Actually, that isn’t an Easter reflection. I managed to lose any internet connection four or five days ago and have now only popped in to my old office to bring all my official computer equipment from home before we move out of the Croydon house… which we do this coming Wednesday.
In the silence I have managed to miss addressing an absurd example of journalistic ignorance in the Independent (I think I might write do similarly by writing a lengthy and passionate piece about something of which I know little – quantum physics, perhaps), the big ‘Church school admissions’ story, and the whole of Easter. Even Liverpool’s thrashing of Birmingham City fell by the wayside.
This has been a pain for me as the writing (and subsequent commenting/debate) always helps me to think more clearly. I am not sure how much such ruminations will have been missed by readers of this blog. But, the enforced silence has been like enforced fasting - probably good for the health and for getting things in perspective - but it plays havoc with the blog stats.
Anyway, now back to radio silence until the end of this week when we will be settling into our new home in Bradford and getting reconnected with the blogosphere.
As we are about to begin the haunting journey through Holy Week (which needs to be lived as if we didn’t know the outcome), I have been doing two things: listening to the new Bruce Cockburn album and reading Tony Blair‘s A Journey.
Holy Week takes us with Jesus and his friends through places of apparent confusion to a place of dereliction and apparent abandonment. Some time ago Jesus ‘set his face to Jerusalem’ and knowingly entered the heart of political and religious power. This place in which God is blasphemed, his people exploited and political integrity compromised is the place you go to if you have a death-wish… or a point to make or a change to bring. The rubbish dump outside the city is riddled with the gallows used to humiliatingly execute those who dare to challenge Rome.
Read the Gospel accounts and it is clear that Jesus knew where he was going and what was likely to happen there; but, his friends travel with an optimistic misconception about their enterprise. And, ultimately, instead of their hero doing the stuff of religious vindication and political victory, he seems to walk directly into the trap set by the imperialists and their puppets. Why does he do this and why doesn’t he explain himself to his friends? Why doesn’t he avoid the personal pain and suffering and the radical disappointment and disillusionment of those who might now feel conned?
Well, part of the answer lies earlier in the Gospels when Jesus, immediately prior to his public ministry, faces up with ruthless honesty to the most fundamental questions of his character and motivation. In the desert, away from distraction, he cannot escape the questions: Are you in this for the power and glory? Are you really prepared to deny your own material needs in order to stick to your course? Do you really have to walk the way of pain and suffering – surely there must be another way? If you really are the Messiah, why must you walk this way and suffer such an apparently futile fate?
All of this goes against ‘normal’ assumptions about power, rights, purpose and value. Having faced it in the desert, now Jesus faces the reality as he walks towards the place where his commitments will be tested and he will discover whether or not he has been deluding himself.
Yet, his friends just don’t get it. He doesn’t try to tell them what they won’t understand. He knows that they will have to learn their own way – that there is no short-cut to re-shaping their world view or their fundamental assumptions about who and how God is. He has to let them do this in their way and in their time – and he can’t spare them the pain of it all. No short-cuts, no easy explanations, no false comforts, no escapism. (And we must resist the urge to leap too quickly from Good Friday to Easter Day without living – and enabling others to live – through the sheer bewildering emptiness and horror of Saturday. Sunday makes no sense without the experience of that desolation and sense of deep disappointment.
But, where do Tony Blair and Bruce Cockburn fit into this? The answer is: indirectly and tangentially, but interestingly.
I deliberately waited to read Blair’s book until the rather tedious and predictable judgements on it and him had gone away. There was little in the immediate criticism of the book that was enlightening. As Blair himself recognises (repeatedly) in the book, prejudices about him - his motives and the nature of particular events – are not going to be changed by Blair’s own account. Views are too entrenched. However, the best he can hope for is that people will understand why he took the decisions he did – particularly in relation to Afghanistan and Iraq – and on the basis of what information. He asks for comprehension, not agreement.
What has surprised me in the book is Blair’s honesty about the failures and his generosity to those who made his life and work difficult. And I now wonder whether my resistance to his defence of George Bush’s intelligence and integrity actually says more about me than it does either of them.
However, what I have found most intriguing is the way Blair draws lessons of leadership from his experience – albeit with the benefit of hindsight. The most explicit discourse on this comes in the chapter on the Northern Ireland conflict and the Good Friday Agreement. But, he illustrates well the loneliness of leadership and the agonising nature of decison-making when the loud voices around you want you to decide differently. Even if a million people march against you and accuse you of lying, how do you do what you believe to be right rather than what is either popular or expedient?
Now, I am not defending his decisions regarding Iraq; that’s for him to do. (And just to nobble those who might selectively quote me and accuse me of associating Blair with Jesus… it is the phenomenon of leadership demands that I am thinking about, not the nature of the messianic!) What I am interested in here is the matter of authentic leadership when the heat is on. What sort of leadership is it that prefers not to face the challenges of action (as opposed to loud words and empty threats) and looks to political expediency or electoral popularity as their principal guide when taking far-reaching decisions? In Blair’s case, he recognises the charge of the ‘messiah complex’ and does seem very sure of his own rightness. But, that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t right to make some of the decisions he did. As he states, only he could make them and make them he did.
I don’t know Tony Blair. I only met him once and our conversation got interrupted before it had got going. But, I feel more intrigued now to understand more about his motivation than I did before reading the book. I am not sure I have changed my mind on key elements of the decisions made, but I understand better why he made them. And, ultimately, regardless of whether or not those around him agree or understand, he still had to decide what he thought was right and not what might be merely expedient in the short-term.
And Bruce Cockburn? Back in 2004 he wrote a song called This is Baghdad. On the Life Short Call Now album, he rails against the misery and destruction in Iraq:
Everything’s broken in the birthplace of law / As Generation Two tries on his magic flaw
Carbombed and carjacked and kidnapped and shot / How do you like it, this freedom we brought? / We packed all the ordnance but the thing we forgot / Was a plan in case it didn’t turn out quite like we thought. / This is Baghdad…
It is angry and horrified and yet offers no solutions. Fair enough. The poet’s job is to illuminate, not resolve.
But, in his wonderful new acoustic studio album Small Source of Comfort he has two songs about Afghanistan. One – The Comets of Kandahar – is a guitar piece about the sight of jet fighters taking off after dark, invisisble apart from the purple flame from the tailpipe. The second is a powerfully moving elegy to dead soldiers. He was about to board a plane at Camp Mirage, a Canadian staging post in the Middle East, when he found himself part of a Ramp Ceremony in which the remains of two Canadian casualties were honoured before being repatriated. He says in the sleeve notes: “One of the saddest and most moving scenes I’ve been privileged to witness… this song is dedicated to the memory of Major Yannick Pepin and Corporal Jean-Francois Drouin”.
The song needs to be heard rather than the lyrics simply read. Like a good Psalm of lament, it is drawn beautifully and tragically from the bowels of the poet:
Each one lost is everyone’s loss, you see / each one lost is a vital part of you and me.
Cockburn’s anger about the conflict is not enough to prevent him seeing beauty in the darkness or compassion in the particular. He also allows prejudice to be challenged by experience.
Being on retreat means being behind the game when it comes to the news. So, I have picked up on the latest NHS shenanigans with a certain incredulity. Given the lesson learned from Tony Blair – that New Labour behaved during its first term in office as if it was still in opposition and didn’t move quickly or radically enough to instigate change – it is understandable that David Cameron wants to get as much done as quickly as possible.
However, he is hampered by three factors: (a) his big ideas (the Big Society, for example) have coincided with massive financial retrenchment… with the former being undermined by the latter; (b) there seems to be little dynamic coherence between the major initiatives launched; and (c) the sheer incompetence of the process for legislation.
Is the NHS fiasco the third or fourth claw-back of confidently announced initiatives? The difference here, however, is the enormity of the changes proposed and the fact that NHS reform represents the flagship policy of the new government. Clawing back the sale of forests is one thing, but announcing a ‘pause’ in the legislative process for NHS reform is of a completely different order.
The arguments can continue about NHS efficiency (provided we remember that efficiency of itself is not the raison d’etre of the NHS) and whether or not care might be delivered more effectively (which is the point of the NHS). The inevitable pros and cons of different ways of organising health care must be weighed up – and it must be recognised that any and every system will have pros and cons – but we must not confuse ends with means.
The worrying thing this time, however, is that opposition to the reform of the NHS is huge and crosses many social and professional boundaries. Some resistance will surely be down to inertia, insecurity, vested interests, fear of change and institutional bloodymindedness. That happens in any institution. But, what is interesting here is that the opposition is informed, unconvinced by the proposals and fearful of potential disarray in the system – not for the sake of the system, but for the sake of the people for whom the system is supposed to exist.
There are two dangers here for the government. First, they rehearse the Thatcherite mantra that it is not the policy that is wrong, but that some poor people out there just haven’t understood it – that once they have understood it, they will obviously have no objection. In this case the policy has been understood and is being questioned in substance by very well-informed people. Patronising opponents won’t work any more.
Secondly, the process appears to be driven by a political dynamic and not one that serves the service itself. That is to say, it might be helpful if a pilot scheme or three were introduced in order to road-test the proposed reforms. A process in which the public was able to see what the outcome might look and feel like is far more likely to win over sceptics than an ideologically driven rush for change. But, we don’t do pilot schemes any longer, do we – in education, health or anywhere else?
I have no problem with proposals for ways of improving the NHS (given the caveat above that improvements always bring with them unanticipated or unintended deficits). I have no problem trying out alternatives. I am open to be persuaded that reforms are necessary and might be helpful. But, I am not happy to see legislation passed on proposals that have not been properly thought through, not tested in the real world (as opposed to on Excel) with real people, not communicated in a way that is respectful and convincing, and possibly shaped to solve a different problem (finance rather than health).
It must have been humiliating for the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, to stand in the House of Commons, unsupported by Cabinet colleagues, and announce a ‘pause for listening’ in the legislative process. Yesterday David Cameron had to take personal control of the ‘presentation’ and (bizarrely) state that consultation during the next couple of months will be ‘genuine’.
It’s a mess. And it is just the latest in a line of incompetently handled initiatives in this government’s first year in office. As Blair says in his book A Journey, it is far harder being in government than in opposition. It’s also hard, having listened to the Tories accusing the last government of incompetence, now to see such obvious incompetence in office.
Wouldn’t it be great if the Prime Minister could treat us like adults, apologise for the systemic process and communication failures of his government so far (forests, education, NHS, etc.) and announce a more mature way of doing things. It’s his first year and the economic pool we are paddling in is horrible, so we might even be sympathetic. But, while he pretends that everything is under control, that all the problems are the fault of the previous administration and that all his colleagues are competent for their office, we will continue to be suspicious.
Last Friday (1 April) my election as the tenth Bishop of Bradford was confirmed in a (mostly legal) ceremony at York Minster. Having a bit of time to kill before the service and legal ceremony, we went to have a look at the David Hockney exhibition in the City Art Gallery.
You go in through the front doors (not surprisingly) and ahead of you is a large room with a fifty-panel painting mounted on one wall: Bigger Trees Near Warter. On the facing wall there are explanations of process and there are computer displays explaining how and why Hockney set about this task in the first place.
What is interesting about the enormous painting is that it depicts an ordinary scene on the bend of a road near some buildings in North Yorkshire. It is the sort of place I have driven through many times and not noticed. Whereas I see a bit of countryside that has to be driven through if I am to get from where I was to where I want to be, Hockney sees a scene that captures the nature or spirit of a particular environment. I see ‘shallow’ and functionally; Hockney sees ‘deep’ and artistically. This might be because he is looking for somewhere to paint and I am keeping my eyes on the bendy, narrow roads – but you get my point.
I was musing on this while looking at the painting in the art gallery. Sometimes what we are looking for determines (or, at the very least, influences) what we see or how we look. And the gift of the artist is to invite us to look differently and see places (or things) differently. The artist asks us to look through a different lens and risk the potential for changing our perspective, having seen the object differently. It is what the Bible calls ‘repentance’ – changing how we look in order to change the way we see in order to change the way we think in order to change the way we live.
My wife remarked that Hockney “takes the ordinary, sees it differently, and makes it monumental”.
The second thing that struck me about Hockney’s work was an easily-missed comment on one of the explanatory panels in the gallery. His method involves observing, then painting very quickly. When you are doing this with fifty panels it is possible to end up with several large, wet panels at one time. So, he and his assistant had to modify their vehicle and construct a frame in the back so that these panels could be transported in whatever condition and without damage or compromise. Questioned about the characteristic spontaneity of his painting method, Hockey replied: “You’ve really got to prepare if you’re going to be spontaneous.”
It’s one of those annoying things that the people who make life look easy are those who have dug deep foundations and prepared well. Preparation is everything. The radio and TV presenter Chris Evans describes inIt’s Not What You Think, the excellent first part of his two-volume autobiography, how his radio programmes are meticulously prepared for using pie charts. He only manages to get the effect of spontaneity because the whole thing is broken down into smaller units and is thoroughly prepared. It is impressive to see it in action.
Spontaneity is sometimes used as an excuse for laziness. A politician might be tempted to ‘wing it’ – or (he says…) a preacher to ruminate from the wells of experience, but we usually get found out. We become repetitive, uninspiring or embarrassed when questioned. Preparing for a radio documentary interview a month or so ago (for Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday on BBC Radio 4 – going out in May), I checked basic facts, read lyrics and even bought three CDs I had last owned on tape. The interviewer turned up in my office the next morning with books, CDs and other resources and was surprised to find I didn’t need them – I had thoroughly prepared and knew what I was talking about (or limited what we did talk about to what I knew…). He kept remarking on it – much to my surprise as I couldn’t imagine doing the interview without having done my own research.
OK, I’ve winged it with the best and the rest of them. I’ve occasionally got away with murder and also know what it feels like to be found out – faced in front of a camera or microphone with a question for which I was not prepared. I’ve also been arrogant enough to think people would be interested in my unique perspective, only to find from their body language that I was mistaken.
As Tony Blair might have said (but didn’t): ‘Preparation, preparation, preparation’.
nickbaines
