Cactus in a hostile environment: our toxic political culture

for Collinwood Road URC, July 14th 2013

25 An expert in the Law of Moses stood up and asked Jesus a question to see what he would say. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to have eternal life?”  26 Jesus answered, “What is written in the Scriptures? How do you understand them?”
27 The man replied, “The Scriptures say, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.’ They also say, ‘Love your neighbours as much as you love yourself.’”
28 Jesus said, “You have given the right answer. If you do this, you will have eternal life.”  29 But the man wanted to show that he knew what he was talking about. So he asked Jesus, “Who are my neighbours?”
30 Jesus replied:
As a man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, robbers attacked him and grabbed everything he had. They beat him up and ran off, leaving him half dead.
31 A priest happened to be going down the same road. But when he saw the man, he walked by on the other side. 32 Later a temple helper came to the same place. But when he saw the man who had been beaten up, he also went by on the other side.
33 A man from Samaria then came traveling along that road. When he saw the man, he felt sorry for him 34 and went over to him. He treated his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put him on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. 35 The next morning he gave the innkeeper two silver coins and said, “Please take care of the man. If you spend more than this on him, I will pay you when I return.”
36 Then Jesus asked, “Which one of these three people was a real neighbour to the man who was beaten up by robbers?”
37 The teacher answered, “The one who showed pity.”
Jesus said, “Go and do the same!”

(Luke 10 : 25 - 37)

The linking of these two commandments (to love God and love neighbour) is critical : one deals with the ‘internal’ aspect of religious faith — loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength — what’s going on inside you that noone can see.  The second deals with how that cashes out in the world : how someone on the path to eternal life behaves.  What faith looks like in practice.

And the question is : where is the boundary between the neighbour and the foreigner to whom you owe no obligation?  Understand this : in Jesus’s Judæa, ‘neighbour’ was understood very clearly to mean ‘fellow-citizen’, ‘fellow-countryman’.

Now we might scoff at that : “obviously, my ‘neighbour’ is every other human being in the world”.

It‘s absolutely not obvious at all.  How is it ‘obvious’?  As I look at British society at the moment what is very obvious is that there are limits to our compassion.  We are being taught it persistently and insidiously by our politicians and the media.

Two examples :

You will hear politicians regularly using the phrase “hard-working ordinary people” or suchlike.  These are the people — ordinary people like you and me (we’re meant to understand) — whom they are there to serve.  They’re on our side.

Be very wary.  What they mean is that the people they are there to serve are the ones who are working, not the ones that aren’t working.  It’s a phrase carefully designed to drive a wedge between those who have work and those who don’t.  The United Reformed Church, in conjunction with the Church of Scotland, the Methodist and Baptist Churches have publicly demanded that our leaders cease demonising and lying about (yes, they’ve used that word) unemployed people.  Because (to take just one example) the majority of unemployed people are only out of work for a few weeks — less than a fifth of unemployed people have been out of work for more than two years (and some of those have already found jobs and are waiting to start.  When unemployed figures rise, what it means is the average time it takes a person to find another job has increased, so more people are unemployed at any one time — but it’s not the same people otherwise the long-term unemployed figures would be rising, and they’re not.  They’re moving in and out of work all the time.  So we’re being invited to lose compassion for anyone who isn’t in a steady job.  Distance ourselves from those on the edge of the economy.  We’re being taught to believe that unemployed people — even though most unemployed people actually work — are not our ‘neighbours’, we have no obligation to them.  That’s what we’re being ‘groomed’ to believe.  Welfare benefits become undeserved charity.

My second example is the insidious way that a wall is being constructed between permanent UK residents and so-called ‘immigrants’, and especially ‘illegal immigrants’.  Now, like ‘unemployed’, ‘illegal immigrants’ is a slippery term.  For instance, it includes 147,000 asylum applications dating back to the early 1990s — that’s nearly 20 years in some cases — which are still stranded in the Home Office bureaucracy. The government’s own Chief Inspector reported :

Such was the inefficiency of this operation that at one point over 150 boxes of post, including correspondence from applicants, MPs and their legal representatives lay unopened in a room in Liverpool.

(Report by Independent Chief Inspector of Borders & Immigration John Vine, Nov 22, 2012)

That is the equivalent of the population of the City of Oxford unable to provide residency papers because their applications, submitted between six and twenty years ago, have not been dealt with.

‘Who is my neighbour?’

Well, it’s not those 147,000 people, that’s for sure.  It was revealed yesterday that the prime minister set up a cabinet working party called the ‘Hostile Environment Working Party’ whose job is to make life as miserable and difficult for unwanted immigrants as possible, to break up their families and drive them into destitution, and a new swathe of laws on the statute book is designed to do just this.  These people are being absolutely redefined as ‘not neighbours’ — people to whom we have no obligation whatsoever.

In fact it’s the very opposite : the obligation on employers, landlords and doctors will be to sack them, evict them and deny them medical treatment.  I’m not joking : that is exactly what the new laws will require.  And I imagine the prime minister's ‘Hostile Environment Working Party’ also has a media consultant on it to make sure that the stereotyping, demonising messages are filtered into the media.  We’re being groomed to believe this abuse is acceptable, normal, “common sense, really”.

And this new ‘them and us’ mood is catching on.  Read the comments that people post on the websites and you’ll find the spite-filled, poisonous messages you read there deeply alarming — at least, I do.  We have our own spiritual work cut out if we’re to avoid our minds being poisoned — it’s insidious.

‘Who is my neighbour?’ asks the legal expert of Jesus, to test his grasp of the law.  Maybe it was a genuine question, not a trick question.  Perhaps he genuinely wants to know how the Law of Moses defines ‘neighbour’.  Read Deuteronomy — it’s not straightforward.  The answer he gets is not what he expects.

Jesus twists it back as a question about what it means for you to be ‘neighbourly’.  And instead of generalising, he pulls it down to a story of a particular incident.

Why does he do that?

Because it’s so easy to stereotype and generalise, isn’t it?  It’s impossible — it’s downright dangerous — to generalise about unemployed people and immigrants because every story’s different, as I’ve explained.  You couldn’t have a separate law for every particular situation.  But lawyers have to generalise in order to make their laws, don’t they?  Law is a blunt instrument, and in the wrong hands becomes a ‘weapon of mass destruction’, as these new laws will.

So instead of giving a legal opinion, Jesus gives a story of particular people, and the picture he paints of the Samaritan is not the stereotype — because, after all, there is no stereotype Samaritan. He and his disciples have just passed through Samaria : they’ve been welcomed in some people’s houses, not in others. This Samaritan is a man of compassion, who understands that compassion doesn’t stop at the borders of Samaria.  Even though the man who’s been mugged might despise him (were he conscious) the Samaritan helps him anyway.  In his hour of need, and whilst not in a state to choose who will or won’t help him, the victim depends for his life on the Samaritan, while his fellow-countrymen abandon him.

So Jesus puts the lawyer (the politician — for in his day, the two were not far from being the same thing) in a situation where he must acknowledge that maybe, one day, he may desperately need help from a Samaritan — “so, my friend, be very careful before you go writing laws that drive a wedge between Samaritans and us”.

The MP who, because she was so appalled by it, leaked the information about the ‘Hostile Environment Working Party’, was not just any MP. Until recently she was government Minister for Children and Families. She will no doubt pay a high price for her ‘outing’ of what’s going on.  Unless a lot of things change quickly in our toxic political culture she is (as my Australian relatives would say) ‘cactus’.  She’s ‘cactus’ . . out on her own in a hostile environment, with noone wanting to get too close to her.

As happened, eventually, of course, to Jesus.  I wouldn’t push the parable too far.  Sarah Teather will continue to be very well paid, and though on the front benches she may be ‘cactus’, she'll find plenty of friends outside a House of Commons that’s so intent on creating a ‘hostile environment’.  Jesus’s world was very much more violent and chaotic, and the price he paid for his message of neighbourliness was total.

My task this morning, of course, is not just to deliver social comment (even if it does come straight from the Gospel reading) but to proclaim The Gospel — ‘Good News’.  The thing is, the message of this text isn’t necessarily Good News.  It offers no promise of life to those who swallow the poisonous message that we owe no obligation to people without work or to people who can’t produce the appropriate documentation to appease the gods of the Home Office.  There is no eternal life — it says — for these people, though fortunately there is always the opportunity for repentance.  ‘Repent — and believe the Good News’.

But it is ‘Good News’ to the victims of these laws — “despite what they say, you are valuable to God; you are welcome in the Christian community”.  And our response to the Gospel must be to live that welcome, and not cooperate with systems that limit our neighbourliness and replace it with legally-sanctioned abuse.

The world — the ‘hostile environment’ which our smiley Prime Minister has set up a Working Party to create — will do its worst.  Those who actually believe in loving ‘the neighbours they have from God’ (as we sang in our hymn) as they find them, in all their variety — not as the stereotypes by which others full of fear want to portray them — may find themselves unpopular with the majority.  But the love and acceptance of the outcast shown by Jesus is invincible even in death.  The resurrection means many things, but amongst them is the conviction that cactus can survive and multiply in the desert.

Statistics are taken from the Office of National Statistics latest reports.  The paper referred to is the Joint Public Issues Group's 2013 paper The Lies We Tell Ourselves : comfortable myths about poverty

A complete philosophy of religion in 1000 words

From time to time, I find myself conducting a service with a lot of people who have no church or religious background at all, and very little knowledge of Christian belief.  Rather than say creeds that are full of jargon, I try to open up the world of Christian thinking about ‘life, the Universe and everything’ in as few carefully chosen words as I can.  Here’s the most recent attempt — slightly expanded.

When we talk about ‘God’ (capital ‘G’) we are not talking about something that may or may not be real, something that may or may not ‘exist’.  Indeed, to talk about God ‘existing’ doesn't quite make sense.  God is the word we use for the reason why anything ‘exists’ at all.  God is whatever causes reality as we know it.

So to say ‘there is no God’ is either to say ‘there is no Reality’ (but that would be stupid — wouldn’t it?) or ‘Reality has no cause’ (which seems a bit weird), or ‘even if Reality did once have a cause we will never know what that was so there’s no point talking about it’.  If that works for you, fine, but me, I’m interested in what Reality’s like so I can work out how to live my life — and die my death.  It seems more likely to me that whatever was the first cause of Reality is still holding existence in being, and will be at the end of the Universe (if there is one).

One thing we can definitely say about God — if we’re to use the word properly — is that God cannot (by definition) be a product of our imaginations any more than reality is a product of our imaginations (but see footnote).  Why? Because to worship something that our minds have conjured up or imagined is what the ancients called ‘idolatry’ — worshipping something you’ve ‘made’ — and that was absolutely forbidden.  If we’re worshipping a product of our imaginations, then by definition we’re not worshipping God but something else (and the Bible suggests that’s a dangerous thing to do).

In fact, because we’re human, we can only ever worship a product of our imaginations, but we need to recognise that that’s what we’re doing and keep ourselves continually on the alert for signs of false-god-worship.  (That’s why the first Christians were persecuted for being ‘atheists’.  They wouldn’t acknowledge the Roman emperor as one of the gods, which was nonsensical to a lot of people, quite apart from being traitorous.)

I suppose you could say, though, that whatever God is like, we and all of reality are a product of God’s imagination!

The key question, then, is not whether God ‘exists’ or not.  That is a meaningless question.  It’s rather like a fish debating whether water exists.  The question is — what is God like?  What is Reality like?  Here are some possibilities :

• Is there only one Reality or many, for instance?  Is there a ‘this world’, and ‘another (spiritual or ideal) world’?  (Groups that believed that caused the early Christians a lot of trouble, and were eventually ejected from the Church).  The central affirmation shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims is, “Hear, O Israel : the Lord your God, the Lord is One”

• Is Reality basically mechanical, and only understandable in terms of physics theory? (Bear in mind that physicists are having trouble finding a single set of theories that make sense of the whole Universe).  Are human beings the only point at which the Universe has feelings, and are those feelings just meaningless processes going on in our brains?

• Is the Universe basically human-friendly or is it out to kill us unless we stop it?  Should we just accept whatever comes, or should we ‘barter’ with God, try to outmanœuvre the workings of the Universe?

• Does everything in the Universe sort of hang together in a balanced way, making sense; or is the Universe a chaos of different forces competing with each other, some horrible, some beautiful, with no overall purpose?

For most of human history, religion has probably been based on the last of these beliefs : that it’s chaos out there — that there are many competing ‘invisible forces’.  That the gods are cruel and fickle, always at war with one another and not basically interested in human beings.  And that we have to attract their attention with our rituals and buy them off with sacrifices.  (That doesn’t just apply to ancient civilisations.  The same sort of religion, for instance, is practised by those who think The Free Market  is some unchallengeable principle that must be appeased if society is to flourish — appeased with ‘human sacrifices’ if necessary.  It’s just that the language is different).

The Jews who later became known as Christians, however, had what they called a ‘gospel’ — meaning ‘Good News’ — which, they claimed, rendered this sort of religion redundant.

This Good News is there throughout the Bible, but it is revealed most clearly in the shape of a human being — Jesus of Nazareth.  Jesus’s followers came to believe that in Jesus they were seeing what God is like.  (That is to say, what the one Reality is like, deep down.)

The Good News is that ‘God is One’ and ‘God is Love’.

This doesn’t sound very ‘news’, does it?  It sounds like a statement of the obvious.  Of course ‘God is love’!

Of course?  There’s absolutely no ‘of course’ about it!  When you look at Reality, where’s the evidence?  It’s a crazy claim to make — not least by people whose holy prophet was tortured to death — and the early Christians were understandably ridiculed for it.  Reality, surely, is harsh, chaotic?  ‘Life’s a bitch, then you die’.  Better burn a pinch of incense on an altar to ward the gods off, in the hope that they’ll be nice to us — or at least leave us alone.  Where’s the evidence that ‘God is love’?

The evidence is Jesus.  That is the reason why Christians dare to claim that the deepest Reality loves us.  How it is that Jesus is ‘evidence’ is another story.

footnote : Since we can only ever experience reality in our minds I suppose you could say reality itself is ‘imaginary’.  Whilst that might keep us humble by reminding us that everything is to some extent subjective — that is, that every person experiences and interprets reality differently — I'm not sure quite how far that gets us.  It’s quite good at challenging dominating single ideologies, but its danger is that we end up imagining that only ‘objective’ science can say anything sensible about reality, which is pretty much what we’ve ended up doing.

Letter to MP on Same-Sex Marriage Bill

Having chewed through the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill yesterday, I read through the Hansard transcript of Tuesday's Parliamentary debate. The following is the letter I have written to my MP this morning as a result :

I see that you abstained at the second reading of this Bill on Tuesday. Although I am a strong supporter of the idea that same-sex couples should be able to claim the same rights and privileges as married heterosexual couples, I think I might have been tempted to do the same.

I am writing to ask for your advice and help as the Bill enters its revising phase. I don't know whom I should be writing to at this point. Is the matter now out of your hands until it returns for its third reading, or are you able to have any input to committee considerations?

Hugh Robertson, in his brief summing up at the end of the debate, asserted that

This Bill simply allows people to get married who are currently excluded from doing so purely because they are of the same sex.

If that were true, I would have little difficulty with it, but it isn't true. Schedule 4 Part 3 includes a couple of key exemptions from existing marriage law — exemptions which, to my mind, have the effect of changing the whole understanding of what marriage is (at least, for same-sex couples). I find it hard to imagine why any same-sex couples would object if this small part of the bill were struck out. I can't understand why it has been inserted in the first place.

The exemptions concern grounds for annulment and divorce on the grounds of non-consummation and adultery respectively. By removing adultery as grounds for divorce (only for same-sex couples, not heterosexual couples) the Bill is effectively an Adulterer's Charter, and undermines same-sex marriage.

Eight MPs pointed to this mysterious deficiency, but Hugh Robertson had either not heard or chose to ignore the point : Stewart Jackson, Craig Whittaker, Jim Dobbin, Nadine Dorries, Helen Goodman, Fiona Bruce, David Burrowes and Geraint Davies. Stewart Jackson quoted the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey on this point, so we can be fairly sure Schedule 4 Part 3 will get a tough scrutiny in the House of Lords. Maria Miller's reply was quite obtuse, arguing that adultery would be considered 'unreasonable behaviour' and so effectively comes under that heading.

But why should adultery be automatically regarded as 'unreasonable behaviour' as she assumes? She seemed to be making the assumption that sexual relations outside the marriage would be unreasonable — but in that case, why not say so?

There is something going on here, and my view is that what is going on is the beginning of the removal of sexual relations from the concept of marriage altogether.

I do not subscribe to the view that the primary purpose of marriage is procreation (as a number of speakers argued). I do believe, however, that marriage law is one of the key ways in which we locate (what we might better call) 'one-to-one erotic relationships' within British society. The laws of marriage provide the model for the expression of erotic relationships, steering them towards long-term, committed, loving relationships. Even if this ideal is often observed in the breach, I reckon that the vast majority of people accept that marriage (one sexual partner for life, 'forsaking all others') is the goal. We Britons may more commonly practice serial monogamy; young people may (as young people always have) feel the need to practice erotic relationships without commitment before finding a life partner; many couples choose not to formalise their marriage legally; others, through human weakness, fail to live up to the ideal, but I see little evidence of interest in polygamy or 'open marriage'. Marriage, as a sexual relationship 'forsaking all others', is clearly the model, and it is not right that LGBT people should be excluded from it. I could add the importance of marriage as providing a secure and stable environment for the raising of children. Although at one time I was a little queasy about children being raised in a same-sex household, I have come to realise that this was an incoherent position to take, given that I did not see anything intrinsically wrong with same-sex relationships per se.

One possible reason for this peculiar attempt, in Schedule 4, to remove sex itself from marriage is that the drafters of the Bill failed to recognise the nature and importance of erotic love in human relationships. The debate seemed to veer between (on the one hand) sex as leading to childbirth and (one the other) loving and caring for your partner. But one-to-one erotic behaviour is enormously important to human beings. In order to avoid a lot of confusion, misunderstanding and hurt (in people's lives, but also in the divorce courts) it needs to be located in a widely-understood social and legal framework, and the vast majority would agree that marriage is that model framework — even if not all choose to formalise it for themselves, and even if not all agree that same-sex couples belong in that framework (as I do).

I append a short paper about the blessings and dangers of one-to-one erotic behaviour, describing why it should be located within a social structure of committed loving relationships 'forsaking all others' (this being an edited-down version of yesterday's blog).

Despite the worthy sentiments from many speakers avowing their desire to affirm loving — and implicitly, sexual — same-sex relationships, that is precisely what the Bill doesn't do! I wish it did, so that it was affirming the erotic component of same-sex relationships and not pretending they're not there. It is simply done, by striking out Schedule 4 Part 3, and I can see no earthly reason why that should not be done during the revising phase. How can I best lobby for this to happen?

An Adulterer's Charter?

I've just (very belatedly) read through the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill to see what it does and doesn't say. I've had a bit of a surprise, and have come to the belated conclusion that it has one fundamental flaw : it is an adulterer's charter.

The heart of it, of course, is that it defines the legal contract of 'marriage' in existing legislation to include couples of the same sex. Most of it is then taken up with tidying up possible areas of confusion around pension entitlements, around arrangements for contracting same-sex marriages overseas (e.g. whilst on service with the armed forces or in British consulates). It sets down in which buildings, and under what conditions, same-sex marriages can be registered — it excludes the Church of England and does not impose a requirement that religious organisations should conduct such marriages against their wishes.

[What is different about the C of E is that it is a state church and therefore, unlike other churches, cannot refuse to marry any couple so long as one of them lives in the parish. Without this clause, the local vicar would be obliged to marry same-sex couples. It might have been possible to create legislation that got round this difficulty, but whilst the C of E is established, it would be difficult.]

It includes a useful and long-overdue section that tidies up a gap in existing law concerning married people who undergo an officially-recognised sex change. Under existing law, if they were to remain married to their partner they have to go through an annulment and then re-recognition (presumably as civil partners).

The law is — or at least was until this Bill — clear that marriage is an exclusive relationship in a sexual sense. It's fine for me, as a married person, to have a close relationship with someone other than my partner, but if I have sex with them I have crossed a line and opened myself up to breach of the marriage contract. Having sexual relations outside a marriage relationship is — or was until this Bill — grounds for divorce. But for some reason I don't understand, it would not be grounds for divorce in a same-sex marriage.

I'm sure that, back in the past, this prohibition of adultery was all connected with the importance of knowing whose children were whose — which children were entitled to maintenance by whom and whose estate they were entitled to inherit. You couldn't allow married people to go off and produce children outside the marriage without taking full responsibility for the consequences, and certainly not if it was done without the full consent — or even knowledge — of their partner. It would represent a massive breach of trust, and be a recipe for social chaos in which the most vulnerable — the children — stood to suffer most. The law is weighted such that if a married woman has a baby the legal presumption is that it is a child of the marriage, and the husband therefore has a duty of care towards it. In an era when men were seen as the 'breadwinners' I guess that makes sense for the protection of the child — but of course it creates a sense of the married woman being her husband's 'possession', to be jealously guarded.

In these days of easy contraception the risks of illegitimate children are much less, of course, and the State has let irresponsible parents (usually fathers) off the hook by providing some support for the upkeep of the child of an unmarried mother through the benefit system.

According to this Bill, if a partner in a same-sex marriage commits adultery with a member of the opposite sex it is still grounds for divorce, but not if they take up a sexual relationship with someone of the same sex. It seems odd to me for same-sex marriages to be given this exemption. Where's the equality here? Surely marriage, whether same-sex or not, is (in terms of erotic one-to-one behaviour) "to the exclusion of all others". Why should the taking of erotic pleasure in a one-to-one relationship with someone outside the married relationship without the knowledge or permission of the married partner not be considered an equal breach of trust, and grounds for legal complaint?

The fact that two people of the same sex cannot between them conceive a child is not deemed to prevent them being married. I agree with that, and support same-sex marriage, because the purpose of erotic behaviour is not only for conceiving children. So why should an adulterous same-sex relationship (that equally cannot produce children) not be considered a breach of that marriage contract?

If a same-sex marriage is not exclusive in terms of sexual behaviour, in what sense is it a marriage? There is an inconsistency here. In this sense, the Bill does represent a 'watering-down' of marriage, even an undermining of it, because it is saying that a supposedly equal same-sex marriage is not required to 'exclude all others' in a sexual sense. If it denies a wronged partner redress in the courts, it's a legalisation of adultery, surely?

My argument is not from tradition, custom or culture. It is rooted in an understanding of the place of erotic love in human nature and human society, particularly from a Christian perspective. One of my primary reasons for supporting same-sex marriage — indeed, for believing that it is long overdue — is that I believe 'one-to-one erotic behaviour' is best expressed, and for the sake of a healthy society should be confined to, married relationships 'to the exclusion of all others'. Even if many people choose to form exclusive one-to-one sexual relationships without making a formal legal commitment, and if many people fail to live up to the ideal, the legal definition of marriage as being 'to the exclusion of all others' is still generally understood as the model. And since it clearly doesn't mean 'not having any relationships of any sort with anyone else', it clearly means 'exclusive sexual relationship'. In Britain we may go in for serial monogamy, but we generally frown on polygamy. I agree that marriage is not intrinsically heterosexual and that it is not exclusively about procreation, and I imagined that it is because they resented being excluded from this committed, sexually exclusive partnership model — marriage — that many gay and lesbian couples want to see this Bill succeed.

But I do believe that sexual relations are at the heart of the marriage model. They're being short-changed -- we all are. Marriage (whether homo- or hetereosexual) is the best model because of the nature of erotic love.

The purest form of love — what the Christians call 'agape' love — is totally selfless. Its only concern is the welfare of the other. At its extreme, it is 'love your enemies'. If it is done for selfish reasons it ceases to be 'pure love' in this sense.

Erotic love, however, is a different sort of love — although it does not exclude agape love (as some suggest). In fact, the two go very well together. Unlike 'agape' love, the giving of erotic pleasure typically involves the receiving of it, too. One-to-one erotic behaviour can therefore be a very powerful way of strengthening the bond between two people. In Christian terms I would argue that this, rather than the making of babies, is its primary purpose. The fact that erotic behaviour produces a personal erotic 'reward' is one of its great blessings, because it gives people who might otherwise (in the busyness of life) drift apart a motive to get 'up front and personal' and renew their relationship erotically. The sex drive can drive us together — it is a bonding drive.

The Bill, however, doesn't afford it any value or relevance -- it strikes out 'non-consummation' as grounds for annulment. This, and the exemption for same-sex adultery cuts directly across this purpose of marriage (see Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill -- Schedule 4 Part 3, 'Divorce').

By constraining erotic urges within an exclusive committed relationship, the marriage model of relationship 'channels' sexual energy to hold couples together. By saying officially that the expression of that bonding drive outside the partnership need be no impediment to the relationship, the Bill is effectively saying that marriage has nothing to do with sexual relations at all. To be consistent, the Marriage Act needs to be amended to remove adultery or non-consummation as grounds for divorce/annulment in heterosexual marriages too, thereby separating legal partnerships from sexual behaviour altogether. Only then will it be 'Equal Love' — but will it be 'love' of the sort most people think this debate is about? Will it be 'marriage' as most people — including those (like me) who support same-sex marriage — understand it?

The fact that one-to-one erotic behaviour produces a personal erotic 'reward' is also its danger, of course. It can so easily become a selfish act. In its most distorted form it becomes the using of another person for sexual purposes. If one of the purposes of marriage is to channel people's sexual urges into forging enduring partnerships that can form strong building blocks for society, then the complementary purpose is that of protecting society from the dangers of abusive (that is, purely selfish and exploitative) sexual behaviour. I would say that indulging in sexual behaviour outside of a committed relationship (without the partner's knowledge or agreement) is at the least selfish behaviour, in breach of trust. To exempt partners in a same-sex marriage from this constraint is effectively to say 'it was never a marriage in the first place'.

As I have said, the actual erotic preferences of the couples involved are completely irrelevant to this. Society's laws only need to reach into that private domain where the protection of individuals (other partner or children) from abuse by one of the partners has become an issue.

So the Bill is effectively an adulterer's charter for some, and if it were consistent it would be an adulterer's charter for all. It effectively 'desexualises' marriage. It deals with the same-sex issue by running away from it. I didn't realise this, and I'm sure most people don't. Far from affirming the sexual nature of same-sex relationships, it denies the significance of erotic behaviour in human relationships altogether as irrelevant. That is a recipe for a lot of confusion, misunderstanding and hurt. It would be quite simple to correct this fundamental flaw : just remove the same-sex adultery exemption (Schedule 4, Part 3, 'Divorce'). Then we might have 'Equal Love'.

Richard III & living DNA

a reflection (for our little Lunch Club communion service) on last night's TV documentary about the excavation of the remains of English King Richard 3rd.

The scene : a light table in a forensic laboratory. A reconstructed skeleton, recently excavated from an archæological dig in a car park, is laid out on the table. Various archæology and medical experts are grouped around the table, their faces lit from below by the light from the light table.

Also at the table is a TV presenter and a woman who's devoted a lot of her adult life to the cause of restoring the reputation of the English king, Richard 3rd. She really, really wants this to be the skeleton of the king — the last English king to die in battle, the last of the Plantagenets. In fact, in her heart she's already decided it is. Intuitively, she's known it is from the moment she first saw it in the dig, and insisted on the bones being moved from the site wrapped in King Richard's flag. To her, this is not just a collection of bones, but a person. But believing in her heart that this is Richard 3rd doesn't make it so.

One thing that disturbs her is that the skeleton very clearly has a severe spinal deformity. Richard 3rd was famously, according to historical legend, a hunchback — but she's spent years arguing that this was malicious propaganda put about by the Tudors . . . history is written by the victors of wars, and unless Henry Tudor could blacken Richard's reputation his own claim to the throne was dodgy. Shakespeare famously recycled the idea, yet what a coincidence that a skeleton with a spinal deformity should be found right in the place where Richard's body might be found.

Bit by bit, the story is pieced together with the evidence. The forensic pathologists are able to describe in great detail not only how the owner of this skeleton died in battle — but also how his body was dragged from the battlefield afterwards. And it all matches the historical accounts. There's a carbon dating match, then a DNA match with a known living descendant. Eventually, an expert reconstruction of the man's face is produced, and we're looking at him. The woman's intuition and rather desperate faith is vindicated, and she is overjoyed. But she has to come to terms with the fact that King Richard did in fact have a spinal deformity. So it wasn't all lies.

"Dead men tell no tales", says Long John Silver in Treasure Island. No longer true, quite.

Reflecting on the programme, I thought of us today, gathered around a table. Not a light table in a forensic laboratory with a TV crew, but an ordinary table here. And on the table, reminders of a man's death. Not his skeleton, of course. Our intuition tells us that there is something special here. Expectation is high. We very much want to believe that this is the body and blood of Jesus, and to feel that we are in his real presence. But the forensic evidence isn't promising. If we were to examine what we have here, what we would find is bread and non-alcoholic wine, not human DNA.

Except that there's something here that ties us to Jesus much more than the skeleton bones tie us to the real Richard 3rd. After all, the bones don't answer most of the questions that really matter. They don't tell us much more about the man.

By contrast, when we gather around this table we perform a ritual and say words that Jesus himself, on the night in which he was betrayed, asked us to do and say as a way of remembering how he was to die, and the meaning of his death, and as a way of describing everything that he was about. Not 548 years ago, but nearly 2,000 years ago. This breaking of bread and drinking of wine is an echo of the ancient Jewish ritual of the Passover and speaks volumes about how Jesus understood his mission. The more we understand the significance of this little ritual the closer we are to Jesus. We really are in his presence — it's as if he were speaking to us. "Do this". If anything, we're even more in his presence than if what we had here were his skeletal remains.

"Dead men tell no tales"? This one does. This dead man was raised from the dead and still speaks — through this ritual, and through the scriptures that teach us what this ritual means. If we want to know more about Jesus, we don't need carbon dating and DNA tests on his bones; we need to immerse ourselves in the Old Testament which was his Bible, in the New Testament passages that record his actions and teachings, and in the New Testament passages that reflect on those, and help us to understand what he is saying to us now.

Those people gathered around the light table in the forensic laboratory made good TV, and it was quite exciting wondering whether what they had on the table was the remains of a long-dead king. But actually, what we're doing here ought to feel more exciting still, as we find ourselves in the presence of a living king who still speaks a word to each of us : a word of challenge, a word of comfort, a word of hope. And as we take those to heart, and walk in his way, we share his living DNA. We become the Body of Christ.

'A Casual Vacancy' (J.K.Rowling)

I read only about two novels a year - mainly because I have to read them in one stretch. I can't put a novel down until it's finished, so have to go for it when I've got a gap in the schedule. I decided some time ago that J.K.Rowling's first 'post-Potter' book would be one of them. Partly out of curiosity : I've never read any of the Potter books or seen any of the films, and was curious to know how good a writer she really is. She's sounded interesting when interviewed, and has had some tough life experience before hitting the jackpot with Harry Potter. And it's about local politics - a world I've become much involved in in recent years.

I think it's the best novel I've read in many years. It's certainly up there with the Ian McEwans I've read, of which 'Atonement' was the most powerful. Well-written and very well observed. It struck me how much better writing can be than film. To read an account of a dinner party here, with all the underlying tensions, character flaws and intrigues going on between the participants -- even with truly great actors, you couldn't get a quarter of it into a film.

The 'canvas' is that of a complacent, pretty, rural small town whose parish council contains within its borders a sink estate of the neighbouring large town. An opportunity has arisen for a boundary change - one important issue over which the parish council might actually have some power - and battle lines have been drawn up between those who want to lose the sink estate and/or close its drug rehab clinic, and those who feel a real responsibility to those who live on that estate. A key advocate for that estate (who grew up on it, then 'made good') - dies suddenly, giving rise to a casual vacancy of more-than-usual significance. In fact, he is pretty much irreplaceable. On this contextual stage, a fascinating range of actors play out their parts. Families with hidden dysfunctions - domestic abuse, mental illness, addiction, 'forbidden loves' and in some cases sheer grinding poverty. It has to be said (and I dare say this reflects J.K.Rowling's own experience) - all the men in the book come out as pretty dreadful creatures with the exception of the late-lamented cause of the 'casual vacancy'. Not that the women are presented as angels. The teenagers, who play a key role in the story, are particularly well-observed.

It's a very down-to-earth story to say the least. Rowling pulls no punches. As the story unfolds, it unfolds the reader's prejudice and (without giving too much away) leads to the recognition of some unlikely (albeit flawed) heroes. Hollywood it is not. Unlike a typical Hollywood story, this one is actually credible. A week later, I find myself remembering bits of it and realising their significance -- it's a thought-provoking book. There is a little spiritual message secreted within it which pops its head up a couple of times in passing. It's expressed in a quote from a Sikh guru, but it could equally be expressed as the Quaker challenge to "look for the light of God in every person". Ultimately, I think this is what J.K.Rowling wants us to do. The book could be read as a cynical observation on human nature, but actually it's a challenge to 'look deeper'.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown loses the plot.

There was a most bizarre piece in last weekend's Independent. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown meets a compassionless right-wing woman at a party and concludes

The only lesson learnt from the Nativity story (and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol too) is that presents must be given and received, stuff none of us needs or even wants. Three wise men gave to Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh. So now we all must buy, buy, buy. Bearded Brad Pitt selling us Chanel perfume is our own wise man; and the Tiffany boxes that will be opened tomorrow are Christian offerings.

What a stain all this is upon that great faith and its beginnings. Christianity is dying not only because people would rather shop than go to church on Sundays, but because it is not longer true to itself and has sold its soul to capitalism.

So, let's get this right .... people shopping rather than going to church on Sundays -- presumably these would not be Christian people, then -- means that "Christianity" has sold out? She then compares her imagined compassionless consumer-fest of the modern secular Christmas unfavourably with the original Christmas story in the New Testament, as I would guess the great majority of Christian preachers were tempted to do and many probably did in one form or another (in fact, as I did -- see previous post 'A Tale of Two Stories') and concludes that 'Christianity' has rejected its own story in favour of a narrative that despises the poor and blames them for their own misfortune. And all of this with no evidence whatsoever.

The only way I can make any sense out of it at all is if she is equating the prevailing culture of this country with 'Christianity' (in other words, this is a 'Christian nation'). Are there any Brits still around that believe that Great Britain is the model of a Christian nation? I think she's confusing us with the United States of America.