Feet of Clay

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

When I was just twenty years old I worked in France for six months. This allowed me to become the only bishop I know who’s been arrested for busking on the Paris Metro. I don’t think it was the singing or guitar playing that was bad; it was just that I didn’t know you had to have a licence. To cut a long story short, I talked my way out of it … and even got to keep the money.

At the point the police stopped me I was doing a John Lennon song from the  ‘Imagine’ album. When my father heard this he responded not to my predicament, but merely observed of John Lennon that you can’t get good fruit from a bad tree. I even took him seriously at the time.

But, of course, this is nonsense. Yesterday I listened to Mozart – evidently a bit of a moral nightmare, but who wrote some of the most sublimely Christian music. Nick Cave, in his marvellous book, Faith, Hope and Carnage, written with Sean O’Hagan, emerges from the shattering death of his young son to wrestle hauntingly with mortality, God and meaning.

What holds these two musicians together is the recognition that human beings are complicated, that mortality is fundamental, and that everyone is messy.

Which comes as a relief for many of us. One of the things Jesus does in the gospels is gently explode assumptions of self-sufficency, self-righteousness and self-purity – especially sacrificing other people on the altar of my cleanliness. It is the unlikely people – who know their own weaknesses and failure and don’t need to have their wounds salted – who find liberation and new life, not those who want to hold other people to standards they can’t keep themselves.

It seems to me that it is experience of the rough side of life that strips us of illusions, but also relieves us of the need to pretend to be right all the time. And I worry about the people who get put on pedestals – sometimes involuntarily – but whose feet of clay will one day be revealed … leaving them rubbished and others disappointed.

There is a massive danger in creating or sustaining a culture in which we set certain people up as heroes, only to wait for the time we can knock them down as failures. This might make me feel better – or morally superior even – but humility is surely the key to compassion: the recognition that, in biblical language, “we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”.

Yet, rather than piling on some neurosis, and like confronting mortality, this can actually be the beginning of freedom.

 

Borderlands

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

President Zelenskiy’s address to Parliament yesterday was another step in maintaining solidarity with Ukraine.

I simply can’t imagine what it will be like to live in Ukraine right now – waiting for the military onslaught that threatens to accompany the first anniversary of the Russian invasion. I can’t imagine such fear of the imminent unknown, having no control over what is to come.

As Anna Reid illustrates in her excellent book Borderlands, Ukrainians live on an edge, a border between Europe and Asia.

But, living on an edge – the word for it is ‘liminality’ – changes perspective as well as behaviour. I have good friends who live in Basel which borders Germany, France and Switzerland. Wherever you go there you have to pay attention to a different language, variations of culture and history, architecture and mood. You drive down a road and find you’ve been in two or three countries. And this means navigating strangeness, respecting difference.

Now, nothing should ever trivialise the predicament in which Ukraine currently find itself. Although for many of us, borders do not represent a threat, simply dividing, but also open us up to new people and experiences, this is not the case with Ukraine: their border is characterised by extreme violence, fear and blood.

Yet, there is a parallel in the ways people think and relate in any context. Living on an edge compels us to face difference and respect narratives that are not mine. Having been a professional linguist many years ago, I understand what it is like to look, think and listen through the lens of a different culture – a people whose story is different from mine.

But, the bigger influence on me is the Judeo-Christian tradition which tracks the formative story of people for whom home is always contested, estranged or constantly moving. In fact, the earliest credal statement in the Hebrew Scriptures begins with a striking statement: “My father was a wandering Aramaean…” Exile is one of the major biblical themes – and this is a reality we are now seeing every day as millions of Ukrainians flee. In the biblical story people are exiled without their consent, often at the sharp end of an empire’s weaponry. Jesus himself constantly crossed borders to be where people actually stood – never seducing anyone with false promises, but being realistic about the brutality of the world. He, too, paid with his life. For him the injunction to “love my neighbour as myself” was never some romantic idea – it is costly, especially for those who live on a sharp edge.

I look at Ukraine from a place of security; but, I can also look through the lens of their experience to better understand my own, too.

 

Teachers

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

When I visit schools – usually primary schools – I always get asked what is the best thing about being a bishop. I usually say: it’s this! Visiting schools. And I mean it. I genuinely think that teachers do one of the most important jobs in any society and we should value them accordingly.

The main thing about teaching is that, obviously, it is really about learning. We give our children into the hands of other adults for hours every day and expect them to be nurtured – body, mind and spirit. Because teaching is not about force-feeding information into soon-to-be economically-active receptacles, but, rather, about curating character, shaping a world view, forming a mind, opening up the world, stimulating curiosity. And this can only happen if children learn to learn.

At a time of uncertainty on just about every front, I think it is wise to stop and think about what education is and what it is for. Questions about teachers’ pay and conditions are not to be confused with the deeper questions of what they are actually doing and what the rest of us expect of them. As I hinted earlier, a society that sees the economy as an end (rather than a means to an end – human flourishing) will never value the intangible work of shaping personality, character and community.

I come from a tradition that sees children as more than potential workers. Jesus warned against offering a stone to a child who asks for bread. Three thousand years ago the Hebrews placed priority on teaching your children from a very early age – but as part of a community that shared a view of love and justice and mercy that was rooted in a memory of humility.

It’s easy to say, isn’t it? But, any child who listens to the news can be forgiven for being fearful of a secure future. A Czech philosopher, Jan Patočka, came up with a striking description of this fragility when he wrote of “the solidarity of the shaken”. Teachers are also part of this solidarity, and bring to their task all the same uncertainties everyone else feels. But, the children we entrust to them can only find security if the wider society sees them as vital human beings and not just potential commodities – shapers of human futures rather than cogs in a merely economic wheel.

And that’s why I am gripped by the value placed on children in the scriptures I read. It’s also why I think teachers do important work on behalf of the rest of us.

 

Who are we?

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

I was struck in the last few days by the coincidence of two events. First, the remarkable news from Germany about the rumbling of a far right plot to oust the German government and return to a pre-war state. The second was hearing that the last of the Dambusters has died and listening to his firsthand account of the bombing raid in May 1943.

Both of these reports provoke a challenging question: how does our telling of history shape our perceptions about who we are?

In one sense, it is surprising that we are surprised by the organised plot in Germany involving the Reichsbürger movement. The far right have not exactly been asleep, and political movements building on conspiracy theories are not a phenomenon confined to only one country. But, when choosing which ‘state’ in their romantic history to go back to, how and why did they choose the Reich? I guess the answer lurks somewhere in the mists of trying to recreate a lost world which they think justifies their values and grievances about today’s world.

Reporting on the Dambusters raid rightly praised the courage and ingenuity of the bombers, but made little mention of the human consequences. It is hard to look through the eyes of those on the receiving end and listen to the story that they might tell of the same event.

We all do this to some extent or other. As a Christian I read scriptures that tell a particular story from particular perspectives and I have to do the hard work – easily avoided – of wrestling with how to handle it as “the Word of the Lord”. This, of course, involves struggling with it – not just forcing it through the prism of my prejudices today in order to make me feel justified or godly or even right.

For example, I see myself reflected in the story of the exodus where a people, liberated from four hundred years of captivity and slavery in a strange land, start complaining – within weeks – about the menu and mutter that maybe Egypt wasn’t so bad after all. Anyway, fantasies of an idealised golden future, fossilised in a past myth, always hit against reality. Later readers are also invited to wrestle with how this story was experienced by those who were on the receiving end of the new world.

In other words, both individuals and communities – entire countries and continents – look for the narrative that makes sense of now, or, at least, of what they would prefer ‘now’ to be. 

The stories we choose to tell about ourselves must be open to scrutiny and challenge. Partial truths have consequences and damage everyone.

 

Life and Death

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Recently my daughter gave birth eleven weeks prematurely. Both mum and baby are doing well. Then, last Sunday afternoon my mother died at 90, with all five of her children around the bed in the home she had lived in since getting married in 1955.

I had just returned from meetings in Estonia, where locals spoke about the threat from Russia and their perceptions of the invasion of Ukraine. For me, there was the whole of life, contracted to a birth, a death, and everything uncertain in between.

The evening of my mum’s death I was surprised to recall a Bill Viola video installation at Tate Modern when I was living in London. Created in 1992, it was called Nantes Triptych. The screen on the left recorded the last thirty minutes of a woman in labour. The screen on the right displayed the last thirty minutes of his mother’s life; the screen in the middle showed a humanoid form swimming through the mysterious course of life, accompanied by sounds of the two women labouring towards a beginning and an ending.

The installation was intended to be lived with for thirty minutes. While I was in there I was the only person who stood from beginning to end as people walked in and out. I have often wondered what that was about. Was it, for example, that we are bad at contemplating the pains of birth and death? Or that the life in-between is complicated enough without having to think about it’s meaning? Or something else?

I was once asked, in the wake of some violent global tragedy, what happens when we die. I helpfully said, “I don’t care.” She responded: “Given your job, (I was Bishop of Croydon at the time) don’t you think you should?” Well, I think now as I did then that we need to keep it simple. So, I said that Christian hope is rooted in the person of the God who raised Christ from the dead – not in some formula for working out what happens next. But, death – not a vague ‘passing’ – is not to be avoided as if it marks the end of everything. The first truth of human existence, made in the image of God, is that we shall die. How we get there matters.

My mother did not rage against the dying of the light, but, rather, saw it as a welcome next step on the journey. She went gently into that good night and confidently.

 

Fragility

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Some years ago on a visit to the United States, I drove from the Gulf Coast down through Florida. A massively destructive hurricane had powered its way through this part of the state only a few months before and we drove for fifty miles through utter devastation. For miles on end every tree had been snapped like a pencil, leaving the tops pointing into the earth and creating triangles of dense wood. Towns and settlements stood abandoned, leaving shattered wooden houses derelict against the now quiet sky.

Hearing of Hurricane Ian has brought it all back to mind. Solid looking buildings in permanently inhabited communities get boarded up in an attempt to withstand the torment. But, ultimately, weather will not and cannot be tamed. In the end, we are at the mercy of the elements.

The problem is that, unlike most people who live in vulnerable parts of the globe, some of us have got used to thinking we can control the world and our life. Dangers simply have to be managed in order to maintain what we dare to call ‘normality’.

But, if we learn one lesson from the Covid pandemic and the obvious effects of climate change, it surely must be that (a) human beings need to learn a bit of humility about their fragility, and (b) respect for the creation might just relativise our collective hubris. I guess humility emerges from realism and a proper acknowledgement of our human contingency.

This goes to the heart of one reason I am a Christian. Acceptance of my and our collective need of grace and one another means that arrogance and pride can be put to one side. My personal self-fulfilment might not be the ultimate goal in life, after all. Facing mortality compels me to face this fragility – not with misery, but rather with liberation. Equally so when we face the current threats caused by energy, money and violent conflict.

Fatalistic escapism? I don’t think so. Knowing our need and accepting the fragility of the world can in fact drive us to what I would call incarnational commitment. That is, a commitment to get stuck into living in the world as it is, loving our neighbour as ourselves, shaping a better and more just common future, but without any sense of entitlement to security.

How we respond to the challenges of the coming months and years – which most of us can’t control – will tell us what we really believe and whom we truly love. For Jesus, loving one’s neighbour was not a suggestion – it was a command.

 

Olympic Stories

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Next week sees the tenth anniversary of the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. To my shame – so I am told – I can’t remember much about the athletics, but, like millions of people, I found the opening ceremony unforgettable. We were presented with a vision of Britain that, in one sense, we wanted to see – of civilisation and development, of community resilience and a generous collective altruism.

Inevitably, it represented a particular take on our island histories. But, few came away from it unmoved – if not for the history depicted, then at least by the scale of the drama.

Looking back on how the opening ceremony was conceived, one of the key participants said: “If you didn’t know what Danny Boyle looked like, you wouldn’t know who was leading the meeting … He didn’t lead by dominance or by being extrovert; he led by listening. We all felt heard. I think this work turned out the way it did because Danny was a great listener.”

Interesting, isn’t it? Leadership by listening.

I think there are several strands to this phenomenon.

First, good leadership starts with learning the language of the led. We can’t know how to speak if we haven’t taken the time to learn what might actually be heard.

Secondly, it’s in the telling of stories that we begin to piece together a narrative that connects with the audience and makes sense of their experience of the world. Only having listened to people telling their story can I begin to shape what I might call The Story.

Now, none of this is new. As a Christian I can’t escape the constant reminder that in the Gospels Jesus puts time into gathering or walking with his friends and taking them and their questions – even their fantasies and misconceptions – seriously. He never derides them. But, in re-framing stories, he treats them like adults – making their own mind up and taking responsibility for what they do about it.

In Luke’s Gospel, for example, during dinner at the house of a religious leader a woman bursts in and pays embarrassing  attention to Jesus, the guest. The host sneerily questions Jesus’s moral rectitude in not rejecting the woman. But, rather than point out the host’s hypocrisy, he asks if he can tell a story. The host agrees … and thereby opens himself up to making a judgment on his own arrogance.

So, as we celebrate the anniversary next week, it’s worth reflecting on how stories shape our memories, but also shape our view of what we want to become.

 

The Teardrop Explodes

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Listening to the news about Sri Lanka this last couple of weeks, three symbols haunt my memory and imagination: tears, ammunition and a flower.

Although it was the name of a late 1970s band, The Teardrop Explodes evokes current events on the beautiful island of Sri Lanka – which, with a population of around 22 million, is shaped like a teardrop in the Indian Ocean.

In May 2009 a thirty-year civil war finally came to a brutal and bloody end, and hopes were strong that peace and ethnic reconciliation might – in time – ensue. For me this is personal as the Anglican Diocese of Leeds has a long-standing and strong link with the church there, and I have visited the island, met people from all sides of the divides, and witnessed the aftermath of extreme violence.

When I was there in autumn 2015 the second symbol – ammunition – spoke powerfully into this space. There is a monument near Jaffna in the north and close to where the final battles of the civil war were fought. Erected by the triumphant Singhalese military, it represents a shell or bullet penetrating a very large wall. The warning to the defeated Tamils was clear: we won, you lost – and you are vulnerable. As a gesture of future reconciliation it wasn’t helpful; indeed, it is solely and intentionally a reminder of past grievance and humiliation.

However, for me, the third symbol – that of a flower – hangs over this. The Bishop of Colombo gave me a pectoral cross – which reflects Christ’s suffering at Calvary. But, rather than standing alone, this cross is set into a lotus flower. And, for our link church in Sri Lanka, the lotus is a powerful symbol of the reality of violence, but rooted in the promise of resurrection – that out of suffering can come new life. In other words, death, violence and destruction do not have the final word. There is always more to be said. Resurrection isn’t just a fantasy – wishful thinking or vague hope – but new life that demands response, commitment and sacrifice if beauty and flourishing are to have half a chance.

It would be too easy artificially to resolve the tensions inherent in these three symbols: the teardrop exploding again today in frustration with corruption and the abuse of power; the penetrated wall; and the cross set in a lotus flower. But, all three speak of realism in the face of despair. A realism that takes hope seriously and commits itself to making it real. A reminder not just of historic pain, but a call to future life.

 

Shaping a future

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the morning after the Boris Johnson signalled his intention to resign as leader of the Conservative Party (following the unprecedented resignation of 59 government ministers).

The current convulsions in Westminster offer, if nothing else, a compelling drama. I guess politics are, by definition, always dramatic. After all, they involve people, the ordering of society, uncontrollable events, convictions, emotions and other contingencies.

But, dramas involve characters, contexts, narratives, and so on. And a clear question that needs to be asked when the dramas are playing out around us is, simply: what is driving the characters? The audience needs to be able to understand what is going on not only on the stage, as it were, but also in the minds of the players.

To illustrate this we could look to Shakespeare – after all, a new Shakespeare theatre opens next week in Prescot, Liverpool, and there are few dramatists who explore the complexities of human character as well as the Bard of Stratford.

Shakespeare’s imagination was fuelled by a close relationship with the Bible. And he recognised that the Bible is not a handbook of doctrines, but records the narrative of a people wrestling with human nature and how to order a just and merciful society. This narrative is brutally frank about reality and how real people behave, what drives them, which values are to be seen as virtues.

And this is where the current political dramas come in. Character and virtue are both essential to leadership and the common life of a society. So are the vision and values that drive the ordering of our society. But, it is not just the actors on stage who shape the story, so does the audience by its engagement.

The episode that shapes my own mind on this comes from the Old Testament. Before the liberated people of Israel could enter a Land of Promise – after unlearning ‘Egypt’ in a desert for forty years – they had to work out what the new world might look like once they settled. Rituals were established in order that they should never forget that once they had been slaves, refugees, homeless and rootless. They were to enshrine justice and mercy in the laws and institutions of their community for the future. Compassion for the powerless was integral. And all this was to help them shape a just and virtuous society. It didn’t fully succeed.

But, when things go awry or a society faces some re-shaping, it is vital that these fundamental questions are addressed: which values will drive us? Who and what are we for? Does virtue matter in public and institutional life?

But, in these dramas no one is a mere spectator. All are responsible actors, accountable for playing their part.

 

Gestures of hope

This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

I remember hearing the late great Leonard Cohen explain how he delved into drugs and religion to alleviate his distress; but, he said, “joy kept breaking through.” I remembered this while watching a couple of videos from Ukraine this week.

One was a young woman in her coat and backpack, outside the railway station in Kyiv, playing the piano while the air raid sirens howl across the fearful city. The calm beauty of music defying the threat and the violence – music that, if silenced here by bombs, will be played somewhere else by someone else. The fragile but persistent beauty of music challenged the fear and threat in the air.

The second showed a group of soldiers playing instruments and dancing during a break from the grimness. The small crowd loved it – an interval of joy.

But, you might ask what’s the point? Is it defiance? Or sheer bloody mindedness? A gesture of order against a landscape of chaos?

Well, I’m not sure it really matters. What they do in these simple acts is point us through or beyond the immediate to a barely imaginable future. They light a fire that cannot be extinguished. They are gestures of hope. When things are closing in, they open us up – like a flower opening to the light of the sun which keeps burning anyway.

And there is a long tradition behind them. Three thousand years ago a prophet called Jeremiah was about to be sent off into exile with his people. Military defeat had led to loss and humiliation for a people who thought God had been on their side and couldn’t now understand the abandonment they felt. And, as loss dominated everything – as life seemed to be ending – Jeremiah bought a field. Pointless – the exile in Babylon might last for decades or, even, centuries? Stupid? Misguided by fantasy? Or brutally realistic and hopeful?

Jeremiah had no illusions about suffering, but he was also able to imagine a different future. I guess many of his friends – if he had any by then – thought he was deluded or making a pointless gesture. But, he was drawn by a vision of God and life that saw beyond the immediate, convinced that endings never end – that out of the trauma and out of the destruction new life will come. So, he buys a field that someone else might one day cultivate to feed a community or start an economy.

Jeremiah refused to let violence have the last word. So do the Ukrainian soldiers and the young pianist. In this sense, hope has a melody and life has a rhythm that makes us dance.