Drama

It struck me today that one of the things that I do that simply isn't reflected in my blogging is watch a lot of television drama. I love the small screen. Why? Well, I love stories; and the big screen simply doesn't tell stories very well: it tends to hide weak characterisation and plot behind big visual impact. Two hours isn't long enough to develop a story - even trilogies tend to attempt to go one better than the film before on impact more often than attempt to take us on a journey. Eight or ten 50-minute episodes allows a story to be told (and the BBCs The Hour shows that you can have amazing attention to visual impact through colour, rather than big budget set piece special effects). I like story-telling; but I don't read very well - reading takes such an effort for me (a consequence of dyspraxia and dyslexia) that I very rarely get more than two-thirds of the way through a novel, however engaging I find it. So I watch a lot of TV drama.

Earlier this year, we watched Broadchurch (ITV). Seaside town is rocked by the death, in suspicious circumstances, of a young boy. As a Whodunnit it didn't work: the identity of the person responsible was telegraphed by the refusal of the investigating officer to believe that anyone could be unaware if someone close to them was a killer. But then, I would suggest that Broadchurch was not a Whodunnit, but an exploration of what such an event does to a community. And as such, it was excellent. At first, the town turns on itself: everyone is a suspect; everyone has secrets, and, as those secrets are dragged into the public glare, more than one person who had moved to the town to rebuild their life after some sorrow or other finds their life made unbearable once more.

In Broadchurch, everyone is a complex character. And yet the script-writers do something very interesting: every character is likeable. Not in a too-good-to-be-true way, but in a people-are-both-flawed-and-yet-still-likeable way. This is a truth we need to be reminded of, when tempted to dislike our neighbours.

The town goes on a journey, from turning against itself to coming together, in order to rebuild their lives. Interestingly - unusually in fiction, though an accurate observation of real events - the vicar and the church building plays a central role in this process, despite the vicar's own struggles as an alcoholic in recovery, despite the suspicion with which clerics are tarred in relation to young boys, despite the irrelevance of the church for many most of the time.

A second series has been commissioned. It will be interesting to see where the story goes.

More recently we have watched The Fall (BBC). Sexually predatory female police officer heads up the hunt for sexually predatory male serial killer. In many ways, each is the mirror of the other. Both see themselves as outside, and above, 'herd' morality. As such, neither is as interesting as they believe themselves to be. Nor as unique, for it turns out that moral ambivalence runs through everyone. When we write our own rules, it turns out that we have no originality in us.

Whereas in Broadchurch every character is in some sense likeable, in The Fall there is not one likeable character in the entire cast. And this, too, is a very honest portrayal of people: a great many of whom are quite unlikable, if how we feel about others, and behave ourselves, is any guide. Honest, but without any sense of hope.

I don't believe that the Church has a monopoly on hope, and I certainly wouldn't want the church portrayed as the place of hope in every drama, but hope is necessary. It must be found somewhere: and it must be found somewhere outside of ourselves; must be found and cherished with others.

A second series has been commissioned. While I suspect awards will be won, I'm not sure I can be bothered to keep watching.

Clothes : House

"For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs."

I am reflecting on the Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, Luke 8:26-39, and the Epistle paired with it, Galatians 3:23-29. Both passages are concerned with wearing clothes, and living in a house.

Clothing has always been about more than a practical covering. Clothing has a key role to play in our cultural identity, symbolizing our connections with others. Different societies, and different layers of society, have come up with their own clothing solutions, as a means of reminding us, and informing others, of our place - of where and how we fit in to the Bigger Picture. Clothes might denote social status, profession, family ties, affiliations - or the overlaps of two or more of these.

In the Greco-Roman world, there was not the sheer diversity of clothing that advances in technology down the ages has made available to us. The main factor distinguishing different groups was the quality of the raw material used, as indicator of social status. But men, regardless of wealth, would ordinarily wear a knee-length woolen tunic under a woolen cloak. In Jewish culture, clothing was part of the marriage contract: wives were required to provide the family with clothes (made in the home); husbands were required to provide their wives with the the raw material to do so.

Like clothes, houses are not simply practical means of protection against the elements: the ways in which we go about solving that problem speaks volumes about our cultural values and connections to others. In Jesus' world, houses were typically one- or two-room homes built around a shared central courtyard. People lived in extended family groups - and those extended families worked together as well as lived together. So, for example, Jesus' home would have been an extended family of builders, or stone masons, possibly living next to other families of builders - until he was rejected by that community (for pointing out that God's concern extends beyond his chosen people and the land he had given them) and found inclusion within an extended family of fishermen instead (see Luke 4).

So when we read about Jesus, having gone beyond the border of the Land, being met by a man who for a long time had not worn clothes or lived in a house, we are hearing a story about one man who has been rejected by his family meeting another man who has been rejected by his family. And this man - unlike Jesus' own people, his own family - recognizes who Jesus is.

But the man is worried that Jesus, also, will reject him. Worse: that he will hold out the hope of freedom, only to dash it once more. And in a sense, Jesus will reject him (which raises another issue: what do we do when Jesus says, "No!"?).

This man's situation is contained: he cannot be restrained, but he can be managed; he lives among the dead, where no one else will go, for fear of the spirits of the dead. (Only after the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Empire did the departed come to be seen as friends; only then did cemeteries come to be located first within cities and in time gathered around church buildings.) Here is contained fear: Jesus' actions, defying the containment, result in unconstrained fear - first among the unclean spirits, then among the citizens when they find the man 'clothed and in his right mind.'

Not for the first time, Jesus is not welcome. The man who did welcome him begs to be allowed to depart with him; and Jesus refuses. Jesus rejects him. Why? Because Jesus did not cross the Lake to extract the man from his community, but to restore him to his community; more than that, to reunite a divided community, to restore the community. The man has been clothed - someone (Jesus?) has surrendered their outer garment, their cloak, to cover his nakedness (or lack of outer garment). Now he must go home. Now he must return to the extended family, the network of workplace relationships, that had been unable to cope, and take up his part within the family - telling everyone who he will come into contact with through that household what God had done in restoring them to one another.

In his letter to the believers in Galatia, Paul picks up the same language, of being 'clothed in Christ' and of being sons and heirs - that is, members of a household - to express the restoration of a divided community, whether divided along lines of ethnicity, social status, or gender...

We are never brought into a private relationship with God, a personal religion; but, rather, into a community that serves one another and the wider community; a community that has a story to tell of what God has done for them.

The question is, is such an (offensive) act of God too frightening to welcome? Are we more comfortable settling for the compromise of contained fear? Or, where are we happy to welcome such restoration, and who do we wish to keep at arms' length?

Health Warning: to pursue the restoration of a divided community might result in your being rejected by your own...

Crossing Cultures

People connect with other people, in groups of different sizes, each with its own particular strengths, and weaknesses.

There is public connecting to others. We do this, typically, as part of a large group sharing a particular interest-based experience: going to a concert, or watching a sporting event. We experience being part of something bigger than ourselves. Though most of those present are not principally involved – not performing in the band or orchestra, not playing in the team – they are, nonetheless, an integral part of what is going on. Typically, we stand, or sit, side-by-side; and do not expect to have a conversation with those around us. And we don’t do this weekly: even if you are a season-ticket holder for a team or concert hall, and you attend every event (which you probably don’t), it takes up certain times of the year.

Christians connect publically, in worship services where most of those present are not performing, but are, nonetheless, an integral part of what is going on. But we ‘aim for’ weekly attendance (they weren’t here: do you think they are ill?); and we (good Anglicans, at least) throw in an awkward Sharing the Peace moment.

There is social connecting to others. We do this, typically, in recreational ‘third places’ – co-workers in the bar for Happy Hour; children in the park after school. Here, movement and interaction are fluid, as we encounter people and make first-impression decisions on whether we want to get to know them better, or not. It is a smaller crowd than our public belongings, and involves a certain degree of conversation.

Churches tend not to connect socially so much. Where they do, they typically do so over fairly rigidly brokered terms, such as the Summer Fair – they don’t tend to be fluid – and churches tend to be so focused on their own programmes that they don’t get involved in the social connections going on in the neighbourhood around them...

There is personal belonging to others. We do this, typically, with friends, people we have some degree of shared – and growing – history with. They could be people we went to university with; they could be neighbours. We tend to get together as and when we can. In a highly mobile society, we might now live a long way apart and not see each other face-to-face particularly often. Getting together is precious; we might go away on holiday together; we probably keep in touch through social media. When we do get together, it is relaxed: there is no set agenda. Some of us might go off and do one thing, while others do something else; or, some of us might end up in the kitchen, while others end up in the garden. We probably don’t meet up in one another’s homes as much as in the park or at the beach. We talk about...anything and everything: what is going on in the news, what we are up to...

Churches are big on personal connecting. We typically do that in small groups that meet - a weekly diary appointment, a scheduled business meeting - in the home of a regular host, and sit in a room doing a Bible study.

There is intimate belonging to others. That is, friendships where we can – and do – share our secret hopes and fears, the things we need someone to know but wouldn’t want most people to know. This might be a sexual partner, or a parent, or sibling, or a longstanding friend or very small and tight circle of friends. Typically these friendships have grown over a length of time; they have not been engineered by anyone not in the group.

Churches are not as big on intimate connecting as they are on personal and public connecting. Some fear the very idea. Some put people in such positions, and hope it will work out.

What is interesting is this. People connect with other people publically, socially, personally, and intimately. This goes on around us, and may go on within our church. But the form such connections take in Christian circles is typically very different from the form they take in the culture around us. For ‘very different,’ read ‘totally alien.’

I watched an insightful talk on the Verge Network website recently, in which Todd Engstrom asked, If a missionary is someone who leaves their familiar culture in order to take the gospel to people who don’t know Jesus – people who have no hope of salvation, who aren’t empowered and sent by the Holy Spirit – then why, in seeking to bring those people into our cultural forms, are we expecting them to do the work of being a missionary, not us?

Barnabas

Today is the feast of Barnabas. ‘Barnabas’ (‘Son of Encouragement’) was a nickname (his given name was Joseph) (in the same way that ‘Peter’ – ‘Rocky’ – was a nickname given to Simon). He was one of the first members of the church to endorse Saul (who became Paul), and the two of them became co-conspirators in the gospel. Sent as representatives of the church in Antioch to the church in Jerusalem, they returned to Antioch with John Mark (who may have been a relative of Barnabas). Together, they set off from there on a journey to Cyprus (where Barnabas came from) and on into what is today southern central Turkey; but after Cyprus, Mark left, returning to Jerusalem. Some time later, having returned from their trip and reported back to the church in Antioch and in Jerusalem, Paul felt it right to go back and visit the new churches in Turkey, to encourage them. Barnabas wanted to take John Mark, but Paul did not think that it was wise to do so, because he had deserted them before. Paul and Barnabas, longstanding close friends and co-conspirators, disagreed so sharply that they parted company. As far as we know, they were never reconciled; though Paul and John Mark were, in time.

This morning I was having breakfast with several other church leaders, and at the other end of the table I overheard animated discussion about these events. Paul, the consensus affirmed, was obviously a difficult character to work with; prone to angry over-reaction. Barnabas was clearly the better role model...

I am not convinced. My reading is that Paul and Barnabas were both concerned for John Mark. There is no need to air-brush out their disagreement in order for this to be so. We are told that Paul did not think it wise to take him – and wisdom is not the same as pique. Wisdom might recognise that courage can only fail so many times before a young person’s spirit is crushed. Mark had run away – twice already, if we accept the tradition that the young man who was present at Jesus’ arrest and ran away was Mark; a story, if the tradition is right, Paul may well have known about his sometime travelling companion. If he had not yet faced up to this and worked it through – again, Paul would be in a place to judge this – running away a third time could well prove unrecoverable. Is it not, perhaps, Paul’s judgement that John Mark is not ready?

Unable to go where he had planned with Barnabas, Paul – compelled to carry the gospel – headed elsewhere with another co-conspirator, Silas. Barnabas took Mark; but he, too, doesn’t go on the full journey Paul had proposed.

Barnabas takes Mark to Cyprus.

Why?

Cyprus was where their cut-short journey had begun. From Cyprus, Mark could have looked out at the horizon, towards the place of his failure, day-after-day, until he was ready to face his fears. And ultimately the way we move beyond our place of failure, our moment of desertion, is to be led back to that painful moment by Jesus and in those surroundings be restored and re-commissioned. But only Jesus can do that, and he does not have to take us back to the place physically (as we see when he restores Peter, who denied knowing him in Jerusalem, on the shore of Lake Tiberias). So I don’t think that is why Barnabas took Mark to Cyprus.

I wonder whether Barnabas took Mark to Cyprus because that is where Barnabas’ own story begins.

How do we encourage someone else? How do we help them to grow as a disciple? By sharing our story of being a disciple: as fully, as honestly – victories won, defeats suffered – as possible; all the time, making connections between our story and God’s story, between our experience and the person of Jesus. And the only way we can share our story that fully is to invite others into it: to give them that access, to take them to significant places, to introduce them to people who have invested in us.

That is why when I am encouraging someone in need of encouragement, I tell them about Sheffield. Not because St Thomas’ is the perfect community (this story, too, contains sharp disagreements and partings of company within it, and more than once); but because it is where the journey that has led me to meet them began. That is why, when I have had the opportunity, I have taken people to Philadelphia, the campus God gave St Thomas’ ten years ago this very weekend just past.

According to tradition, Barnabas was martyred on Cyprus; and Mark went on to collaborate with Peter (in writing the Gospel according to Mark) and with Paul, as well as planting and overseeing churches in his own right. But he was able to do that because, at a crucial moment when courage fails him, Paul and Barnabas both invest in his life: Paul, by protecting him from further loss; and Barnabas by inviting Mark into his own history.

How, then, might we observe the feast of Barnabas? With a meal – obviously! – but also in telling stories, of those places and people who have been used by God to shape us, to the encouragement of others, and the glory of God’s name.

Three-in-One

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

Luke 10:27, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18

Because we in the West are so influenced by ancient Greek thought, by the impulse to classify everything into distinct categories, we have a tendency to hear these words as highlighting difference:

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

and, indeed,

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

But what if the spirit of these words – perhaps best understood as both an invitation and a challenge – was more concerned with unity?

‘“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” and, “Love your neighbour as yourself.”’

Differentiation is not entirely unhelpful. Indeed, it is a necessary stage, without which we are unable to navigate the world as we set out from home. Ancient Hebrew thought is also concerned with differentiation, such as that between ‘clean’ and ‘unclean.’ But while setting out from home – moving from Eden to fill the whole earth – is part of God’s intention for us, it is also God’s intention that we eventually return home – return to that place where we walk in harmony with one another and with God. And that movement requires first a stage of differentiation and then a stage of unification. This is why it is written that in Jesus, God is reconciling all things to him. God fills and bursts our containers.

The other evening I was with friends who are committed to living a life that attends to seeking to love God, the extended family of faith God has given us (self – the person only exists in community), and those who live alongside us (neighbour). That is a good thing. What I shared with them was what God had put on my heart, to ask the question: “How have you spent time with God today?”

I was not surprised that the first reaction was one of discomfort, of guilt. Why? Because of that tendency to separate things into different categories: the tendency to see loving God, self, and neighbour as ourselves as three different kinds of activity which we must seek to perform. Loving becomes defined by certain activities, which become tasks, which become squeezed out, which become opportunity for guilt. I gave God five minutes today...I haven’t told anyone about Jesus today...

One of the ways we remind ourselves that we are called to love God, self and neighbour is visually, through a triangle, a shape that has three sides, three angles. But a triangle only exists when there are three sides coming together at three angles: a triangle is a unity, at every point, in every moment.

We are never not with God, never not with our extended family of faith, never not with our neighbour. We are not alone in the world.

I love God when I acknowledge his presence, as I sit in the garden, as I acknowledge his presence in the person I am talking to. And I love that other person as I acknowledge God’s presence in them – for in so doing I am drawn to recognise them as made in God’s likeness, honoured, rather than focused on the particular ways in which that likeness is marred in them...and how that marring jars against the particular ways God’s likeness is marred in me. I love – or not – my extended family of faith and my neighbour as I make decisions that have an impact on them – including the simple, daily decisions, such as what I buy, and where.

Is the movement of your life focused on differentiation (remember, this is not entirely unhelpful, especially in the first half of our journey through life, but will become increasingly hard to juggle as we are drawn to start on the homeward journey), or becoming increasingly unified (not monochrome, but celebrating reconciliation between diversity)?

Birthday Girl

Trinity Sunday : Part 2

Where Is God?

For over six months now, I have been actively looking for a new posting. My current post, in Liverpool Diocese, comes to an end (at least on paper) next month. Today I received the latest in a growing pile of correspondence informing me that I had not been offered a post I had applied for. This in itself is alright – my prayer is not, ‘Let me get this job’ but, ‘Your will be done’ – but there is only so many times you can stomach being told that you will be outstanding...somewhere else.

We had hoped that we would know by now. Indeed, originally we had hoped that we would have been able to move next week. For several good reasons, that was our preferred timing. We’re not living in a war zone, or with cancer, but we have been living – and continue to live – with a protracted season of uncertainty: and while we can’t put life on hold, neither are we able to make firm plans. This takes its toll, in many ways, some bigger than others.

The situation we find ourselves in is further complicated by the various expectations of others, most of which, however well-meant, are fairly unhelpful.

Where is God in all this? And how might Trinity Sunday resource our continued watching and waiting?

God is where God has always been: seated on the throne in heaven. As Christians have needed to be reminded ever since the letters that form the New Testament were written, things look very different from a heavenly perspective. Our circumstances are precarious, even when they look secure; but God is at work to bring about his good will, not by coercion or inevitability but by the world-overthrowing power of love.

Christians believe that there is one God, and that this one God exists in the form of a community. As we also believe that we are made in the likeness of this God, that invites us to understand ourselves as persons – existing in indivisible relationship to others – and not, as is prevalent in western culture, as individuals – a sub-human form of life. But the Trinity is a mystery: that is to say, though it can be known, through revelation, it cannot be exhausted by our understanding. Unlike every good gift in creation, it is an infinite resource given us. And at present, I am reflecting on Rublev’s icon as a window into that greater reality.

According to Rublev’s symbolism, the Spirit reaches out to us, drawing us deeper into a life of prayer; from which vantage-point we see a greater revelation of the Son as our peace and as our pilgrim’s shelter on the way to the Father; who, in turn, we experience as the one in whom we find our permanent home. We meet the Spirit in the wilderness at the very edge of the Promised Land; the Son beneath the tree where Abraham camped as one who held the Promise in potential, or the tree where Deborah sat to exercise God’s wise judgements within the Land, or the tree in Micah’s great vision (Micah 4:1-8, which combines mountain and tree and house with watchtower); and the Father as fulfilment of his Promise.

When we are reminded that our home is the Father’s house – that we are a child of God – and that Christ is our peace and that the Spirit draws us into this deeper reality through the unpromising foothills of circumstance [the children enter Narnia because of the Blitz] those circumstances are restored to their rightful perspective: not as trivial (to be dismissed), but as boastful (and passing); not as an illusion (to be denied), but as a place of grace (where death fails to keep its grasp on life).

And so we persevere, allowing the Trinity to come to us, welcoming travellers only to discover that it is they who welcome us in...

Trinity Sunday : Part 1

Last Sunday was Pentecost. Perhaps because last year I incorporated a full-size skeleton and a medical dummy torso (in order to help us engage with Ezekiel’s vision of a valley of dry bones restored to life by the Spirit of God), I wasn’t let anywhere near a Pentecost service this year. But I am orchestrating Trinity, this coming Sunday.

My intention is to set up a live tableau version of Rublev’s most famous icon, which depicts Abraham’s three angelic visitors and represents God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit extending the invitation to the person gazing on – or rather, through – the icon. The 'movement' of the icon is from Father to Son to Spirit to onlooker drawn in back through the Spirit to the Son and so to the Father.

On the table is a dish of roast lamb, a shared meal and a symbol of the Lamb who was slain. But I’m thinking of adding other things, first: a board game (I think God likes to have fun); the Sunday newspapers (I think God is interested in what is going on in the world); a TV remote (I think God likes a good story)...

I’ve prepared three 450mm x 640mm panels to be held up behind the tableau, depicting the background (as well as my take on the full icon, on a panel twice as large, as prompt for the story we will tell...).

The Holy Spirit (dressed in blue and green, symbolising life in sea, sky and on land) is associated with a mountain in the wilderness, for the Spirit teaches us to pray. This is an appropriate prompt for prayer.

The Son (in a brown robe symbolising earth and blue cloak symbolising heaven – for the two are united in him – with a gold sash for authority) is associated with a tree, the Tree of Life (the tree of execution transformed into the Tree of Life), symbol of peace. This is an appropriate prompt for asking ourselves whether we know peace – with God, with ourselves, with others, in our circumstances – and to pray for those known to us who do not experience peace.

The Father (in shimmering ethereal robes, for no one has seen the Father) is associated with his house. The door is always open, and on the roof there is an upper room with an open window, from where the Father looks out to see the prodigal returning home. This is an appropriate prompt for asking ourselves whether we know that we are welcome in our Father’s home, and to pray for those known to us who have wandered far from home.

Mosaic

Several friends of mine are in Israel at the moment, visiting various biblical sites. Their photos on Facebook are giving me happy memories of a study trip I made there several years ago. But today I was particularly struck in a fresh way by an image from Sepphoris via my Aussie friend Malcolm Potts (who, as it happens, coined the phrase ‘kairos kisses’).

Sepphoris was a Roman city built in Galilee during Jesus’ lifetime. Thanks to King James’ Authorised Version of the Bible, we have inherited a cultural image of Jesus as a carpenter from Nazareth; but a more accurate translation of ‘tekton’ would be builder. As Sepphoris was a major building project within easy walking distance of Nazareth, we can be almost certain that Joseph and his apprentice would have found work there.

I’ve often found understanding Jesus to have been a builder by trade to be a rich resource. It teases the account of four friends who tear up the flat roof of the house Jesus lived in for a while at Capernaum, in order to lower their paralytic friend down into Jesus’ presence: having forgiven the man’s sins and restored him to health, did Jesus forgive the friends’ trespass, re-constructing the roof? It illuminates his stated intention, on the night he was betrayed, to go to build an extension on his father’s house for his bride – the Church – and then return for us. It adds something to Peter’s metaphor of the Church as living stones being built into a temple. It resonates with the expansion of the local church through the ‘oikos,’ or extended family home.

But though I knew that, in all probability, Jesus had worked on the building of Sepphoris, it had never struck me before that he might have laid some of its famous mosaics. After all, the mosaic was a Roman decoration. But today, this struck me as being deeply significant:

Jesus was a builder, who took the broken little pieces – perhaps even broke some larger pieces himself – and brought them together, side-by-side, to create beautiful pictures...

And after all, isn’t that what he still does today? Isn’t that how he reveals the beauty of his bride?

Ascension

We are currently in the mini-season of Ascension-tide (or a sub-season within Easter, from Jesus’ ascension forty days after his resurrection until his sending the Holy Spirit at Pentecost ten days later). The following are three apparently unconnected observations that have struck me over the past few days:

[1] Reveal/Conceal

Ascension Day. The heavens and the earth simultaneously reveal and conceal the glory of God in Christ Jesus, defying our insistence to delineate, to divide-and-conquer...

This is a mystery, which cannot be explained but only lived: a way of being that recognises that our world is made of the heavens and the earth, bound together in the person of Jesus; a way of living that acknowledges the limit to our understanding, and of our role – not just that there is, at present, a limit, but that there will always be a limit; a way of living that acknowledges the voice within that tells us that (we see enough to recognise that) there is more to life than we can see, and with both joy (in response to revelation) and humility (in response to concealment) comes alongside others who sense the same.

[2] A table, spread

“You prepare a table for me in the presence of those who trouble me.” Psalm 23:5a

We are invited to participate in a meal. But we are not invited alone: those who trouble us – those whom we would describe as our enemies, even – are also invited to the same table; and we are invited, and challenged, to sit in one another’s presence. At this table, neither ‘us’ nor ‘them’ is the host; we are all the guests of honour. And as we learn to listen to one another and to recognise one another as honoured guests at the table, so healing oil is poured over us and rubbed into wounds, some of which they have inflicted on us, some of which we have inflicted on them, and some of which are self-inflicted. This happens as our wounded-ness is first gently exposed – and that is only possible in the company of those who trouble us: whose values and answers to life differ from our own, calling into question our unknown assumptions. This does not happen when we sit at table only with those who do not trouble us, because they are like us; for in such company the wounds we need healed remain hidden.

[3] Perspective

If we view and present people primarily in terms of the categories ‘economic resource,’ ‘economic threat,’ or ‘economic drain,’ then we must also view and present the Slave Trade, the Holocaust and the Killing Fields as virtue we have lost...

When we stop and think about it, this might not be the kind of society we want to nurture.

How might Ascension-tide help to resource an alternative way of viewing and presenting people? As those for whom Jesus intercedes at the right hand of the Father? As those who might be caught up into the heavens with him – hidden in Christ, the One who has accomplished his work and handed on his mission; the King of a kingdom in which there is no meritocracy, where the first shall be last and the last first, and yet where it costs every citizen everything they have; the Ancient of Days and Wounded One?

If there is a common theme among these three thoughts, it is this: that Ascension-tide opens us to the limits of our fear-bound categories; and in so doing prepares us for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh, young and old, male and female, Jew and gentile – to diversity expressed in the unity of love.

Aging

The aging process reveals the heart, and has a beauty of its own that is quite distinct from the much-prized outward beauty of youth.

(Purple tulips on our kitchen table)

Chasing After The Wind (Without A Kite)

Education Minister Michael Gove has called for longer school hours and shorter school holidays. This, he believes, will help working parents; and reverse the disadvantage our children are currently at in the global economic competition with Asian children.

This makes sense, if working parents are what parents are, primarily: homo operarius; and if this is what children are born to become, whether they themselves have children of their own or not. If ‘Arbeit macht frei.’

Jesus asked the question, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?”

Jesus asked a lot of questions. He asked more questions than he gave answers. He undermined the assumptions of the self-assured, and opened up space for another way of experiencing the world to be discovered.

What might it mean, to forfeit one’s soul? Might it mean to lose oneself, to surrender the unique gift God has given to you, in you, which he has never given before and will never give again? To be so subsumed in the pursuit of gain external to oneself – money, power, fame – that one is lost to oneself...and, therefore, to the possibility of relationship with another, whether our Creator or our neighbour? To merely exist, when one might have lived?

In his approach – both inquisitive and provocative – Jesus drew on an earlier teacher, identified as the Teacher, whose key discovery and lesson was that anything pursued to excess – study, play, work, advancement in the world, riches – loses its true value as a gift from God to be enjoyed in its time. We are not masters of our own destiny, but in attempting to be so we will find ourselves dissatisfied with the present and disappointed with the future. You can read this view of holistic education for life in the book known as Ecclesiastes in the Christian Old Testament, or Qohelet in the Hebrew Bible.

School is good, and so is work. But neither are the be-all-and-end-all. There is more to life; even – perhaps especially – if you are called upon to be Secretary of State for Education...

St George

Today is the festival of George, martyr, patron of England. The story goes that George was a knight (or at least, a soldier) who fought a dragon (or possibly a crocodile; or may have stood up to a human tyrant, and therefore defeated a work of the devil, that serpent of old: anyway, it’s complicated...). Without question, he had nothing to do with England, but was adopted by English knights on the Crusades.

Patron saints are strange creatures, and the stories we tell about them take on a life of their own, shaping us in turn, long after the stories are lost and the ‘saint’ stands as a hyper-real sign that represents something that does not exist but is presented, and indeed consumed, as real: in this case, ‘Englishness.’

Here are some competing Georges and dragons, some competing Englishnesses, for St George’s Day:

George the ‘immigrant’ who represents the inclusion of other peoples and cultures within Englishness;

George the soldier who sets out on his travels, setting other people free from that which tyrannises them, whatever form it might take;

George the superior military might who inflates crocodiles into dragons and personifies mortal men as evil incarnate in order to perpetuate a status as liberator;

George the dragon;

George the symbol of racism;

George the deeply ironic symbol of racism, exposing the vulnerable belly of the beast and cutting it open with its own sword;

George the...

Hyper-real

When the Chancellor of the Exchequer divides the population into two neat columns, the Strivers (+) and the Shirkers (-), he is indulging in hyper-reality: presenting us with something that looks human, realer-than-real saints and sinners (monsters, even); but a version of citizen that airbrushes out:

the person who finds themselves in a low-wage, low-morale job;

the person who believes there is more to life than overtime;

the person whose work responsibilities stretch far beyond their competence;

the person who would like to work but cannot find work, or is too ill to work;

the person who has worked all their life, whether in paid employment or as a homemaker, and is now elderly;

the person whose life has fallen apart through tragedy;

the person who has good days, and bad days;

productive days (however we might measure that) and unproductive days (however we might measure that);

life-to-the-full days, and oh-just-f***-it-all days;

the person who will go the extra mile for some people, and cross the street to avoid others;

the person who embraces certain responsibilities and shirks others;

the person who has been cheated or conned;

the person who...

I have been several of these people at one time or another – several in one day – and might or indeed will become others at some point: because I am a real human, and a real citizen, not a hyper-real image.

But this indulgence is equally true of those opposed to the Chancellor’s policies as it is of the Chancellor. And in creating a hyper-real George Osborne, the possibility of positive transformation in the real lives of real people in the real world is short-circuited. Not only would the real George Osborne be justified in not recognising the hyper-real Osborne to be himself (after all, it isn’t), but those who paint him as a Villain invariably paint themselves as ‘better’ than they are (enhancing their moral superiority with a tuck here, an enlarged-but-gravity-defying curve there).

We are entirely surrounded by high-definition twenty-four-seven hyper-reality.

We need to learn to see through the hyper-real images. We need to learn to see ourselves, to see one another, inevitably as though reflected in polished brass but nonetheless closer and closer to the true self that God alone, for now, sees fully (1 Corinthians 13). How is God able to see in this way? Because he loves us, for God is love. And to the extent that we allow his love to show us ourselves and our neighbour, to that extent we will be able to opt out of hyper-reality and embrace the real.

It won’t be easy.