply to huff and puff about its moral shortcomings, or to draw historical parallels, although those are almost inescapable. We cannot address hysteria by embarrassed shuffling fro

m foot to foot as those who have just realised that our eccentric neighbour at a cocktail party is actually potty. Neither should the concern be suppressed, as that only amplifies it and may even seem to validate its more febrile imaginations. If you awake in the night fearing your brain is being chewed up by space monsters, best wake up. The only answer is a truthful analysis of reality. We need to engage the higher end of the Brain with reality.

In fifty minutes of fast paced German liberally sprinkled with hard facts and figures, Bade analysed the real trends in the German population — falling in many places, and increasingly in need of high capacity intelligence from anywhere in the world it can be got. It turns out that most German Muslims see themselves as German, and very much share the general aspirations them of fellow citizens for their children, but often lack to a greater extent the means to bring them about.

Reflecting on the unpleasant soft racism and Islamophobia that can be found in the English media, it strikes me that quality of analysis is very thin on the ground. Politicians run scared before the wind without the means, courage or resources to shine light into the murky cellar. And as was the case with doing God, the field of play is left to the forces of ignorance and tribalism. The whole up to date picture can be found in the Encyclopedia of European Migration and Minorities: From the Seventeenth Century to the Present, which the professor has co-edited. Cambridge University Press. £106.50. They may want to serialise it in the Daily Mail, but don’t hold your breath...

Doing God in Dresden...

2011-06-03T11:42:00.007+01:00

...is very interesting for anyone who grew up with the Simplicissimus (“We were right so everything we did was right.”) English black & white movie narrative of World War 2. But that's another story, best told, perhaps, in resurgent stone Baroque which contrasts strangely with Socialist Realist 1960’s blocks that doughnut the centre.

For the first (and probably last) time in my life, I looked along the row yesterday morning at a Bible Study, to find Dr Christian Wulff (CDU), President of the Bundesrepublik.

So, no name dropping you understand, there was I a few feet along from the head of state of the largest democracy in Europe...

So, it’s OK for politicians to do God in this country, including by a Roman Catholic politician who turns up at a Protestant Bible Study as participant. I wasn’t too wowed by all the childish nonsense in the UK press about Tony Blair and what denomination he could join.

But a further bit of doing God happened slightly later when the President was up on the stage with young people and educators concerned with integration and civil society. As a warm up, the interviewer asked everybody a personal question — “do you pray and, if so, to which God?”

The Christian Wulff answer, for what it’s worth, was that when he is on the road he enjoys some time out in Churches and similar places, and personally, he prays every night as part of his bedtime routine. He prays to “Jesus as described in the Bible.”

But what was interesting was what happened next, or rather what didn’t. Nobody suggested he was a nutter. Nobody suggested his new Economic wheezes were the product of either God or the Devil, being foisted on the public within a secret theocratic agenda. Nobody suggested that he was merely making it up to gain votes.

Indeed, Chicken Licken, the sky did not fall. And that was the difference between the way such a question is handled in the public square our side of the channel and pretty much everywhere else. Where grown-ups live.

Airbrushing out Women

2011-05-15T14:55:00.002+01:00

The US Secretary of State sat in the war room as her troops closed in on Osama, monitoring developments carefully with senior operational chiefs including the Director of Counterterrorism. The manner of Osama's taking off has raised moral concerns, but the fact that the US secretary of state, being female, “doesn't have a wee tail like little boys do,” (as a recently seen Edwardian manual of nursery management says) is a matter of fact that would, you’d think, raise no religious or moral concerns.

But you'd be wrong. The sight of Hillary Clinton in role as Secretary of state and Audrey Tomason as Director of Counterterrorism so offended Der Zeitung, a Brooklyn based hasidic newspaper, that it airbrushed them out — a time-consuming operation, but necessary to protect their readers from the dreadful sight of women in positions of authority.

I am sure the newspaper notionally admits these woman exist. Some animals have to cover their eyes so they can't be seen. In that spirit, the paper airbrushed the women out of what soon became one of the most famous images in the world. This was a crass and obvious thing to do, presumably because the satisfaction of the few in their silo outweighed for them the millions beyond their silo who would find their behaviour reprehensible.

Der Zeitung’s reaction was a real give away:

Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

In other words, if we don’t consider it disparaging, it isn’t, because we say so. What tosh! The newspaper went on to say its photo editor did not realize he was violating White House copyright conditions.

“We should not have published the altered picture, and we have conveyed our regrets and apologies to the White House and to the State Department,”

So hang 0n, DZ still does not acknowledge its journalistic sin of manipulating the truth, let alone its somewhat medieval attitude to half the human race. As one is usually told by Unreconstructed Discriminators in every sphere of life, this had, of course, nothing to do with women being women — a piece of self-deception that always gives the game away from the start. The reality is that discriminatory is as discriminatory does. All else is self-deception.

Instead Der Zeitung took refuge behind a screen of faux-religiousity. I say “faux” because I take it from the fact that back in the Iron Age there was no need to airbrush the judge Deborah out of the Book of Judges, that the Eternal himself does not feel the same collywobbles about this as his more zealous minders.

So we see the capacity of Religion to become part of the problem, a smokescreen to cover unreality rather than a means of engaging with Eternal reality, including that of the present. Soon those who take this path are safely tucked up in their own religious disneyland in which the thing they most fear is kept out of sight. Their religion thus becomes a cover for fantasy, an alternative world, ultimately an insanity licence.

And just as all of us this side of the pond smirk away at the gormless folly of Die Zeitung, perhaps we need to reflect on our own more ingrained cultural sticking points about women. 30 years after equal pay legislation came in, womens’ earnings still lag significantly behind those of little boys with wee tails, the British Boardroom is still largely a male preserve, and, dash it all, we have all just enjoyed a lovely wedding in which the only female voice in an hour of liturgy was that of the Bride, as though that were normal. We all still have some way to travel ourselves before we arrive at the world of Ephesians 2.

Moral relativism is not enough...

2011-05-08T11:28:00.013+01:00

Everyone will, like the Dalai Lama, find the death of Osama Bin Laden “understandable.” They will think his demise broadly desirable, and hope it draws a line under a particular strand of Fundamentalist militancy. But the manner of it, which is not entirely clear, raises disturbing questions for many people alongside the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Given that Osama was more effective and dangerous totemically than operationally, have we, in fact, seen the last of him? Treating him as a warrior rather than a criminal could play dangerously into his followers’ fantasies about him. In a world where people deny the moon landings, 9/11, and the death of the Princess of Wales, we can look forward to a rich flourishing of conspiracy theories about it.

Nobody who was not in Osama’s bunker this time last week knows exactly what actually happened — indeed those who were present must have been in a state of mind very different from judge and jury. The troops themselves had to calculate their risks in real time, reacting to all the circumstances they found. The rest of us will be profoundly grateful we didn't have to make that call.

What the debate about Osama's death has revealed is a startling moral relativism in many reactionary journalists and a few of the politicians they phoned around as they strung together a story out of this.

We must respect humanity because it is an absolute created by God. He made human beings in his image and likeness. Humanity is not a privilege accorded by other creatures, but the Maker's Mark. My own sense of moral reference is a basic way of honouring God. My respect for the humanity of someone else is not a privilege for me to play God and give them, nor a reward for good behaviour. Furthermore, people are capable of all kinds of evil, all of us, Christians (Adam and Eve) believe. The Church calls realism about this the doctrine of the Fall, and it is the context of all human behaviour to a greater or lesser extent. This doctrine carefully preserves the truth that nobody is, in any simple sense, evil, although they can do massively evil things. God saw all that he had made and it was good.

It follows from this basic theology from page 1 of the Bible, that if I commit an act, like a lynching, that denies the image of God in another human being I not only act out my own fallen nature (thus losing the moral high ground), but I also behave in a way that compromises my own humanity — thank God he gave it as an absolute that no human being can take away, not even me.

The moral relativism of some journalists about this (“Normally, of course, we should respect life, but he didn't so we don't have to”) is a real slippery slope, morally. It betokens not Conservatism, but Pelagianism — one of the oldest heresies in the book. They must not be surprised if bishops, including the Archbishop, do not collude with their Pelagian views.

School Admissions: Tears and Fears

2011-04-25T09:34:00.011+01:00

“Why, Oh Why?” whines the Mail about school admissions. Stephen Glover excoriates opening faith schools to all and sundry as “death wish.” However our C of E schools’ title deeds say that “all and sundry” is exactly whom they were founded for — like the Kingdom of Heaven, the way Jesus taught it.

The Church is there to spread the teaching of Jesus, not sectarianism and bigotry. We are in the business of growing faith, not paranoia about “secularism.” We are non-sectarian whenever possible, not because we have lost our nerve, or as a marketing gimmick, but because Jesus taught a bigger conception of God and humanity than any sect can take in. He addressed everyone, not just the religious, and his harshest words were for those who ghettoised faith.

Bishop John’s TES interview (as Chair of the National Society) suggested that the standard aim of Church School admissions ought to be 10% of places for Churchgoers, the rest for fringe and everybody. Interestingly, looking around, as Chairof our Dicoesan Board of Education, at our 289 schools, the vast majority of them are primaries, and the proportion he’s talking about is actually what usually happens. It doesn’t kill anyone off. Our schools face major challenges, but they are generally doing their job, serving the communities they were founded to serve incredibly well.

Different contexts need appropriate policies, though. In some places there is a desperate shortage of Church School secondary places. It takes me back to my time as admissions governor for Ranelagh, a pioneering and excellent Comprehensive school in Bracknell.

If the frequently repeated figures for churchgoing in England reflected reality in any simple way, we would have had no admissions problem. Given the size of the local population of parents of 11 year olds, the school would only need about 30 places a year for them, leaving another 94 for fringe and non Church families.

In fact the assumption of a post-Christian secularised population was, quite honestly, complete tosh in our area. Our school used to receive at least 120 fully documented applications every year from regular Churchgoing families, and a good 50 others from families with a strong claim to places. That’s the simple fact. Not 30. 179.

One way to address the real problem would have been to increase the number of places available in Church secondaries in the area to allow for a more balanced intake, with a larger number of places for fringe and outside families. Sadly it was not in our power, as governors, to build a bunch of new secondaries at 30 million a pop; nor to expand numbers in a school on a cramped urban site. So we soldiered on, trying to be as fair as we could in applying our published admissions policy. And in the meanwhile there was a school to run.

I expect Bishop John meant exactly what he said. He wasn’t laying down some new iron law about admissions, which the National Society couldn’t anyway. He was talking about the good things Church schools have being made available to as many people who want them as possible; which is something, surely, we would all wish for, although the way to achieve it will be more obscure and trixical in some local contexts.

Finally, I was interested to meet last week a friend and colleague just back from the States who pointed out that inEngland there is a lot of twitchiness about Faith and politics, and in the States about Faith and Public Schools (in the American sense of the term). Is it, he wondered, the same cultural twitchiness? I wonder...

Squaring a Human Rights Circle

2011-03-28T08:18:00.008+01:00

There used to be a sign on Paris Metro trains designating a particular seat for the use of people with special needs of seating. This being France, it had its own legal hierarchy, including, if I remember correctly war wounded, blind people, and pregnant women. I used to wonder if wild fights ever broke out between old blessés de guerre from 1914 and pregnant blind women over who took priority and why. The thought is ridiculous.

But that is how some see human rights legislation. It’s understandable because if people take human rights cases to court there can be involve a notional process that feels like that, applied with what's called proportionality.

I play the Euphonium to express myself. My next door neighbour wants to sleep at night. If legal push comes to shove an accommodation has to be reached between us. It spoils the story perhaps, but this probably will not involve either banning all Euphonium playing for all time, or absoutizing the right to express oneself in this way so as to banish sleep for ever from those living next to euphonium players. Proportionality looks for a practical way of respecting both rights (privacy and self-expression) simultaneously.

So what about religious particularity and freedom from discrimination? Pushed to an absolute degree either could compromise the other. If an atheist could fight a way through the courts to become Pope that would be a magnificent expression of openness, but bad news for the Papacy, which partly exists to define and maintain a particular identity in a way that can only credibly be done by a Roman Catholic. If, conversely, a Police force decided to soft pedal on the misdeeds of some clergy because they are authority figures in the community representing the dominant religion, this is plainly wrong and deprives the victims of a basic justice they have every right to expect.

This becomes even more complicated when people start asserting Christian rights. Jesus' teaching about non violent resistance (turning the other cheek etc) and the strand of wisdom represented by Romans 13, does not lend itself to crusading militancy. Whenever the Church has ignored this principle it has made a fool of itself and compromised the gospel by behaving in a violent and assertive way to whch it might notionally have been entitled, but which was far from Christlike. People who are being reviled have a notional right to revile back, perhaps, but Jesus tells his followers to do the exact opposite. This being the case it is hard to represent an assertion of that right as something required of his followers by their religon. It damn well is not.

A few preliminary jottings are emerging for me about the ways christians are supposed to apply human rights law to ourselves.

Everything is contextual, sociologically and legally, but discriminatory is as discriminatory does. It is no defence to say “I don’t consider my behaviour to be so,” “We’ve always done this” or ”God told us to do it.” God told slavers they could hold slaves, using clear and obvious Bible passages to do so. But they were wrong. Moral absolutes do emerge and become increasingly apparent contextually because there is a Holy Spirit. Religious groups are not immune, any more than the Scribes and Pharisees were, from moral critique just because they are religious groups.
Any religion has a core of beliefs and practices — Kosher food, Holy Communion, Pilgrimage to Mecca. These practices characteristically bind believers but not non-believers and are part of the distinctiveness of the religion. People have a greater right to bind themselves to these than to impose them on others. As to whether a religious practice is good or bad, by their fruits ye shall know them.
All sorts of lifestyle choices may emerge from religon as moral choices, like pacifism or vegetarianism. Where significant numbers of believers within a religion take different views that is part of how all religious communities evolve, and all we can say is that such subsidiary moral convictions are to be respected as far as possible, but cannot be rolled up into the religion as though they are a core part of it. Their motives may be, but they are not. It is deceitful to suggest otherwise.
I cannot, as a Christian, evade the force of the Golden Rule and Jesus’ summary of the law as core components of Christianity. Against such there can be no law. According to others the positive radical respect, or love, that you would hope for but cannot require from them is a significant absolute requirement. It is hard to square with any attitude which defines them in a way they do not recognise — behaviour which leads to the sin of the Pharisees who bound burdens on others that they themselves could not have borne had they been applied to them. Human rights law is more a matter of “not doing unto others what you would not have them do to you,” but a Church which does not even aspire to manage the lesser standard can hardly represent the greater one.
Christianity has its own absolute principle of Incarnation — that God takes flesh. Therefore dualism about the wicked world is questionable from a Christian point of view. The trick, to quote a Lent Eucharistic prayer, is to find a way to live in this passing world with our hearts set on a world that will never end. The calling is to be entirely within the world but distinctive, as goldfish are wet, 98% water indeed, without ceasing to be goldfish. How to express this calling is a $64,000 plus question which Christians should vigorously discuss but defer to each other about wherever possible because, important as it is, it cannot be an exact science. This is not done not by fixating on any particular behaviour that is held to be counter cultural. Rather it is best done by refusing to absolutise any particular cultural behaviour, ancient or modern, so as to leave room for the greater principle to express itself circumstantially in an authentic way. I am particularly suspicious of temporal certainties being absolutized in the fields of economicas or personal morality.

I wonder what I’ve missed or misrepresented?

Don't pick the Fastest Lemming

2011-03-22T08:00:00.006Z

A central part of my job is helping discern people's callings to particular jobs, with search groups. Very often “leadership” is high on the list of essentials. I uderstand why. Everyone is more or less disorientated in a fast-changing world. People look to clergy to help them through the shifting sands, fog, smoke and mirrors. What many busy people want much of the time is a messianic figure who will turn out and fix things for them. This is the age of the quick fix. Sadly some of the most intractable problems communities face didn’t arise like this and won’t go away without costly and potentially time-consuming social and personal transformation.

The temptation is to pick what seems the most obvious candidate — the competent performer to get things done. But what if the problems are not technical problems? One of the limitations of the Anglican Covenant, peace be upon it, is that it is basically a lawyer’s solution to a broader problem — an attempt to solve mutual incomprehension with aspirin — a quick fix to a chronic cultural issue. People would grow more if they engaged with it humanly and spiritually as well as trying to fix it legally; but maybe all we can manage for now is a bit of paper.

The best leader is the slowest, not the fastest lemming, the oddball who slows down, stands aside, and wonders why. She can be of far more value than the sleekest, zippiest rodent. Appointing to technical criteria is a good discipline for preliminary screening and showing up the issues to discuss at interview. Once that stage is reached, however, you need to look for the person's inner security, personally and spiritually, how well they know where they stop and others start, their sense of perspective, their eccentricities, and the factors that make them the slowest, not the fastest Lemming. Otherwise all you get is the greyest, sleekest überLemming who seems to lead the pack, and we all end up in the drink.

The race goes not to the fastest Lemming, but the one who comes back up the cliff. Discuss?

Munchausen loses Court Case

2011-03-09T22:45:00.009Z

Having penned a little piece in the Guardian about the Johns Case, reactions have ranged from nutter denunciations to thanks for saying what everybody felt but hadn’t got round to saying. Actually, the realities of this case were extraordinarily simple, summarized thus by the judge:

the views that Mr Diamond seeks to impute to others have no part in the thinking of either the defendant or the court. No one is asserting that Christians (or, for that matter, Jews or Muslims) are not 'fit and proper' persons to foster or adopt. No one is contending for a blanket ban. No one is seeking to de-legitimise Christianity or any other faith or belief. No one is seeking to force Christians or adherents of other faiths into the closet. No one is asserting that the claimants are bigots. No one is seeking to give Christians, Jews or Muslims or, indeed, peoples of any faith, a second class status. On the contrary, it is fundamental to our law, to our polity and to our way of life, that everyone is equal: equal before the law and equal as a human being endowed with reason and entitled to dignity and respect.

So...

You may think everybody is out to persecute your religion, but you can only get a court to stop them, if there is any evidence that could give substance to your fears. It is perfectly lawful in the UK to suffer real fear about religious discrimination. It does actually happen and may indeed happen to you. What you cannot expect is the blanket protection of a court against a specific instance of it without evidence that it has happened or is likely to happen to you.

Premature burial is a dreadful thing. Before a Court will injunct a local authority against doing this to you they will require some evidence that it is likely to, or indeed that you are dead in the first place. Since nobody brought any evidence in this case, the result can hardly surprise anybody.

What have we learnt?

Courts don't make law, parliament does. Well, wasn’t that a surpise?
If you require protection against an imaginary threat, go to an imaginary court. Using real courts as grandstands, an essential part of the lexicon of US Culture warriors of the Right, is still, understandably, frowned upon by English judges, who are busy bunnies.
The conflation of a moral view held by a particular section of Christians into a banket phenomenon called “Christianity” that is then adjudged to be under threat doesn’t wash. It’s rubbish. Some Christians, for example, are profoundly sincere pacifists. In stark contrast to anti-gay campaigners, Christian pacifists could claim some sanction for their view from the teaching of Jesus. That doesn’t, however, make pacifism integral to Christianity, such that any court that refused to order the Grenadier Guards to lay down their arms could be held to be attacking Christianity.

Ah, but you may say, there are people out there who don’t like Christianity. There are, and there always were. Some English Christians seem hell bent on behaving like a persecuted minority, and who am I to try and stop them? They’ve obviously never been to Pakistan or anywhere else Christians really are persecuted as Christians.

Historic Christianity does have massive historic, cultural and legal influence in the UK, not least in the pursuit of ancient rights founded on the principles of Equity that gave rise to our human rights law in the first place. The surest way to destroy this influence is for a group of zealots to take upon themselves the role of being the “one prophet left,” and indulge in the legal equivalent of Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.

Human Nature — image of God?

2011-02-27T08:42:00.007Z

Why is it easier to conceive of people sharing their lives and aiming for excellence in a community like a symphony orchestra than in Church? Why does religion so often seem part of the problem, not the solution? I don’t know the answer, although I'm earnestly seeking it, but I want to press the question because answering better or worse it could radically change the quality, maybe even the quantity of our future.

Let’s start with Sam Norton’s very sharp diagnosis from yesterday:

“successful orchestras recruit people who can see the beauty in submitting to a larger vision, something beyond themselves, and it is the authority of that vision, rather than the authority of any individual, that binds them together to produce something marvellously beyond the sum of their parts.

The trouble with our church is that not enough people believe in that larger vision. Ironic really, given what it says on the tin.”

Many people in Church claim to have larger visions of God, but how large is our vision of human beings, supposedly made in his image?

There is a basic Darwinian model of nature as what Woody Allen called “a huge restaurant” — dog eat dog, competition, compulsion, survival.

In the human world this is reinforced by a Freud style account of what goes on in our heads. This is seen as a competitive world of basic instincts, a darkened cellar in which a gorilla and a sex maniac are locked in mortal combat every day, slugging it out over various notionally juicy bones in ways over which they have no control.

Is this vision of humanity adequate?

How could a roiling mass of individuals like that ever produce a decent society?

Or, theologically speaking, how does it reflect the image of God?

Here’s an alternative vision of what’s going on, and the kind of community that could be built on it, from US Economist and thinker Jeremy Rifkin, delivered in visual form by the Royal Society of Arts:

So, theologians, if we want to be art of the solution, not the problem, is it time to re-visit and refresh our understanding of “the Fall of Adam?”

Mahler Nights: Excellence and Equality

2011-02-26T12:40:00.005Z

The almost transcendent experience of this week’s Berliner Philharmoniker concerts in London has got me thinking. Yesterday I wondered how Church could be as engaging, spiritually alive and focussed a community, producing hope as well as music.

Among other really helpful comments, Ray Barnes was back with a searching and pertinent question:

Since at least 80% of the success of the very best performances owe their high standard to the conductor, and since Simon Rattle is arguably one of the very best, the question is perhaps - where is the Simon Rattle of the Church?

The orchestra is ready and waiting!

I am happy to use the word leadership in Church, but rather suspect outside Leadership models, some of which we haven’t caught up with yet in practice, don’t really capture the beadth and depth of what is required. I want to be as accountable as any leader has to be in an excellent outfit today, but know there are other people involved as well.

Enter Fergus McWilliam, since 1985 a horn player for the Berliner Philharmoniker. He gave an excellent and thought provoking talk at the Festival Hall before Wednesday’s concert on how the sound of the orchestra relates to its members.

Afterwards he answered questions with some ideas that relate directly to Ray’s crucial line of questioning.

The band begins with a profound value of equality founded on mutual respect. It is a working democracy, in that it elects its musical director, and auditions are carried out principally by prospective colleagues. In other words it rejects artifical hierarchy and embraces personal fit — auditions, said Fergus, could assume technical competence and were thus not beauty contests, but more like marriage partner decisions.

In such a society there is little or no place for deference, often the English default position. As brilliant as Simon Rattle’s tenure has been, extended by request of the players, it has not been uncontroversial, nor would he or the band expect it to be. The idea of a hierarch high and lifted up sneering at people with whom he disagrees rather than listening to them would be absolute anathema, and kill the sound.

Fergus also called into serious question the idea of the Titanic Conductor, which he had encountered the other side of the Atlantic a few years ago — players produce the dots and the conductor will produce the music. As someone who works daily with the best conductors in the world he wasn’t rubbishing their work, but suggesting it ran on creative tension and relationships. Both band members and conductor mattered as much as each other. Mutual respect and understanding produced the best performances.

He also suggested that decisions to hire people for the orchestra were invitations to join a shared adventure. Risks are involved. There has to be a shared maturity and radical equality,continuous openness to what might be, and willingness to pursue it in a focussed way; a passionate focus around the music itself, andradiucal mutuality.

Levels of virtuousity are climbing all the time, but could, unbridled, lead to a band of soloists playing ego games. People have to want to join the band enough to transcend pure ego, for which you need a capacity that has to be acquired, without losing their personalities. But the real distinctives he looks for in new colleagues, he said, were

Passion (a capacity to feel in the present moment)
Sensuality (sensual awareness, not necessarily in a narrow sexual sense the term is often used in English)
Viscerality (Connectedness between head, heart and guts — radical groundedness)

That’s how Fergus’ orchestra, that many hold to be the best in the world, produces music. His experience is lived, not an abstract ideal. How arrogant would it be for to we think we can aspire to excellence and produce hope without prizing and expressing some at least of those values and attitudes?