Crisis of judgement

Yesterday saw a group of people discovering that they weren’t as big as they thought they were. James and John, preoccupied with their own status have gone. Peter (or ‘Rocky’ to his friends) has contradicted every pretension and disowned his friend. And Pontius Pilate, a man with only the vocabulary of violence and power, of threat and of fear, stands in feeble judgement on the man who, silently refusing to play the Empire’s games on its own terms, stands in judgement on him. That was yesterday – the day hope lay bleeding in the dirt of Calvary.

Today is empty. The end of the story is unknown. A world has collapsed and only darkness beckons. Maybe Pilate was right: only power, domination, violence, destruction, threat, fear and death actually do matter in the real world we all know.

But, this will not be the final word.

Tonight, with the fires lit and the candles burning, we will be surprised – a surprise bigger than the Bradford West by-election result. Good Friday and bleak Saturday have been an experience of crisis (literally, from the Greek meaning ‘judgement’). We all – along with Pilate and the Empire – stand judged by the tortured man who looked to have been getting it all wrong, missing the point about real power. Surely God should look a bit bigger and a bit stronger than this man from the hill country of Galilee? Surely the ‘liberator of his people’ should make a bit more noise and, at least, collect around him some powerful people? But, Jesus collects around him a ragbag of ordinary people who, most of the time, have little idea of where this is all heading. He takes people like us and through them changes the world.

This Easter we face huge challenges in our own society. Economic struggle is accompanied by fear for the future… which looks uncertain for many people. Many people question the basis on which we are building our common future – a moment of crisis, a moment in which we are being judged according to what truly drives us. But, even in this context, the surprising Easter message is one of challenge and encouragement:

• On the cross Jesus opens his arms, embracing the world, absorbing all that we can throw at him and not throwing it back at us.
• Death, violence and destruction do not have the final word: God does – and that word will be ‘resurrection’.
• God is in the business of bringing new life out of what is dead.
• In the empty tomb God quietly points to the power of love and hope and new life.

God has come among us, as one of us, and nothing in this world holds any surprise for God; the world might be wobbly, but God calls his people to hold those who wobble; we are loved to death and beyond.

No wonder the risen Christ says to his frightened friends: ‘Do not be afraid.’

 

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?

 

Distraction therapy

One of the cultural highlights of last year for me was seeing Cabaret in London’s West End. It made the film seem more emotionally thin than I had remembered it being. Seeing it on stage was powerful and shocking.

Cabaret depicts the end of the Weimar Republic under the violent repression of Nazi terror. What the play portrays most clearly is the way people couldn’t cope with the horrors of what was beginning to happen to them, so sought refuge in the escapist debaucheries of the Berlin night scene. Watching it develop, you can’t help but want to cry out: ‘Can’t you see what you are doing? Can’t you see what is happening – and all you are doing is losing yourselves in ‘pleasure’ while the darkness gradually and violently shrouds the stage?’

This all came to mind during a presentation at an academic conference in Paderborn earlier this week by Geiko Mueller-Fahrenholz – a man put in touch with me last year by Juergen Moltmann. Trying to move us on from consideration of ‘Just War’ theory, he opened up for consideration and discussion a draft World Council of Churches (WCC) text called The Ecumenical Declaration on Just Peace. Having debated it, it seemed obvious that we should focus on a ‘just peace’, given that Just War Theory is usually engaged once war has begun or the decision to go to war has in effect already been taken. In that sense, it becomes a post hoc justification for a war.

In the course of our discussions in Paderborn, Mueller-Fahrenholz spoke of the violence of our culture and our apprent retreat into what I usually call ‘distraction therapy’ – precisely what was happening in the dying days of the Weimar Republic in Germany. The threats are so great and the options so complicated that we distract ourselves with entertainment or trivia – anything to occupy our minds and sensibilities and save us from the fear that reality would otherwise evoke. He quoted someone else (I can’t remember whom) calling this ‘psychic numbing’ – a phrase I found to be helpful as a pithy summary of the complex psychosocial phenomenon.

The thesis behind the search for a just peace is that the earth cannot sustain our ways of being human together. Christians must be committed to both peace on earth and peace with the earth, but the cost of this is high and many Christian theologies – shaped by other syncretistic assumptions – simply cannot face it. For example, rather than address the likelihood of there being 150 million climate refugees within forty years, we prefer to put our heads down and – in the words of Neil Postman in relation to the media – ‘amuse ourselves to death’.

This ‘psychic numbing’ provokes a sort of ‘distraction therapy’ that focuses our attentions on smaller matters that might be important in their own right, but not in terms of the bigger picture and the bigger threats. Whereas not everybody will resort to the hedonism of Weimar Berlin, we can submerge ourselves in an obsession with celebrity, entertainment or something else. Entertainment is a good thing and vital to a good life; but not when it becomes a means of retreating from the real world.

When I feel like burying my head with boredom or fear at the threats to the world, I look at my children and (future… maybe) grandchildren and remember that I shape their world by my decisions and neglects and distractions now. Hiding, therefore, cannot be an option for anyone who sees the issues and is, therefore, morally bound to choose what to do in response. Working towards a just peace should become the preoccupation of politicians, media and religious leaders at every level of life. We are clearly not there yet.

For Christians there are at least two challenges here. First, the focus of Christian ecumenical discussion needs to move from preoccupations with internal ‘purities’ to addressing our common agendas as human beings through a commonly-held Christian lens. Build up the church by all means; but only in order then to serve the world that is God’s and of which we are stewards. Second, just how far are some of our preoccupations, arguments and worship cultures simply an alternative form of escapist ‘distraction therapy’ – focusing our attention on things that get us going and fill our minds and time, but distract us from the big questions that matter more?

Geiko Mueller-Fahrenholz has put his finger on an important challenge here – one he also sees as an opportunity for the churches to get their act together and recover their primary vocation. I need to think further and see where this takes me in my own responsibilities.

 

Alienation: on finance and murder

I was still ruminating on last week’s lecture to the Welsh Centre for International Affairs by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Ethics, Economics and Global Justice when I read of the indiscriminate murders of ten people in Alabama yesterday and fifteen people in Germany today. Added to that, I also had a long conversation with a friend in the City of London about the current financial crisis and the novel-but-incomprehensible notion of ‘quantitative easing’. And somehow there is a common theme to all three of these matters: alienation.

Back in September 2008 I took part in a discussion on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s article in The Spectator the previous day rather mischievously headed Face it: Marx was Partly Right about Capitalism. In it he wrote this about the gap between those who enter into financial transactions and those who use the consequent debt as an asset to be traded elsewhere for profit that is necessarily disconnected from the person whose money it originally was: …’individuals find that their own personal financial decisions and calculations have nothing to do with what is happening to their resources, in a process for which a debt is simply someone else’s wholly disposable asset.’

He then goes on (and I will quote the whole paragraph) to drive the point home that the alienation of the transactee from the transaction can only lead to a fantasy world in which reality disappears behind the hubris of algorithms and greed: ‘Behind all this, though, is the deeper moral issue. We find ourselves talking about capital or the market almost as if they were individuals, with purposes and strategies, making choices, deliberating reasonably about how to achieve aims. We lose sight of the fact that they are things that we make. They are sets of practices, habits, agreements which have arisen through a mixture of choice and chance. Once we get used to speaking about any of them as if they had a life independent of actual human practices and relations, we fall into any number of destructive errors. We expect an abstraction called ‘the market’ to produce the common good or to regulate its potential excesses by a sort of natural innate prudence, like a physical organism or ecosystem. We appeal to ‘business’ to acquire public responsibility and moral vision. And so we lose sight of the fact that the market is not like a huge individual consciousness, that business is a practice carried on by persons who have to make decisions about priorities — not a machine governed by inexorable laws.’

The Archbishop is referring to a system whereby ideas become assumed to be ‘things’ (the Market) and people become commodities subject to the impersonal and amoral powers of the reified abstract. In relation to the financial crisis his point is simply that the further you remove the ‘person’ from the ‘transaction’, the further you remove the moral agent from responsibility. Now read his lecture and you will see how he develops this in relation to ethics and the economy and the goal of global justice.

But I think the same analysis is somehow pertinent to the murders in Germany this morning. We have no idea as yet why the 17 year old Tim Kretschmer decided to slaughter teenagers at his old school. Like those who have committed similar atrocities in Finland, the USA and elsewhere, we only get clues about what goes on in the mind of someone like this. But, clearly, something has driven this young man to believe that this world holds little value for him and that the lives of others are equally expendable.

The recent Good Childhood inquiry makes it clear that children become alienated from society and their own responsibility when (a) that is what they see adults living out and (b) when they perceive (unconsciously?) they have no stake in society or how it might develop and be shaped for the future. In other words, alienation from both engagement with and benefit from the world and society in which they live.

There isn’t space to develop this here, but I need to think further about the implications of this for both the economy (and our agency in shaping it) and for our children. This remains impossible without some reference to the reasons behind the establishment of those Old Testament ‘laws’ that offered boundaries for good mutual living and sharing – neither fantasising about the ‘ideal society’ nor romanticising the poverty around them, but always ensuring that the powerful should never forget that once they were slaves and everyone has a place in a healthy community in which value is attributed by something more satisfying than a fat bank balance.

 

Zimbabwe & Gaza

Yesterday I addressed a group of people at a law firm in the City about Zimbabwe. These wonderful people have an ‘austerity lunch’ of bread and cheese and donate to the ‘project’ under discussion – which, yesterday, was Zimbabwe. I was invited because the Diocese of Southwark is deeply involved with the Anglican Church in Zimbabwe and I have been out there on my own and leading a group visit.

It was a good coincidence that I got home in the evening to hear that the Zimbabwean Dollar has been dumped and that foreign currencies are now allowed across the economy. This is only legalising what has been happening anyway – the parallel market has been operating in US dollars for years. Then, today, I heard that the MDC has voted to enter government with Zanu PF. This is precarious and we will have to wait and see what actually happens as plans are taken forward during the next two weeks. The MDC could find itself compromised and then more easily discarded by Mugabe later.

Yet, despite this news, I still get almost daily reports of human rights activists going missing, torture and abuse of prisoners, intimidation of MDC and Church people, and corruption at every level. The vital prerequisite for any improvement in the lives of Zimbabwe and her people is the restoration of the rule of law. Court judgements in respect of ownership of finances, accounts and property made against the ousted Anglican Bishop of Harare, Dr Nolbert Kunonga, have not been implemented  – and Kunonga, with the backing of Mugabe’s men, continues to steal money, retain possession of churches, intimidate anyone who denies him support and makes a mockery of justice.

The law firm people I addressed have asked to donate £1000 towards important projects in Central Zimbabwe. Wonderful stuff that will make a real difference now that foreign currency can be used and we don’t have to do dodgy things with currencies.

Today has also seen the publication of a statement by the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding the launch of the ‘Faiths Working Together’ Fund for rebuilding civilian lives in Gaza and relieving suffering in Israel through the work of Christian Aid, Islamic Relief and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel. This is surely a sensitive and laudable attempt by Christians, Jews and Muslims in this country to address the humanitarian need without regard for causes of conflict, ethnicity or status. The link also gives advice on how to donate.

Why set this up when DEC is already doing the business? Well, I guess it is in order to demonstrate what many secularists prefer to ignore: people of different religions working together for the common good and going beyond the arguments that sometimes appear to sterilise effective action. Good stuff.

 

Big news!

Zimbabwe is a disaster: Mugabe and the South African ‘mediators’ claim a deal, but the MDC denies having agreed it and the sorry saga continues. It seems to me that the MDC must not compromise its position or it will be dismissed by Mugabe at his whim.

Meanwhile controversy rages around the UK in the light of the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the DEC appeal for Gaza. Protestors had to be removed from Broadcasting House and we had the bizarre sight of Director General, Mark Thompson, explaining on early morning TV his reasons for the refusal to broadcast the appeal while behind him was displayed a huge backdrop of the appeal poster and all the contact and donation details. This must have been deliberate as well as canny.

There are war crimes trials going on in international courts and Sri Lanka is in violent turmoil again. In other words, business as usual for a world full of hostility and bad news. The financial crisis rages on, four Peers are being accused of corruption and the economic wallpaper looks pretty grubby. So what?

I went to get the train into London this morning and, as usual, picked up the free Metro newspaper. Its front page headline ignored all of this and proclaimed that a bit of an aspirin taken every day can help your liver.

Is it too much to wonder who thought this was top news of the day? I’m not saying it shouldn’t be – just that I’d like to know why it was thought to be so.

Perhaps it is simply that in the midst of all the bad news, we still find refuge in something small, personal and achievable. It could be that it is sometimes easier to shut out the loud noise of all the ‘big stuff’ and focus attention on the stuff of ‘me’.

Well, whatever the reasons behind this odd choice of priority, the evening papers simply led with the remarkable birth of eight babies to one mother in California. Amid the gloom there is a nice story – though I pity the poor mother who has said she will breastfeed all eight of them. I am not sure whether to be full of admiration … or just avert my attention back to the ‘big stuff’.

 

Slumdog Millionaire

Last night I went out to the cinema in Croydon to see the acclaimed film Slumdog Millionaire. The posters (as well as a number of critics) declare that this is the ‘feel-good film of the decade’. Based in the slums of Mumbai in India, it involves, ethnic and religious violence, abject poverty, horrific exploitation of orphaned or abandoned street children (including deliberate blinding to make begging children more appealing), dehumanising of already damaged people, gangs, corruption, torture and suspicion.

Now, maybe I am a little linguistically challenged here, but that doesn’t make me feel good at all. The film is supposed to depict the triumph of love over destruction and violence, but it left me thinking not of the young man and woman who triumph, but of the millions who don’t. Life is portrayed as cheap (apart from the two good-looking stars) and disposable.

The last time I went to the cinema it was to see Mamma Mia. Perhaps that was ‘feel-good’ becasue it was silly and contrived fantasy – also based on dodgy relationships and haunting pasts.

However, what both films have in common is a great soundtrack (I love the Bollywood stuff).

 

Death in Redhill

I drove over to Redhill this afternoon to address 140 year 10 RE students on the subject of ‘death’. St Bede’s (http://www.st-bedes.surrey.sch.uk) is an ecumenical comprehensive school with great staff and students. I had been asked some time ago to address the subject of death, etc and wondered what I would face. They were good kids and I went away wishing I’d had longer to talk with some of them.

Death is still not something our culture handles very well. It seems to me that the Church doesn’t always handle it well either. I believe that Christian hope is rooted not in a system, but in the person of God who raised Jesus Christ from death, thus denying that violence and destruction have the final word in this world – despite the apparent evidence around us. Furthermore, I am not a Christian because being so will guarantee my eternal destiny – there is something narcisstic about that – but because I believe the truth about God is to be found in Jesus who was raised. So, I’ll follow him whatever life throws at me.

After all, Christmas celebrates God opting into the world. His followers have no option but to do the same – come what may. The rest is detail.

 

Deja vu

Like many other people, my mind is preoccupied with the horrors of Gaza and, despite the current lack of media attention, the appalling situation in Zimbabwe. Israel-Palestine is somewhere I have visited several times and will visit again next year. Zimbabwe is a country I have grown to love because of a strong link between the Diocese of Southwark and four of the Zimbabwean Anglican dioceses. The Croydon Episcopal Area is linked with the Diocese of Central Zimbabwe and we know Bishop Ishmael Mukuwanda and his people very well.

I have been to Zimbabwe several times and Ishmael and his wife have stayed with us several times during the last five years or so. It is in this relationship that we learn to see through different eyes and think through different frameworks. If my theology only ‘works’ in Wimbledon, but would be embarrassing if expressed in Harare or Gweru, then it is not a theology worth having. And to go to such places is to have your theology seriously tested.

And yet even in places of suffering and injustice there is a sense of deja vu – of seeing played out a situation that has been experienced many times before in the long history of humanity. Powerful people become paranoid and oppress others in order to compound their own security. Mugabe is trapped in his own weakness and paranoia – and they will lead to his undoing. As I observed in an earlier post, history teaches us that empires come and go and that power is a gift, not a right.

This might seem an odd diversion, but yesterday I was reading the speech by Franklin D Roosevelt on 4 March 1933 after being sworn in as President of the United States of America. I read it in the Guardian’s Great Speeches of the 20th Century. The introduction is written by the Prime Minister Gordon Brown who in retrospect must surely wish he hadn’t agreed to do it. Roosevelt, speaking of the dire economic straits of 1930s America, could have been writing today. Try this, for example:

‘…we face our common difficulties. They concern, thank God, only material things. Values have shrunk to fantastic levels: taxes have risen; our ability to pay has fallen; government of all kinds is faced by serious curtailment of income; the means of exchange are frozen in the currents of trade; the withered leaves of industrial enterprise lie on every side; farmers find no markets for their produce; and the savings of many years in thousands of families are gone. More important, a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of the moment.

And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilisation. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves, to our fellow men.

Recognition of that falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honour, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, and on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live.

Delivered almost 76 years ago, his words resonate powerfully even now in a world of economic embarrassment and moral fickleness. Roosevelt was writing of America, yet while he was speaking on his side of the Atlantic Ocean Adolf Hitler was enjoying the first months of his rule of a Germany that had no idea what it was walking into.

America re-grew its economic, military and political power and ultimately became the ultimate superpower. But those days are passing even now – just as the thousand-year Reich collapsed after only a decade and a half of catastrophic hubris.

Empires come and go. The Bible tells us so. We’ve seen it all before. Time to learn the lessons. (But I doubt we will.)

 

Epiphany and a crazy world

The world is in financial and economic recession. Israel continues its violence against Gaza – to what possible end? Mugabe continues to disregard the world’s horror at his corruption and scorn for his people. Climate change cannot be ignored. There is a lot going on and everywhere I go people are asking hard questions about the future.

I was in a church in Croydon this morning and tried to bring together the insecurities of the real world into which ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ and the one we inhabit. Wise men travelled to find what God’s own people missed and, at what we call Epiphany, allowed the light of a star to shine into the darkness of oppression, violence, paranoia and mendacity. (Read Matthew 2:1-12) We don’t know what 2009 will hold, but we do know there will have to be changes not only in the ways we live and the choices we make, but also in the values that drive us. The ‘blind growth’ view of economics is being weighed in the balance. And people feel very insecure about themselves, their ‘normality’ and the future of the world itself.

So, it might be timely to recall that Christian hope is rooted not in a system or a prognosis, but in a person. The God who came among us in Jesus of Nazareth is one who is unashamed to live with vulnerability and insecurity (a baby born in an obscure part of the Roman-occupied Middle East) and is unafraid to show the wounds of real life when the risen Christ holds up wounded hands and invites the world to touch them. This God is one who has refused to let the violence, destruction and death of the world have the final word – God has the final word and it sounds like ‘resurrection’.

This sober rumination has just reminded me of the great Beautiful South song that exposes:

A plastic world and we’re all plastic too
Just a couple of different faces in a dead man’s queue
The world is turning Disney and there’s nothing you can do
You’re trying to walk like giants but you’re wearing Pluto’s shoes

And the answers fall easier from the barrel of a gun
Than it does from the lips of the beautiful and the dumb
The world won’t end in darkness, it’ll end in family fun
With Coca Cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.

Epiphany whispers light into a dark world and invites us to look for the God of substance beneath the veneers of security we crave.

This certainly puts into perspective matters such as the future of the Anglican Communion and those internal churchy matters which seem to fill some people’s lives and internet preoccupations. Having blogged the entire two weeks back in July/August 2008, I have just written a review of the Lambeth Conference six months on and it will appear on the Fulcrum website in the next couple of days. I will provide the link when I know what it is. But it all needs to be kept in sharp perspective as the sideshow it is to the real stuff of the Kingdom of God.