Looking Forward
In his advent letter to the Primates of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop Rowan Williams offers his advent hopes for individuals, societies and the Church. For the last of these he gives us just two themes – reconciliation and renewal. Being a sucker for alliteration, I would like to add a third – readiness – to make a new version of the “3 R’s”. I have been trying to reflect on these hopes through the season.
I rather regret that in recent times it has become unfashionable in Advent to preach on the “Last Things” (Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven). Indeed, instead of looking forward to eternity, we are now asked by our lectionaries to look back (to the patriarchs, prophets, John the Baptist and Mary). To be frank, I don‘t think looking at the past is much help in terms of any of these three “R’s”. So let me suggest an Advent alternative.
From this perspective, reconciliation is about recognising that those we are in dispute with on Earth are also those with whom we hope to spend eternity. Despite the old joke (told at some point against most Christian denominations) there is no walled-off enclosure in heaven reserved for those who don’t think that anyone else is up there. In eternity, those with whom I have fallen out now, and to whom I may have behaved uncharitably, will be closer to me than the nearest human being in this present life. The Advent call to the Churches for reconciliation is therefore not so much “unity in diversity”, as “unity in eternity”.
Renewal also has its Advent dimension. We are to breath new life into our earthbound church so that we anticipate something of eternity. Taking just one example, it’s a call to make sure that the heavenly dimension is not absent from our liturgy and worship. And if that seems a rather too obvious thing to say, it is not that uncommon in my experience to find church services that appear to value matey-ness above mystery. A worship that is anticipatory of eternity will speak powerfully to our emotions, to our intellects and to our aesthetic senses. All too often we settle for being gently entertained.
Finally in Advent we are called to readiness. We are invited to prepare ourselves for a God who acts, not capriciously as did the Greek and Roman deities, but with a consistent and loving purpose moving ever towards the ultimate and complete fulfilment of his will. To be ready means to be prepared to wait. To wait for a God who may act sooner or later than we expect. It means to travel light so that, at any point, we are prepared to drop anything that holds us back from responding to where God is. As Archbishop Rowan has said elsewhere, the task of the Church is to notice what God is doing and join in with it.
In the final days of Advent maybe we can move beyond the remembrance of things past, so beloved of our current lectionaries, and begin to look forward. And as we do so, may we look forward both to that great breaking of God into the world that we call the incarnation, and that even greater breaking in of the world into God that we call eternity.
6 CommentsBe Prepared
Two news stories have caught my attention in this first week of Advent, and provided contrasting commentaries on the theme of the season.
The first was the kidnap of Norman Kember and his fellow ‘peace activists’ in Iraq. The outline of the story, westerners abducted, lives threatened, is both familiar and shocking, as is so much news coming from that country. The details, as they emerged, tell a less common story. After years of commitment to peace and reconciliation – and a history of opposition to the invasion of Iraq – Norman Kember decided that demonstration, meetings, the Greenbelt peace tent, weren’t enough. ‘I’ve done a lot of writing and talking about peacemaking. I’ve demonstrated, you name it, I’ve been on it, but I feel that’s what I’d call cheap peacemaking.’ He presumably knew the risks he ran in going to Iraq as a westerner, a professing Christian, and operating outside the protective structures of the occupying forces. Prophetic wisdom, or wild folly?
The second story was the Adair Turner report on pensions, which has prompted discussions ranging well beyond the issue of state pension provision. Without doubt, the discussions are much needed, and any outcome will require wisdom and foresight in planning for a future which is sustainable, in which those in greatest need can be supported, in which skills and gifts are used for the common good, and a proper balance is found between rest and continuing productive economic engagement. Sadly, much of what has been said and written has focussed either on individuals or on a sense of unfairness which reminds me of my own childhood dissatisfaction that my brother had a Christmas stocking until he was 13, while for me the cut-off point was 10!
Both stories, for me, echo the Advent theme of preparedness. Norman Kember has left behind security, certainty, physical well-being, and stepped into a world where he must have been prepared for the worst to happen – and it has. The discussion over pensions is a search for the very opposite; it is about preparing for security, for assurance, for the certainty that each of us will be able to live in at least moderate prosperity for the later part of our lives.
I’m 99% sure that I shall be looking for a secure pension in a few years time, not abandoning all assurance in the pursuit of peace. But I found myself wondering whether the Advent call to readiness was really about investing in pension plans; I suspect Norman Kember’s attentiveness to the people of Iraq is closer to the watching and waiting required.
3 CommentsLabouring in the same field
The 300 page report Women Bishops in the Church of England? spends far too long in skirting around peripheral issues, and in failing to address the central point.
If we start with scripture, it must be with Paul — ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ The Church made excuses for not eradicating slavery for centuries, and has made similar excuses for not recognizing the equality of women with men. Certainly there is a complementarity, and the other scripture texts point to that. Men and women are very different. But, for the Church of God to be whole, just as in a human family, the roles of both mother and father need to be present. The Church has too long presented itself as a single parent family in which men ruled, and the women were grudgingly accepted as housekeepers.
It is very evident that clergy chapters throughout England, which were once boys’ clubs, have been enormously transformed by the presence of women as equal partners in ministry, and indeed, as leaders of the group in the role of rural dean. A great deal of the posturing about different styles of churchmanship has been tempered, and there has been a more gracious acceptance of those who are different, yet labouring in the same field.
Yet this has been achieved at a very high price in England; allowing a polarization about the ordination of women that has enabled those opposed to become caricatures of their churchmanship in the cosy clubs of traditional Catholics and Evangelicals. These boys’ clubs have become entrenched in their views, and have moved further out of touch with the mood of the nation as a whole. They define themselves by their opposition to women priests and bishops, and undermine their notable work in former times at home and abroad, working in slum parishes here, and ending slavery around the world.
The presence of large numbers of women in public life is slowly having a civilizing influence. Public policy and the conduct of parliament is being transformed. And in many parishes the presence of women priests has brought enormous change and new ways of working. The Church of England’s report needed to look carefully at the way in which the presence of women in public life has made a difference today. Ignoring this is a major omission, and a refusal to see the benefits of making the change. It looks as though the Church doesn’t even yet believe in women having the vote.
We know the arguments about the priest or bishop being an ikon of Christ. We need to see women in that role precisely because we need to show both men and women that the Church believes we are all one in Christ, and that it is humanity, not just men, who are made in the image of God.
24 CommentsSupporting Civil Partnerships
The Civil Partnership Act, which will allow same sex couples to register a civil partnership, will come into force at the end of this year. The House of Bishops of the Church of England has issued this statement on the subject.
The tone of the statement, and the speed with which it was issued, suggests that the bishops were fearful of the growing rift with some parts of the Anglican Communion about the issue of homosexual relationships.
Peter Selby, the Bishop of Worcester, has distanced himself from the statement, saying that a previous commitment to ‘listen to the experience of lesbian and gay people’ has not been honoured. He maintains that the new Civil Partnership Act should be regarded as ‘A source of delight, not fear’. He notes that although the General Synod in 1997 urged ‘deanery synods, clergy chapters and congregations to find time for prayerful study and reflection on the issues’ about homosexual relationships, in fact little discussion has taken place. We have been very shy of raising the issues at all.
Our local deanery synod and clergy chapter in Cambridge recently shared in some most fruitful discussions on the subject led by the vicar of St. Mark’s, the Revd Dr. Sam Wells. (He is now Dean of Chapel at Duke University) For many people this provided the first opportunity to discuss issues about homosexuality in a Christian context. For the clergy it opened the door to further preaching and discussion and this has been widely welcomed.
The Bishops, in making their statement, had been anxious to preserve what they saw as a world wide Anglican consensus on an issue which is proving divisive. But no worldwide consensus exists. Whilst in Europe the rights of homosexual people are increasingly defended by law, in many other parts of the world, notably in parts of Africa and South East Asia, the opposite situation prevails. We have a responsibility to work within the laws of our own nations as far as conscience allows. The Anglican Church does not make the law, either here, or in any other country.
In Britain the Civil Partnership Act could not have been passed unless those framing the law were convinced that what was being offered was right, good and proper. It has been done after listening to the experience of lesbian and gay people, and coming to an appreciation of their place in society. The government has clearly gone ahead of public opinion, but that is not unusual. All of society, not just homosexual people, has suffered in the past because people felt afraid to be open about their relationships. A dozen years ago even MPs were taunted just for being gay, and the Church remained silent and afraid to discuss the issue.
The Church is not being asked to allow such partnerships to be registered in church in the way that a marriage can be registered by a priest. However, these partnerships will be ‘legal, decent, honest, truthful’, to quote the line used by the Advertising Standards Authority.
Since heterosexual couples, dedicating the rest of their lives to each other, may do so with prayer in church, even if they are not married in church, then we might consider giving the same opportunity to same-sex couples.
We shall need time to appreciate the significance of the act. Some analogy with marriage has to be made, particularly in the way that the public declaration of a partnership means it should be respected by all. The partners promise to be faithful to each other, and society, represented by the witnesses, promises to respect the exclusivity of their relationship. Surely this ‘strengthens society’ as we affirm in the marriage service. More than this, as Peter Selby says, it should be ‘a source of delight’.
It is worth noting that he is not the only senior churchman to welcome the new legislation. When it came to the House of Lords eight of the Bishops who are members, Chelmsford, Manchester, Norwich, Oxford, Peterborough, St Albans, St Edmondsbury & Ipswich and Truro, took the trouble to be present and vote in favour of the measure.
It is encouraging that they felt able to do so. Perhaps the statement subsequently made by the Bishops was hasty. We might need to do some more listening, and see how the new act works out in practice.
3 CommentsDancing with Terrorists
I arrived for a six week visit to our sister diocese of Peru about 10 days after the London bombings. A few days later a second set of bombers attempted, but failed, to set off four more devices. Everywhere I went I met huge outpourings of support for Britain. And the accompanying message was always, “We know what your country is going through. We have experienced terrorism here too”.
The effects of the Shining Path violence are still evident in Peruvian society. For about a decade the rural hinterland of the country was especially unsafe. Over that period millions flocked into the shanty towns or “pueblos jovenes” that surround Lima, mostly living in shacks made of matting. Economic life stagnated. Businesses failed. The Anglican Diocese itself almost collapsed totally as foreign personnel (especially targeted by the guerrillas) were withdrawn and Peruvian nationals with saleable skills headed north, to the USA or elsewhere. Priests told me of messages pushed under doors threatening to burn their churches down. Then, in the late 90’s, the government of President Fujimori (himself now in exile after fleeing corruption charges, but planning a new presidential bid next year) broke the back of the Maoist movement and Peru began to enjoy the peace, stability and economic growth that characterise it today.
Everyone I met had their stories of suffering from the Shining Path period. It was good of them to empathise with the present London experience, if somewhat overgenerous – it is unlikely that Britain will face anything remotely resembling the sustained attack on its structures and economy that Peru went through.
About a month into my stay, by which time I had been joined by 16 fellow members of the Diocese of Worcester, we were invited, with the permission of the prison authorities, to spend a day as part of our hosts’ long standing ministry to women prisoners. Sentences are undeniably harsh by European standards, particularly for women, and it is not uncommon to spend well over a year in custody awaiting trial. But the regime itself in some ways compared favourably. There are real efforts to teach skills, and mothers can have their children with them up to three years of age. The prisoners make craft goods which are then sold outside with the money returning to the producers to provide funds for extra toiletries, food etc. There was good access to outside telephones lines, though medical assistance is not as readily available as in European penal institutions. Much mirrored the conditions of life in the poorer areas of Lima itself.
With the exception of telephone kiosks the same seemed to apply in the maximum security section we visited after lunch. We were allowed, even encouraged, to take in a modest amount of cash with which to purchase handicrafts from the prisoners. There were few prison officers but the women told us there were no problems with violence. One block brought out guitars and sang songs to us and we replied with the “a capella” version of the 23rd psalm we had practised for such eventualities. Then they began a dance and invited us to join in. The women told us of how dramatically their conditions had improved in recent years. We were introduced to a tiny baby conceived during a conjugal visit to one woman from her husband who is a prisoner in another jail. We watched some of them making sculptures from clay and painting. And we learned that visitors are permitted for most of the day. Some prisoners told us that they are currently awaiting retrials because the law under which they had been convicted had been ruled unconstitutional. Then they began to speak of how they cared for each other because they were all members of the same party, and how their leader was prevented from mixing with the other prisoners. Suddenly the lack of religious pictures and scriptural passages on the walls (unusual for Latin America) struck home – these were the Shining Path members we had heard so much about on the outside.
One of the hardest things that Britain has had to cope with in these last few weeks has been the very normality of the lives of those who detonated bombs in London. We want the perpetrators of such atrocities to be radically different from ourselves, creatures of utter evil whose lives are depraved in every aspect. However, even allowing for some wrongful convictions, and for some whose offences may have been entirely non-violent, I can’t escape the fact that, in Peru, I have been dancing with terrorists. And that they were without exception pleasant, friendly, appreciative individuals.
I need to hold on to the fact that well-intentioned and caring individuals can commit appalling atrocities in the name of some cause deemed high enough to justify it. The original aim of Shining Path – to present a solution to the poverty and inequality rife in Peru by promoting a society based on the radical equality that underpins communism – is not of itself evil; indeed it has much in it that is laudable. The use of violence as part of the means to overthrow despotic regimes is the story of the liberation of Africa (and elsewhere) in the 20th century. Somewhere Shining Path lost the balance. It terrorised the general population more than it pressurised the government. And maybe it was ill-fated in presenting a communist solution at the very moment when that political philosophy was collapsing across the globe. It never succeeded in breaking out from being a small vanguardist force. Its attacks on Peru’s economy did not persuade the mass of the people that capitalism was the prime problem. Part of the tragedy of the recent bombings in London (and before that in Madrid and elsewhere) is that it is hard to see any realistic link between the political goals of the bombers and their actions.
It was a thesis of the French existentialist (and erstwhile international goalkeeper) Albert Camus that to understand all is to forgive all. For Christians I suspect that has to be a statement more about God than humanity. To understand is not automatically to forgive. Or maybe to forgive is not to exonerate from the consequences of a person’s actions. I’m glad, not least for the sake of the many friends I have made in Peru, that the Shining Path terrorism is a thing of the past, and that those who led it on its violent course are largely now behind bars. But I’m grateful that I was allowed, briefly, to see not only the scars that Peru bears from its history, but the humanity, the normality, and even the face of Christ, in some of those who bear responsibility for it, and who now serve out their sentences. And that the Anglican Church continues to minister in such places.
10 Commentsletter from Peru
I’m writing this piece some four weeks into a stay in the Diocese of Peru. It’s my first lengthy opportunity to spend time in a part of the Anglican Communion in the global south.
Part of coming here has been not only to see what a sister diocese is doing but also to gain some perspective on my own ministry and priorities, and to see the life of the Church of England from a different viewpoint. The reflections are obviously my own, and equally obviously carry all the naivety that goes with only a month’s exposure.
Being Anglican in this country that is neither English speaking nor a former part of the British Empire is about having a faith that has both the liveliness of some of the more recent Pentecostal missions (usually imported from North America) and the sacramental underpinning and liturgy of Catholicism. There is evidence that this wasn’t always the case. At some points in the past British missionaries have used South America as a place to export both very partial styles of churchmanship that were marginal positions at home and their personal disgruntlement with British Anglicanism too. Mercifully this is no longer prevalent.
To what feels now a very healthy mixture is added a real imperative to work among the poor in both the expanding metropolitan areas and the remote, highly underdeveloped, rural regions. A generation ago, in the time of Gustavo Guttierez, there was much impressive work done by the Roman Catholic Church in taking up the concerns of the marginalised in the urban “pueblos jovenes” or shanties. Sadly, this seems to have been lost through the consistent policy of the previous pope in imposing conservative bishops on the dioceses. Several of the Anglican clergy are themselves former RC priests.
After very difficult times in the period of the Shining Path guerrilla movement Peru has enjoyed more settled years of late. There is evidence all around of the economy growing. The Lima shanties that Henri Nouwen described twenty years ago are now graced by solid houses and tarmac roads. Further out onto the slopes of the mountains new developments of basic shacks repeat what he then described, but the evidence is of communities over time becoming established and gradually edging from grinding poverty to relative poverty. The pattern is similar elsewhere in the country.
This mixture of civil stability and growth is providing a solid foundation on which the church can expand. What a small body such as the Anglican diocese, with no more than a dozen or so churches and a handful of missions in development, can achieve is necessarily limited, but it is being done with real passion in schools, churches, children’s homes, medical clinics, employment training projects and canteens. New church missions are being planted in the most recent and poorest areas, whilst in more established ones existing work is being expanded. Priests and lay workers are being trained in the diocese, and a new seminary to open shortly in Lima (there is already a part time one in Arequipa) will at last allow potential clergy to be trained in a fully Anglican environment. Parish mission teams come from North America and beyond. They experience a week or so in the life of the church here, and help with the practical work of the missions. In many cases when they return home they continue to offer support to the ongoing work.
The church here knows how important it is to be a member of a wider communion. A very significant proportion of time and energy goes into welcoming visitors from other parts of the world. As a small and relatively recently established church it knows how much it benefits from being part of a communion that has many millions of adherents across the globe, and from the insights and experiences of Anglicanism that they bring. I’m sure that many Anglicans here are scarcely aware of what they have to offer in return, not least as a church that is discovering and delighting in an identity and pattern of mission that many of us elsewhere simply take for granted. Moreover, if being deeply, loyally Anglican mattered less then decisions taken by provinces in the global north could be more easily shrugged off.
To be human is to prioritise. There are only so many battles that can be fought at once and only so many areas in which the church can deepen its life. The priorities hare are pretty hard to argue with. They are to build the church, especially in the poorer areas, through good liturgy, lively worship, social action and Christian teaching. And to build it in ways that are coherent with indigenous culture and sustainable into the long term; avoiding overdependence on the particular gifts and preferences of the small number of overseas personnel that might be working here at any particular time. In Peru at least, the increasing role of women as sole providers for their families, and the presence of a small number of women deacons, suggests that the ground is being prepared for future debate about gender inequalities in the church and beyond. However any idea that the church here either could or should get itself into a position to open up a wider debate on sexuality issues is pretty far fetched.
Earlier this week I stood overlooking the Colca Canyon as a Peruvian Anglican priest pointed out the remote villages, with neither electricity nor roads, on the opposite side. It takes him several days to complete a circuit of them on foot. It took the pair of us six hours and one breakdown on a rickety bus to even reach this point. It took as long with two breakdowns to get back again. It’s a long way geographically from a diocese in Central England where I can be in any of 280 church buildings in less than an hour from home. And some of the pressing issues may seem very different too. But what I am experiencing here is both prayerfully thoughtful and essentially Anglican.
3 CommentsStigamup
Some small Parisian boys, back from their Saturday morning at the pictures almost half a century ago, were anxious to know the formula spoken by a cowboy holding a gun when he required someone to raise their hands in the air. The films had sub titles, rather than being dubbed, and the boys were convinced that there ought to be a definitive, universally understood expression. To their way of thinking, saying “Stigamup”, or something like it, usually guaranteed that in the lawless western frontiers of the USA, an unnecessary shooting was often avoided. Whilst the first application of this expression would be in their games, maybe they were thinking that, were they ever to travel to the wild west, they would need to recognise the one phrase which demanded instant obedience.
10 CommentsThe right, good old way
A couple of weeks ago, I visited Little Gidding. Not for the first time, and not, I hope, for the last, either. But it was the first time I had been in about five years, so it was good to be back.
A long time before, back in 1993, at the dawn of the popular internet, I wrote a piece about a visit to Little Gidding for an Anglican email list. (You can read a copy of that piece here.) At that time Little Gidding was the home of a small community, as well as a wider group of Friends, but in the intervening years the community disbanded and there was some dispute over the future ownership of the community buildings. But now the dispute has been settled, the Friends of Little Gidding have been reconstituted, new wardens installed in Ferrar House, and the ministry of hospitality continues.
So, on a lovely Sunday afternoon we headed up the A14, across the A1, turning off at Leighton Bromswold (to pay homage to George Herbert) and on to Little Gidding. The ‘dull facade’ looked almost beautiful in the late afternoon sun, the noticeboard (new since our last visit) slightly detracting from the composition. Inside, the sun shone brightly through the clear glass and the stained glass of the windows, and the old familiar place looked just the same. This is the place where the Ferrar family, led by Deacon Nicholas, came to say their prayers, morning and evening each day, the centre of their spiritual life. This is the place, hallowed by their community, where ‘prayer has been valid’, this is the place closest to us, now and in England.
Nicholas Ferrar lived in a time of increasing prosperity, with the foundations being laid for the later British commercial and imperial greatness. Ferrar himself came from a wealthy mercantile family, involved in foreign trade and the settlement of English colonies in North America.
It was also a time of religious turmoil in England. Just five years before his birth an attempted invasion by a foreign power aiming to overthrow Queen Elizabeth I and her protestant government had been foiled by a combination of the heroics of Sir Francis Drake and the stormy weather. When Ferrar was 12 a conspiracy to blow up the Houses of Parliament and to kill the king and his government was only narrowly averted, thanks to careful intelligence and leaks from the inside. And not long after his death England erupted into civil war.
Ferrar’s response to this, like that of his contemporary George Herbert, was to live a quiet and godly life. He abandoned the pursuit of worldly wealth and status for a life of prayer and contemplation, in a community of family and other associates. But this was not escapism. Rather, it was an engagement in real life, an engagement with ordinary people and their everyday concerns, as a teacher, as a healer (Ferrar had studied medicine at Cambridge, Padua and Leipzig), as a counsellor. He and his community were consulted by the poor, by the politically active, and by the great and the good — right up to the king himself.
Although Nicholas Ferrar died in his 40s on 4 December 1637 and his community survived only another decade before it was ransacked by the victorious Puritans, and dissolved a further decade later at the death of Nicholas’s eldest brother John, his example still shines as a beacon of sanity in a complex and sometimes frightening world. A life of caring for ordinary people, of ministering to their needs, physical, intellectual and spiritual, a life of quiet, undemonstrative prayer and study, is one that we would all do well to emulate. ‘It is the right, good old way you are in,’ Nicholas Ferrar said to his brother, shortly before he died; ‘keep in it.’
1 CommentEnglish bombers 1605-2005
The revelation that those who carried out the suicide bombings in London were British citizens is a shock. It would have been far easier to be able to regard the terrorists as people from out there, people who were totally different, people with whom we had nothing in common, and for whom were needed have no fellow feeling.
But we have been here before, and we need to learn from our history. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, possibly the most audacious acts of terrorism ever planned. It was planned by Englishmen. It was planned not by the poor or the dispossessed, but by people who largely were privileged and comfortable.
At the accession of King James VI of Scotland to the throne of England in 1603, those who wanted to worship as Catholics had hoped that the new king would be more sympathetic to them than Queen Elizabeth had been. At first James had appeared to favour them, but the Puritans objected to the new relaxed attitudes. James brought back the fines for those who would not worship as Anglicans, and expelled Catholic priests and Jesuits. This intolerance proved to be a breeding ground for extremism of the most audacious kind. And this was within the hearts of Englishmen who loved England. Like the men who successfully bombed London last week, they were indistinguishable from the rest of the population.
Today we have to learn from history. 400 years ago a religious war was beginning in England. The Puritans were determined to get the king to treat Catholics so harshly that they didn’t feel they had a future in England. The Gunpowder Plot led to more repression, partly to the Civil War, certainly to Cromwell’s hated campaigns in Ireland. In the city of Drogheda he ordered the death of every man in the garrison, describing this as “a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches”. In Wexford he slaughtered townspeople and garrison alike.
The legacy of the response to the gunpowder plot has been severe repression and hostility particularly in Ireland which has continued until our own day. It has set the native largely catholic population against the immigrant ruling protestant class for generation after generation. The two communities have been unable to trust each other, and the reason both catholic and protestant terrorists were able to function was that on both sides they knew no-one in their own community would betray them.
Today we stand at that same point in relation to the recent bombings in London as people stood on November 5th 1605. And today we have to reach out and acknowledge that people of Muslim faith have a legitimate and valuable part to play in British society today. We cannot afford to reject people of good will. We need them on our side if good is to triumph.
The Bush administration in the USA with its war on terror has been just as misguided as that of Oliver Cromwell. Its indiscriminate bombing, destruction of infrastructure and failure to establish a rule of law which could be trusted, its treatment of prisoners and detainees have all made things infinitely worse since 9-11.
Jesus tells a parable (Matthew 13.24-30,36-43) which is appropriate to today’s situation. An enemy comes by night and sows weeds in the field. The slaves of the household are up in arms, and want to rush into the field and gather up the weeds. But Jesus says “No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.”
Our danger is that we could, as in the heavy handed and intolerant response to the gunpowder plot 400 years ago, rush in and make things infinitely worse, alienating good citizens of Muslim faith here, and breeding terrorists across the world. We have, fortunately, the good example of the dignified and appropriate response of Spain to the Madrid bombings as a much better example to follow.
The parable of the weeds sown in the crop has an important lesson. We are to live with those who are different. We do not know, and we do not decide which of us is ultimately the good seed which God will harvest at the end of the age. He sends his angels to do that. But we trample down those who are different at our peril, for in doing so, we spoil the good crop, we spoil even ourselves. We find our good intentions turned to hatred and our zeal to oppose what is wrong carries us away in a fury of righteous anger. And we become like an Oliver Cromwell, trampling on the whole of Ireland, turning people against each other for generation after generation.
Our task is to produce the good seed for the harvest, so that at the judgement we will be those whose response to God’s grace will find its fulfilment in his kingdom.
11 CommentsA matter of life or death
Some myths of course we haven’t believed for a long time. Few of us really thought that Britain was somehow exempt from terrorist attack. Nor did we seriously expect that on each and every occasion security forces would be able to prevent an atrocity before it happened. But the myth that many of us held until this week, and which we have now painfully had to relinquish, was that terrorists are radically different from you and me. As I write, the backgrounds of the four suicide bombers are beginning to become clear. From what we can tell at this stage these were ordinary young British men. Born and brought up in this country, educated here, from unremarkable law abiding families. Outwardly at least their interests were the same as those of many of their age and sex.
Chillingly, that closeness is not defined to their backgrounds. For those of us of religious conviction it is equally present in their motivations. Christianity is founded on the story of a man who gave up his life for the sake of others. Faith relativises death in two ways. Most religions declare it neither to be the end nor the most important factor to be considered. I guess that the bombers were like us too in wanting (and this is rightly especially prevalent among young adults) to feel that they were part of something huge – even the outworking of God’s plan itself. The motivations of the original crusaders (who detonated the first suicide bomb a thousand years ago) are not so different from those of these young men.
It’s only after having recognised our similarities that we should go on to focus on the differences. I am helped enormously by the comment of a brother bishop some years ago. He drew an illuminating distinction between “theologies of life” and “theologies of death”. Both are present in Christianity. Both have their place. And in any one of us both will be operating at the same time. One or other however will be the dominant.
Theologies of death focus on temptation, sin, the battle between the divine and the demonic. The central symbol is the cross with Jesus hanging bleeding on it. The world is the entity that nails him there.
Theologies of life by comparison focus on love, forgiveness, the rich abundance of God’s creation. The cross remains the central symbol but here it is empty. Christ is risen, gone before, leading his people. The world, and the rich diversity in it, is itself a pointer to God’s glory.
Those who detonate bombs killing themselves and innocent travellers are operating from within a theology of death. We are closer to them than is comfortable whenever we allow our faith to be more rooted or expressed in what we oppose than in what we affirm. As the scriptures reiterate again and again the mission of Jesus was to bring not death but life. If we are to seriously distinguish ourselves from terrorism it is a theology of life that must predominate, whatever the particular matters being debated.
Faith leaders are rarely to be found with rucksacks full of explosives strapped to their backs but when we propound theologies that place God’s creation under the control of the devil or we declare humanity to be utterly depraved and make that the lynchpin of our position we are ultimately providing the ideological underpinning for actions that in themselves we rightly abhor.
12 CommentsA white band around Edinburgh
As we await news of the G8’s deliberations, it was good to receive, as others must have done, letters from Tony Blair to all who had contacted him about the MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY campaign. It read like a ringing endorsement of our participation in the march around Edinburgh last Saturday.
As soon as we discovered that a cheap flight from Stansted would allow us to join the demonstaration, visit my sister in Edinburgh and get back in time for the Sunday services, we had to go. Initially the organisers had hoped for 100,000 people, double the number that had gone to make a human chain around Birmingham in 1998, appealing for the relief of debt as the jubilee year approached. Certainly our government had welcomed that human chain as a sign that the G8 needed a new agenda.
This time the numbers and the organisation proved far greater. Where Birmingham had a static human chain, Edinburgh the chain was a march which went on for hours. By the time we completed the circuit there were still so many people waiting to begin the march the whole queue was at a standstill, three hours after the first people had begun.
Initially the crowd met in the Meadows, where two stages with giant screens were set up. Images, speeches and music underlined the message of why we were there. Glorious sunshine, and colourful banners added to the enjoyment of the occasion. The rival attraction of watching the Bob Geldof concert either at home or on a large screen somewhere had obviously not diminished the crowds.
Compared with Birmingham, the police presence and the vast number of barricades, looked like complete overkill. On Princes Street, the main thoroughfare of the city, the width of the road filled with four rows of barricades was greater than the width afforded to the marchers. But why? The joyful crowds were adequately marshalled by a large contingent of trade unionists in yellow vests. Under their guidance we were held back at the start and then allowed through a fairly narrow gap, about ten abreast, for the march. Above us, across Edinburgh Castle on its crag, was a huge MAKEPOVERTYHISTORY banner.
One wag with a megaphone yelled out “Call this a march? It’s only an amble. Step it out as if you mean it!” He then turned on the megaphone to give a brief imitation of a police siren.
Amongst the sea of white clothing, a few anarchist troublemakers in black with hoods and faces covered stood out so much that they were easily rounded up by police before any problems could be caused.
The day before, preparations being made in the shopping centre were hugely varied. Some places remained open, and we were certainly grateful for the opportunity of a late lunch. Thousands more marchers must have appreciated the fact that most eating places were open. But apart from the demonstrators, Edinburgh was extremely quiet and many people must have gone on holiday. Some shops were closed, and had signs in the window saying “Closed — so that our staff can join the march”. Others were boarded up, some in order to remain open behind fortress like entrances, but the majority were closed. Perhaps Saturday, for the police and for those who boarded up their shops, was only a seen as a prelude to protests by violent protesters.
But for all who dressed in white and joined the march, it was a great and purposeful day, helping to set the world’s agenda in a way which meant that the poor could no longer be ignored, and that justice needed to be done. The city’s transport coped well, and there were no problems in making return journeys. Indeed, we were at home in time to see the conclusion of the Hyde Park concert.
1 CommentScapegoating the gay community
The Co-op Bank does not want to hold an account for Christian Voice. The Bank is taking this stance because of the organisation’s attitude to homosexuals. It says ‘99% of Christians would not support the level of discrimination against homosexuals urged by Christian Voice’
In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme Simon Williams for the Bank said ‘They are extreme views. They are not mild views… They simply do not fit with our ethical policies… such as… “Homosexual policemen are corrupted by what they do. How can they investigate cases of corruption?”’
Having seen the Christian Voice web site, which has a large section devoted to the participation of police in gay pride marches, it does appear that Christian Voice has an obsession with homosexuality which seems unusual. They do not, for example, suggest that divorced police officers should not investigate matrimonial disputes, or that police officers who commit adultery should not investigate cases of corruption. And whereas they may consider that homosexual activity is a crime against God, it is not, like adultery, also a crime against the spouses of those who engage in adulterous relationships.
It looks as though homosexuals are being singled out for hatred as the Co-op Bank say.
The Archbishop of Canterbury referred to this kind of behaviour in his presidential address to the Anglican Consultative Council on 20 June 2005. He said:
We are always in danger of the easiest religious technique of all, the search for the scapegoat; Paul insists without any shadow of compromise upon our solidarity in rebellion against God, and so tells us that we shall not achieve peace and virtue by creating a community we believe to be pure. And these words are spoken both to the Jew and the Gentile, both to the prophetic radical and the loyal traditionalist. The prophet, says Barth, ‘knows the catastrophe of the Church to be inevitable’ and he knows also that there is no friendly lifeboat into which he can clamber and row clear of the imminent disaster.’
‘We are all butchers pretending to be sacrificers. When we understand this, the skandalon that we had always managed to discharge upon some scapegoat becomes our own responsibility, a stone as unbearably heavy upon our hearts as Jesus himself upon the saint’s shoulders in the Christopher legend’. Not Barth this time, but René Girard, the French philosopher (A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, p.341), once again paraphrasing Paul’s central theme.
I’d like to ask why Christian Voice should particularly choose to scapegoat the gay community. In one sense, the question has no rational answer. It is as incomprehensible as the idea which erupted in many parts of Europe in the middle ages that Jews took Christian boys to sacrifice at Passover. Both are just examples of a group finding solidarity in turning their corporate wrath on to a scapegoat. We can possibly appreciate how people in the middle ages might have perceived those of different faith or customs to be a threat. But what threat could a homosexual person possibly pose to heterosexual people? The gay man is not going to steal my wife, and I know that sex with any other person, male or female, breaks the marriage vows which I took before God and in the eyes of the state.
So is the problem for Christian Voice precisely that the gay man does not want my wife? He doesn’t envy me for having an attractive wife, or see me as a rival for someone he desires? Reading the Archbishop’s references to Girard, is the perceived problem about gay people the fact that they seem often so envy free in comparison with those whose role model is the dominant male? Is that why they are victimised?
Or is it particularly for men who see themselves as dominant, a fear of being raped? Often they are the people who maintain that the Church must be led by men, and that women should “submit” to their husbands. Such men enjoy dominance, and see that view supported by scripture. For such a person, homosexual rape is the ultimate humiliation. This is the story of the men of Sodom in Genesis 19 and one can see how repugnant it is. But Lot’s solution ‘Look, I have two daughters who have not known a man; let me bring them out to you, and do to them as you please.’ is even more horrific: he appears to treat his daughters as property which he can give for anyone to abuse.
Within a Christian context the situation in Uganda where in 1885 King Mwanga had three pages dismembered and burned for rejecting his homosexual advances is almost equally well known. The young men are rightly regarded as martyrs.
Homosexual rape is an extreme example of male domination, with a specific intention of humiliating the victim. Of course, fear of this kind of activity should give men an insight in to the horror which any woman has of being raped, and this danger is much greater than the danger to men. It is at least arguable that throughout the Bible what is condemned about homosexual activity is that it is not seen as an act of love but of repugnant male violence by a dominant person against an unwilling, weaker sexual partner.
But a loving partnership of two people of the same sex is completely different from that. For, just as one would hope that in a marriage the partners should seek each other’s greatest good and happiness in their sexual activity, one would suppose that the same intentions would be present in a homosexual couple. The law provides protection against rape both for homosexual and heterosexual couples, even where the latter are married. It is for the individual to judge whether sexual activity is consensual or abusive.
To my mind that should be the limit of the church’s concern about homosexual couples. After all, in Britain today, we have far more unmarried heterosexual couples, and they aren’t the recipients of abuse and hatred all the time from ‘Christian Voice’.
In my view the Co-op Bank was right to draw attention to the bigoted homophobic victimization of the gay community by ‘Christian Voice’. Would that others might adopt a similarly ethical stance.
88 CommentsAllegorical and Literal
Just after reading the ARCIC Report on Mary I attended a lecture in Cambridge on “The Bible and the Emergence of Modern Science” by Prof Peter Harrison, of Bond University, Australia. It marked the conclusion of a series sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.
Prof. Harrison began by referring to C P Snow, and to the way in which scientists and theologians didn’t understand each other. Then, going through a history of the way in which scriptures had been interpreted, he pointed out that, alongside the literal meaning of any text, the words of scripture were also read in a variety of allegorical senses until the end of the middle ages. Medieval works on natural history exhibited the same kind of interest in allegory, with mythical beasts sitting comfortably alongside animals which could be observed.
At the Renaissance, with the coming of printing, and modern vernacular texts of scripture, the Reformers discarded the allegorical meanings in favour of literal meanings. So whilst allegorical commentaries on the Song of Songs had once been popular, in Reformation times it became far more important to explore the literal meaning of what Paul wrote to the Romans.
This critical approach to biblical texts gradually spread to other fields of learning. Prof. Harrison demonstrated that some books on natural history in England in the early 17th century continued to describe mythical animals long after biblical scholarship in reformation countries had pointed the way towards seeing literal meanings as being of prime importance. Eventually, science based solely on observation and experiment began to flourish unimpeded in England, Holland and Sweden, where allegorical meanings of scripture had been discarded. But in Catholic countries, scientists like Galileo were severely constrained by the church establishment.
Prof. Harrison concluded his lecture by returning to C P Snow and to the continuing problem that theologians and scientists can still use language and assign meanings to words in different ways.
In my view the new ARCIC document illustrates the same difficulty. There is no problem with the literal meaning of the gospel texts. Whilst we acknowledge that the title “Mother of God” may be a poor translation of the original Greek term, 16th century reformers, and Anglicans today are in agreement about the way in which this title is understood. The problems centre on those interpretations of scripture in which Anglicans would argue that a more than literal reading haws been applied.
The report acknowledges the problem, saying
In the following paragraphs, our use of Scripture seeks to draw upon the whole tradition of the Church, in which rich and varied readings have been employed. In the New Testament, the Old Testament is commonly interpreted typologically (By typology we mean a reading which accepts that certain things in Scripture (persons, places, and events) foreshadow or illuminate other things, or reflect patterns of faith in imaginative ways (e.g. Adam is a type of Christ: Romans 5:14; Isaiah 7:14 points towards the virgin birth of Jesus: Matthew 1:23). This typological sense was considered to be a meaning that goes beyond the literal sense. This approach assumes the unity and consistency of the divine revelation.) events and images are understood with specific reference to Christ. This approach is further developed by the Fathers and by medieval preachers and authors.
It sounds like special pleading to retain pre-renaissance allegorical readings of scripture. But, 350 years after the reformers rejected this kind of approach to scripture as a means of establishing doctrine, it is no more possible for Anglicans to go back to the medieval position than it would be for scientists today to write papers on the unicorn or the gryphon.
This has to be said whilst affirming an Anglican defence of the title Theotokos. It is accepted on the grounds that not only is it a definition agreed by an ecumenical council, but also on the grounds that those who arrived at the definition did so on the basis of literal, rather than allegorical readings of scripture. The Fathers understood clearly what they were doing. One might add, for example, that the devotional insights exhibited in St. Bernard’s allegorical commentary on the Song of Songs were never intended to be doctrinal formulations, and were not understood as such. It might therefore be clear that Revelation 12 and 21 or Genesis 3, whilst poetic and interesting, should not be used to illuminate Christian doctrine about Mary as we would wish to affirm it today.
There are, however, dangers in over literalism when applied to biblical texts. The most obvious, as any scientist will report, concern the ways in which some fundamentalist Christians would support a belief in a six day creation, or Noah’s flood, simply because the text says it happened. When we see these texts as illustrations which had a particular meaning for their own time, it is possible to take a rather kinder view of the ways in which Genesis 3 or Revelation have traditionally been read as referring to Mary than would emerge from a solely literal reading.
But, as the report acknowledges, the remaining difficulties concern Marian dogmas formulated after both the Great Schism and the Reformation. The ARCIC 1 statement on the Eucharist said Our intention has been to seek a deeper understanding of the reality of the Eucharist which is consonant with biblical teaching and with the tradition of our common inheritance. That is to say it laid a great stress on the ecumenical understanding of a united church, and tested this faith against a present day reading of scripture accepted by scholars on all sides. As such, the document has provided a firm foundation for further liturgical and doctrinal convergence between the churches.
My fear about the present report is that, by wanting to retain post reformation dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church which are not underpinned by readings of scripture which modern scholars would support, it has not remained faithful to the principles established by ARCIC 1. As a result its conclusions will be of far more limited application. But, from the Anglican point of view, it will remind very many of us of a great deal of doctrine concerning Mary which we can accept, but may in some quarters have neglected.
4 CommentsChallenging the norms of society
On this feast of St Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury and martyr, there is a sharp reminder that the role of a Christian is to stand as a challenge to many of the norms of society, and to criticise authority, whatever the personal consequences.
Alphege, a saintly hermit, was called to high office by Dunstan, and became his successor as Archbishop. He was captured by the Danes, who demanded an enormous ransom for his release. Alphege refused to pay it and forbade anyone from doing so, knowing that it would impoverish the ordinary people even more. He was brutally murdered by his captors at Greenwich on this day in the year 1012.
As we approach a general election, the political parties invite us first to consider our own interest. Who will reduce my tax? -allow me to jump ahead if there is a wait for health care? -secure my pension? -keep England for the English? and so on.
In the days of Alphege ordinary people had no say in the affairs of state, but today we do have a share, both through the ballot, and through the freedom to keep campaigning on important issues between elections. Christians have a responsibility to look at the coming election through Alphege’s eyes, and identify those policies which would impoverish the marginalised, who miss out on many of the good things our nation has to offer.
Beyond casting our votes, now is an excellent time to remind those seeking election of our concerns. We need trade justice, not just a free market. We need to give a welcome to those who need asylum, knowing that those we welcome will enrich our nation as generations of immigrants have done before them. We need to care for children and the elderly, and health provision assigned by need.
The present Archbishop has written to our political leaders about negative campaigning, which appeals only to the greed, the fear and the selfishness of the electorate. He said, ‘Election campaigns can quickly turn into a competition about who can most effectively frighten voters with the prospect of what “The Others” are going to do.’
Surely no party would want to claim that fear, greed and envy were their core values. Wouldn’t the British rather be known as the true heirs of Alphege?
0 CommentsAn Easter beginning
I had a sudden flashback to my childhood, this week. I was standing in front of a schoolteacher, defending myself against an accusation of wrongdoing. There was no point in denial, so I tried to throw the blame, “I only did what Michael was doing”, I bleated. The riposte was instant; no doubt she had used it many times before. “Would you follow him into his grave as quickly?”
Three of the four gospel accounts of Easter morning place someone inside Jesus’ tomb. Matthew and Luke tell us the women enter; John says that it is Peter followed by the beloved disciple. Only Mark has the entire action take place outside. It’s traditional to use these passages to illustrate the emptiness of the grave and to contrast Jesus’ absence from his burial place with his appearances elsewhere over the hours and days that follow.
I’ve no problem with any of that, but it feels as though there is another dimension that has got squeezed out of the picture. Matthew, Mark and John all tell us that the visitors to the tomb hurry or even run away. There is a dynamism, vitality and urgency here that we too easily overlook. Luke expresses the same thing slightly differently by having the first resurrection appearance being to two disciples on a journey to Emmaus.
If we have made the most of these last few days of Holy Week we will indeed have followed Jesus into his grave. And now we need to follow him as quickly out of it! Ironically of course this is the moment when many clergy and laypeople heave a great sigh of relief that the rush of services has come to an end and head off for a few days well earned rest. I’m not begrudging anyone their holidays, but simply noting that whatever momentum we have built up over the previous week will, if we are not alert to the danger, have dissipated by the time we emerge from our post-Easter break.
Whether it is full or empty, the grave is too obvious and natural an ending place. It imparts an inaccurate sense of finality to the Easter story. For the disciples it isn’t the end but the beginning. A new relationship with Jesus beckons them forward. As Matthew puts it, Christ is “going on ahead of them to Galilee”. And Galilee itself is no safe place of rest. It is border country; where unpredictable encounters are always likely; where Jewish traditions vie with outside influences; where the Good News they bring will have to engage seriously with cultures and lifestyles outside of their own.
As they hurry along their journey they will encounter Jesus on the way, in both likely and unlikely places. Their meetings will strengthen them and revive them. So my prayer for us all this Easter Day is that we who have followed Jesus into his grave will continue to follow him out and onwards. And that such rest as we take from our labours will not cost us the momentum that Holy Week has granted us.
1 CommentFacing Good Friday
Our Lent group this year was partly based on the film ‘The Shawshank Redemption’. In the first session we watched the sequence where the protagonist spends his first night in prison, and one of the other new arrivals is beaten so badly that he dies. It’s an intentionally shocking sequence (though comparatively mild by contemporary cinematic standards) and it provoked a discussion about watching violence. Not suprisingly, given the constituency of Lent groups, a number of people said that would not have chosen to watch it, that normally they shy away from portrayals of any sort of violence.
The depictions are there in abundance, whether fictional or the real thing in news coverage. But we have an option, we can decide not to look, to cocoon ourselves, knowing but not knowing. Films come with category labels, TV programmes are shown before or after ‘the divide’, and the reliable characters telling us about today’s news will warn us when there might be something too nasty to watch: yesterday, the warning came in the context of a report on vivisection.
I’m one of the opters-out. Every time I go to a performance of ‘King Lear’, I look away during the blinding of Gloucester; I scarcely ever go to films which I know to be bloodthirsty; I salve my conscience by paying my subscription to Amnesty International, but I can rarely bring myself to read the stories which come in its magazine.
And then Holy Week brings me up short. From Palm Sunday, with its reading of the passion, through to Good Friday’s Stations of the Cross, I am compelled to look, to follow the story of betrayal, and torture, and death. I can remember, as a teenager, hearing Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and wanting to stop listening, but needing to go on.
A year on from the opening of Mel Gibson’s ‘The Passion’, I still have questions about its particular theology, its way of telling the story, and its implicit claim to a physical suffering beyond that of other human beings, just as I did when it first came out. But on reflection, I respect the need to make us accept the reality of suffering.
Tomorrow I will find my mind filled, as it is every year, by unwanted, undesired images of the world’s major and minor cruelties. Tomorrow, I cannot tuck myself inside the cocoon of film-ratings and warnings to the viewer. Tomorrow, I must look, and know that there will be no easy comfort; for that we must wait.
0 CommentsObject Lessons
While watching Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel 4, I suddenly realised what it was like to have them shoot at me; or at least shoot at something I care about.
I love the show, if for no other reason than it gives some of our MPs an object lesson in being an effective Opposition. Last week it turned to the subject of God speaking: Mr Blair finds it hard to hear what God says, so he asks Mr Bush who does hear God clearly. So we learn from Mr Bush that God says they should bomb Iraq, and Bremner wishes God would learn from the Archbishop of Canterbury whose practice, apparently, is to say nothing.
I was on board until we got to the Archbishop.
It took me back to a Daily Mail article I was shown a year ago asking what the point was of an Archbishop who did not feel the need to speak on every subject in the public eye. Of course Dr Williams has and does speak on key issues in public life, it is just that he does not do so to order.
It’s a strange feature of our national life that while so few of us attend Church of England services, and yet we expect its most senior figure to come out with a defining word from God to solve a particularly thorny public debate.
It happens personally as well. I was called to visit some old friends last autumn. They had lived perfectly contented lives without any need for dialogue with the Christian faith. They were now in crisis as the husband was dying a nasty and lingering death. They were clearly disappointed that I didn’t come out with a tidy phrase which would have been a ready source of supernatural comfort in their distress.
I know colleagues who do have a stock of tidy phrases for these occasions, but I have never believed you have to take people back to a world of Santa or the Tooth Fairy to be able to talk about God. Losing a lifetime’s love to death is too serious for that. I didn’t do a quick and easy sound bite, because you can’t give a shallow, ready response to profound pain. (Neither can you leave them empty-handed.)
Newspapers are in business to boost their circulations, so that they can charge more for their advertising space. Demanding a comment from a prelate, then and there, is newsworthy. Whether the comment is worth hearing, or whether it is absurd, it makes no difference to the journalist as it will still sell papers. Tomorrow it will be someone and something else, which will be required to be just as instant.
To be expected to respond to complex national issues with deadline-driven instant insight is unreasonable. Just as no course in faith, which will do a dying man or his wife the slightest bit of good, can be delivered in one visit over afternoon tea. But both are possible, all they need is time, consideration, prayer, and silence.
Above all they each need an understanding that any insight about anything, national or personal, is about being committed to a journey of discovery, in which things about ourselves are revealed, some of which will be assuring, some of which will not. Journeys are not all of a fixed length, and the outcome is not always foreseen. Whatever else they are, they are not usually responsive to instant demands for pithy comment.
I’m sorry Mr Bremner, an Archbishop who doesn’t always speak on demand is not a national liability. If anything, he is an object lesson to our representatives of how to manage grave and weighty issues. He does speak, however. As I write this, he is addressing a gathering in East London on the subject of who is raising our children. Whether I will agree with him or not, he will be worth hearing because what he says will be the fruits of a considered and prayerful journey, in a way that a lot of what is passing through Parliament is not.
Silence to a demand is not to say nothing, it may be that the question is the wrong one, or that silence may be an invitation to take a longer and more prayerful look.
1 CommentDiversity and Renewal
Recently, some very striking demographic analysis has been undertaken into Irish population trends. To cut a long story (or perhaps, a rather intricate analysis) short, it has been suggested that by the year 2050 Ireland could have a population of 20 million (rather than the current 5 million or so), and that fewer than 6 million of these would then be indigenous Irish. If the trends on which this analysis is based continue, then Ireland would in just over one generation have been transformed from having the genetically most homogeneous population in Europe to having one of the most diverse. Indeed, the ‘old’ Irish would not even make up the biggest population group: that would be the Chinese.
This is interesting to me not least because, over the past year, I have visited China twice, and so this has caused me to muse how a ‘Chinese’ Ireland might appear in a few years time, and what it might mean — including what it might mean to organised religion. In China, things are changing faster than any of us could imagine in our own environment. Some of it is rampant materialism, but China is not a country without a hunger for something more profound. My guess is that a Chinese population in Ireland will be an innovative and tolerant and energetic population; those already here show all those signs.
So while I have been musing on this, the Anglican primates meeting in Ireland have been dealing with their own intercultural issues. They have had to confront the reality of a western liberal culture coming under attack, and in an elaborate ritual of trying to sit down somewhere more or less on top of the fence have, predictably, failed to be comfortable in this posture. Nobody could, with any confidence, try to predict what the Anglican family of the year 2050 will look like, based on this evidence from the prelates. But there are few signs that anyone is trying to construct a forward-looking vision of an intercultural Christian world.
My own instinct is to say that western liberalism — at least where it stresses the dignity of human lifestyles which do not hurt or oppress — is by now very well rooted in these soils, and will survive the new cultural mix, and possibly even thrive in it. Our new world is about releasing innovative energy, and not about trying to shoehorn all life and culture into a narrow selection of time capsules.
The church may turn out to be relevant to this, or it may turn out to be just a ghost. The time has come for us to assert the right of Christianity to be a signpost to the future, and not just a grim reminder of some of the less pleasant aspects of our past. We must celebrate diversity and renewal, not be frightened by it. It’s time to realise that the place for Christians is not on the fence.
2 CommentsStealing the heart of the Church
The BBC referred this morning to the “Battle for the political heart of Anglicanism” being fought out at Armagh between the Anglican primates, over issues about same sex couples.
It is fascinating that this is seen as a particularly Anglican issue, when the same difficulties are found in other churches, as a Baptist observer said at the Church of England’s General Synod last week. The reason must lie in the history of the Anglican Church, the close founding link of Church and state, particularly in the way that relations were defined and described in Richard Hooker’s monumental Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity 400 years ago. Since that time, with bishops in the House of Lords, there has been a close correspondence between the laws of Church and State to the extent that it is often difficult to discover which is which. We’re reaping some of the problems associated with this in the upsets over the marriage plans of Prince Charles and Camilla, and it is fascinating to find that European Human Rights legislation needs to be invoked to say they can legally marry in an English register office outside the gates of Windsor Castle.
Whilst the Church of England was little more than a national church (leaving aside the Scottish Episcopal Church and its great legacy to the Episcopal Church of the USA) it might have seemed that laws of Church and State could be seen to correspond. But, with the growth of the British Empire and the exporting of the national church into other cultures, conflicts were bound to arise.
A particular problem was the prevailing polygamy found in of parts of Africa. Whilst Christianity did not allow polygamy, there was a certain tolerance of it for those who were not Christians, and often a blind eye was turned to the ancient droit de seigneur of local rulers to collect a large harem of young women. Things only came to a head when Mwanga, the ruler of Uganda in 1886, wanted boys, not girls, for his bed. The Christian pages began to refuse his advances, so he had them put to death. They included Catholics and Anglicans. On their way to the place of execution, these young Christians sang hymns in honour of the Lord and some were still singing when the flames surrounded them. Since then they have been regarded as founding martyrs of the Christian Church. It is salutary to think, however, that few people would have shed tears over maids in waiting, had the ruler preferred girls. Not surprisingly, the Church of Uganda, in honouring its founding martyrs, strongly opposes homosexual relationships today, as Britain did in the time when Oscar Wilde went to prison.
So long as the Empire continued, many local cultures were suppressed. Today, with the independence of nations which were once British, the differences emerge. Pakistan is a largely Muslim country, competent to make its own laws. In Muslim law it is legal for a man to take four wives. The Christian Church there, whilst holding different views, would never dare to advocate these for anyone outside their own flock. Equally, the Christians there know that the acceptance of homosexual relationships would lead to the burning of Christian churches and the persecution of Christians. The Church is not in a position to advocate different rules from those of the state.
In a worldwide Communion, Anglicans have to accept that we are not in the driving seat when it comes to making laws. There is in Pakistan, in Uganda, and in other places a complete abhorrence of homosexual activity.
Equally, in Europe, it is secular Human Rights law which is in the driving seat, not the laws of national churches. Today the British Navy asks the advice of gay rights groups about the best way to encourage recruitment of homosexual men and women. Gay rights are enshrined in the law of the land. They are seen as just as important as the rights of people of different races, or the rights of women, and all are protected by law.
In much of Europe, in the USA, and in Canada, discrimination against gay people is now being consigned to history, along with slavery and the lack of universal suffrage. It is only shameful that the Church, which was in the forefront of the campaign to free slaves, still treats women and gay people as being less than fully human, with impaired human rights. Speaking out and saying that a faith founded on the incarnation has to be a faith which respects the dignity of all people has required great courage. Fundamentalism still tries to steal the political heart of the Anglican Church. There is a rearguard action against the ordination of women to the episcopate.
In much of the USA, Canada, Britain and Southern Africa, the battle is over. National laws guarantee the rights of women, of gay people and different races. The Church is doing little more than catching up with what governments, nationally and internationally, have agreed.
At the same time it is totally impossible for Anglicans in many other parts of the world to uphold a viewpoint which is so much at odds with their own national culture and laws. Pakistan and Uganda will want to be different. But we need to be grown up enough to accept that.
The Anglican Communion was never intended to be, and cannot be monolithic. We have to accept (Article 34 in the Prayer Book) that there will be national differences. “It is not necessary that Traditions and Ceremonies in all places be one, and utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversities of countries.”
These articles were honed out of the bitter controversies of the Reformation, out of the martyrdom of John Fisher, Thomas More, Ridley, Latimer, Cranmer and the rest. And in the time of Elizabeth people realised that there had to be an end to blood letting. Christians had to learn to live together in peace, and respect differences of conscience and custom. We need to learn the lesson again.
29 Commentssound the trumpet, proclaim a fast
The season of fasting is upon us. But outward show of fasting is forbidden, both by the prophets and by Jesus. The prophet says “rend your hearts and not your garments” and Jesus says “whenever you fast, do not look dismal.”
We are told “whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you.” The words have an uncomfortable ring in the light of the responses to the Tsunami. Certainly there has been enormous generosity. And, whilst millions of donors have been moved to give quietly, doing what Jesus said, many others were pushed in the right direction by seeing what others were doing, or because others asked them to give. First it was governments, and those league tables which appeared in our newspapers. Initially, only Australia appeared to appreciate the enormity of the devastation. Then, as news of the losses started to emerge, Sweden, finding a huge proportion of the victims were their own nationals, started to give massively. And Britain and all the rest, no doubt as travellers started to come home, began to promise aid on a more fitting scale. Governments, shamed by the unparalleled giving by individuals to charities, promised more.
From then we have had all sorts of initiatives to help people to give and keep giving in the forefront of our minds. There have been fund raising events, sponsored events, appeals by particular personalities and so on. Charitable giving is announced by trumpets. Television programmes, special records, and all the rest focus our giving.
But that always happens. We have “Wear your poppy with pride” for Remembrance Sunday. That’s what we used to do, but now people wear the same poppy, for which they have given no more, with far too much pride for about three weeks. We have red nose day, in which surely those who wear the noses have their reward, lots of fun for the day, having spent not a lot. The “non uniform” days for school children encourage the same kind of mentality. It says “We will give, so long as we get something out of our giving.”
Beyond this, people’s giving to the rich is far greater than our giving to the poor. Sponsorship of the arts, one’s old school or university, is a wonderful way of blowing one’s own trumpet. The lottery, in Britain, has benefited the rich far more than it has helped the poor.
We ought to be able to say that we shouldn’t need fund raising events. We shouldn’t need people to encourage us to give, who perhaps, by making themselves the focus of giving, “have their reward” already from the many people who see them promoting a good cause and respond to that. We shouldn’t need to see our name in lights as sponsors, whether we are individuals or governments. But there is no doubt that if we want help on the right scale, the trumpeting works. And, as charities have reminded us, once appeals in the past slipped out of the news, the promised aid stopped coming.
This time, with the tsunami having woken up everyone to a global disaster, and with many other desperate needs perhaps being neglected as a result, a new approach is required. Our giving should not need to be triggered by events such as this, but should be regular and committed. It should be part of a way of life, for individuals, for all commerce, and for nations. The poor will always be with us, and only a sustained programme of aid on a massive scale will stop the gap between the rich and poor getting greater.
Now might just be the time when governments could say that they are going to raise the proportion of GNP given to relieve poverty, rather than lower taxes for those who have enough. Now might be the time to remove the crippling burden of debt for poor nations. Now might be the time to justice in trade. And it might be the time to do it just because it is the right thing to do, not just because we like blowing our own trumpets.
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