The ultimate ‘now’

I was around in Southwark for the 40th anniversary memories of the publication of John Robinson's Honest to God. This year is the 50th anniversary. In this week's Church Times the excellent Mark Vernon runs though the issues again before Richard Harries puts it all in to a personal context.

Honest to God caused a huge debate. Robinson called for a re-think of theology and the purpose of the church. En route he drew on Bonhoeffer's thinking, but didn't quite go where I think Bonhoeffer himself might have been heading. Big headlines didn't help the seriousness of his case, but it did lead to discussions everywhere about God. (In today's world this is the responsibility of the New Atheists who, in trying to diss God and theists end up getting people talking about God and theism – fulfilling the Law of Unintended Consequences, I guess.)

What Richard Harries does is place the phenomenon into the wider cultural and political context of the 1960s, and particularly its idealism. Which, of course, immediately points up the danger of reading history through a contemporary lens. The debates about Margaret Thatcher did the same: it was easy to spot those who hadn't lived through the 1970s and those who had.

The loss of idealism is troubling. Students these days are hardly likely to annoy the hell out of taxpayers by demonstrating; they have to concentrate on minimising and then paying off massive debts before they have even started.

The contrast is acute for me when I go to Kazakhstan and talk with young people who, whilst being realistic about the 'challenges', are immensely proud of their 22 year old country and seriously optimistic about the future. The only way I have been able to think about this is that they are building something and shaping a future – a bit like European countries after 1945. Contrast that with the tired cynicism that characterises Europe and we seem not to be building something, but merely trying half-heatedly on to something we have inherited.

This is also true of European ecumenism. At a round-table discussion with Herman von Rumpoy last year in Brussels, I ventured to suggest that the European narrative derived from two world wars and the shedding of oceans of blood had run its course. Yes, we must learn from our recent history, and, as Bertolt Brecht says in the conclusion of his play The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, recognise that 'the bitch [of fascism] is on heat again. But, I fear that the narrative emerging from mid-20th century Europe does not hold the same power for my children's generation as it does for those of us shaped by the war. We need to create a new narrative that engages the subconscious psyche of a new generation for whom the twentieth century is 'history' and not 'memory'.

OK, it is not exactly a deep observation; but, it is one that haunts me. I think it is a task that is urgent and yet being largely ignored. All efforts go into trying to secure what we have (largely, the institutions that define Europe in terms of administration and process), rather than creating something imaginatively new.

This is on my mind also because I have just finished reading Cees Nooteboom's book Roads to Berlin. It is a strange book. In three parts, the bulk of the text comprises reportage and memoir from immediately before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989/90. It is immediate and has the vivid benefit of recreating the atmosphere in Berlin as the world changed – all seen through the eyes of an outsider (he is Dutch) living through, yet detached from, those epic events. In parts 2 and 3 he reflects back on those events and on Germany and 'Germanness' twenty years later.

It is an uneven book, but better for it. It is unpretentious – although there were many references I didn't get, and this made me feel both uneducated and a bit stupid. But, it is a good read for anyone who wants to think about history, how we live through and reflect on it, how we need to look at ourselves through the eyes of an other if we are to think clearly about who we are and how/why we have become who and what we are.

The trouble with history is that we always think that 'now' is the ultimate – the end – when it is only tomorrow's yesterday and will look different when looked back upon by outsiders.

Oh well. Back to contemplating the future of Luis Suarez…

 

Posted with Blogsy

 

Low expectations

On the long and tedious journey back from Dresden to Bradford I got the train to Berlin Hauptbahnhof and then went over the road for the bus to Tegel airport. The buses run every six minutes. Which is useless efficiency if they are all full, you can’t get on and you have a deadline for catching your flight.

I gave up and went back over to the station to get a taxi. A bloke saw me and suggested we share – halve the cost. He turned out to be from Zürich and the conversation during the taxi ride was the best bit of the entire journey.

At one point he asked me where I had learned to speak such excellent German. Flattering? Not really. My German is not great and I know it. Having been relatively fluent donkey’s years ago doesn’t help much when you are rusty and rarely get to speak for any length of time. It was kind of him, but the real issue is this: he was surprised that, as an Englishman, I could speak any German at all. In other words, he had very low expectations and they were exceeded. In fact, I had only chit-chatted a few banal sentences before he made his comment. I hadn’t exactly recited Goethe like a native.

The journey took around fifteen minutes – in which time we covered Russian culture and politics, Swiss beauty spots, weather systems in Moscow (where I have never been) and frustrations with Berlin buses. The taxi driver just moaned about how the city gets bigger and fuller: too many people, too many cars, too many trains… but, obviously not too much custom.

I have no idea of who my co-passenger was, but he obviously wasn’t put off by the purple shirt and clerical collar. He made a long and tiring journey at least interesting. And I am recording it here so that I don’t forget it.

 

How long is now?

If that sounds like an odd question, that’s because it is. Or it isn’t.

Looking out of the hotel window in Berlin back in August I caught sight of a building with black letters on a white background. Despite the lack of a question mark, the question it posed has bugged me for the last five weeks. Here it is:

This week, ‘now’ is not long enough. Too many demands, too much preparation to do, too many decisions to make and too much to think about. I just wish ‘now’ could be longer.

But, I have also met an elderly couple today who have been giving their savings away in order to help the next generation. No sentimentality here. No easy life that has led to the freedom of costless generosity. This couple have known tragedies and loss, dislocation and regret. Yet, they told me that it is more important to live and give now than to keep saving it all up – for what? For a future that might not be there? For plans that will not be fulfilled? For an old age they are already in?

There is something to be said for living in the ‘now’ and not thinking you can take it all with you when you go. And there is something to be said for giving in the ‘now’ – not for any reward or benefit, but for the mere grace of being generous to those whose ‘now’ is proving tough.

How long is now? Answers on a postcard.

 

…then we take Berlin

Leonard Cohen performed in Berlin last week, the night before we arrived for the weekend. The Berliner Morgenpost on Friday had a rave review of the gig, using language that was both critically appropriate and affectionate. Describing Cohen as “one of the most moving singer-poets of our time”, the reviewer maintains that “seldom today is it possible to experience such an emotional, definitive, truthful concert.” What better conclusion could any artist wish for than this:

We cannot thank the venerable old man enough for subjecting himself to the exertions of such a long world tour. For standing on a ‘live’ stage again and letting us share in his great art.

At the age of 76 Cohen did six encores for his overwhelmed audience. I’ll be happy to still have a pulse at 76.

There is something about this generous appreciation of Cohen that exemplifies the spirit of Berlin. Walking around the Museuminsel or strolling down Unter den Linden towards the Brandenburg Gate, it is easy to forget both the agonies that were born in this city as well as the high culture that characterises German arts and music.

This is a city that bears the scars of the last century’s brutalities, divisions and inhumanities. On Friday and Saturday we visited the Reichstag as guests of the former German Bundesminister, Frau Dr Irmgard Schwaetzer, and saw in the bowels of the restored building not only the thousands of bullet holes that riddle the walls and give some idea of the slaughter that this building witnessed, but also the graffiti written on the walls by the Soviet soldiers who took the Reichstag and ended the war.

Generously accompanied by a retired German Ambassador, Dr Alexander Arnot, we visited some powerfully moving and challenging places:

• Topographie des Terrors (the newly-opened exhibition on the site of the Gestapo HQ and Main Office of the SS – which is overlooked by what was Goering’s Ministry of Aviation and a remnant of the Berlin Wall)
• the Gedenkstätte Deutscher Widerstand (in the Bendlerblock where Stauffenberg had his office to which he returned thinking he had just killed Hitler on 20 July 1944… only himself to be taken out and shot along with other officer colleagues: Hitler had – incredibly – survived the bomb)
• Gedenkstätte Plötzensee (where several thousand people were executed by the Nazis).

One of the powerful reasons for visiting these places is that they resonate not only with horror and terror, but also with heroism and sacrifice. They remind us that Nazi terror was not only directed at the Jews, homosexuals, Communists, mentally ill or handicapped people, but at Germans at every level of society. People were executed even for thinking the ‘wrong’ things – see, for example, Helmuth James Graf von Moltke.

I have no idea how I would respond to the threat of a regime such as the Nazi dictatorship. None of us does. It is shameful when people who live in relative security pass judgement on those who compromise or give in to intimidation and violence – especially with the marvellous benefit of hindsight. Talking to Dr Arnot I was reminded of the story I was told years ago about cattle on the prairies of America and how they manage to get hit by trains when there is only one train track for hundreds of miles. They don’t set out to get killed by a train. Nor do they have a strategy for roaming over the plains. They just put their head down and nibble a bit of grass. Then they nibble the next bit and then the next bit after that. They just keep nibbling and sometimes find themselves where they shouldn’t be – in front of a speeding train. They just nibble their way to destruction.

Evil takes hold because people compromise a little, then a little more. Then it is too late. But, frankly, if I was asked to sign a piece of paper in order to ensure that my children were able to be educated and not be excluded (as happened in the GDR), I would probably have signed. None of us knows until we are there.

Two other striking elements to the day’s visits and conversations:

1. Language is key to all this. The concentration camps were built on the need to take certain people into ‘protective custody’. Corrupt language and you corrupt the soul, opening us up to all sorts of miseries. (One of the points made by Rowan Williams in his book on Dostoyevsky.)

2. The Bible can be used to justify all sorts of appalling things. The Nazis quoted Paul: “Those who do not work shall not eat.” We know how that was used to justify systematic barbarism.

I was in Berlin this last weekend to preach at the Dom (Cathedral). The extremely generous Domkirchenrat and their wonderful pastor, Dr Petra Zimmermann, were wonderful hosts. Yet, standing in the Dom I couldn’t help but notice the gold lettering in the ceiling which quoted from the Lord’s Prayer: “Dein ist das Reich” – “Yours is the Kingdom” – and wondering how that was read by Christian worshippers while the Nazis were corrupting, terrorising and brutalising their society.

I must go back before long. Berlin is – to my mind – the most fascinating, moving, challenging and demanding city in Europe. So much history is held there for those who wish to see it. Questions pour into the mind – for example, how did a society that experienced the fear generated by the Gestapo and SS so easily accustom itself to the Stasi in the GDR? Berlin is not just a place of horror, however; it is also a place of amazing culture, remarkable reconciliation, astonishing reconstruction, formidable hope and the courage to look not only to its past glories and crimes, but also to shape a better future. It is inspiring as well as sobering.

 

Ostalgia after 20 years

It has been fascinating listening (in the car on the drive from London to Liverpool) to all the stuff on Germany 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I did a 30 minute slot on a radio station this morning and was interested to listen to the memories of Germans from the east and west of that surprising and momentous day two decades ago.

But, amid all the memories, it has brought to my mind a different event.

Last year I was in Astana, Kazakhstan, for a conference and was seated at dinner one evening with the Chairman of the Senate, Kassym-Jomart Tokayev. Tokayev is a very fluent English speaker and a politician of broad experience. I think there were seven or eight of us around the table and the conversation ranged widely over all sorts of political matters. Being a little opportunistic, I thought I’d grab the chance to ask questions I could never ask anyone else: Tokayev knew Gorbachev and Yeltsin and worked closely with both of them.

I asked him why it was that Gorbachev is seen in the West as a great hero – the one who liberated the East and ended the Cold War – and Yeltsin is seen as an egotistic drunk who was an embarrassment to everyone who saw him. His response surprised me. He said that Gorbachev was a loser (my word) who sanctioned a massacre in Kazakhstan only several years before Glasnost kicked in and then oversaw the collapse of an empire; Yeltsin, on the other hand, was admired for his strength, political ability and his drinking. Apparently, in Russia a man who can hold huge quantities of alcohol is revered rather than resented.

This made me realise again that it is too easy to assume that everybody sees the world through the same lens. The way we judge ‘strength’ in the West might be totally different from how it is viewed in the East. It was fascinating listening to Tokayev telling stories of people who are legendary in my world, but for very different reasons and from very different perspectives.

It is a similar story in Germany today. Ostalgia (as it is being called) refers to the sort of romantic memories of the old German Democratic Republic. The world of the Berlin Wall was easier to understand: east and west, capitalist and communist, etc. But there were things of value in the east: universal health care, full employment (even though much of the work was not great), cheap travel, good education, etc. One German commentator I heard this morning noted that ‘you cannot put a price on freedom’, but that freedom comes at a price: freedom to fail, to be unemployed, to lose, to be poor, and so on.

The events of this night 20 years ago remind me that freedom must never be romanticised – but it must be highly valued. The fall of the Wall brought losses as well as gains. But life is like that. Isn’t it?

 

Then we take Berlin…

… which, of course, is the title of a Leonard Cohen song – best version by Jennifer Warnes.

In England we have this rather sad envy of all things German. In Germany – so the story goes – everything is top quality, everything works as it is supposed to work, the trains run on time and they all speak English anyway.

Well, they do ‘do’ quality – just look at their buildings. Everything works everywhere – and, if it doesn’t, they put it right very quickly. Most speak English – which can be a little frustrating if you want to work on your German. But - and it is with some relief and a certain Schadenfreude that I report this – the trains no longer run on time.

Or, at least, mine didn’t yesterday. The Deutsche Bundesbahn was late!

I took part in the final ‘pilgrimage’ walk with 1000 people through Kassel, concluding with me and Carla Maurer (from Switzerland and on the right of the picture) sending people on their way home with God’s blessing. This final event also involved Bishop Wolfgang Huber and the President of Germany, Horst Koehler and his wife. So, I sat with them on the stage, had a good conversation with them afterwards (in which I suggested he didn’t come to Berlin Cathedral on Sunday morning) and then had coffee with friends before catching the fast train to Berlin.

It took 90 minutes longer than it should have done. By the time we got into Berlin I had missed the lecture I had planned to go to at the Humboldt University by Professor Dr Christoph Schwoebel. That’s ninety minutes late! So, I checked into the hotel, got a meal and had an early night.

This morning I was preaching at the Berliner Dom and I have worried about this for weeks – probably annoying everyone else by moaning about it too openly. In Kassel a good friend of mine, Christoph Roemhild, helped me with the German; so I was able to mount the extraordinarily enormous and intimidating pulpit with more confidence than I deserved. There was a congregation of (so I was told) around 700. I preached on the raising of Lazarus (you can read the basic text on the Berliner Dom website) and when I finished there was spontaneous applause. That has never happened to me before. I think they were so relieved it was over that they couldn’t contain themselves.

The service was wonderful and nearly had me in tears. The choir and orchestra led the setting by Johann Sebastian Bach and the service was led by the Dompredigerin, Frau Petra Zimmermann, and the EKD Bishop for Ecumenical and Foreign Affairs, Martin Schindehuette.

This service was, however, more than an opportunity to hear an Englishman speak German in public – which is usually good for a laugh. It represented yet another opportunity for German and English Christians to worship and serve together. This month represents a number of anniversaries: 70 years after the outbreak of the Second World War; 60 years of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz); 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall; and almost 20 years of the Meissen Agreement (bringing together the German Protestant Church and the Church of England in a common service of the people of Europe).

In my sermon I did draw attention to the fact that much of the reconciliation after the war was only possible because of the readiness of the churches to admit guilt, reach out and provide a rationale and locus for forgiveness, reconciliation and hope. We take it for granted now, but I found myself deeply moved by the unity we demonstrated and genuinely felt as we worshipped together this morning.

While waiting for the bus to the airport (where I am writing this) I looked again at the Berlin television tower – an embarrassment to the East German authorities during the Communist years. Every time the sun shone on it, the reflection took the form of a cross!

Incidentally, the reason I advised the German President to worship elsewhere this morning was because it is Election Day in Germany and he told me he would normally go to church before voting. I thought he might prefer to hear a German sermon rather than an outsider’s ruminations. I hope he had a good morning – he is a very nice man.

 

Why not be a neo-Nazi?

Just walk into any pub and you’ll find people pontificating about everything under the sun with great authority. The same can happen at the General Synod of the Church of England – and I bet it happens in every boardroom, every other church and every other medium. We love to speak about things we don’t actually know about.

The General Synod brings together some fantastic people of vast and impressive experience. But there are times when the theme of a debate blanks some brians and brings to the microphone people who have no idea what they are talking about with such confidence. For example, whenever the General Synod debates something to do with the media, my heart sinks as speaker after speaker makes it evident they read the Daily Mail and have no idea what they are talking about.

Today in Blackburn was different. A German member of the Meissen Commission (which I am currently chairing) spoke with serious passion about his confrontation in East Germany with young neo-Nazis. This guy grew up in the Communist GDR and worked as a Christian pastor in a society that persecuted you for your Christian commitment (or lack of atheism). He now faces a society in which atheism is taken for granted and neo-Nazism is gaining ground eveyr day – even with demands for a return to Germany’s 1937 borders.

His question was put in the context of a discussion about the nature of truth and truth claims. If we have no conviction of the absolute truth claims of Jesus Christ, how (he asked) do we deal with the young person who says he wants to be a neo-Nazi? It is not enough to simply tell him he shouldn’t – without giving a cogent reason why not … one that is rooted in something more reasonable than wishful thinking.

My German friend’s point was that if you accept (uncritically) the common assumption that relativism is normal and any ‘truth’ is OK as long as it is ‘true for you’, you have nothing to say to the young neo-Nazi. He has chosen his path and you have no grounds for denying him whatever will make him feel fulfilled. On the contrary, he said, we have to have a grounded and consistent theology and anthropology for giving a cogent reason for not becoming a neo-Nazi.

In other words, the problem lies not in the neo-Nazism, but in the relativistic thinking that reduces our fundamental philosophical and ethical choices to mere consumer preferences. If you reject the need for a ‘truth claim’ that you believe is more true and more compelling than other truth claims, you have nothing to say and no grounds for saying it.

His point was that a Christian needs to be intellectually as well as culturally and pastorally sharp in addressing the real lives of young people in East Berlin. To neglect the seriousness of the philosophical/theological task is to vacate the space in which nasty cancers like neo-Nazism can fester and grow without coherent challenge. Simply mounting a demonstration to shout that ‘my preference is better than your preference’ is hopelessly inadequate and will achieve the opposite of what you hope to achieve.

A coherent response to the neo-Nazi requires a clear understanding of and commitment to a view of the human person that is rooted in him having been created in the image of God (anthropology); in him being morally responsible in a way that regards some choices as more or less moral than others; in him assuming a view of society that involves mutual responsibilities; and in him committing himself to a way of life that sees power in a wooden cross and not in an Iron Cross.

This is challenging. In a liberal democracy the question might not be too urgent – yet. But in East Berlin this is the real challenge of today among young people who are given pride and certainty in political doctrines rooted in seriously dodgy anthropologies – but able to flourish in a society that has relativised its moral judgements to the level of ‘your choice is equally valid to mine and I can’t stand in judgement on your choices’. That way lies deep trouble – as Berlin discovered once before.

 

Another London

One of the best bits of living in London is the fact that you can never exhaust the place. In fact, you can never really ‘know’ it either. It is just too big and too interesting and too diverse.

We have a lot of people come to stay with us from all over the globe and showing them London usually involves the usual sites: Buckingham Palace, Downing Street, Big Ben, the Tower, St Paul’s Cathedral, etc. But it all becomes familiar – as do the places one usually goes to along the routes one knows to be best or most direct. So, sometimes it is good to get an alternative view and see some of the odd bits through someone else’s eyes – and here is a less-than-ten-minute alternative tour of London:

I particularly liked the model of the city showing all the projected new developments. It reminded me of Hitler and Albert Speer surveying the model of the new Berlin. It also reminded me of the only current equivalent of a national leader planning and building a new city: Astana in Kazakhstan. There is a huge model in Astana (the capital city) and, as evry official is keen to tell you, it was all the idea of the President, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

You can plan where the buildings will go, but you can’t plan or control the life a city creates.

I know this sounds a bit like a bad sermon with a terrible leap of logic, but… it also reminds me of Jesus teaching in stories and images. If you teach using propositions which require assent or dissent, you can control what is being understood (or, at least, you can think so); but if you tell a story or use an image, you tease the imagination of the hearer and risk them distorting it, missing the main point, re-telling it wrongly, etc. Jesus clearly thought you should just get good news out there and not worry too much what people did with it. I agree.