Compassion

Yesterday the Guardian published a short blog post on religious broadcasting, so I guess I should post this.

This is the text of this morning's Pause for Thought on the excellent BBC Radio 2 Chris Evans Show. I thought of doing something on the agonising banality of Eurovision, but just couldn't muster the enthusiasm. (I like Bonnie Tyler, but the song is a disaster…)

This is a terrible thing for a Liverpool fan to admit (and I do so though gritted teeth), but I admired Sir Alex Ferguson's speech last Sunday. He had just finished his last home game as manager of Manchester United and was thanking the crowd for their support. I actually heard it in the car and found it quite moving. The speech, that is, not the car.

The bit that got me was when he said that in future he would be able to watch the team instead of suffering with them. Bang on, Sir Alex.

When you identify closely with people in whom you have invested yourself, you can't help but experience what they experience. You laugh with them and you suffer with them. What they feel, you feel with them. The usual word for this stuff is 'compassion' – which literally means 'to suffer with'.

It's brilliant, isn't it, that we have the capacity to do this – to go through what someone else is going through with them. Even if you can only watch from the sidelines. Like seeing the care poured out on a dying friend by family and those around her who can't save her for her children, but can love her through the ending.

This is also how I think prayer works, believe it or not. It isn't about getting things or twisting God's arm; no, it's about being drawn in to the experience of those for whom we pray so that we see through their eyes and hear through their ears. Which is why prayer seems to be mostly about changing the person who does the praying.

Anyway, compassion amounts to more than the the cost-free “I really feel for you…” Real compassion draws you in and you get wounded.

Well, cheer up! Saturday's coming and we'll all be suffering together: all the nul points at the Eurovision Song Contest, watching Man United swagger, and – for those wonderful fans of Bradford City – agonising for promotion at Wembley.

Feel for me, please.

 

Posted with Blogsy

 

Beauty and beasts

Yesterday saw the return to planet earth of the Canadian commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield. During his time orbiting our little planet he has sent some extraordinary photographs of space, the ISS itself and the planet. I came across him on twitter and was hooked.

Looking down from a great height grants a new perspective to the viewer. Tied up in the detail of living in a big and complex city, it is easy to lose sight of the 'big picture' and the meaning of it all. I was only 10 when Apollo 8 took the first human beings out of earth's orbit and sped them around the moon and back. They became the first human beings ever to see the earth in its entirety from space – and their photographs became the most beautiful and iconic images ever seen. Looking back at the earth changed for ever the way we saw our life on and exploitation of the earth.

Chris Hadfield did something similar in that he gave access to the mystery of meaning by capturing views from a great height in such a way as to put the preoccupations of daily living into a larger context. He posted hundreds of mesmerising images on twitter and then did a David Bowie cover video before returning back to Kazakhstan in the Soyuz capsule. If he ever gives up being an astronaut, he clearly has a fantastic career ahead of him in media and communication.

There's nothing original in all of this. It just brings to my mind the words of the Psalmist who, looking at the starry sky at night, asked: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, who are we that you are mindful of us, human beings that you care for us?” (Psalm 8) Confronted by the mystery of the enormity and beauty of the cosmos, why do we think we even matter?

Well, there is a time and place for such contemplation and the writing of such poetry. But, look down again and we are caught up in the mystery of human fallibility and the limitless capacity of human beings to do appalling things to one another and to the planet. It is sometimes hard to hold onto the beauty in the face of the horror. Events in Syria easily blend into 'big stuff' that we cannot comprehend and so push to the back of our consciousness; feeling helpless, we filter it out – even reports of a rebel eating the heart of a government soldier.

Yet, here is the rub. That heart belonged to a person who is a brother, a son, a husband, a neighbour. The death and post-mortem abuse of this person changes for ever the lives of individuals and communities. Even in the context of the enormous cosmos, we still think that what happens to a unique person matters. Why?

This has been brought home to us in England most acutely by the stories of intentional, cruel, exploitative grooming of young girls by gangs of men. The trials in Oxford that concluded yesterday beg huge questions about a society that claims to be civilised whilst allowing such behaviour to continue for so long. And every individual girl or boy involved matters infinitely. It is hard – though vital – to hold onto the beauty and meaning of the universe and human life whilst staring human cruelty and exploitation in the eyes.

The best commentary I have read thus far is by the BBC's excellent Mark Easton. He puts his finger on the sensitive question of whether we just find it too hard to address some questions when 'community cohesion' or 'race' are involved. He is dead right. And just as racism is an evil to be exposed and rooted out, so is a refusal to name things for what they are. The element the media and politicians (in particular) need to pay attention to in these matters is language and category: the fact that someone is a Muslim does not mean that Islam is what drives him to abuse young girls or boys; the fact that someone is nominally (or tribally) Christian does not mean that it is Christianity that makes them behave atrociously. As I noted in an earlier post, ethnicity and religion should not be confused: they are not synonymous.

What lies under all this is an uncomfortable anthropological reality: the human propensity to commodify anything we can lay our hands on. We turn people into objects for exploitation, sale or entertainment (look at the tabloid media, for example); we turn the earth into a Swiss cheese, forgetting that the one thing not being made any more is land and what lies underneath it. Child sexual exploitation powerfully dehumanises both victims and perpetrators; the victims need to be defended and liberated, the perpetrators need to be held accountable and be reminded that moral accountability – integral to human being – demands justice. People are not commodities.

The great Bruce Cockburn puzzles over this stuff – the contrast and tension between the beauty of the cosmos and human being on the one hand and the inhumane bestiality of some human behaviour – when he writes:

Amid the rumours and the expectations and all the stories dreamt and lived

Amid the clangour and the dislocation and things to fear and to forgive

Don't forget about delight…

 

Posted with Blogsy

 

Horror and hurt

I had intended to write something considered prior to yesterday's so-called 'equal marriage' debate in Parliament. However, other matters, travel and squeezed time militated against it. Now it is done (but is only the beginning of the parliamentary route) I find myself bothered by phenomena rather than content… if you see what I mean. I am waiting to go into a radio studio, so this will be brief.

1. Yesterday's debate was remarkable for the category errors flying around. Apart from the fact that the legislation was being pushed through without having appeared in any manifesto was interesting enough, but the confusion of 'equality' with 'equity' seemed insurmountable. Words such as 'equal', 'inclusive' and even 'marriage' carry the heavy weight of assumptions that seem to go unchecked.

2. It is not good to make law and change institutions on the basis of highly emotive language and criteria. Serious deep thinking should underpin such change – regardless of the view you take on the outcome. If yesterday's debate was evidence of an education system that teaches people how to think, then we clearly have more problems than we thought.

3. Language has entered Humpty Dumpty land. Listening to some people – in Parliament and in the e-world – it would appear that the word 'inclusive' now includes only those people/views deemed acceptable for inclusion. Anyone who levels any argument against what is proposed is a 'bigot'. Opposition to gay 'marriage' is equated with 'homophobia'. 'Conveniently ignoring gay people' is the criticism of any inconvenient argument. This has loud echoes of any rational criticism of the Israeli government being reduced to 'anti-Semitism'. Equally, language that attacks those in favour of yesterday's motion on the basis of their sanity or moral integrity says more about the speaker than the object of their venom.

4. We seem to have entered a sort of la-la-land in this and other public debates where 'being hurt' is the worst thing that can happen to us. Like with women bishops in the Church of England, too much of the debate (and response) is weighted emotionally to what will cause to whom the greatest or least 'hurt'. As if hurt can be avoided. In the grown-up world that isn't la-la-land we know that any decision 'hurts' those who disagree with it. The fact that people won't like a decision is almost irrelevant to the argument for deciding in a particular way. Someone always gets 'hurt'. But, going back to the Church of England's debates, a 'yes' can't be a 'no' – you can't both have women bishops and not have women bishops. But, being swayed by the hierarchies of victimhood, we end up trying to have 'yes/no' and think we are being 'pastoral' or just nice to each other. Of course, what the lack of clarity does is make the 'hurt' worse and the muddle more destructive.

5. A question. Why don't we invite MPs to publish the correspondence that has so offended them – from proponents and opponents of yesterday's legislation? It is absurd that some MPs decided to vote for/against legislation because they were so offended by the nature, content and tone of correspondence received from opponents/proponents. The fact that some horrible Christians write horrible and unchristian venom to people with whom they disagree shouldn't surprise anyone. You should see what bishops get sent to them and the language in which it is framed. (I once got an email that described different ways I could take my life – which I should do because I am a disgrace to humanity and the church. It was signed: “Yours in Christ”…) Get over it! Clearly, people behave badly from every side and being accused of homophobia, hatred and inhumanity doesn't go down well even when you know rationally that it is nonsense.

The debate will continue. I think – which I am allowed to do – that yesterday's vote was a massive mistake – for reasons to do with marriage and not with sexual identity or partnerships. Unlike some others, I find myself surprised to find in Roger Scruton and Philip Blond's Respublica paper a case that I have yet to see dismissed. I think the cultural and societal impact of this move will only be calculated once the cultural loss has accumulated.

Now for the deluge of vitriol.

 

Posted with Blogsy

 

Space and time

No, this isn’t another forum for the ubiquitous Professor Brian Cox.

Just listening to the news this morning and there is a raft of serious ethical issues treated as ‘items of (practical) interest’, but without any time for proper consideration in the constant stream of mediated ‘news’:

• Gazza’s alcoholism – and who, if anyone, is responsible for ‘saving’ him from himself;
• Gay marriage – not only what happens to the institution of marriage (regardless of your stance on gay marriage itself), but also the assumptions behind the ‘equality’ language;
• Nuclear waste – and how we make decisions about the earth and its resources when the consequences of those decisions will be borne by generations to come;
• Banking – and whether splitting retail from investment risk covers all the moral bases and addresses the continuing underlying cultural issues;
• Covert operations – when a society wants to be protected (and is harsh when protection fails), but doesn’t address what might be the limits of covert practice in providing such protection… especially given the reality that people working against states or societies aren’t always very nice and usually don’t play by the usual rules’
• Industrial complexity – like when meat guaranteed to be halal is discovered to have forbidden pork in it… illustrating not just the complexity of industrialised food production, but also the need to respect religious and other human/societal sensibilities.

And don’t get me on to Manchester City and the money around the Premier League.

I guess most of us just lurch from one pragmatic judgement to the next when presented with complex moral issues at every turn. Life is complicated enough. But, it also suggests that we – as a society – need to create more space to slow down, think, reflect on long-term consequences of instant choices. Or, as I put it yesterday, to ‘think deeply’ about why what matters matters.

Maybe, as we approach Lent, there is wisdom in slowing down. Not busy is one way of starting. I need to pay attention to what it is saying, and I commend it.

 

Another German sermon

I don't know why I keep agreeing to do this.

A week tomorrow I will be with the Meissen Commission in Eisenach in Germany. I have agreed to preach at the morning service in the Georgenkirche – where Johann Sebastian Bach was once the Kantor and Martin Luther preached. It is their harvest festival, but also the first in this year's series of sermons on the Reformation Decade themes. That's all OK, but I am doing it in German and I always agonise during preparation over how to say it without sounding hopelessly inarticulate.

Fortunately, we have a young German student staying with us and she has agreed to help me sound less stupid in her native language.

Actually, apart from quoting Bruce Cockburn at the end (I bet you didn't see that one coming…), it isn't hard to bring together harvest, creation, gratitude, ethics, music and metaphor in one narrative. But, it has reminded me (yet again) of the inextricable connection between worship and ethics: don't sing one thing and live another. Try Amos for what happens when we bear God's name and then institutionalise injustice and corruption.

In a week that saw further calls for justice to follow truth (Hillsborough), an appeal by certain football managers to end celebrations of innocent victimhood, further admissions of abuse by churches, police officers murdered in Manchester and violence erupting around the world because of bad film, a reconnection of the songs we sing with the ethics we enshrine seems all the more essential.

 

Posted with Blogsy

 

Assisted dyeing

If you want to turn your white sheet red, make sure you only put red dye in the water.

If you want to ensure that the evidence you collect fits the conclusions with which you started, select for your committee those who begin with the same assumptions and conclusions as yourself.

The Commission on Assisted Dying has done just that. We also knew its conclusions before the publication of its report this morning because it had been widely leaked. But, even if no leaks had dripped out, the conclusions would not have been a surprise.

Two challenges this morning: (a) Look at the constitution of the commission and use your imagination to work out how they came to the conclusions they did, and (b) spot the difference between the campaigning goals of Dignity in Dying and Falconer’s conclusions. This commission is only independent in so far as it was self-selected and self- established. Loads of groups and bodies involved in the debate refused to speak with them.

So, before giving their report too much credence, just imagine the credibility an ‘independent’ group of evangelical Christians would have been given if they had established a ‘commission on abortion’ and concluded they were against it?

Assisted dying is a hugely important (as well as contentious) ethical matter which demands serious debate on philosophical, theological, anthropological and pastoral grounds. But the presentation of this commission and its coverage in a sympathetic media needs a massive dose of caution. On any other subject it wouldn’t have been taken seriously.

Update: link to Church of England response.

Further update: good BMJ post offering wider view.

 

Loving your neighbour

Back to Fulbert Steffensky again.

As indicated in recent posts from the United States, I have been reading a book of biblical reflections by the German theologian Fulbert Steffensky entitled Schöne Aussichten: Einlassungen auf biblische Texte. He brings a fresh perspective to some familiar texts and I haven’t read anything yet that was even slightly tedious. But, thinking about some of the questions raised about our culture, society, young people and values, Steffensky reminded me of a translation matter I had read a long time ago, but seem to have forgotten.

Jesus picked up the injunction in Leviticus 19 that we are to love our neighbour as ourselves. Except that, according to Steffensky and others, he didn’t. What the words actually mean is:

Love your neighbour, he is as you are.

In other words, rather than inviting all sorts of twentyfirst century narcissistic agonising over whether I can love anyone else if I don’t love myself (or am not first fulfilled in myself), the point is that I am to love my neighbour because he/she and I are one. We have a common humanity. We are both made ‘in the image of God’. And that goes for my enemies as well as my friends, the aliens and strangers as well as my family, the weird as well as the wonderful.

At one point Steffensky says:

If I say: ‘They are not like us,’ then we are also saying: ‘We can do to them what should never be done to us.’

He then quotes the Jewish poet Erich Fried, who was once asked in a television programme how he would define a Neo-Nazi. He replied:

A Neo-Nazi is a human being who gets toothache like I do, who suffers for love like I do, and who can weep like I can.

The difference between us does not obviate this common humanity which must lie at the root of any Christian ethic. Steffensky is thinking through the assumptions about human value that underpin an ethic worth building on. To do as the tabloids do and portray appalling criminals as ‘monsters’ – thus making them ‘not like us’ – is to avoid the hard critique of ourselves as well as the societies we create. It is a self-justifying form of distraction therapy.

Steffensky goes on to explore the implications of this, rejecting along the way the suggestion that he is pleading for a ‘contentless tolerance or general relativism’. Rather, he warns those who wish to eliminate ‘difference’ against the temptation to ‘clean up’ the world – in fact, one of the glaringly obvious things Jesus challenged: the dangerous obsession with purity that eliminates the ‘unclean’. German history has relatively recent experience of what this looks like.

It might be useful if an English publisher would produce Steffensky’s book here.

 

Getting the disconnect

I was listening to Bruce Cockburn in the car while on my way to visit one of my clergy this morning. The first track on his last album, Small Source of Comfort, is called ‘The Iris of the World’ and one verse calls into question the ability of certain people to ‘get the disconnect’ between perception and reality.

I had just been musing on two pieces of news: (a) the refusal of some prominent atheists to debate publicly with William Lane Craig – not on personalities or assertions, but arguments and evidence, and (b) the furore over the mere suggestion that people considering abortions should be offered counselling before they go ahead with the termination. It reminded me of the response to the most detailed research into the nature of childhood – the Good Childhood report by the Children’s Society – when many commentators, unable to criticise the research, decided that the conclusions were inconvenient to their chosen values, choices or lifestyle and, therefore, rejected them.

The common denominator here is a prevalence in our society to start with conclusions and then try to find evidence to support them. In the absence of evidence, assertion will suffice. The problem here is that those doing the asserting are also the same people who constantly demand from everybody else ‘rational evidence’ for their position.

Take the first issue first. An fellow Oxford atheist philosopher, Dr Daniel Came, has written to Richard Dawkins accusing him of cowardice for refusing to debate with Professor William Lane Craig. Dawkins is not alone: Polly Toynbee and AC Grayling have also declined to debate and it is hard not to conclude that this unwillingness is born of fear rather than rationality. I am still waiting for a response to David Bentley Hart’s The Atheist Delusions and the substantive philosophical and historical refutation of the lazy and unargued-for assertions of the so-called New Atheists he offers. Is it fear that the evidence won’t back up the assertions that puts them off? If not, then what?

David Bentley Hart’s argument – backed up with copious historical analysis and evidence – is essentially that the pre-Christian world actually saw human life as expendable and cheap. What he terms ‘the Christian revolution’ brought about a ‘universal’ valuing of human life, of mercy and justice that did not hold sway beforehand. He then questions whether, in the post-Christendom world, the assumption of universal human niceness can honestly be held if the Christian worldview and associated praxis are removed. In other words, who says that the ‘neutral’ or natural default of human beings is to be nice to each other, to love justice and mercy, to protect the weak and vulnerable, etc? History would seem to demonstrate that such an assumption can not only not be taken for granted, but is actually called into question by the evidence.

Now, this comes to mind because we now live in a culture in which many people think it is OK to have abortion on demand as a sort of right (or routine method of birth control) and for life to be ended where there appears to be any suffering. In other words, we live in a culture which appears to wish to make decisions about the ethics of living and dying in isolation from a common understanding of the worldviews underlying such a position, or the implications of adopting it. Such discussion needs to go deeper and longer than a simple case-by-case judgement on the sentiments and sensibilities of personal circumstances as we go along.

I am not and have never been opposed to abortion per se. But, when you step back a bit and ask what our culture is shaping and on what philosophical basis the moves are being made, there must be cause for genuine concern. Abortion is not trivial; it is not like taking an aspirin for a headache.

That’s why I am wondering: why the outcry about the suggestion that people be asked to think before opting for an abortion? What’s the problem? Yes, there is a massive pastoral issue in supporting people – whatever decision they ultimately make. Yes, there are circumstances where such decisions are enormously complicated. Yes, the ethical responsibilities are not always clear. But, so are the deeper cultural questions that relate to what sort of a culture we are both losing and creating. Even if we don’t agree with the rationale behind the current proposals, that doesn’t let us off the hook of asking the question.

There is a question here for anyone interested in how cultures are shaped and what makes civilisations come and go. I am compelled to agree with David Bentley Hart – with his excoriating judgement on the post-Enlightenment twentieth century state’s proclivity for enormous and technologically organised violence – that we are in danger of glancing along the surface of time, making ad hoc decisions about life and death, but in the absence of any ‘deep’ analysis or rational thought about essential values. It cannot be taken for granted that, left alone and de-religionised (or de-christianised), human beings will ‘naturally’ tend towards goodness, kindness and mercy. Christianity was, in one sense, a response to the evidenced absence of such a corporate nature.

So, what is the philosophical case for assuming that we can do what we want to do simply because we can? And who is to decide what is, or is not, acceptable? And to whom?

 

More hand-wringing

Having been out of blogging action for a little while (leaving, moving, settling, starting, lacking wi-fi, mind on other things, etc.), it’s one word that has got me going again. In my last post following the killing of Osama Bin Laden, I stated that ‘vengeance is not necessarily the same as justice’.

Apparently, this sort of thinking is just ‘hand-wringing’. The Archbishop of Canterbury questions on moral grounds the killing of Bin Laden – not a man who often resorts to unthinking utterance – and this is reduced to ‘hand-wringing’.

OK, let’s get one thing out of the way first: can the journalists who use this lazy cliche find something more interesting and less patronising?

The real point, however, is that ridicule is simply a way of avoiding difficult moral argument. Simply deride those who have the guts to face the questions the rest of us don’t want to wrestle with.

For example, my own involvement in Zimbabwe led me to believe that unless and until the rule of law is established there, little else can happen to sort the place out. What should Robert Mugabe learn from the killing of Bin Laden? Either the rule of law is fundamental or it isn’t.

The decision to kill Bin Laden is understandable at a number of levels, not least that of political pragmatism. The implications of putting an iconic figure like Bin Laden on trial in an international court raises more than a few questions and fears. But, to ask uncomfortable questions about the morality, the philosophical undergirding, the ethical rationale and the capacity for consistent application of the decision to ‘take him out’ (which, for once, seems an appropriate term) is not ‘hand-wringing’; rather, it is the essential thinking that someone needs to be doing when political pragmatism goes in directions we might find less ‘appropriate’ to our interests.

The irony, of course, is that the more the term ‘hand-wringing’ is used as lazy, dismissive, patronising journalese, the more it suggests that there is, in fact, a case for deeper – and more disturbing – questioning.

Hands up for the hand-wringers.

 

And then?

Preparing to move from Croydon to Bradford at the end of April, I am conscious of the discontinuities that make life interesting. In Rumsfeldian terms, I am moving from a particular set of knowns and unknowns to a different set of known unknowns and straightforward unknowns.

What interests me about this is something that underlies much of the language we use to explain the news. There seems to be an underlying assumption (or desperate hope?) that there is a pattern to be followed, an outcome to be assumed and a ‘plan’ to be conformed to. Somewhere. Somehow.

Human beings seem to be wired for pattern. Maybe part of the notion of the Imago Dei (being made in the image of God) is the instinct to bring order out of chaos – or, at least, to think that order should be brought out of chaos. Whether with telephone numbers (doubles or triples?) or travel directions, we look for pattern and shape and order.

But, the truth of the matter is: despite the best preparation and the fullest briefings, we have no idea what might happen tomorrow. The outcome in Libya will be shaped by decisions and dynamics that can’t be fully predicted because they are made or shaped by people – and people do strange things sometimes. I have little idea of what awaits me in Bradford (other than in structural terms) because it is hard to be categorical where people are concerned – and people change their minds, behave irrationally in certain (unpredictable) circumstances and have an infinite capacity for surprise.

It might be helpful to the rest of us if politicians and journalists (in particular) left a little space for the unpredictability of life and the inconsistency of human agents – especially where the ‘observer’ becomes ‘agent’ and changes the context. Read any political biography and we realise that what was presented as intended outcome was really a jammy confluence of factors that brought a certain ‘orderliness’ to otherwise random events. Utopia is a fantasy – as is the notion that we are masters of our chosen destiny (rather than constantly surprised by events beyond our control).

And the difference between this fantasy and what is known as the Kingdom of God is simply that the latter takes human agency seriously. Wherever order is sought, chaos is not far behind… and chaos can always be wrested from the jaws of order. Equally, however, what looks inevitable can be transformed by the surprise of hope.

In other words, we just have to get on with whatever is presented to us. In my case, I have to work with what I find and (yes, on the basis of previous experience and the wisdom acquired from it) go from where we really are to where we might realistically become… and put up with whatever good or bad stuff shapes the journey. That’s what makes it all so interesting.

This reminds me of the great Bruce Cockburn song Pacing the Cage in which he says:

Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend.
Sometimes the road leads through dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend.

Spot on, Bruce. And that reminds me of the Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister who, after being given a hard time by a group of us in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem some years ago, banged the table and said:

Sometimes it seems there is no light at the end of the tunnel. But it is not because the light is not there; it is because the tunnel is not straight.