The tortoise of Christ

I found myself reflecting recently that the Church, all too often, is a bit like a tortoise. Slow-moving and cumbersome. Wrinkly and old. Silent. Encased in buildings built like fortresses into which, shy creature that it is, it frequently retreats when it senses danger.
Maybe this is why, during a church service, you will often hear the words :
"As Jesus' tortoise, so we pray :
Our Father, who art in heaven . . ."

(from an original one-liner by Milton Jones)

Smokin' prayer

thank you, Lord, for Sudoku fuel and for my smokin' wife . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBt2mYnTumQ&feature=player_embedded


What's that about?

Seduced by the gods

A discussion thread on the 'Theos' think tank website http://bit.ly/oc8Dia asks (in the context of the Norwegian atrocity) "Are we responsible for our actions?"

For me the most powerful practical theology is in Walter Wink's trilogy on the 'principalities and powers' (he has sections on the Biblical theology of angels, gods, demons, elemental spirits, 'the satan' &c)- the "invisible forces that determine human existence" which are the 'air which we breathe'. Forces which are part of the Creation and there to bring blessing, but which, if 'worshipped', bring curses instead. The fundamental 'sin' is idolatry : allowing 'that which is less than God' to override the worship of God.

In that sense, the Breiviks and Winehouses of this world are all too human, and only different in terms of the degree and particularity of their 'idolatry'. Wink writes of the gods seducing us, and then leading us off the dance floor into the dark, which sounds like a pretty accurate description of what has happened (particularly in the case of Breivik - I don't think we know the circumstances surrounding Amy Winehouse's death).

Paul of Tarsus (if it is he who wrote Ephesians) warns us that we are contending not against human beings but against these 'spiritual forces in the heavenly realms'; elsewhere he castigates Christians for being seduced by angels when it's their duty to 'preach' to the angels. (Wink argues that these forces are immutable : 'they have to do what they have to do' - it is only humans that have the freedom).

The fight against fanatic xenophobia, then, shouldn't get drawn into hypothetical speculation regarding to what degree Breivik retained any personal freedom of choice (or whether he had effectively surrendered it - been seduced off the dance floor - such that there was no going back). It has to be countered by

a) discerning the components of his spiritual idolatry e.g. the herd or pack instinct, the longing for some sort of 'purity', the sense of nationhood and racial affinity (but a dangerous conflation of the two), the sober celebration of the power of violence or whatever, with

b) a thousand and one mini-strategies that celebrate the blessings that those things can bring (for such blessings do exist) and which warn, challenge and oppose all the many ways in which those instincts start to override the call of God to 'love your neighbour, and even your enemy'.

The spiritual challenge is to avoid what René Girard calls 'mimetic violence' - the challenge (as Wink puts it) of 'not becoming what we hate'.

Atrocity and 'Humanity'

In a Church Meeting discussion last night about what it means to offer a 'radical welcome' to people, someone made the point that we need to be able to see past the labels to the 'humanity' beneath. Stereotyping sells papers, makes complex matters appear simple, and appeases people's own tribal or pack instincts.

Seumas Milne, writing in today's Guardian (http://bit.ly/pyrUCF), dismisses the arguments of those who suggest that the Norwegian mass murderer Breivik is insane. I'm sure Milne is correct : Breivik had planned his 'political' strategy for years in consultation with extreme right-wing Islamophobic groups in England and elsewhere. He lives in a world in which a moderate Muslim is only a cover for violent extremist Muslims, a world in which any politician who makes a noise that they can construe as being sympathetic to Islam (in the words of columnist Melanie Phillips, whom Breivik apparently quotes at length in his manifesto) is "at best a stupid mouthpiece of those who are bamboozling Britain into Islamisation, and at worst a supporter of that process." (see http://bit.ly/neU37p ) This is the woman that the BBC chooses to put on 'the Moral Maze' - see earlier post - the woman who smells anti-semitism in every critical comment about the Israeli government who nonetheless condemns the British Muslim community for its "inflated and perverse sense of its own victimisation". Am I glad I don't live in her world of stereotypes, labels and conspiracy theories.

I get the same sense of frustration when I read that 'all Christians believe X', 'all Muslims believe Y' - or at least, if they don't believe X or Y then they implicitly support those who do. It's not true. I remember a conversation I had with a respected Jewish rabbi who was telling me about a series of inter-faith conferences he attended. Within a couple of hours of assembling, the conservative and fundamentalist Muslims, Jews and Christians would have gathered at one end of the room, and the liberal-minded ones at the other. If Breivik hadn't been a "white Christian" fanatic, but born in Pakistan instead, he would have been a fanatical Muslim mass murderer. The skin colour and religion is just an excuse, irrelevant in itself. Every religion has verses in its scriptures that can be pressed into service to justify mass homicide, provided they are taken in isolation. You don't have to be insane to become a fanatic - just have . . . I don't know . . a profoundly low self-esteem, coupled with an inflated ego, a touch of an inability to see things from others' perspective and perhaps mostly an addiction to conversations that fuel that tribal sense of heroic self-righteousness (which I'm sure must be quite enjoyable and addictive).

Seumas Milne might have noted that the Guardian's immediate initial response to the atrocity as soon as the news broke was to identify the likely perpetrator as an Islamic extremist. Ironic that the same evening as the killing, the English Defence League firebombed a mosque (in Luton, I think) and daubed it with slogans. According to Melanie Phillips, as a white Christian I must be an apologist for such acts - irrevocably tainted as I am by racial and religious association. In fact it is people like her who are the apologists, not only for the EDL and the Breiviks, but for the Islamic fanatics too.

The problem with looking for the common 'humanity' in each other is that 'humanity' can be - as we see - both beautiful and gracious but also disgusting and brutal. There are choices to be made all along the line about what constitutes 'humanity' - something that I believe is a fundamental weakness in the (secular) Humanist project. For me, I'm inclined to follow the Quaker advice to 'look for that which is of Christ in everyone'.

Murdoch's only doing what comes naturally - it's the politicians who fail to govern that should 'consider their position'

There is no such thing as 'business ethics'. The essence of business is making money : that's all business is. We shouldn't complain too much if a business like News Corporation scours the gutters, abuses human rights and bribes policemen to beat its rivals in the marketplace. Like a cat with a bird, it's only doing what comes naturally. We're dealing here, not with human beings, but with what the Apostle Paul called the 'principalities and powers' (Ephesians 6:12) :

"We are not fighting against humans. We are fighting against forces and authorities and against rulers of darkness and powers in the spiritual world." (The 'rulers of darkness' are not humans like Rupert Murdoch; these are 'spiritual' forces, beyond any single human.)

Any ethics in business has to be supplied by human beings. Yes, we can hope that the human beings employed in the business have ethical standards and apply them. Realistically, though, that isn't going to happen unless ethical behaviour is rewarded. It has to be rewarded from within - the people at the top must define the ethical position. In News International that clearly doesn't happen and hasn't happened for a long time. Rebekah Brooks is absolutely implicated. Murdoch's (and her) ethics are 'do what is necessary to make money'. He and his underlings don't need to instruct junior journalists to hack voicemails. They don't even need to know they're doing it. As long as those journalists could be confident that they would be commended for anything that steals a march on rival newspapers, some of them were bound to do it - like the soldiers that torture prisoners because there is a top-down culture of impunity. Or like the famous assassins of Thomas à Becket, who overheard the king wishing his Archbishop dead, and murdered him on his own altar steps. The king - according to the story at least - had himself whipped through the streets of London as a public penance. I can't wait . . .

Of course, every purchaser of the Sun and the News of the World has also rewarded Murdoch's empire with their custom. The 'customer is always right' in business. As long as someone is prepared to buy gutter journalism, gutter journalism will exist. But it's not realistic to hope the market for gutter journalism will dry up, any more than it is realistic to hope that people like Coulson, Brooks and Murdoch suddenly see the light.

So if it's too much to hope that media moguls in a competitive world will behave ethically, because it's too much to hope that their market will dry up, who will supply the ethics?

Isn't that what we have politicians and judiciary for? In fact, isn't that almost their sole function?

What we have had for the past thirty years is a political culture of hand-washing and avoidance of responsibility.

The old Tory ideology is "You can't expect the common people to know how to run a country. The best people to do that are those who already know how to run a country estate, keep the peasants employed and all that." In the 80s that culture changed and went downmarket. Now it was big businessmen who were likely to be the best at running things (except, of course, they did that so well they shifted most of our manufacturing industry to the Far East because it was more profitable). That meant the only real big businessmen left in the country were the financiers. And how the Blair government feted them! Now of course we know that the financiers weren't terribly interested in running the country either - much more interested of getting as much of their tax liability offshore as they could.

In this whole sorry mess, then, the real culpability lies with our political leaders for failing to govern - for failing to do the job we put them there to do. For failing to supply the ethics to a fundamentally unethical world of business and finance - in fact, for doing the exact opposite and transferring responsibility for governance on to them. And alongside them - and this is a tawdry story yet to fully emerge - stand the police. It seems pretty clear that investigations into phone hacking were blocked at a very senior level in the Met. And unless it was just one rogue policeman passing on phone numbers (like it was 'just one rogue journalist' Mulcaire) I expect to see heads roll at top level in the Met - a police force that's shown itself stunningly short of ethics in recent years and tried to spit out the only Commissioner who showed signs of having any.

400 years ago, bloody civil war fuelled by religious bigotry led to a separation of the power of the Church (the Rupert Murdoch of its day) from politics. Well, theoretically. Now it is time for an enforced separation of powers between politics and big business and finance. Rebekah Brooks shouldn't be allowed anywhere near the gates of Downing Street - or Cameron's dining table. All MPs - or if not that, at least Cabinet members - should automatically be required to resign from their business interests.

And David Cameron, rather than Rebekah Brooks, should be the one 'considering his position'. We need a clean sweep and a culture change at the heart of British politics.

Sharon Shoesmith

Dreadful interview by John Humphreys on R4 'Today' prog this morning. He didn't ask a single question about the inquiry into Sharon Shoesmith's dismissal as Head of Child Services (or whatever the job title was) for Haringey Borough at the command of Ed Balls. He arrogantly said "the nation wants to know who to blame" (or words to that effect). So he speaks for the nation? He certainly doesn't speak for me!

As I understood what she was trying to say - she didn't get much of a chance, and could have perhaps said it more clearly - she wasn't arguing that she shouldn't have been dismissed. (Humphreys clearly assumed she was). Only that her summary dismissal on the instructions of a politician, without a proper inquiry into the circumstances surrounding Peter Connolly's death, is unlikely to be the best way of improving the way statutory agencies deal with children at risk - and the focus absolutely has to be on learning the lessons and improving procedures. Scapegoating may make people feel better, it may sell newspapers and enable politicians to exonerate themselves but it doesn't actually enable lessons to be learned. It's not in the interest of 39,000 children at risk. In fact it may encourage a culture of secrecy and dishonesty and put them more at risk. It's irresponsible. And we are equally entitled to ask whether government has been giving the necessary resources to social services departments : it's an eye-watering caseload in many cases.

I think she's dead right, and dearly hope the appeal is lost. I have no idea as to whether she should have been dismissed, and if so on what grounds. The stupidity is that the manner of her dismissal means we will probably never know whether she should have been.

Morris as 'Sacrament without Word'

Currently preparing my sermon for tomorrow, which will be delivered wearing morris dance costume, since this year May Day is on a Sunday. I've long been fascinated (as a somewhat lapsed dancer) by a powerful ritual that has lost all contact with its original meaning - we're left with speculation. Yet there's probably more proper (that is, ritual, rather than social) morris danced in churches at Morris Ring meetings than at neo-pagan events.

Hopefully I'll get a link up to the finished article. Meanwhile, early to bed tonight to be up at 4:15. As a local councillor for the Magdalen Bridge area I have a particular interest in the policing of a very recent "tradition" : extremely drunk students jumping into the river from a height of 10m - a river that currently has only 80cm of water in it in places.