Exams

 

Most Fridays I go for a 10K run with friends, although, post- having Covid, it will take me a while to get back to that level of fitness. And there is a clear ritual to the process. Each week, a map of the proposed route is posted on Facebook. At some point in the course of every run, Brian says, When I said that [previous hill] was the last hill, I had forgotten about this one ... and I always respond, To be fair, the route is always flat on the map ...

Maps are incredibly helpful but limited. A road atlas doesn’t show the topography, or let you know where there are roadworks or traffic jams. Maps need additional information, and interpretation.

We can think of exams as maps. They tell us something, and they certainly aren’t a waste of everyone’s time, but there is plenty they don’t tell us. A pupil’s exam results don’t tell us the road they travelled to get there, the additional challenges they faced and had to overcome. We can locate where someone is on the map, but it is possible that one child got there climbing a steep ascent, while another child got to the same location, from another starting point, by way of a flat route or even a free-wheeling downhill section. Exam results can never be truly comparative. But, taken with other information, they can be helpful in making decisions about where to go from here.

The past few years have been incredibly challenging for our youngest son, Elijah, not primarily to do with the pandemic. But he has achieved an amazing set of GCSE results, and we are proud of and delighted for him.

 

Strength

 

Mr Putin is amassing invasion-ready troops on the border with Ukraine—and simultaneously accusing the US administration of provoking a war as a pretext to impose economic sanctions against Russia.

This is classic bully behaviour: reframing the story, when they are stood up to, the bully insisting that they are the one being bullied. The narcissist, on being held to account, crying, ‘I am the victim of a witch-hunt against me!’

Politics (in the widest sense) is about power: including the power to do good; and—with the best of intentions—to cause unintended harm. And power is easily abused. Therefore, (well-intentioned, most often Left) political solutions to the problem of bullying produce systems that are susceptible for co-option by the bullies themselves. The very structures put in place to protect the vulnerable end up creating cover for the Übermensch.

I am currently enjoying watching the tv series Superman & Lois with my wife and our teenage son. In the pilot episode, Clark Kent, his wife Lois Lane, and their teenage sons Jonathan and Jordan Kent move from Metropolis to Smallville, the backwater Kentucky town where Clark grew up. Smallville needs them; but Clark and Lois recognise, their family needs Smallville as much as (perhaps more than) Smallville needs them. This family needs Smallville, and something that is found in Smallville, but that Metropolis lacks.

Superman and Clark Kent are not so much alter-egos as the same person in different spheres. Superman is saving the world; Clark is trying to be a father to teenagers.

One sphere is concerned with power—and, yes, how to exercise self-control, and build (or lose) trust, and be accountable, all of which a father needs to pass on to his sons, for the political sphere is a sphere of all our lives.

The other is concerned with covenant. With commitment to the common good of a group of people who have much that is not shared in common. People with different personalities, facing different challenges, having different values and aspirations, coming to different conclusions as to the best way forward—yet committed to one another.

Smallville has endured some hard times, but here there is still a civil society based not on power or expediency but on neighbourliness and free association. It is at risk, cannot be taken for granted; but, nonetheless, it is still there, in the fabric of the place.

If we hope to be the kind of society where bullying does not flourish, we won’t get there by legislation, which is not to say that legislation does not have its place, but that it has is limits. We will need a very different vocabulary, a different playbook. We will need to learn to be curious, to ask questions for clarification, to suggest ways forward held lightly and open to counter-suggestions, to negotiate compromises, to take time-out, forgive, ask for forgiveness, seek to bless, prefer others over our own interests. In such ways we build resilience and healthy esteem for ourselves and for others.

There is a strength to power. But there is a greater strength to vulnerability.

 

Corresponding warriors

 

On Saturday, Jo, Elijah and I watched Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). Afterward, Elijah and I had a conversation about the rebooting (or journey of redemption?) of a character whose history is mired in racial stereotyping, to a place where a new cinema storyline creates space for no less than four female characters—brought to life by the brilliant Awkwafina, Meng’er Zhang, Fala Chen, and Michelle Yeoh—as absolute equals to any male characters.

These four Chinese-heritage women, along with others in supporting roles, entirely align with another ancient cultural understanding of the place and role of women, the biblical term ezer enkendu, or woman as ‘corresponding warrior’ who comes to fight alongside, and rescue, the male counterpart. Again and again, across two generations and both sides of a family line, women in this film enable their men—husband, son, nephew, friend—to discover and draw out his truest nature, and to set aside false projections of what it means to be a man, or indeed a failure as a man, including a protracted child-man state.

The film includes the lasting trauma inflicted when a gang of men kill the wife and mother played by Fala Chen, and the choices her husband and children, a son and a daughter, make in response to their trauma.

After Saturday comes Sunday, and at our service of Choral Evensong we read out another, longer list of women’s names: 108 women (plus the two very young daughters of one of them) who have been the victims of domestic femicide in our country in the past year. Women killed by their male partners or ex-partners, or family members.

Women are corresponding warriors. And sometimes they need to stand shoulder to shoulder with one another, and alongside male allies, to fight, in a way that is deeply, viscerally physical while at the same time non-violent, for justice, for transformation, for a redemptive story. Because not every woman has a peaceful end, not every woman gets to liberate a man—whether sexual partner, or father, brother, son—who is willing to make himself vulnerable to love’s transforming work.

We name them, in public and before God, looking to the day when we can fall silent because there are no names to offer up from the previous twelve months. We name them, in hope of the possibility of a new story.

 

Shame and glory

Today was my son Noah’s last day at Sixth Form College. Noah’s cohort have had such a disrupted A-level experience. It has not been what they, or their teachers, would have wished. And it is hard enough to deal with disappointment as an adult, let alone as a seventeen-, eighteen-year-old whose pre-frontal cortex is essentially undergoing something akin to the hidden transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly.

Undoubtedly, Noah and his peers have not always handled these past two years as they might, had they been thirty-five; and so, on top of the disappointment, and often anger, they have experienced a great deal of shame, of being wrong or a failure or a disappointment to others, to their parents and teachers. Shame that, unaddressed, overshadows their hope for a meaningful future.

The antidote to shame is glory. Not the tawdry bling of making a name for yourself, but a personal share in God’s glory. For the glory set before him, Jesus scorned the shame of the cross, of the humiliation of public execution. That glory was you, and me, having a share in God’s glory, as those lovingly fashioned by God from clay (malleable, like a teenage brain) and entrusted with a share of the life-breath of God’s own utterly free Spirit—literally, inspired by God—and invited into reconciled relationship with God, through Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Drawn into mystery, and adventure; into disruption and uncertainty, yes, but a redeemed and creative, life-generating, disruptive grace, and faithful journeying through life.

I see the glory of God in my son, and in his peers, in their teachers who have given their all and done their best for their students in challenging circumstances. Just as love casts out fear, so glory overthrows shame. The academic year is over, though teachers must still deliberate their assessments and students await their grades. But for now, rest in peace, and rise in glory.

Readiness

A week today, our daughter begins at Oxford University. And people keep asking me how I feel about this.

Well, I feel proud of her, of how far she has already come. And I feel God’s pleasure, as a parent; for God gave her wings, and we have not fashioned a gold chain to keep her from flying. But I don’t think that is what the question is getting at. I think people are asking, how does her leaving home affect me?

And I do not know, yet.

My primal distrust of the sea, and dyspraxic issues with balance, mean that surfing will only ever serve me as a metaphor, and not recreation. But I find myself far out in the bay, bobbing on my board, waiting, waiting, for the wave. I have no idea how far it will carry me, before unceremoniously dumping me into its disorienting underbelly. But, for now, I wait, far removed from the well-meaning questioners on the shore.

Slowing my breathing, sharpening my senses.

In liminal space.

And on the horizon, the curl of a wave rises towards me.

Happy Christmas!

Amsterdam

End of an Era

From today, we no longer have any children in primary school.

And breathe…

Confirmation

Bishop Paul confirmed Jo, Susannah, and Noah at the Minster.

Alan Ward came up from Sheffield, representing Susannah and Noah’s godparents.

Leavers' Prom

Summertime

15

ND13 and BB8