A kind of madness

What do you do when you find out the great Suggs is going to be in the studio when you go in to do Pause for Thought on the the great Chris Evans Show on the great BBC Radio 2? And how do you do justice to the great Bradford City cup final at Wembley (on Sunday) at the same time as recognising the shocking child poverty realities I referred to yesterday… when Liverpool have just gone out of the Europa League on an away goal… and Suggs is in the studio?

No idea. So, here’s what I said this morning – including sixteen Madness song titles:

It’s a bit of a strange experience living in Bradford at the moment. Believe me, it was a grey day when I left yesterday, but whatever the weather this weekend, nothing will dampen the spirits as Bradford City go to Wembley for their first ever cup final. If Liverpool could bang in five against Swansea last week, anything is possible. What an embarrassment!

Isn’t it great when the underdog threatens the top dog? No shadow of fear – just the sheer madness of enjoying what most people thought was one step beyond possibility. You can take it or leave it, but in the middle of the night, when Bradfordians wake up in a cold sweat thinking of the glory ahead, nothing will take away the joy of celebration.

Now, there’s lots of serious stuff going on in the world – I know that. Oscar Pistarius. Syria tearing itself apart. In this country we are still finding it hard to wake up to the appalling statistics of child poverty – forgetting that poverty doesn’t just make life a little bit miserable for a child now; it affects the whole of their life, their physical growth, their education, aspiration and life opportunities. It is bad for children, families, schools and society.

But this runs alongside the excitement of good stuff that goes on. Life is always a mixture of the grim and the great. Our house might be a place of weeping, while next door is a house of fun. As the Old Testament Ecclesiastes put it, “there is a time for everything.” Honest, if not always comfortable.

It’s a crying shame, but I will miss the final at Wembley cos I’ll be driving in my car to Cambridge. But my heart will lift on Saturday night, Sunday morning in anticipation of the joy to come. Wonderful? Absolutely! Or, as the song puts it: “Oui oui si si ja ja da da.”

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Where the Niles converge

This is the basic text of this morning's Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2's Chris Evans Show. Search blog for 'Sudan' to read posts.

I guess most of us have at some time in our life entertained some romantic ideas about exotic places we dream of visiting one day. I remember reading Antony and Cleopatra – Shakespeare, not the Carry On version – when I was at school in Liverpool and imagining the River Nile. Plagued with queen-biting asps, obviously.

Well, a few weeks ago I actually went to the Nile. In fact, I went to both Niles: the Blue and the White. We were visiting Bradford's link diocese in Sudan and every day drove over the bridge in Khartoum where the two rivers converge before heading north to Egypt and so on. I'm not colour-blind, but I tell you: both the Blue and the White Niles look brown to me.

Life is tough for many of the people we were visiting there in Sudan. Outsiders and foreigners are being told to leave, and southerners are being sent… er… south. Now, the reasons for all this are complicated and the politics somewhat controversial; but, what we saw was the human cost of other people's privilege. Put simply, when life gets tough between different peoples, the easiest thing to do is separate… grow apart deliberately.

But, the solving of one problem doesn't bring peace – it simply creates more problems and causes lots of misery for the ordinary people who have to pay the price of powerful people's greed and vanity. But, we in Bradford are bound up with our friends in Sudan and, whatever happens, we will stick by them.

An hour after we left our guesthouse for the airport at one in the morning, the house was raided, guests taken in for questioning, and the place confiscated by the security services. It might be a world away from Bradford and the Yorkshire Dales, but, like the Blue and the White Niles, we have converged and cannot be separated as we travel into the future together.

Disappointingly, I saw no queen-biting asps.

 

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The end of the world

Here is my script from this morning’s Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. I met Michael Buble in the studio – which was nice – and then did my stuff as follows. But, I had to drop the second line of the song quote, so will add it at the end!

I’ve been on the road recently and you know what it’s like when you spend hours on trains – you can only read so much and then your mind begins to wander. Randomly sometimes. Well, I was coming back from Germany last Sunday and was reading a pile of stuff, all of which sort of suggested that the world was about to end. And then, somewhere in the murky depths of my memory, the line of a song poked up:

The world won’t end in darkness, it’ll end in family fun…*

It was the Beautiful South some years ago in a snarly little song called ‘One God’. But, you can understand the sentiment – the world’s turned plastic!

At some point every generation thinks it might be the last. Relatively minor issues take on ultimate importance and we can’t conceive of life continuing differently. Well, maybe it’s time for a bit of perspective. For example, when I was younger, and getting very excited about some issues, I learned to ask myself this question: in the context of the entire history of the entire universe, does this matter? Clearly, not everything did. When I was a vicar in Leicestershire I used to baptise in a Norman font – which had been used for a thousand years – and we would drink Communion wine from a chalice that had been used for nearly 500 years. Through wars and Reformation and disasters and all the stuff of the world and so on.

And guess what? Life carried on.

I am in London because the General Synod votes today on whether or not to allow women to be bishops. Some are saying that it will be a disaster if we do… and a disaster if we don’t. But, whichever way it goes, it won’t be the end of the world – whatever people say as they raise the emotional stakes. Wednesday will surely come; the sun will rise; we will still be here; life will carry on; and, hopefully, one day, the Beautiful South will cheer up and re-form to prove it.

[*"The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun / with Coca Cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun."]

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Imagination (again)

I did Pause for Thought on BBC's Radio 2 Chris Evans Show this morning.

I wanted to think about the importance of imagination – for good or ill. Having been in Eisenach, I wanted to contrast the imagination of Johann Sebastian Bach and Martin Luther with the horrors of Hitler's boys – birthed in the same place. But, the tone wasn't right for the particular medium of the Breakfast Show. S, I re-wrote it on the train to London yesterday evening. And this is how it ended up this morning:

Don't ask me why – cos I can't stand the thing – but I can't get John Lennon's Imagine out of my head. I have to forgive him a bit, though, because when Liverpool were rubbish at the beginning of last season, the line “Above us only sky” etched into his statue at John Lennon Airport was added to with the words “and below us only Wolves and West Ham”.

But, the reason I can't get the song out of my head has to do not with Lennon or his fantasies, but rather with the importance of imagination in shaping our lives and our society. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I've just got back from Germany where I was preaching in the church in Eisenach where Johann Sebastian Bach was baptised and where Martin Luther preached.

Now we're talking! Johann Sebastian was one of many Bachs, but his vision of God, the world and what human life is all about fired his creative imagination to write some of the most sublime music in history – he saw behind the mundane and the music soared.

Luther, too, rebelled against powers and authorities that turned people's eyes down into the muck of human failure instead of up into the sheer generous freedom of forgiveness and a new start. What's more, he did a bit of a Bach and wrote loads of songs to celebrate it all.

Of course, the place of Bach and Luther was later the place where unspeakable things took place – as happens when our imagination goes bad. Yet, with Bach and Luther, the Old Testament prophets provoke our imagination to see beyond the present reality and be held by a vision of a better, more just and merciful future. Jesus does the same by teasing our curiosity with images of a different way of being and loving and living.

I want to keep my imagination fired up. Like Bach and Luther. And even John Lennon.

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One of those (media) days

A recording for a BBC Radio 2 documentary at 8am this morning in London. Then the Chris Evans Show Pause for Thought on 'imagination'. Then a keynote conference address on communications challenges facing the church (mostly posed by the digital age and social media). Then a panel discussion at the Cheltenham Literature Festival on religion and the media. A bit of a busy one.

My points at the communications conference were basically:

• Churches need to (a) develop competence in understanding the particular media and the languages hat need to be spoken in order for different audiences to hear.
• Churches need to move from a reactive to a proactive mind-set – shaping the agenda/discourse, not always responding to it.
• Contemporary media demand (a) interactivity and (b) interconnectivity.

There is no longer any one-way traffic in terms of putting a message out there. We need to see what we put out as the first and not the last word. This demands the humility of learning and the confidence to drop defensiveness. Yes, we need to increase media and communications literacy – particularly with bishops and diocesan gate-keepers. 'Communications' is no longer what we do once we have done the business; communication is integral to our business. Therefore, communications professionals need to be at the heart of diocesan structures, around the table for any diocesan discussions, and looking at all aspects of diocesan life through a communications lens.

The challenge is to listen, learn, flex and be unafraid of risk or failure.

This evening's discussion at the Cheltenham Literature Festival was mediated by Michael Wakelin, former Head of Religion and Ethics at the BBC. The panelists were me, Lucy Winkett, Abdul-Rehman Malik and Sarah Joseph. We covered a number of elements of religion and media and I tried to be more positive about (particularly) social media. We covered matters of religious literacy on the part of media professionals, but also the need for religious practitioners to master the media they wish to work in. Incompetence is not over-ruled by some idea of the vitality of any 'message'.

One woman had a bit of a rant after the event. I couldn't quite work out why such rudeness was supposed to commend her atheism to me. Funnily enough, I agreed with some of her complaints about the church, but couldn't see why she was telling me all this in such an aggressive way.

Oh well…

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Lost in technology

I came down to London last night for an early start today. While all the Jimmy Savile stuff gets worse and the political rhetoric about our economic 'challenges' seems divorced from the reality those of us on the ground see every day, I am feeling like a fish out of water at a conference on diocesan communications.

I recorded an interview for a BBC documentary at 8am, then met a friend for a drink before going upstairs to do Pause for Thought on the excellent Chris Evans Show. Then I hot-footed it (or, more accurately, hot-tubed it) over to the Royal Geographical Society for the webby techie comms gig. The opening session introduced us to how the excellent MyDiocese software stuff has been updated and improved. It all looks wonderful.

The problem is I wouldn't know where to start. I use social media and know what I am doing with what I use, but get into technical detail and my brain turns to mush. I am glad someone knows how to work all this stuff.

Division of labour. Let the comms guys do their stuff and I'll just keep banging out the content I can manage.

I did the keynote address (on the communications challenges facing dioceses), focusing on interactivity, interconnectivity and the need to put communications at the heart of any diocese: risking risk, proactively setting the agenda and going beyond simply 'getting our message across'. took me forty minutes to say all that…

Now I'm off to take part in a session on religious broadcasting at the Cheltenham Literature Festival this evening.

All good fun.

 

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A hearing problem

I was doing Pause for Thought on the BBC Radio 2 Chris Evans Show this morning. It’s not always easy to know what to say about what, especially when you have to write he script a day or two ahead of the game. ‘Events’ might intrude in the interim…

Anyway, this morning it was a casual conversation that got me going:

A couple of days ago I had one of those conversations that leaves you confused – not about the content, but how the conversation itself ever happened in the first place.

I was having a chat with a woman in a shop and I remarked that I hoped we’d sort the Swedes out on Friday. She said the best way to deal with swedes is to chop them up, boil them, then roast them in the oven. At least, that’s what I think she said. The problem was, I was talking about Euro 2012 and England’s chances on Friday while she was thinking ‘vegetables’.

This reminded me of when I was a kid in Liverpool. Two neighbours were having a chat one day about the ants. It was only when Mrs Green went into detail about how, when even Nippon failed, she resorted to pouring boiling water down their hole, that Mrs Howard twigged that she wasn’t referring to the two elderly spinster ladies she had been talking about. In Liverpool we didn’t distinguish between ‘ant’ and ‘aunt’.

I remember this every time I find myself not listening to what someone is actually saying and jump to conclusions about what I think they are saying. And this happens a lot – not just to me, but to all of us. What we hear is not always what is really being said.

Remember the disciples mishearing Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian? “Blessed are the cheese makers? Of course, he means producers of all dairy products…”

We do this with Jesus all the time – making him say what we want to hear him say, rather than what he actually said. We duck the hard stuff. We can confidently propagate the stuff about ‘loving your neighbour’ – even if we find it easier to say than to do – whilst quietly ignoring the embarrassing stuff like ‘deny yourself, pick up that cross and come with me’.

What we hear isn’t always what is being said. So, when I say I hope the Swedes get battered on Friday, you know what I mean.

 

 

I can’t stop loving you

I’ve just been doing Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2′s Chris Evans Show. I had a tip-off that Engelbert Humperdinck would be the special guest on the show. Bereft of any other inspiration, I recalled some of his song titles and ended up with this (with six titles embedded):

Did you know that 200 years ago today Spencer Perceval was assassinated by John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons? How could you possibly have forgotten that? He was the Prime Minister! He must be turning in his grave, wondering ‘am I that easy to forget?’

Amazing, isn’t it? Tell them in the pub that Spencer Perceval is dead and they’ll wonder what all the fuss is about.

You know, I think one of the things we fear most is being forgotten. It really matters to us that our place in the world is marked – or, at least, noticed. So, we fear being forgotten, lost to the memory of those whom we love and who we hope love us.

And maybe that’s the key. However anonymous we might be to the vast majority of humanity, it matters that someone loves us and will remember us when we slip from sight or shuffle off our mortal coil. ‘A man without love’ is a terrible fate – even if it is a great Engelbert song.

We all need love, don’t we, but it comes with an inescapable logic: if you’ve received love, then give love. You can’t say you love God while not giving flesh-and-blood expression to that love by loving your neighbour. That’s the deal. And Jesus unashamedly commended the freedom and relief that comes from letting go of our selfish narcissism and finding that, as someone sang recently, ‘Love will set you free…’

So, this morning my plea is dead simple: please release me from the fears and doubts that crave love and affection, and set us free to open up to the loving of those who love us simply for who we are. It’s a great starting point. And when it comes to the last waltz in this world, at least we will know that we will never be forgotten.

Or, if all else fails, we can always hear the last words of God: I can’t stop loving you…

 

 

Talking the blues

Given the awful news in the last week of deaths in Afghanistan (6 British soldiers and then 16 Afghan civilians), I wasn’t sure what to write for Pause for Thought on this morning’s Chris Evans Show on BBC Radio 2. How do we address something like this in a couple of minutes in the context of a lively, fun show?

 

I immediately thought of the blues – I was downloading an Eric Clapton CD to my iPad at the time. Whihc is why I began my script as follows:

 

You know what it’s like when you listen to an album time and time again, but you never really take any notice of the song titles – and then you have a look at the back of the CD box… and you wonder what you’ve been listening to? Well, I was getting an Eric Clapton album onto my computer (Me and Mr Johnson, if you must know) and, apart from the epic They’re Red Hot (er… let’s not go there), the one that caught my eye was the intriguing Milkcow’s Calf Blues. I still don’t know if this refers to the baby cow born to the milkcow, or the lower rear leg muscle of the cow itself…

The blues often have odd titles. When I was a teenager I played trumpet in a jazz group and one of my favourite tunes was St James Infirmary Blues – a Louis Armstrong classic. I have no idea which St James Infirmary it referred to, but I guess it wasn’t the one in Leeds.

The thing about the blues is that they always dig deep into human experience and the everyday stuff of our lives. Like the Psalms of the Old Testament, they lend a vocabulary to the profoundest – and often most painful experiences of loss and love and longing. They give a voice to those bits of life we find it hardest to express – especially if such expression makes us sound weak or miserable or, worst of all, a failure.

 

I have written about the blues elsewhere. The power of the blues is in the raw honesty, the lack of fear of exposure or ridicule. They often strip away the veneers of human self-sufficiency. They go deep. Try listening to Clapton’s River of Tears (on Pilgrim) and you hear the music weeping.

 

Anyway, how should we apply this briefly to events of the last week – especially as the news came in this morning of an appalling tragedy in Switzerland in which 28 Belgian people were killed in a coach crash, 22 of them children?

 

In a week in which six soldiers were killed in Afghanistan – five of them from West Yorkshire – and a rogue American soldier systematically killed 16 innocent people in Kandahar, and the dreadful news from Switzerland this morning, perhaps we need the blues to give us a voice. Otherwise, how do we say something useful about such horrors and the agony of sudden loss?

There is a time for simply voicing the pain – not trying to make some sense out of it. The psalmists cry out at the injustice of this world – the same now as it was three thousand years ago – and tell us that God invites us to be honest, not correct.

 

It doesn’t exactly nail theodicy. But it is a rather feeble example of how to try to say something useful when rationalising is inappropriate, but something needs to be said that shines some light on our reaction to events that tear at our heart. The context shapes the content.

 

Stories

I have just done this morning’s Pause for Thought on the BBC Radio 2 Chris Evans Show. I probably should have done something on ‘leap year’, but I did it on ‘stories’ instead.

Having been reading the Bible for a very long time now, I often wondered why Jesus chose to talk in images and with stories, rather than making points and telling people to agree with them. I used to think it was just a local cultural preference of his time, but I there’s actually something deeper going on – something that nagged away at me during the last week as we heard about Nelson Mandela and Marie Colvin.

Mandela went into hospital and the world waited to see what would happen. Clearly, there’s nothing unusual about an old man whose health is failing. But this isn’t just any old man. This one has become a global icon of selfless reconciliation – a man who suffered for three decades, but emerged as one of the strongest men in the world, enabling South Africa and other countries to look for radically new ways of behaving. Behind the name of the man is a story that moves us deeply in our hearts and our imaginations.

Then the Sunday Times journalist Marie Colvin was killed in Syria whilst trying to tell a story – not of dry political arguments or power struggles, but illustrating these with stories of real women and children, real people being brutalised, defenceless people in an ordinary place being subjected to the merciless power of heavy weaponry… and those who control it.

As I have observed elsewhere, she is a fantastic example of good journalism. Marie Colvin put herself in danger in order that the wider world might see and hear how the decisions of others – the powermongers of this world – impact the lives of people like us. And it is that power of storytelling that gets into our heads and scratches away at our imagination.

Which is why, I think, Jesus taught with stories and parables and pictures. Words and statements just go in and get accepted or rejected. Stories scratch away and tease us until we grapple with what they are all about.

He once told a story about a man wanting to build a tower and asked if he would begin without first counting the cost. Mandela and Colvin certainly counted the cost of their commitment. And their stories just won’t let us go.

So, nothing too deep there. Something that will no doubt be appreciated by the Sunday Times which, pleasingly but surprisingly, highlighted my Lent address on BBC Radio 4 tonight as their ‘Pick of the Day’ for today. The caption praised me with faint damnation – something about the Lent talk showing more theological depth than is evident in my ‘inveterate blogging’. Interesting, then, that nothing in the Lent address has not appeared at some point in blog posts here. Maybe I should start using longer words…