Inclusive conversation (Kirchentag 2)

This is the only relatively free day I have at the Kirchentag in Hamburg. I started work this afternoon with an interview on the 'Red Sofa'. This is a stage in front of the Congresshalle in which people are interviewed, interspersed with music from Chris Paulson and his band (which turns out to be his two sons). I only ever see Chris every two years at the Kirchentag and on the Red Sofa.

Following Margot Käßmann's Bible Study this morning, we stayed put to listen to a discussion including Joachim Gauck, the Bundespräsident. Moderated superbly by a ZDF TV presenter, Gauck engaged with Samuel Koch (a quadraplegic actor who had been an athlete), Rainer Schmidt (a pastor/cabarettist and Paralympic winner) who was born with no forearms, and a business woman called Monika Labruier. The theme had to do with creating a 'strong society' and focused on disability issues. It was intelligent, moving, challenging and very, very funny. Again, the hall was full – 7,000 people – and many were locked out.

The remarkable thing about this conversation was the lack of self-pity on the part of the disabled participants… and their refusal to allow any romantic idealising of them or their attitude to life. And nothing was considered out of bounds.

One interesting question revolved around the identification of victimhood. According to Gauck and his fellow interlocutors, responsibility has to be taken by those whose lives are 'diminished' insofar as they are active players in shaping their life; but, society also has a responsibility to provide for and create optimum space for people to thrive. This involves making space in schools for the development of proper provision for disabled children – and this cannot be done over the heads of disabled people, but in discussion with them. Cost should not be a tool for making life hard for disabled people (but, try saying this to parents of disabled children in England – some of it would sound like a conversation from a different planet).

The discussion concluded with questions of how we cry against God. Gauck made the point that we all cry against God for what 'might have been', but asked how much do we need? Schmidt put it this way: “Ten fingers or just my single thumb? I can do what I need to do.” Schmidt went on to describe how he 'discovered' at the age of six that he was disabled and described an inclusive society as one in which different people are enabled to live together and thrive.

It is impossible to do justice to this. Whatever I write here is open to question and the language to criticism. So be it. Gauck ended by saying that he thanks God that he is here to hear this conversation.

Music at this event was provided by a rock band of mentally-handicapped people.

Schmidt went on to discuss abortion in a way that would not be possible in England without polarising people immediately. Noting that if he had been expected now, he claimed he would almost certainly have been aborted. This then led to debate about abortion and the grounds for it in Germany – including discussion about the reasons why fewer children are being born in Germany today.

What is striking is how the Kirchentag encourages and allows intelligent debate about serious matters without people having to polarise. The ethical divides are not ducked, but nor do they force people behind barricades. It is a model of intelligent and respectful difference.

Anyway, the afternoon for me involved visiting the huge book hall and then heading over for my interview. I caught the last 45 minutes of a podium discussion between Israelis and Palestinians before going to eat with friends and get back to the hotel to bung up this blog.

Now for bed. Tomorrow is busy and looks like hard work.

 

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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…

 

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Everything changes

Easter Day. Resurrection.

A cellar was discovered in Cologne, Germany, in which Jews had been hidden in 1942. Among the various graffiti on the walls was this:

I believe in the sun though it is late in rising.

I believe in love though it is absent.

I believe in God though he is silent.

Resurrection Day tells us that Christian hope is rooted not in acceptance of a formula that guarantees escape from the horrors or routines of the world, but in trusting the person of God who raised Christ from death. In other words, whatever else the world throws at us, I will trust – in living and dying – in the God who raised Christ. The rest is detail.

After all, we have now lived the story from Christmas – God opting into the world and all it represents – to Easter – God appearing to fail, only to confound our expectations and understandings of the world. Resurrection isn’t the end – the nice, neat resolution of all the horrors of suffering, injustice and pain; rather, it reinforces the vocation/compulsion of God’s people to plunge themselves into the realities of the world, willing to suffer, not escaping from it all, but unafraid: because both our living and our dying have been transformed by God who raised Christ.

Happy Easter!

 

Abiding and bread

Among all the work stuff I have to read (like the report issued yesterday – funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation – on the 2012 Bradford West by-election) I have just read Professor Ben Quash's excellent new book Abiding. The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book, it addresses the urgent need of Christian people to commit to place and stay there.

With reference to film, art and literature, Quash writes beautifully about how to live generously and contentedly with life lived in community. Rooted in the Benedictine experience, he draws on Scripture to encourage openness, attentiveness, reflectiveness, looking reality in the eye and living an authentic life. In so doing, he eschews the escapism of fantasy – religious or otherwise – whilst encouraging a habit of 'abiding' in body, mind, relationships, exile, woundedness and peace.

Perhaps it isn't coincidental that today I visited a church in Bradford where a simple community has arisen around the making of bread. Bread Church draws people from the local community into what I want to call an 'abiding presence' – where people bake bread together, share time together, talk together, break loneliness together, eat together, pray together, care for one another. It can only happen where one or two people commit themselves to a particular place – to abiding and not running away. It is impressive and rooted in the soil of Christian love and mercy.

Bread Church embodies what Ben Quash describes.

This is a book for slow reading and one I will be commending strongly – and not only because Ben is soon to be installed as Canon Theologian of Bradford Cathedral.

 

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Traveling lives

Killing four hours in Istanbul Airport isn't easy. The last time I was here, my connection (to Astana, Kazakhstan) had left here before we had even left London Heathrow. While waiting for a substitute flight with Air Astana we were given vouchers for a gourmet meal in Burger King. It wasn't funny.

This time I am doing some reading. Which brings me on to…

… two books I have read recently that have proved worth recommending.

Charlotte Methuen's Luther and Calvin: Religious Revolutionaries is a beautifully written introduction to the life, teaching and impact of two of the great European Reformers. Sometimes, when listening to English evangelicals talking about ' the Reformers' in awed tones, it might seem that these were paragons of orthodoxy, defenders of simple revealed truths about God and us. We quickly reduce them to simplistic-but-useful reinforcers of our own theological preferences. Sometimes it seems we award them the same authority as that claimed by the popes they opposed. Read the reality and a different picture emerges.

Of course, they were creatures of their time and they didn't know the end of their own story. But, their stories make it clear that their theology developed and changed, their theology was often driven by their politics, and their theology might well have developed even further if they had lived on (or in other times and contexts). We dig them into a framework that suits our own preferences and then quote them accordingly. It is always amusing to hear Hooker quoted by all sides in current Anglican debates…

Reality is always more ambiguous and more complex than our debating points would allow.

The full(er) picture is to be found in Diarmaid MacCulloch's magisterial Reformation, but Charlotte Methuen's concise book does the business. It is surely coincidental, but reading the book during the synodical debates on the Anglican Covenant and women bishops caused the ringing in my head of lots of bells.

The second book I finished on the plane from Manchester to Istanbul. I know of Mark Thomas only from the occasional telly programme and his very funny People's Manifesto. Extreme Rambling is a powerful, poignant and perceptive record of his walk along the length of the Barrier erected in Israel-Palestine. He walked it in three stages, meeting people along the way and asking lots of questions. It isn't an encouraging book unless you approve of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and think the illegal settlements are a really good idea. But, it is so well written – a personal narrative that takes you into the heart of some of the fundamental problems of this beautiful and tiny piece of land.

Having read up on the history and politics of Sudan, I am now on to William Boyd's Waiting for Sunrise. Ideal for a plane journey.

[Written Saturday 12 January, posted Monday 14th. Boyd book finished...]

 

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Goodbye to Canterbury

What a way to go out?

Dr Rowan Williams celebrates his first day of freedom from office with a brilliant documentary journey through Canterbury Cathedral: Goodbye to Canterbury. The BBC at its best and Rowan at his best: brilliant, poetic, articulate, fascinating, stimulating, educative, erudite, clear.

I still maintain – as I have consistently – that the 'Rowan is too hard to understand' narrative was mostly an excuse by lazy commentators who couldn't be bothered to work at thinking.

In this programme – written and presented by Rowan himself – he proves himself to be an adept communicator and media operator. How embarrassing for so many to have written him off so easily.

In this wonderful programme we have poetry, art, history, music, aesthetics, theology, philosophy, drama, beauty, honesty, storytelling, ecclesiology, evangelism, rhetoric, social analysis, realism, education, communication, interpretive clarity, personal reflection, politics, economics, explanation, and more besides.

Perhaps Rowan might be persuaded to do more of this now he has left office?

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Wounded healers or unhealed wounders?

One of the remarkable things about the wonderful Olympics 2012 is how the humble champions speak of the journey to the podium. It is easy to hear them speak of “twelve years of training and preparation for this event” without realising that those twelve years were made up of over 4380 days. In some cases every single day involved rigorous dieting and training – come rain, snow or sunshine.

This is not the job of wusses. If many words could be used to describe what is involved in such athletic commitment, one of them might be ‘resilience’. And it is a word deserving of wider reference and application.

In a culture of what I have called elsewhere ‘consumerist narcissism’ (or ‘narcissistic consumerism’?) – in which self-fulfilment justifies any cost – resilience is not needed. And in a Christian church that looks for instant healings and panaceas for every bit of conflict or challenge, resilience is often underplayed. For resilience implies continued struggle, acceptance of adversity, re-direction into altruism.

So, it is timely that Justine Allain-Chapman has just published a book that addresses (far more intelligently than I could) the ‘role of adversity in healing and growth’: Resilient Pastors. In it she shines a helpfully critical light not only on the superficial ‘make it better’ default of many of us, but also on theologies of liberation that focus on the liberation at the expense of the adversity that cries out for it. There are both personal and pastoral implications for individuals and for those who exercise pastoral care unwisely or uncritically.

In a book that is realistic and compassionate, we also find helpful recapitulation. Although I had to fight the temptation to underline every use of the word ‘resilient’ in almost every sentence of the first chapter, the author recapitulates at every stage the argument and rationale thus far. Each chapter ends with a highlighted summary of what has gone before. Bigger brains might find this unnecessary, but I found it helpful.

Clearly, as anybody closely involved with pastors/clergy will recognise, we need resilient pastors in today’s church. Allain-Chapman rightly questions whether the contemporary “emphasis on the wounded healer motif is that it emphasises woundedness rather than healing”. (p.106) Surveying literature on ‘resilience theory’, she shines fresh and challenging light not only on our understanding of pastoral need, but also of pastoral practice. Moving from a look at the desert as a place of tough encounter, she takes a brief illustrative perspective from the Bible… and then from the Desert Fathers:

To go through the desert experience involuntarily can be both overwhelming and crushing. To embrace it can prove both constructive and liberating. (p.54)

Identifying three stages of the desert metaphor which promote resilience – embracing the desert; encountering God and the self; altruistic living and pastoral responsibility – she then explores how these work out when we choose to face up to the struggle and not simply look for a quick resolution to it. She invokes the theology of Rowan Williams in seeking a contemporary application of the early Christian experience of these things.

So, this is an excellent book for those who want to think seriously about real humanity, genuine Christian struggle, authentic pastoral engagement, and the dangers of what Bonhoeffer famously called ‘cheap grace’. The style isn’t always easy, but it is a book worth persevering with.

A bit like life and adversity, I guess. And, while we are at it, it reminded me of the disconnect between hugely admiring the commitment of the Jessica Ennises of this world while sitting in a comfortable chair drinking another beer…

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A life more ordinary

Encouraged by the news this morning that the great BBC comedy series Rev is to have a third coming (in 2014), it seems unremarkable that it is such an account of ordinary life that struck such a chord with people. It is funny because it is real.

Yet, we are in the midst of that great celebration of extraordinary prowess and achievement that is the 2012 Olympics in London (and elsewhere). Every minute of the day we witness the best, the most powerful, the most excellent, the strongest, the most enduring, the most courageous. Sitting in the chair with a beer can’t help but make us feel a bit weak and feeble. A bit silly, really, as to compare oneself (in my case a 54 year old bloke who is off to the osteopath again in an hour) with the most physically fit and trained athletes of a generation is ridiculous. I wouldn’t dare to wear lycra – even for a laugh.

Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence, then, that the running down of workload for the ‘summer’ month is allowing the space to read a few books that have been sitting on my desk for months – or that one of them is about ordinariness in Ordinary Time.

Everyday God: The Spirit of the Ordinary is the latest publication by Dr Paula Gooder. Anything by Paula is worth getting and reading. She is one of those rare people who can do the academic stuff – and comfortably use the academic language – and also communicate with us ordinary mortals in ways that fire the mind and spirit. Not surprising, then, that she is in heavy demand as a speaker and lecturer around the world.

Everyday God simply reflects on biblical passages and episodes to draw out the importance and facility of living in the moment, embracing the ordinary, and not missing the obvious whilst searching for the spectacular. Paula points out early in the book the need to find (and work at) a rhythm for ordinary life – a way of shaping life rather than simply drifting through it. She writes (p.9):

The challenge for each one of us is to find a rhythm that works with our personality, our home life and our working pattern… When you have found the rhythm that works for you and you have done it for long enough, then the rhythm carries you… It is a little like steering into the current of a river. Once there the rhythm does the rest, pulling you closer and deeper into the presence of God. The problem is getting into the rhythm in the first place. It takes discipline, practice and sometimes pure grim determination to get over the hump of boredom, distraction and busyness into the rhythm beyond.

She goes on in the book to illustrate what it looks like to ‘see differently’, recognising that familiar biblical passages can be read afresh in ways that encourage and not simply challenge. The structure is simple and clear: ‘Ordinary people’, ‘Ordinary God’, ‘Living extraordinary ordinary lives’.

This is the third in a series of books that take us through the rhythm of the year: The Meaning is in the Waiting: The Spirit of Advent and This Risen Existence: The Spirit of Easter are also excellent.

 

Memories are made of this…

OK, it’s a tacky title from a tacky song. But, I was reminded of it during a fascinating cross-cultural session at the College of Bishops meeting in Oxford today.

Bishop Wolfgang Huber had made some great observations about the need for the church in an ‘aesthetic post-modern culture’ to find new ways of engaging people with Christian faith. In Peru all those being confirmed are required to memorise passages of the Bible, creeds and other texts. The Bishop’s point was that memorising might not be exactly trendy, but it is very effective.

It is the memorising that grabbed my attention.

Charles Wesley (or his brother…) once said that we learn our theology not from what we hear from the pulpit, but from what we sing. His point was that if you put a good tune to something, it is easier to remember. Then he got on and wrote hundreds of hymns to memorable and easily singable tunes.

(This once led me to observe in a different context that if you sing rubbish, you believe rubbish. It caused me endless grief when taken out of context.)

Wolfgang Huber suggested that we ought to agree on a selection of texts that all Christians should be required to remember – to commit to memory. I agree with him.

We no longer require children to learn poetry or songs. After all, anything can be looked up immediately on the phone; so, why go to the effort of memorising songs or poetry?

Well, I am useless at it. The only poetry I can remember in full is from the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band (Neil Innes) and it helpfully reads:

“I am such a pedant,
I’ve got the brain of a dead ant,
All the imagination of a caravan site…
But I still love you…”

Not exactly Shakespeare, but it stuck.

I need to think further about the power of memorising texts that become part of you. Many people have experienced the power of repeated liturgy: prayer that eventually becomes so much part of you that it prays you.

Requiring candidates for Confirmation to memorise a creed or the Decalogue or the Beatitudes might seem demanding. But, the question is whether we are demanding enough of young Christians and whether or not the memorising of texts would be helpful in maturing them in the faith.

This is not the same thing as indoctrination. It is about creating the space in which people can reflect on what has become part of their ‘vocabulary’ – their mental and spiritual language.

I will take this to the Meissen Commission at the end of this week – of which more anon.

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Location:Oxford

 

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.