The Rachel Mann Blogspot

St Paul's: A plea for theological humility?

2011-10-31T09:04:00.000-07:00

I love my younger brother - he is intelligent, sensitive and cultured. However, among his many gifts, I have yet to discover any particular skill as a theologian. Thus, I realised that something was afoot when -via Twitter - he began to get involved in what might be called 'religious and theological commentary'. When my marvellous brother - secular and indifferent to church machinations - piles into a debate I sense something extraordianry is happening.

Indeed, one of the intriguing dimensions of the ongoing events around St Paul's (has anyone dubbed it StPaulsgate yet?!? Oh, Lord have mercy, have I just said it??) is the joyous abandon with which secular commentators and journos have plunged into telling the world what Jesus would be up to in the midst of confusion, ire and passion of OccupyLSX. In a move as old as the Crucifixion, much fun has been had on the part of commentators saying that right now, this moment, Jesus isn't hanging out in church but on the steps. Most agree that 'Jesus is a Socialist, innit?', and depending upon where one is on the political spectrum, this statement will guide your take on what's happening both inside and outside St Paul's.

It really will come as little surprise that as an old socialist and someone with an instinctive feel for liberative theological approaches I am inclined to go with a theological perspective that places Christ beyond the walls of establishment, class privilege and the warm halls of the powerful. The Jesus of the Gospels clearly was far more interested in the depredations of Mammon than the rather cheap modern debates Christians are inclined to have about what one does with one's private parts or what physical bits one must (or don't need to) have in order to be a Bishop. It strikes me that any attempt to turn Christ into the prophet of profitability and the bottom line is the very worst kind of idolatry.

Nonetheless, there is a need for nuance (and I pray to God that I am not buying into some lazy stereotype of Anglican compromise). 'Where is Christ in the midst of St Pauls and OccupyLSX?' is a subtler question than it at first appears to an instinctively uncompromising mind like my own. For my sense is that God is the one who resists our easy designations and our desire for ready consolation. What do I mean?

Let me give an example from my own case. For a socialist and radical like myself one of the 'ready consolations' of this situation is that it shows up just how compromised the Church of England is in the powers and principalities of mammon and power. It can lead me to almost delight in the fall of individuals and institutions I see as overly compromised by their connections with money and amoral power without responsibility. And there is part of me that feels precisely that way.

And yet there is a danger in this approach. For there is a danger of pretending that I - and my 'holy' perspective - is not compromised in any way. And I am always suspicious of the clarity and certainty that comes from being oversure and overconvinced of my perspective. A healthy dose of the hermeneutics of suspicion really is well worth while. For both me and pretty much all of us are people of unclean hands and unclean lips. We are the compromised and, if I'm honest, I know that I am caught up in exploitative capitalism and social advantage in ways in which I would often prefer not to acknowledge.

This - of course - is not an argument for a kind of quietism. I still think that the system I am caught up in is exploitative and unfair, etc, and I am committed to change, but a moments reflection makes me cautious about lording it over the fall of individuals and institutional structures. Or to put it another way: I am cautious about my instinct that says that Jesus is entirely outside the walls of St Paul's and hanging around in the protester's camp. That just feels too easy for me - it makes God too small.

God strikes me both as wanting to reveal and expose reality/truth and invite people to transformation. One massive dimension of this is surely the exposure of our current financial ways of going on as massively exploitative, privileging the few (of which I am one) over the many and the rich over the poor. Living out the Kingdom is surely about being the kind of person who works to transform that system. This god is found in the likes of Giles Fraser, many of the OccupyLSX and countless others regardless of faith or lack of it. But this God too also wants to expose fundamental human arrogance and pride, regardless of politics or perspective - the kind of pride, in my own case and many others, that makes me a little too sure about where God is and where God isn't.

Not Resigned: Giles Fraser and Establishment

2011-10-27T02:34:00.000-07:00

I want to offer a very brief comment on Giles Fraser's resignation this morning.

I do not know Giles personally, but I know a goodly number of people who do. It is evident from both conversations with them over the years and from his public body of journalistic work that he is a very intelligent, gifted and committed priest. One friend of mine once commented on his Church Times work, 'I often disagree with him but I am always challenged by what he says.' When his appointment at St Paul's was announced I was one of many who was a little surprised - it was not clear to me how this turbulent priest would fit into one of the great Cathedrals (or is it Sepulchres??) of Establishment.

Nonetheless I took this bold appointment as an encouraging sign from a church that too readily makes cautious appointments. The events of the past couple of weeks have saddened many on the Left of the Church, including myself, for demonstrating that the magnificent and sometimes beautifully eccentric institution we love can be a little too comfortable with the powers and principalities.

Fraser's resignation comes as little surprise to many but it remains - for this old radical at least - deeply troubling. Giles - one suspects - will come out of this debacle with enormous credit and the Church with serious egg on its face. But there is another element to this which should trouble those who are - for their sins - passionate about what the Church of England can offer to the Polis and a world hungry for change and wisdom: what space for the eccentrics and the turbulent at the heart of Church?

The church sadly so often strikes me as being very good at rewarding those who play the game and toe the party line and the church does need people who are committed and passionate about the mechanics and internal dynamics of being church. But I rejoice in the fact that the National Church can still attract people as interesting, turbulent and critical as Fraser at a time when so often we seem to be in retreat. That Fraser has now left St Paul's will - I hope - be both personally liberating for him and enable him to continue to bring challenge and vision to the church; but it is also something about which I weep.

The curious case of St Paul's and the blocked drains

2011-10-25T06:48:00.000-07:00

Drains are hardly the world's most attractive things. Nonetheless they are essential to sanitary living and, as a rule, one doesn't notice them until they go wrong. Thankfully we have specialists to deal with them. This morning my drains (in WW2 parlance) 'went for a burton' and while I wait for Dynarod to come and save me from my own poisonous effluent I thought I'd take a moment to reflect upon the current impasse and debacle happening at St Paul's London in relation to the OccupyLSX movement.

St Paul's decision to close its doors has left many, including me, exasperating, bewildered and suspicious. The grounds that have been cited are 'health and safety'; however, friends and colleagues who have visited the site have (accepting that they are not health & safety professionals) failed to perceive on what particular grounds this claim is based. Equally, St Paul's has - insofar as I am aware - not provided evidence to the public which demonstrates, beyond peradventure, what those health and safety grounds are. This has left a vast media vacuum in which both speculation and anger has grown. Since Giles Fraser's dramatic intervention on the first Sunday of the protest, there seems to have been a lack of intelligent connection with the protesters - a failure of candour and engagement which (given the unique opportunity the church had in this situation) is both depressing and heartbreaking.

One dimension that has unavoidably been churned over is the gap between Giles Fraser's well received statement on that first Sunday of the protest and the subsequent statements bearing the Dean's imprimatur. It takes very little wit to speculate that there has been some difference of opinion within the leadership of St Paul's (The Chapter) and one suspects that Fraser - a very gifted theologian aand public intellectual - has felt placed in an extremely difficult position. The Dean-led change of position - which will probably be branded by St Paul's as a 'change of enphasis' - indicates that the Dean has given a top-down steer. At one level this is unsurprising - the Dean is primus inter pares. Nonetheless, surely Fraser has been left out in the cold. Fraser's statement of support for the protesters was clearly the example of priesthood being exercised in the midst of the polis' wrestling with its way forward; the corporate response has had the troubling whiff of power's sulphur.

The Church of England is in a curious and sometimes unenviable position: as National Church it is inevitable caught up in the manoevres and passions of Establishment and those who are drawn to it, but equally it has a unique position to speak into the things of the Nation's moment. Whatever is actually happening behind closed doors at St Paul's, the feel being given off is of a church too cautious and too compromised by its closeness to money and power. As someone who's been around the church for a long-time I find conspiracy theories unappealing - we are too amateurish, too leaky and too confused as an organisation to achieve the level of sophistication for major conspiracies. The situation at St Paul's has the feel of giant mess up rather than giant conspiracy. And sadly an opportunity has been lost.

Whatever one feels about the Occupy LSX protest, the Church - as represented by St Paul's - has missed opportunities: opportunities to mediate, to discuss and dialogue, and to host and show hospitality. It has lost the opportunity to bring intelligent theological reflection into the protest movement and has risked the social and political capital (which I guess is more interesting and significant than the increasingly dodgy financial capital being thrown around the CIty) that may have accrued from sensitive and mature engagement with passionately felt human concern.

Many people - including myself in a contribution to a forthcoming book - have suggested that the church is part of the drainage/plumbing system of English Society. That is, that like many other things in our polity it is part of the essential, hidden pipework of the land and it runs so deep that one hardly notices it until something goes wrong. Who are the 'plumbers' who will sort out this situation at St Paul's? That remains to be seen. However, it seems likely that the time for a theological version of Dynarod has come.
Which reminds me. Back to those blocked drains!

The Ad Spot: Saying stupid things about television (so you don't have to)

2011-10-11T10:00:00.000-07:00

I find the current UK ADT advert fascinating. Yes, I really did say that. I want to be clear though - this advert is so dreadful it makes everything George Lucas has done in the past 30 odd years look like Tarkovsky.

If everything Lucas has done in 30 yrs was given life it would look like this

Equally its premise - What means most to you? - is basically repellent, giving a number of irritating no-notes the chance to outline a mixture of the bleeding obvious and the tiresomely self-centred.

Nonetheless, the fascination of the ad derives not so much from its spectacular lack of poise, but the bewildering philosophical and intellectual puzzles it poses. (Yes, I may have drunk two bottles of jagermeister as I write this.)

Here is the puzzle: what we see is a bunch of people talking about 'what matters most to them'. Now we are all aware that we are watching them in an advert on television. We are - after all - not living in the 19th century.

'Moving pictures you say? Next you'll be saying every town will have its OWN telephone'

Nonetheless there is a question of trust. We are being invited to identify with these irritating people. We are being invited to think: 'Oh, he loves his surround sound more than his wife. He's just like me. He's a bum-wipe, but so am I. Therefore I must get a big yellow alarm box on the front of my house'. That sort of thing. But are we supposed to believe that these are real people rather than actors?

At one level this is an absurd question. Given that we know that this is a product of the mass media, we know that the ad is not real. It has been carefully edited to get its message across and so on. However, in an age when we expect so-called 'ordinary' people to appear in reality shows and such like, we have also come to expect a certain degree of verite in our ads. Why couldn't these people on screen be simply ordinary people talking about what really matters to them? In a post-modern age of complicity between producers (ad people, tv execs, etc) and punters (the human footballs like me who sit on the sofa, eating tacos and watching this bilge), things have got textually complex: actors or not-actors? That is the question.

However, I want to suggest that - in fact - the cunning people at ADT are playing with our simple minds at a whole new level. I want to suggest that this advert relies on a) us being invited to believe that the people yacking on about their businesses are real people but THEN b) our realization that they are actually minor actors pretending quite unconvincingly to be real people. In other words the advert want us to deliberately not suspend our disbelief...it wants us to recognise the actors as actors. And through doing so, it encourages us to trust the brand more than we might otherwise do.

Consider the woman who stands on the step of her house and, in a somewhat unconvincing British Indian accent, then tells us that what matters to her most is her independence and home security (and the occasional cameo in Holby City). There is something familiar about her face. Surely she was in a spate of shows in the 1970s & 1980s? I'm not sure we're supposed to be more specific than that. But she has a distinctive face. And given that alarms are targeted at homeowners and the security minded - that is to an older audience - we are supposed to recognise her, even if we are not supposed to be too sure where we recognize her from. The recognition is actually meant to be reassure us in a way that a real person would not.

This is what happens when you give ordinary people the oxygen of publicity

The point is this: the advert makers want to expose the fact that this is 'make believe', in order (ironically) to encourage us to trust in the brand. For if these were simply unknown actors then we would be left unsure whether to trust them or not - for we would be left with the question as to whether they were actually merely ordinary people. But if they were simply ordinary people we would equally be unsure whether we can trust them - for ordinary people are (by definition) unknown to us and would leave us wondering if they are offering glowing testimonies or talking about their lives simply to get on tv. But the actual situation provides the perfect solution: initially we're unsure whether these talking heads are actors or the public. We are intrigued.We are unsure. And then at the centre of the ad appears the lady who might have been in Mind Your Language or Eastenders or Ever Decreasing Circles or summat. Then we see a woman talking about her business who we're sure was in something like Casualty as 3rd bus-explosion victim and, in consequence, we are reassured. The advert is not real, but these are people we know from comforting tv shows so everything is ok. We can therefore trust the brand.

Trust me, I played '4th cadaver' in Waking the Dead

The bottom line is this: in order to trust this brand we want people who are like us, but not too like us or too different. We would be unhappy if the actors were too famous, because then the ad would be too unrealistic. Sean Connery or Bono talking about what matters to them would be too disconnected from our lives. But equally we don't want peope who are exactly like us - because that would be too realistic and annoying. Frankly, how we live our lives is too dull and frustrating and appalling to be shown on tv and it be appealing. So the semi-known actor is the perfect compromise. In a culture that is so readily mediated by screens and the visual we want people who are comfortable in that world, who are validated in that world and therefore are comfortable and real to us. But we don't want ourselves. That is why the ADT advert is simultaneously cheap, annoying and crap AND complete genius.

Will the real 21st Century stand up please?

2011-10-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

Lots of things can blow a person’s mind: pistols, hand grenades, being a character in the film Scanners. Few realise that History should be added to that list. For it is not - as some ministers of education are inclined to believe - merely a list of dates of big events (usually battles) conveniently edited to tell the national story. This would tend to turn history into a large scale version of that scene in Damien: Omen 2, where the Son of Satan reels off a list of battle dates to the sweaty consternation of his teacher.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to learn every single battle date of the Peninsula War

Thus, historians can make extraordinary claims. Whereas most people suggest that the 20^th Century started in 1900 or 1901, I remember reading in history class that some set the start point as 1914. Equally, the starting point for examining 19th Century political history was 1815. For a person as sheltered as me, these were the most shocking claims I encountered until I found out (look away now if you have a weak constitution) that Kelly's Heroes wasn't factually accurate (apparently they didn't actually take down the Tiger tanks with Shermans but with samurai swords).

Now that I am an old grizzard, I can appreciate the rhetorical power of these claims - the point of the claims is to draw attention to potent moments in history. That is, to political and social 'game changers' that have impact for decades and perhaps even define a 'century' (which we all know is an arbitrary, culturally defined concept anyway).

Talent is an arbitrary, culturally-defined concept, right? RIGHT?!?

Much as one might dispute flashy rhetorical claims about 'proper starting points' for studying historical 'eras', what if the 21^st Century hasn’t quite started yet? That is to say, what if we are yet to experience the defining moments of this century?

Many folk will want to dispute such speculation – on any number of grounds. Some will want to say that we have already experienced a defining moment of this century – 9/11. 9/11 is seen by many as definitive because it de facto signalled the end of the American Century. Clearly, this event was significant for demonstrating the limits of a particular expression of American power. Equally, the movement of economic power away from the West towards the East may prove to be a definitive shift in what may become China and India’s Century.

However, there is another deeper emerging economic dimension that may yet prove to be a defining moment: the crisis of money. It may be that we are living through a series of events which prove definitive for the feel of the next thirty, fifty, even one hundred years.

There is simply no doubt that the globe is in the midst of a crisis of credit and money that is affecting all nations – rich and poor – and which has led governments and economic blocs to pump mind-boggling amounts of money into economies and markets. Thirty years of faith in uncontrolled market economics – which has essentially been faith in the techniques of the hardened gambler and a love of having things on tick – has led to a situation where nations are throwing ‘money’ into a system in the hope that the system can be saved; in the hope that this money won’t simply disappear and suck the whole economy down with it.

Complex financial devices are my speciality, baby!

Clearly the hope of most nations and economists is that the current crisis in credit and money will all just settle down and we can all go back to our old ways of going on – living on credit, markets awash with complex monetary devices to keep the rich rich and the poor grateful. And perhaps this will be the case. But my sense is that the world is not going to easily get this financial problem back in the box – or if it does, the world will never quite be the same again. The age of cheap money, cheap credit and liberal economics may be coming to an end.

It is intriguing that we in the West have lived in a money economy for nigh on a thousand years now. But it is worth remembering that, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe existed on a different model for several hundreds of years – a gift based economy. This was not merely a barter economy – far from it – but one in which an item's value was as much dependent upon the quality of human relationships as anything else; this was a world in which something trivial might become significant simply because it was offered as a token of trust or as a gift. In a money economy, everything can be assigned a precise value. Money becomes effectively the measure of all things.

Oh goody, the future currency of the world.

We have lived in a culture that for nigh on 1000 years has allowed money – and recently credit – to become the measure of all things. In which all things can be assigned a value for exchange. Money will not be going away any time soon. But we may be living through a revolutionary time. The trust that, for countless generations, we have all placed in money’s power may be coming to an end. For there is only so much anyone can do with money and credit. It may be that we are on the verge of a return to the world of the gift - a world where other forms of value and exchange become viable again.

In short , we may yet be to enter a new world - a new world which may define the 21^st century.

From the Church Times Vaults: The Unavoidability of Social Media

2011-10-06T14:14:00.000-07:00

Several folk who have no access to The Church Times have asked for this to be made available on the blog - so here it is!

‘Social Media’ has come a long way since a certain German monk, furious with abuses within the Church, nailed a list of complaints to a church door in Wittenberg in 1517. One supposes that a modern-day Martin Luther might choose a blog or Facebook or Twitter as a means of dissemination and public connection. And there are, indeed, an increasing number of clerics, theologians and would-be opinion formers – me included – who are embracing modern, high-speed means of communication. And some of the best of those – Bishop Alan Wilson, Lesley Crawley, David Cloake and Hayley Matthews – are both exploring what it means to be a Christian, a human and what the future shape of the church might be.

Martin was less than pleased when his tweet to the Pope (@pope I is just fighting da corruption, innit? megalolz) was met with stony silence.

Nonetheless, the Church – or at least sections of it - is not renowned for being what is known in modern technological jargon as an ‘early adopter’. Indeed, the Church – for all its radical beginnings – has often been seen as a key agent of conservatism. At the risk of overstretching the point, if ‘paper’ represented cutting edge communication technology, one would expect many in the church to be arguing for the advantages of papyrus or parchment.

This is understandable. Many perceive the Media – in its various forms, including social – to be hostile towards Christianity. Equally, our Episcopal leaders (and those who manage their media profiles), recognizing the way media can go global at the click of a button, are understandably afraid of misrepresentation and parody. Perhaps, then, it is safer for the church to pursue the routes that it has become comfortable with: books, monographs, sermons, and letters. Basically anything that is commonly committed to paper.

But, love it or loathe it, Social Media will not be going away any time soon. As the recent film about Facebook, ‘The Social Network’, demonstrates, in a few years Facebook has gone from being a resource for Harvard students to one of the largest companies in the world and a central means that people use to communicate and organise their lives. In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen the dark side of that as two misguided men tried to use Facebook to incite riots and have received custodial sentences. The micro-blogging site, Twitter – in which users are limited to messages of 140 characters – has become a key place for news to break and where super-injunctions are challenged. It too – in the febrile moral environment which followed the riots – has been criticized as a focal point for organizing violence. And then there are countless bloggers: individuals who express opinions, more or less well-informed, on myriad topics and whose presence has, in some cases, been taken as superceding the work of traditional print journalism. Their success is reflected in the fact that almost all traditional print media now have blogs, many of which use bloggers’ work to supplement their own output.

Clearly, given that Social Media is a human creation, it cannot be considered either cultural and ethically neutral or logically good in and of itself: Human artifacts are always compromised by the simple fact that we make them. They reflect our limitations and interests. However, one sometimes suspects that the church is excessively sceptical about them. The critique of Social Media is usually based on it being destructive towards proper relationships and communication. Thus, we end up sitting with our laptops sending each other messages and tweets rather than actually speaking to people face to face or via the telephone. We sit in isolated worlds.

There is no doubt that people use Social Media to be mean, banal, exhibitionist, self-important and to avoid face-to-face contact; equally, given that a medium like Twitter constrains its users’ word count there is a sense in which many tweets are mere cocktail party chatter. However, surely all of the above actually reflects the nature of human beings rather than anything necessarily pernicious. If we dismiss Social Media on the grounds that it generates a high proportion of nonsense and banality we shall, in effect, be dismissing some of the things which are simply part of being human.

Twitter is just one of many ways I use to meet girls

Aside from the high levels of throwaway nonsense – to which I, as a fun-loving human being, am an avid contributor – Social Media represents a remarkable Christian and human opportunity. The way in which this has been most explored is as an evangelistic or missionary tool. Given the almost global reach of Social Media, propagators of the faith have been quick to see the opportunities to place the Gospel message before new audiences. Intriguing as this effort may be it is not what most interests me.

Part of the fascination of Social Media lies in its role in societies which are increasingly ‘post-religious’ in any conventional sense; not only are church attendances declining but many folk are increasingly vocal in their disbelief in God. However, what is clear is that social media gives people a sense of participating in something much greater than themselves – one of the classic roles of traditional religion. Facebook enables folk to be friends with and communicate with people who they may never even have met. Twitter enables communication on another level: people are able to engage in conversation with not only like-minded others, but people they may traditionally have been very distant from – senior politicians, celebrities, musicians and so on. How deep this conversation goes is moot; however, many people are finding they have expanded rather than diminished senses of their identity – where their identity has cyber dimensions as well as conventional ones. I use Twitter as key networking tool, whether to discuss my journalistic, poetic or theological writing, a process made more difficult without its immediacy. Being a vicar and a woman ordinarily means that people have expectations about how I act and what matters to me; social media enables others to respond to me without making judgments based on my appearance, accent and profession. Clearly this has dangers: social media presents opportunities for fraudsters and the malicious to present false personalities, but (accepting that one must not be naive about who people claim to be) the simple fact remains: social media reflects an expansion of many people’s worlds rather than their diminishment.

The truth is that for very many of us – perhaps most – we will continue to live great swathes of our lives in conventional ways: we will still have the demands of ensuring that we pay the bills, the joy of going out with friends and so on. And thank goodness for that: Social Media can be addictive and placing it in its proper perspective is important. But the fact that many of us have a sense of reality which transcends the established patterns of our lives is genuinely exciting: Even if many people have abandoned religiously endorsed senses of the Transcendent, it is evident that in social media people are experiencing a world which takes them beyond traditional expectations and possibilities. This isn’t simply about ‘ordinary’ folk being able to talk to so-called celebrities. Nor is it simply about the ill, disabled or house-bound being able to connect, although this is significant to many, including myself. There is another possibility: In a society which many have suggested is increasingly divided and privatized, social media offers one way of helping people to connect. Clearly, it cannot offer the deep solutions to social malaise many are searching for, but I, for one, have been struck by the way social media has pushed my social networks. It can be uncomfortable to engage in fierce and immediate conversation with people from very different theological, political and cultural expectations to oneself, but it is both stretching and often rewarding.

Christian mission not only needs to come to terms with a social world less limited by location and cultural background, but – in its inclination to talk of the Transcendent – to find language which connects with people’s very practical, immanent experience of it. Even if that experience is tentative and fragile it is real. As lives are organised around the Internet, we find projects like ‘I-Church’ (a virtual church community), the Twurch of England (the Church of England on twitter) and Unvirtuous Abbey (internet monks wittily praying for a technologically complex world) which seeks to engage with it.

There is also, as I see it, something rather beautiful and striking about Social Media. This perception is drawn from the fact that social media is simultaneously ephemeral and permanent. Consider Twitter. Tweets are tiny parcels of words, thrown into cyberspace. Most get immediately lost and ignored. They are ephemera. And yet, because they are in cyberspace, they also have an odd permanence – they simply float in cyberspace for all time, like a tiny chip of an asteroid in space. And sometimes someone tweets something snappy, brilliant and clever. And, you see it for a moment. If you like it perhaps you ‘retweet’ it to your followers, and then it's gone into cyberspace. This odd combination of the permanent and the insubstantial mirrors key truths of our lives and of God. We are, as Shakespeare puts it, ‘such stuff as dreams are made on and our little lives are rounded with a sleep’ and yet, our fragile lives, are the stage for actions which potentially alter the world. This very fragility and solidity lies at the heart of God: in the fragile existence God chose to embrace in Jesus and in the permanence that extends that love across all time. The beauty lies in the interaction of both.

A Hypothetical God

2011-10-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

There is something liberating about ‘what if’ questions. Much of life – work, running a household and so on - happens in situations which act against imagination and creativity. This is just one reason why ITV1 continues to exist or Dave still gets an audience. It is also why many organizations, desperate to break out of ruts, have ‘vision days’ and (awful as this phrase is) talk of ‘Blue Sky Thinking’. Hypothetical thinking – precisely because it involves asking ‘What if ‘x’ was like this?’ – can generate new imaginative possibilities.

Corporate Banking decided to hold a 'blue sky day' to rethink its image

I’d like to pose a hypothetical question in an area in which the church has got, at best, rather bewildered and, at worst, horribly divided and angry: human sexuality and specifically gay sexuality. I do this in the hope of opening up some imaginative space within this difficult and complex situation and of drawing some heat out of the traditional arguments.

I acknowledge that I do not do this as a neutral. I am gay or to use my preferred term queer. In some people’s eyes this disqualifies me from even attempting to move discussion forward. However, I’m not sure ‘neutrality’ is an option for any of us: our views, whatever they are, will always reflect our stories, interests, and history. Thus the value of the hypothetical situation: it does not require that you agree with me, only that you let your imagination play.

My question is: What might the church look like if Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans (LGBT) people were a gift and a blessing? That is, if LGBT people were as much of a gift from God as anyone else; and as such something to give thanks for.

It is clear that LGBT people challenge some well established ideas and attitudes within the church community. Being ‘queer’ challenges the assumption that the nature of sexuality and gender is monochrome and obvious. For example, transgender people raise questions about how nuanced and complex gender actually is and the extent to which male and femaleness is a social construct; their experience of ‘gender dysphoria’ clearly unsettles preconceived notions of what it means to be human.

Suppose that LGBT people and the challenge we present to comfortable assumptions and ideas were embraced as a blessing or gift to the church. What might the church and our pictures of God and human beings look like?

God during his 'trying to break into Battle Metal' phase

The church – despite its many wonderful gifts – has often been rather zealous in patrolling its borders. Even a cursory examination of church history reveals the energy expended and, on occasions, violence perpetrated by those keen to ensure that doctrine or liturgy or morality or the 'purity' of the community remains unsullied. Even a cursory glance at history will demonstrate the extent to which the church - in authoritarian mode - has contributed to the formation of a persecuting society. Thankfully, the church has sought to become increasingly welcoming towards groups it has historically held sanctions against – for example, the divorced, the remarried, and single parents – but, in some quarters, that is not the case for queer people. If LGBT people were treated as a gift and a cause for celebration perhaps the church would look even more remarkable than it already is. It might be an even greater sign of hope – hope of acceptance and affirmation. It might be a sign that instead of erecting walls the church was seeking to bust them down and embrace difference.

Clearly there are already a goodly number of LGBT people within the church – a fair number of them clergy. Historically, we have shared our gifts while remaining silent about a significant part of our identity. If LGBT people were treated as a gift, a key part of their identity might be properly acknowledged and celebrated. LGBT people are as various and interesting as anyone else and do not deserve to be reduced to their sexuality, any more than a straight person. However, LGBT people potentially offer deeply needed gifts. For example, a common queer experience is of feeling silenced and, therefore, of having important aspects of their personhood denied. This experience - of being silenced – is more common than many people might assume. It is a common experience among women, the disabled and so on; LGBT ministers may bring rare sensitivity into complex pastoral situations. One thing is clear though: If LGBT people genuinely were a gift for the church there is a sense in which Church would become a bigger, more surprising and unexpected place – both for its members and those looking from the outside.

There really is nothing I can add...

At the same time, we would need to think more deeply about our pictures of human beings. Identity really matters to Christians: ‘Who we are’ is actually one starting point for our exploration of ‘Who is God’ (and vice versa). We are, as the famous formula has it, bearers of the Image of God and yet called into the Likeness of Christ. In the hypothetical picture I’ve sketched, queer people – as people who challenge certain conventional pictures of human identity, specifically around sexuality and gender – reveal new, thrilling dimensions of human possibility and thus of what the image of God might actually look like. That the very Image of God might include LGBT dimensions represents an expansive picture of being.

Equally, if our Image of God is enriched, then we have a picture of God who creates, sustains and celebrates a truly remarkable humanity – not just straight folk, but people whose stories are quite different. This would be a God who is radically simple – for in love and for love he has created all – and expansively graceful enough to embrace all.

I am prepared to admit that – as a hypothetical picture – this may be nothing more than a beguiling fantasy. It may, even if contains a glimmer of truth, be an overstatement. I am even prepared to admit – at the level of logical possibility - that I may be so entirely wrong about LGBT people that we are actually a curse on the church. But I would struggle to imagine what the church would look like if that were the case, let alone offer it my commitment.

The Bible suggests that, through the Spirit, young and old will dream dreams and have visions. This picture of a church in which LGBT people are a blessing which opens us up to greater imaginative possibilities may ultimately be wrong. But if we are to be faithful to the God of abiding love and grace, I’m not sure we risk dreaming of anything less.

What Hollywood teaches us: A Bankrupt Culture

2011-09-28T03:27:00.000-07:00

Hans: Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there?

McClane: Yeah, I'm still here. Unless you wanna open the front door for me.

Hans: Uh, no I'm afraid not. But you have me at a loss. You know my name but who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child? Another orphan of a bankrupt culture who thinks he's John Wayne? Rambo? Marshall Dillon?

McClane: I was always kinda' partial to Roy Rogers actually. I really dig those sequined shirts.

Secretly I've always wanted to be in law enforcement -
one of the good guys like the Sheriff of Nottingham

One suspects that everyone's favourite designer villain, Hans Gruber, meant his remarks about 'a bankrupt culture' in a rather different sense to that which we face today. We live in a society and a financial culture which may actually 'go bankrupt'. And as the following interview shows there are cowboys in the mainstream who are more like Buford Tannen or Jack Palance's character in Shane ('pick up the gun...pick up the gun') than Marshall Dillon or Roy Rogers.

There are people who actually want 'the system' to fail so that they can make money out of it. For the essence of their behaviour is the desire to bet on failure and thus generate money for their self-interest. They have no interest in the human consequences of their actions, provided that the market is not totally pulled down or becomes completely unpredictable (and therefore unprofitable to bet on).

Now call me mad, but I remain convinced that the best guide to capitalism's cultural state is its cinema. And the film we should look at is not 'Wall Street' or its sequel, or the documentary work of the likes of Michael Moore. No it is 'Pretty Woman'.

'Pretty Woman' is a film about a double redemption: the redemption of a hooker from the life of the street through money and romantic love and the redemption of a ruthless capitalist through love and the liberal use of a heartwarming soundtrack from Roy Orbison.

Feminist analyses of this film are more common than me after two glasses of lambrini. I shall therefore leave them alone. But we should not ignore what 'Pretty Woman' has to say about Capitalism. Richard Gere's character is a selfish, money-bloated git who uses leveraged buy-out to make piles of cash for him and his buddies to writhe on. They are the early precursors of today's money bandits - using debts to make make money.

Me (with a bemused Chorlton) after 2 glasses of lambrini

But what saves him? Basically the hottest prostitute the world has ever known. Even in her cheap clothes, Julia Roberts looks hotter than a freakin' supermodel. Indeed, in some ways it would be better to describe her as a 'mannikin': for ultimately she is not a woman admired for her scintillating intellect or presence, but because of how she looks. Indeed, if memory serves, she gets access to the poshest hotel in Beverley hills because of the way she looks. She is given access to a limitless credit card account and, like Cinderella, is transformed by the simple addition of clothes.

You'd look like this too if you were storing
vast bundles of cash in one of your body cavities

Of course what really matters in the end is that she is (in that other great disparaging Western stereotype) 'a tart with a heart'; and with the combination of (one presumes) extremely skilled sexual practice, vast amounts of Puccini and champagne (well known working-class pleasures), Roy Orbison's quiff and a body to die for, she transforms the heart of her Prince Charming. And by the end he decides that screwing over companies for lucre is no substitute for working along side them and making them viable companies again.

Who would have thought it?
The true face of compassionate capitalism

And so we find a culturally bankrupt answer to a society that is rapidly going financially bankrupt: the financial sharks in this world just need to find an extraordinarily beautiful rough diamond of a girl, unafraid to work for a living, but whose only interest is in love. A woman who will stand up for herself until the platinum credit card comes out or her prince drops by in a Mercedes Guardian, a red rose in his mouth. This is all that is needed to turn a self-regarding fiend into a man whose prepared to care - not only for his gal but for a society who depends on him. That - Hollywood teaches us - is all we need to save society from ravenous unfettered capitalism. Of course, money always wins, but add a gorgeous, fun-loving girl into the mix and money - the great divider - will be used to make us all proud.

From The Church Times Vault: Harry Potter & cultural theology

2011-08-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

Theological college had many highlights: the chance to be formed in a creative way, the opportunity to test out wild ideas, and the experience of training in a lively and vibrant setting. However, the real highlight – for a film nut like me – was the opportunity, one Saturday, to turn the college common room into a cinema and watch all three ‘Lord of the Rings’ films back to back. It was fun, intense and emotionally draining. Now I am about to do something equally ridiculous and wonderful in a parish setting: on the weekend of the final film’s release, I shall be having a Harry Potter ‘octothon’: seven films back-to-back followed by an immediate trip to the cinema to watch the final adaptation.

There is no doubt that J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has been a true international phenomenon. Whatever one feels about its literary merits, it has become a compelling series for children and adults alike. This was achieved on such a grand scale that books were marketed with both children’s and adult’s covers. The film adaptations – whilst of varying quality – have been so successful that they rank among the world’s biggest grossing films.

The series’ impact fascinates me. For its success with both kids and adults goes beyond literary or cinematic merit: In literary terms, Harry Potter might reasonably be called ‘Mallory Towers with Magic’ – that is, a bunch of kids go off to boarding school and get to do exciting things with magic. And yet, as the critic Lev Grossman notes, its world has ‘... a freestanding internal integrity that makes you feel as if you should be able to buy real estate there’.

It is easy to dismiss Harry Potter’s appeal to adults as nostalgia fodder – nostalgia for the lost magic of childhood. And there is truth in this. Nostalgia for lost youth is an abiding motif of many adults’ lives. Equally, as the spiritual writer, Alan Jones, notes, there is, in the modern world, ‘an underlying and constant anxiety about the future’. In this context, it is unsurprising that adults might take flight into comforting fantasy and images of a lost, and fantastical, childhood.

However, something spiritually more significant is going on. In an age when, in the UK and Europe at least, most adults don’t go to church and most children aren’t significantly initiated into faith, Potter and its ilk act as both reminders of and initiators into big spiritual and moral ideas. For example, Harry Potter is famously both an orphan and the victim of child abuse at the hands of his horrific cousins, the Dursleys. His school, Hogwarts, becomes his home and his friends his family. For Harry, the magical world represents a kind of ‘homecoming’. We are invited to participate in and identify with this sense of ‘homecoming’ and ‘emergent identity’ as we read.

In a world which is genuinely fast-moving and complex – a world which many of us feel utterly caught up in and alienated from at the same time – the story arc of Harry Potter provides a kind of calm port. We want to climb in and live there. Clearly the Potter universe is imaginative fantasy and yet it feeds our alienated, orphaned minds with a vision of homecoming and belonging that, post-faith, many feel they have lost.

Understandably many will say that, if this is even half-true, it is desperately sad: if a children’s fantasy story is giving adults a sense of place and connection to something greater than themselves, we are very lost indeed. Once, religion fulfilled that role and any person of faith, including me, will want to open people’s hearts to the Christian reality.

Yet we – as people of faith - are dismissive at our peril. The imaginative power of Rowling’s work says something revealing about what our everyday religion can lack. And that, of course, is wonder and, in a very real sense, ‘magic’. This is not about childish fireworks (great as they are) but about a sense of living in a world thoroughly alive with the power of God’s Spirit – a world of possibilities in which our imaginations are dazzled and fed. Church life, with its over emphasis on keeping the show on the road, can so readily be stripped of imagination and wonder. If we are to offer folk a genuine sense of homecoming it needs to be one based not on getting folk to maintain the organisation, but on feeding their sense of possibility.

Equally, we risk losing sight of the imaginative complexity of Rowling’s world. Harry and his friends are presented with genuine and real decisions – decisions which are personally costly, risky and sometimes questionable. Harry’s friendship with his best friends is tested again and again, especially in the later books as adolescent hormones kick in and he deals with adult questions about exactly who he can trust. In other words, Rowling’s universe, fantastic as it may be, is very like our own. Clearly the author has a very real sense of good versus evil, but these are characters who are not acting out according to a set moral menu. They make real decisions which have difficult consequences. By the end of the Potter novels, several key characters lie dead, others are brought face to face with the dreadful consequences of their actions and Harry and his friends witness the effects of standing up to hatred and violence – death and pain.

When we combine that costliness with the work’s mythic sense of belonging and homecoming, it is not hard to see why adults and children alike find this a potent and easily accessible re-presentation of ethical and spiritual truths – sometimes more potent than those offered in our culture’s truly great book, The Bible. So, for example, the defining spiritual truth of the Bible is the transforming and saving power of sacrificial love. Yet Rowling’s story restates this truth in a way that is both moving and readily understandable and, for many, more comprehensible than the Bible: Harry’s very survival, as a baby, is due to his mother’s willingness to sacrifice herself for his sake. Indeed, it is constantly reiterated throughout the series that it is Harry’s capacity for love, and nothing else that will enable him to defeat the embodiment of evil, Voldemort.

And, ultimately, inscribed in the heart of the Potter books is the single greatest myth of Western culture: the willing sacrifice of the one for the salvation of the many. Given how potent the Christ story is, it is hardly surprising that Rowling found it unavoidable. Her writing gifts – sometimes simple, sometimes delightful and winsome (and occasionally long-winded) – bring that myth alive in ways which people who may never darken the door of a church can comprehend. Indeed, perhaps it is the very artlessness of her writing that makes her so successful. She is, in terms of craft, no match for the likes of Phillip Pullman, but skill is rarely a measure of impact. The simplicity of her sentence structure makes her novels accessible across a huge variety of age ranges and makes the novels a delight for adults to read to kids. Equally, her tendency to spell everything out in minute detail appeals to many children and adults who prefer not to have too much imaginative work to do. Crucially, her work has an ‘ageless’ quality: in an age when children’s fiction is carefully categorized into age groups, the Harry Potter series transcends easy categorization. The combination of this with a compelling story arc is seriously potent.

When the lights finally come up at the end of my Potter ‘octothon’, I know there will be tears in my eyes: not only because I will be saying goodbye to characters who have become part of my own story like friends, but because the myth of the one who dies and lives again will have been beautifully and simply re-presented once again.

The Lost Boys: Some Post-Riot Thoughts

2011-08-11T05:25:00.000-07:00

The notion of 'The Lost Boys' is one of the most familiar tropes in our culture. Many - including myself - will connect the idea with the '80s vampire film of that name which depicted a gang of vampires as teenaged rebels, lost to ordinary society. Of course, the phrase has its modern origin in JM Barrie's Peter Pan. The Lost Boys are children, led by Peter Pan, who through residing in Never Never Land never have to grow up and take on responsibility, the rules of conventional society and all that goes with it. Our tabloid media has occasionally made use of the phrase to 'brand' teenagers (primarily from the inner cities) who have fallen outside the conventional run of society's expectations. Perhaps it has been replaced, in the light of the recent riots, by the less poetic 'feral youth', but the notion of a group of youths, primarily boys, falling outside ordinary social convention and expectation is a key modern trope.

In the late '90s, when I lived and worked in Salford, I spent a considerable amount of time in the company of so-called Lost Boys (& Girls). I helped run youth groups aimed at kids as young as seven or eight and as old as eighteen. I'll be honest with you: when I started I was absolutely shocked and stunned. Some of the kids we worked with were deeply troubled, neglected and, frankly, almost unmanageable. They had very little sense of boundaries. I feel slightly ashamed that I often thought that, for any number of the young lads I worked with, there was really nothing down for them. Some were already stealing at eight and, whether through bravado or truth, would offer you drugs for sale. It haunts me that I could already see the future of these little kids bleakly drawn out at the age of eight: petty criminality, drug dealing, prison sentences, boys becoming hardened tough guys. I sometimes hear about kids I knew back them - now in their late teens or twenties - and so many have spent time inside.

Of course not all were heading that way. And one of the things I want to emphasize is that even for those that had lost their way, there were some really special moments. Moments of immense warmth and humour in which the lads and lasses displayed real Northern/Salfordian charm. These were the moments when the masks of toughness (usually forced upon them by vile home lives) dropped and the child - still wanting to be hopeful and to dare to dream - would shine through. That was what would break my heart the most: knowing that these kids, even some of the older tougher ones, were still really kids. That if they were lost, they were still hoping against hope to be found. It was always harder to break through that carapace of toughness when the lads ganged together. But even then sometimes there were times of smiling and possibility.

It's easy both to condemn and to apologise for the behaviour of (what have been primarily) young people over recent days. I have been as angry as most and, believing we should priotize our best qualities (our compassion, our vision, our hope), I have also wanted to understand the causes of the behaviour. But most of all, I remember back to those scary, insane, often appalling but sometimes inspiring days in Salford. I remember the kids before they were utterly broken and lost. I remember the lad who - at eight - was forced out of his home everyday by a mum who needed the house to earn her living as a prostitute and how he'd roam the streets and be both charming and a little shit. I pray that he has found his way out of the cycle of violence and prison I know he fell into. I remember the lost boys and girls and how many seemed to have nothing down for them from such an early age.

There is a mystery here of course. Why do some, sharing in almost the same set of circumstances as another, escape these patterns of brutalization and others find it unable to resist? The Ancient Greeks were very honest, noting that we are all subject to the vagaries of moral luck, that even those who seek to cultivate the inner life of excellence can sometimes fall. The circumstances of our nurture really do have a massive impact upon who we become, even as some find the inner resources to carve out a different path. I know that those who have perpetrated the riots in the past few days need to come to a sense of responsibility for their actions; but I am also unsurprised that many share the common experience of exclusion, poverty, poor schooling and difficult home lives. I have had the advantages of moral luck in my background and many of those who perpetrated the violence did not. This simple fact prevents me from judging them as harshly as many feel they are entitled to.

Violence, hatred and hope

2011-08-09T05:21:00.000-07:00

There is simply no doubt that the recent events in London and Birmingham have been vile, cruel and destructive. As someone who remembers only too well the 1981 & 1985 riots which ripped through our inner cities, I have been sickened by the images splashed across news media, Twitter and the internet. Indeed, the second by second, minute by minute coverage has only amplified people's anger and ire. This anger - which I share - has reached a crescendo and, given the opinionated nature of the net, has pumped up both people's language (de facto suggesting that the perpetrators are less than human) and calls for a very strong-armed police response.

I genuinely 'get' these responses: there is a huge part of me that wants to rip the gonads off the scrotes who have decided that this is the moment to help themselves to a lorry load of Nike Air Maxes and that burning down the livelihoods of committed, hard-working and often small scale businesses (including the stock of the marvellous Basick Records) is de rigeur urban behaviour. Nonetheless, I want to try to look beyond some ofthe responses and dig for something deeper. And no - this is no apologetic for angry, unrreasoned and stupid behaviour. I am a sufficiently sophisticated liberal to understand the sociological and economic analyses and explanations for the rioting. I 'get' the post-Marxist, Liberation Theology critique of consumerism and what this turns people into (even though, in truth, I often think it may be a little crude). Others have commented on this dimension I want to explore another: who is part of our community?

My anxiety is this: that the immoderate, but understandable, way in which many of us (including myself) are inclined to talk about the perpetrators of the recent violence suggests that they are no longer part of our society; that their behaviour has revealed them as 'sub-human' and, as such, not worthy of anything more than having their legs broken or innards removed with a rusty halberd. 'They behave like animals so treat them like animals'. The behaviour of a small section of society has made me extremely angry and tempted as I am to condemn them to the 'outer beyond' as a bunch of chavs, gangstas, hoods, whatever, they are still part of us.

Margaret Thatcher famously suggested that there is no such thing as society. for her there were only individuals and collections of individuals who band together for a common cause, good or ill. This kind of mentality has been almost impossible to resist in a culture which has emphasized the priority of individual desires (focussed primarily on buying and brands). On this picture, the rioters become simply an association of individuals ganging together for vile ends. And at one level that is true; but it also enables people to wash their hands of the situation or reduce the riot merely to a public order matter that needs to be quashed by any possible means. This picture is inadequate precisely because it lacks any sense of the patterns of wider society and the national community in which we all - in varying and differing ways - participate. A community which still seeks to value the damaged, lost and, yes, even the depraved enough to want to not only punish wrong doing but seek to reform individuals and redeem communities; to not simply take individuals who are seen as a canker and turn them into sausage meat. (That is the behaviour of totalitarian regimes and thank god we are very far from living under such conditions.)

So, once this situation has been brought under control - and yes, we should be supporting our police (who despite unresolved issues of institutional racism remain one of the world's most restrained law enforcement agencies) and those seeking to stand up to thugs - there will be an extraordinary number of issues unresolved. Certainly, those who have looted and destroyed must be punished; but this must be proportional and dispassionate. But I remain concerned that punishment does not foster compassion and human empathy. One of the failures of our society, in certain contexts, is its regular inability to foster a vision of 'the Other' as fully human and therefore not to be abused, brutalized and treated as dog shit. How we can help each other become less aggressive, less driven by desire for things and so on is a great enigma.

Concerning the rioters and looters my instinct is not to punish with 'extreme prejudice', but to suggest that - alongside custodial sentences - they be exposed to the reality of living in monastic settings - Buddhist, Benedictine, whatever, I don't mind. Absurd as this may sound, there is no doubt that the world of the monastery is a world where folk have to learn to get along with each despite vast difference and simmering anger and in which 'what we own' is much less significant than 'who we are'. Take the piss out of me if you like, but given thirty years of failed government schemes and rampant consumerism, I suspect that in many cases it may yet be worth a try.

The Priority of Justice

2011-06-09T05:03:00.000-07:00

As I've indicated in previous posts, Rowan Williams is, in my opinion, one of the finest intellects in Britain. Whatever one's perception of his faith commitments, his erudition is beyond question. I've met him and heard him speak on a number of occasions and I have always been impressed by his patient, nuanced approach. I've also had the privilege of reviewing his poetry for PN Review; it is hard to doubt his substance as a poet, even though his work often gives the impression of 'occasional' work rather than the product of a sustained vision. This is hardly suprising if one places his output in the context of his commitments as a theologian and as Archbishop of Canterbury. It is, in fact, a miracle that he gets to write anything at all.

His comments upon the Coalition's approach to welfare, health and social reform are very much in keeping with his politics. His commitment to social justice is well-established and one would expect nothing less from someone who represents the Christian Left and who takes his role as Archbishop seriously. Whilst we may not be in the situation we found ourselves in in the 1980s - where some felt that the C of E was effectively the real opposition to the Tory Party - it is clearly crucial that the Church is serious in its questioning of the Big Society.

However, inevitably, for someone like me - a feminist and a lesbian priest - there remains a question why the Archbishop has not been bolder and more vocal in support of justice within the Church and of decision making processes within Anglican Provinces. I do not understand why he has not supported the Anglican principle that national churches make decisions about pastoral decisions without undue pressure from outside provinces. ECUSA and the Church in Canada have made locally-appropriate decisions to affirm gay clergy; these are decisions/policies which were voted for. And yet Rowan has been disinclined to support them.

Equally, there are very real concerns about the need for justice for LGBT people within the Church of England; Rowan - certainly in his pre-Cantuar days - was extraordinarily and publicly affirming. This support has, at best, gone underground.

Justice really matters - for the poor, for the excluded and the silenced. As does mercy. Rowan is absolutely right to challenge creeping notions of the 'deserving' vs the 'undeserving' poor within our social discourse. Generosity to the vulnerable and excluded - as a kind of mercy and grace - matters. As does commitment to standing in solidarity with them.

I trust and pray that Rowan will demonstrate his solidarity to all who are excluded - both within and without the church - as he ministers to the nation in the years to come.

Why America is Vampire Heaven

2011-06-08T10:11:00.000-07:00

Vampires used to be sexy, dangerous, and cruel. These days they are just as likely to drive mid-priced European hatchbacks, sparkle and have an unhealthy obsession with refraining from human blood.

Whatever you think about Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga (and, if you are one of my regular blog readers, I’m guessing it’s probably nothing very polite), only a fool would deny that it has had a significant impact on teen (girl) reading, on perceptions of vampires and on popular culture. Although there is superior literary ‘vampiric’ product out there, Twilight shares with Harry Potter the quality of generating a world which many people want to climb inside and live in.

Curiously, for me, I’m not going to lampoon the series, primarily because it would be almost too easy. Equally, I’m not going to comment on the dubious vision of women found in the Saga – the central character, Bella, is clearly utterly obsessed with Edward and has no goals outside of wanting to be with and please him. This is not an attractive vision of young womanhood.

Edward has that, 'Damn I need to crap a hunk of dried blood the size of a boulder again' feeling

Instead, I want to comment upon what Meyer’s representation of vampires has to say about her picture of the USA. This interests me in part because Meyer is a practising Latter Day Saint. The relevance of this is that the Latter Day Saints are, in a sense, the ultimate expression of a certain kind of American self-understanding sublimated into religion. Let me put it like this: there is a key sense in which America has, in its very DNA, a conception of itself as place of blessing and ‘manifest destiny’. Given that, it is logical that God would speak directly to Americans – would single them out for revelation and blessing. Thus, the Book of Mormon – a revelation which, according to LDS story, was found in the US for a chosen people on a pilgrimage of destiny. While The Twilight Saga is not a LDS book – though it clearly is one of the most ill-disguised adverts for pre-marital celibacy around – it is a book which reveals much about Meyers’ prejudices and pictures about her native land.

The Twilight Saga tells us again and again that vampires are both dangerous and alien. Most vampires prey upon humans and keep their distance from conventional human society. We are told that humans have a natural discomfort in their presence, even though vampires can be extraordinarily charming when finding their prey. However, the real story of Twilight, once we see underneath the sickly romance between Bella and Edward, is about acceptance.

Firstly, the central lovers are essentially insecure. They are addicted to each other beyond reason and sense and, even though Edward presents a more mature front, both spend an inordinate amount of time actually holding onto each other; as if they can only be safe and secure in each other’s arms. What they are both desperate for is acceptance and sense of place.

'Is that a Volvo C30 Edward drives? Hawt.'

Secondly, the Cullen clan, under the leadership of Dr Carlisle Cullen, are driven by the desire to belong – to belong to the ordinary company of good and decent Americans. Thus Carlisle works extraordinarily hard in that most respectable of professions – a doctor; his wife Esme is a homemaker and his adopted children all go to the local school, work hard and get top grades. And they love the American pastime – baseball. This is vampirism as ‘fitting in’. Even when the kids are taken out of school it is on the pretext of doing something wholesome – going hiking. Of course they’re actually indulging in that other All-American pastime – hunting grizzlies. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that this family are drinking the grizzlies’ blood they’d give the family from Little House on the Prairie a run for their money.

The message of all this is that, even if you are a vampire, you can find real acceptance in America: as long as you make sure you maintain your wholesome image and you don’t give into any, well, dubious/’unnatural’ urges like wanting to drink people’s blood (among no doubt a much bigger list of things). Oh, yes, and you have an exceptional amount of money and are good looking. For the Cullens have more cash than Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (and are obviously better looking – though there are a number of the previously mentioned grizzlies who can achieve that). They love to drive flashy European cars (which curiously does not annoy their patriotic countrymen and women – clearly the US car industry is totally screwed), have piles of cash lying around the house and wear designer clothes.

Indeed there is a truly profound comment on America here[1]: the message of the Cullens is that if you really want to get on the US today, be exceptionally attractive, drive gas-guzzling, environment destroying motors and throw away insanely expensive clothes after one use. That’s right folks: true acceptance in the US comes to those who are wealthy enough to afford to treat the world as their garbage can and do not care that the creation of their expensive threads has ruined the hands of ten children in a back alley workshop in Jakarta.

Of course, the only ones who really see through the Cullens are the Native Americans...wait a minute, isn’t Meyer’s take on them actually a bit racist (native Americans turn into ‘smelly dogs shocker’) and stereotyped? Oh God, what’s the point...

Just go read the books...or don’t...or meet a handsome vampire and give up on your life ambitions...

Nurse! NURSE!!!

[1] By ‘profound’ I mean ‘silly and pseudo-intellectual’

From The Church Times Vault:: The Sacrifice & Irony of War

2011-06-03T03:45:00.000-07:00

This was originally featured in The Church Times in 2007 and reflects the huge influence Paul Fussell, Modrick Ecksteins and Geoff Dyer have had on my thinking.

Most of us would agree that war is brutal, nasty, and violent. Few would instinctively add ‘ironic’ to that list. The cultural historian and literary critic Paul Fussell famously suggested that war constitutes a terrible irony of situation. So, by way of illustration, Fussell notes that in the Great War 8 million people were destroyed ostensibly because two people, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort, had been shot. Equally, in the Second World War, air bombardment (which was supposed to shorten the war) prolonged it by inviting those who were its targets to cast themselves as victim-heroes and thereby stiffened their resolve. I suggest that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was presented as a war of liberation aiming to give Iraq back to its people; in a dreadful twist of irony, its consequences daily seem to lead the Iraqi people deeper into bondage and dependence.

War constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. Perhaps the most poignant example of this is presented by the Great War. Everyone knows that the there was a mass belief that the war would be over by Christmas; everyone also knows that that hope was cruelly crushed by the consequences of total war. The beastliness of war in part lies in its capacity both to inflate people’s hope (by offering the anticipation of quick victory, the defence of national pride or dubious promises of conquest) and also to snuff out that hope by its uncontrollable consequences. The experience of the Great War – characterised by the seeming innocence of the European nations in 1914 about the consequences of industrialised war and the unprecedented nature of what actually happened (three and a half years of stalemate, the development of ever more nasty ways of prosecuting war and so on) – may reveal war’s irony par excellence, but it is hardly an isolated case.

Currently, the U.S.A and its allies are involved in what is usually called ‘a war on terror’; it has been noted by commentators in many quarters that this is a war truly without limit. It does not have, like so-called conventional wars, what might be called an ‘end-game’. It is unclear how ‘we’ will know when it has been ‘won’. The reality of trying to fight an asymmetrical war seems to offer the possibility of taking war’s irony to a new and more appalling level: if we cannot imagine what it would be like to truly bring the war on terror to an end, then we cannot anticipate just how dreadful and limitless the effects of its prosecution might be. One is tempted to suggest that if the governments of the USA and Britain had been more attentive to the ironic nature of war as definitively revealed by the experience of both world wars (but also by less total conflagrations), they might have drawn back from the seemingly uncontrollable, nasty and bewildering expedition in Iraq.

‘Remembrance Sunday’ has a peculiar resonance for me, one which was shaped by childhood. It is as much about memory – my memories of my grandparents, both male and female, whose lives were altered forever by their experience of the Great War – as remembrance. I remain impressed by the bleak peculiar stillness and movement of the National Ceremony of Remembrance from the Cenotaph. As a child I refused to go to church on Remembrance Sunday because I was transfixed by the TV broadcast of this strange event. It was the day each year on which I, a wild excitable child, stopped, and simply goggled at the stiff choreography of figures so ancient they were surely made of stone and animated by a magical spell.

To use language I’ve learnt since, Remembrance Sunday was to me at 9, a ritual speaking into transcendence and vice versa. I found strange communion in a cold November ritual. My Grandad Bert, a veteran of the Somme and Paschendaele, watched too - but alone. Years later, mum told me this was because he hated anyone seeing him cry. We can forget too easily that the essential purpose of war is injuring, and I have met (and in my grandparents case loved) too many who have been war’s casualties to feel at ease talking too blithely about war’s sacrifice, glory and duty. I know too much about how the Church has, to its shame, conflated martial and religious understandings of these words in order to evoke at best fine feelings and minister to people’s grief, and at worst to stir the Nation on to greater violent efforts. I give thanks that the Church of England today could not conceive of acting as the Bishop of London, Winnington-Ingram, did during the Great War and work effectively as a recruitment sergeant for the war effort, offering rousing speeches based on Biblical texts to stir the common man to join up.

And yet I find it a peculiar privilege to preside at Remembrance Sunday worship. I feel inadequate and somewhat awed to lead prayers in the company of men and women who, through their experience of war, have been party to terrible events and yet remain people who seek after the things of hope, faith and love. I remain convinced that underneath the faintly militaristic feel of many Remembrance Sunday rituals (the bugle, the use of standards and Laurence Binyon’s famous words) there is a ‘hard’ core of significance – the victims and perpetrators of war (who are sometimes one and the same) must not be forgotten. In a forgetful culture, so often dazzled by its technological and monetary success, I should not wish our rituals of remembrance to decay into misuse, even as I anticipate their evolution.

British society has shifted so much since the remembrance rituals were inaugurated after the Great War. Traditional patriarchal notions of honour, duty and glory are for most of us a spent force. Many of us are inclined to see the real heroes of war as those who refuse to fight. In 1994, in Tavistock Square, a memorial was finally unveiled ‘to all who have established and are maintaining the right to refuse to kill. Their foresight and courage give us hope’. As the writer Geoff Dyer noted, for many of us, ‘pride has come to reside not in the carrying out of duty, but in its humane dereliction’. One of the challenges for Church and Society in the 21^st century is nurturing rituals of remembrance which encompass both the prevailing cultural mood with its appropriate abhorrence for war and an honouring of the sacrifices of servicemen and women both in the past and now. Soldiers, like prophets, have often been without honour in their own land, as shown most notably by the experience of ex-servicemen in the USA post-Vietnam. Their service should not be sneered at or forgotten. Equally, a failure to be attentive to the nasty ironies and consequences of war would be to betray them and their successors even more.

Bashing the Bishop

2011-06-01T03:48:00.000-07:00

Where I come from 'Bashing the Bishop' has a very specific meaning. Being extraordinarily innocent I understand that it is something gentlemen do at night with their beards in order to make them more luxuriant. It is not in this sense that I am using that phrase today. Rather I use it in reference to the fact that Bishops in the Church of England have come in for a bit of a hammering recently.

My innocent face

Firstly we had 'Is-he-or-isn't-he-a-mason-bishop-gate'; then we had 'men-who-like-other-men-A LOT-can't-be-a-bishop-gate' and now we've got, 'Just-throw-half-of-the-bishops-in-the-House-of-Lords-out-through-the-front-gate-gate'. Presumably where there will we wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Clearly it is the case that the House of Lords - by every desire to extend democracy and British fair play - needs reforming. (By 'reforming' I am inclined to mean 'scrapping and replacing with an elected house'. For today, however, I am determined not to allow that to cloud my main point.) Given that the Anglican Bishops have 26 seats in the Lords (a mark of Establishment) and there are other faith groups which are under-represented there is a question mark about fairness and justice in representation. Current proposals for Lords' reforms suggest cutting this number by over half.

Busy Day in the House of Lords

Whether this proposal is serious or not, there are significant reasons why I sense this is a progressive move. And this is not especially to do with extending representation to other faith groups. It is to do with dismantling the temptations of preferment and privilege within an already privileged institution - an institution to which I am genuinely commitment.

The Church at its most exciting, interesting and intriguing is an irritating, radical and critical beast. Sadly I have witnessed too many of the church's potentially most interesting voices tamed and neutered once they have got the whiff of purple and moving among the great and the good. Often - and I admit this is anecdotal - the more intelligent and able among the church seek to smooth out their style and move in the right places and ways in order 'to get on'. And the number of seats the C of E has in the Lords is a sign of just how 'exalted' it is possible for a church man (and soon church woman) to be.

Some will tell me that it is important that the Church has a voice in the highest places and that our Bishops do much valuable and radical work there. Certainly some do and I would not wish to deny influence to those who speak truth to power.

However, what is clearly the case is that where the Church has been most potent is when it has been substantially connected to the people. Governments are most troubled by voices which represent the hungers, hopes and aspirations of large groups of ordinary people. The Church - as numbers continue to decline - sometimes feels like it's lost this connection. Its constituency sometimes most feels like it is a diminishing, sometimes self-serving (somestimes rahter remarkable) group of people who choose to 'hang out' in a sacred building once or twice a week rather than the wider group of people we're called to serve. When the Church connects wholeheartedly with the people, serves them, loves them and is untroubled by privilege and power it may have some hope of speaking with and for them. Then it might dare to let go of privilege, preferment and Establishment. Then it might be truly dangerous. Good, but dangerous.

From The Church Times Vault: The Joy of Darkness – What the Church can learn from Heavy Metal

2011-05-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

As some of you will be aware, I write opinion pieces for The Church Times from time to time. I'm conscious that because a) its internet version is subscription only and b) there may be some of you (hehe) who don't regularly pick up a print copy, you may not have seen my scribblings. To kick things off, here's the one on Metal that got a few folk frothing last year. As you'll see it's much more academic/measured than some people have suggested. Enjoy!

As darkness falls we wait like supplicants expecting the manifestation of a god. Ripples of applause break out, yet how can sixty thousand people be so quiet? And then it begins – a single note rising through the still summer air. A note followed by a roar – the roar of sixty thousand throats full of joy and delight.

This is no religious ceremony, at least not in the conventional sense. This is Sonisphere, a major festival of one of Britain’s most ridiculed and despised popular music tribes: the Metal fan. And instead of a god we wait for those kings of the Metal stratosphere: Iron Maiden.

Of the major music genres, Heavy Metal is perhaps the most maligned. Since Black Sabbath effectively created it in 1969 by using the dissonant sound of the medieval ‘Devil's Chord’, Heavy Metal has been cast as dumb, crass and, on occasions, satanic; music hardly fit for intelligent debate, let alone theological reflection. And yet, as both priest and metal musician and fan, it strikes me that the church, at this agonized time, has a serious gospel lesson to learn from this darkest and heaviest music.

Sonisphere brings together sixty thousand fans for a weekend of rocking to the kind of guitar riffs that turn your insides to pâté. It features everything you might expect from Metal and more. For the uninformed here’s a quick sketch: Musically, although it has many variations, Metal is characterized by a distorted, heavy guitar sound, with intense beats and muscular vocals. Songs cover any theme, but are unafraid to deal with death, violence and destruction, often in the first person. Lyrics like Metallica’s ‘Our brains are on fire with the feeling to kill/ And it won't go away/'til our dreams are fulfilled’ are not untypical. Metal fans are predominantly male and white and, as Sonisphere demonstrates, generally like tattoos, piercings and sport t-shirts supporting bands like Lamb of God and Apocalyptica. In addition, many bands have an anti-Christian stance. Slayer’s ‘I laugh at the abortion known as Christianity/I've seen the ways of God/I'll take the devil any day/Hail Satan’ is typical. This is not promising material for a lesson in the gospel.

And yet, Metal culture demonstrates the liberative power of human honesty. As a Metal fan for twenty five years, I’ve found ‘Metal-heads’ graceful, welcoming and gentle. The music’s willingness to deal with nihilistic and, on occasion, nasty subjects, seems to offer its fans a space to be warm and accepting in a way which shames many Christians. Metal’s refusal to repress the bleak and violent truths of human nature liberates its fans to be more relaxed and fun people. Sadly, by contrast, some readings of Christian faith, with an overemphasis on personal holiness, so easily crumble into stifling niceness and smiling humourlessness. It is such Christianity that the likes of Slayer are repelled by. Metal has no fear of human ‘darkness’. It invites the church to discover a liberative theology of darkness: darkness not understood as negative and bad, but as a place of reality and possibility. The poet Henry Vaughan famously suggests that in God there is ‘a deep but dazzling darkness’. Clearly there are some Christians who are ‘unafraid of the dark’, but many are yet to discover its potential as a place of integration and wholeness. Metal has long understood that without the Dark we can never truly be whole.

Many Christians will be concerned about the ‘Satanic’ dimension of Metal. Clearly, as a priest I do not think that Christianity is ‘an abortion’ even if I am severely critical of it. Distinctions need to be drawn. Much of Metal’s fascination with Satan/Evil is play-acting, driven by a desire to shock; some of it is simply story-telling, vocalizing Evil in the way Milton did in Paradise Lost (though without his genius). And some of the recent so-called ‘Black Metal’ bands have consciously cultivated satanic images. But these ultra-heavy, growling bands do not especially trouble me. Their avowed views are simply this generation’s attempt to go to the most shocking place possible.

Metal invites Christianity to be less afraid of wildness, parody and the ridiculous. It is clear to me that, subconsciously, festivals like Sonisphere demonstrate a healthy understanding of the medieval concept of the Fools’ Feast. The Fools’ Feast temporarily allowed the world and its comfortable values to be disrupted and inverted through excess and licensed anarchy. Young people typically took the central roles and would choose their own mock bishop or lord to act as Lord of Misrule. Such wildness and parody never sat comfortably with Church power and was ultimately crushed. And yet festivals like Sonisphere recover the spirit of the Fools’ Feast – for the human spirit will always need to rebel against ordinariness. Thus, license to dress and behave ridiculously, over-indulge, and ridicule sacred cows. Metal fans, like most people, generally lead rather ordinary lives and in an ever more regulated culture, a Fools’ Feast is essential to human flourishing.

I worry that as we Anglicans live out our Christian sincerity we have an insufficient comprehension of the significance of the Fools’ Feast. We have perhaps too much of what Nietzsche called ‘Apollonian’ religion rather than ‘Dionysian’. That is, we can make our faith too reasonable, ordered, and controlled, rather than allowing it to flow with passion, foolishness and absurdity. I am not suggesting that as Christians we have all had a humour bypass, but we are inclined to take ourselves too seriously, even when we’re having fun. Now one might respond that, unlike Metal-heads, this is because Christians are involved in a genuinely serious activity. But if that is the case, surely that is only more reason to rediscover the liberating and disturbing quality of foolishness in our gospel living. For the fullness of human living surely demands it.

Do Not Be Afraid

2011-05-15T15:33:00.000-07:00

Everyone enjoys a joke. Except some librarians. And most dictators. But apart from them, everyone likes a joke. Well, if you discount clowns. And possibly whoever was responsible for gagging the cart-wheeling verger the other week.

Two weeks ago, I was particularly delighted when a friend told me a joke concerning me. What made it even better was that it was told with a straight face. As if it wasn't a joke.

We were enjoying an Italian lunch, yacking about the usual things - how Brits go doolally in the face of pomp (apparently there had been a big wedding or summat the previous Friday), women bishops, being gay in the church, how is it possible that Vernon Kaye keeps getting work and so on - when she dropped into the conversation that a few months back my name had been mentioned in some newspaper twitter feed/blog/blah as one of the candidates for first woman bishop.

How I laughed...Would you buy a used car off me??

Once I'd stopped choking with laughter on my breadstick I pointed out very clearly why not only would hell have to freeze over but it would have to open an all-night skating rink before I would be considered bishop material. Firstly, if the Church of England couldn't consecrate Jeffrey John, then it sure the hell couldn't go for me. EVER.; secondly, there are clearly lots of talented, polite and actually rather marvellous women who I would cheer should they be picked on for the role; thirdly, given my bold and radical (by 'radical' many people would say 'heretical', 'silly' and 'idiotic') reflections on church I'll be lucky to be offered another job; and, fourthly, and most importantly, I am precisely the kind of unsafe, opinionated, and unthinking fool that those responsible for ensuring the 'smooth image' of the church I suspect rather despise. Which brings me to my point.

One of the dimensions of the 'masonic flying bishop-gate' event this weekend ( I wish I was making this up) is the extent to which appointing him sends out unhelpful messages to the media, society and to parishes. Now I have no wish to comment on the specifics of this event, but I am intrigued by the extent to which the Church of England has become fascinated with managing information, image and identity.

Clearly it is the case that bishops do attract media attention, Rowan and John Sentamu most directly. Their words are scrutinized and, on occasion, taken out of context. As such, I do understand why these figures are cautious about image and have advisory staff who are inclined to make of them 'smooth men'. I understand and, yet, there is a huge part of me that weeps at this situation and actually is inclined to see this as a sign of an institution losing such edge as it once had.

I know that many liberal/radical Christians like myself have experienced disappointment during Rowan's tenure as Archbishop of Canterbury; there is a sense that he has not been as bold or as radical as many on the Christian left had hoped. I have shared this, though there are no doubt substantial reasons - political, administrative, personal, theological - why he has not been what some have hoped. He is - in my view - one of the supreme intelligences in the UK, religious or otherwise, but the role of Archbishop is almost impossible to wear well.

Picture of a Bishop

My concern is that the fear of the media and the appointment of safe clergy to bishops' roles may mean the appointment of eccentric, bold characters to the episcopate becomes ever rarer. When I think back to bishops who actually mattered to me in my formative years - when I was an admittedly critically-minded, intellectually ambitious teenager - I inevitably think of David Jenkins. His thoughtful and very honest theological explorations were of course parodied in the press and his appointment as bishop was massively controversial in some quarters. But whatever else he was, he was interesting, immensely intelligent and genuinely engaging and he gave many of us hope. His appointment was rare, but I fear that today it would be practically impossible. The smooth men would not have it. I pray that I am wrong.

It may seem lazy and cliched to claim that the Church has never been about being safe, but as I see it, this claim is true. My anxiety is that, as it continues to shrink, the church will become ever more desperate to protect what it has and will continue to miss the opportunities to be as bold and risky in its 'leadership' as it it called to be.

International Women's Day Talk

2011-03-30T05:17:00.000-07:00

A few week's back I was invited to preach a sermon at the end of Monmouth's Women's Literature Festival - as a kind of closing event. I've decided - as a result of some interesting responses from the 100 odd people who witnessed it - to make it available here. Hope it has some value. Apologies for length and you should bear in mind that this is a guide text - I departed from it in several places as thoughts/ideas struck me. Enjoy!

I’m sure we’ve all come across Lewis Carroll’s infamous Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. She of ‘Off with their heads’ fame. As a role model for women she may be of limited appeal; how about the White Queen? She appears in Through the Looking Glass and is notable for living her life backwards through time; she offers Alice ‘Jam tomorrow and Jam yesterday, but never jam today’. She is rather dotty and perhaps quite mad. Surely no more a role model for women than the Queen of Hearts? Yet even as a comedic character she says something which resonates closer to many women’s experience more than might be comfortable: for she tells Alice that when she was younger she practised believing impossible things for half an hour a day and that sometimes she believed six impossible things before breakfast.

As someone who regularly feels caught up in impossible things, surely she must at some point in her career have been a priest and feminist theologian.

And leaving aside the oft made joke that modern western women – women like ourselves - are skilled at multi-tasking to the extent that we are juggling if not impossible, then certainly difficult ideas and tasks every day of our lives, consider the reality for the vast majority of women and girls in our world. And I am not underestimating the pain of men or boys, but it is those with xx chromosomes who bear the brunt of the world’s depredations.

We’d like to imagine that trafficking in women and girls would be illegal throughout the world and yet there is sex trafficking on a major scale in many countries and in over 1 third of countries there is a legal grey area which makes it de facto legal. In over half of the countries of the world women are legally de facto second class citizens – that is even where legislation exist to protect women they are systematically treated as of less value than men in personal, social and employment matters. In half of the world’s nations women are educated to a level at least 15% lower than men and in many cases it is much worse. And in 90% of countries, women’s physical security cannot be taken for granted. Our world is full of people living impossible lives and still struggling to believe in what can appear to be those most impossible things of all: hope for the future, faith in self, others and the faithfulness of God, and in love not shattered by abuse, dark compromise and exploitation. And so very many of them are women.

And Jesus says, ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted’.

It is a striking statement. For those of us on a Lenten journey with Christ towards Jerusalem it reminds us – along with that shattering parable of the Pharisee and the Publican to which it has become attached – of the real significance of our presumed self-importance to God. That God is truly interested in our need, our vulnerability and hunger for wholeness and forgiveness rather than the way we may inclined to pump ourselves up with pride and self-value about our achievements, possessions and activities.

What would you say if I told you that among feminist theologians – that is, for people like me – there’s a huge question mark about the extent to which Jesus’ statement about humility is a helpful thing for women to hear? Indeed, what if I told you that what Jesus says is exactly the opposite of what women – as bearers of the image of God – need to hear? Maybe if you’re a fully paid up feminist this won’t come as a surprise; for many my suggestion may come as yet more confirmation of just how subversive feminists actually are...how dare we suggest Jesus may be wrong.

Well let’s see if I can give some account of myself before you throw me out of the church.

Now we all will have met many self-confident – perhaps over-confident women. And truth is that in our society women and girls have come a long way. But the truth is – I sense – that for all the changes in women’s prospects we are still inclined to be judged by how we look and by the extent to which we conform to a stereotype based on pleasing men.

Well if that’s too high-faluting then let me say this. In my ministry I have come across so many women and girls who are caught in situations which frankly would not be put up with by the vast majority of men – either in work situations where they are paid less, in home situations where they are working yet doing the vast majority of the work, or in relationships which are shattering in their abusiveness and lack of hope.

And part of the deep reasons for the acceptance of these situations lies in our social conditioning which tells us to accept things, seek the peace, try to accommodate, make things work. Which says ‘put others first’; which says ‘do not put yourself forward’; which suggests a particular kind of modesty and humility.

Women in our society are taking on increasingly demanding roles and yet so many of us hold corrosive self images. And if that is the case here how much more in so many places?

So what if pride – which is of course one of the classical deadly sins – isn’t a sin for women but a great virtue? A Christian virtue?

For that woman who has spent her whole life in the church doing the jobs no one else wants to do and doing it without complaint...

For the powerful creative woman who suffers the insults of both men and women for daring to speak up for change ...

For the woman who suffers neglect and violence in her relationships and yet still hungers for the slightest show of affection because her upbringing has told her to look for it...

For the girl who thinks she is only what she can look like or what she wears...

For the countless millions of women and girls around the world who are undervalued and treated as sex objects or are abandoned...

But...Jesus says ‘All who exalt themselves will be humbled and all humble themselves will be exalted.’

Perhaps the reward for women’s patience, for our willingness to be humble, will be our exaltation in the kingdom of heaven...

But how long will we wait? For how long will that line be used to control and limit expectations?

What if though we all need to reach deeper? One of the things about feminism that is often ignored is that it seeks to free up both men and women. That’s it’s not about women being on top. And it is perhaps in this regard that we as Lenten pilgrims need to reflect again on the call to humility...to go deeper than the shallow account we often give of it...

What is the call to humility really? Is it the call to put ourselves down as so many women have through the centuries? Surely not...for Christ is not calling us to crawl like second rate beings but to stand up to our full height...

The call to humility is the call to be our full and true selves...to not only appreciate that we are all, male and female, bearers of the image of Christ, but also invited to grow into the Likeness of Christ.

Surely we’ve all come across countless examples of false humility – of folk who’ve perhaps are saying things like ‘Oh well it was nothing’, ‘I’m not really that good at this’ but are really communicating a very strong sense of pride; and I accept that some people are genuinely just being modest, but often there are other human agendas going on...

And where this becomes extremely toxic is where folk – often but not exclusively women - end up selling themselves short...in other words actually being much less than God is calling them to be...

Think of Christ...if he is our model of humility, what does he reveal as a model for women and men? Well, he certainly is no shrinking violet – warm, humane, generous, but also direct; able to deal with power and authority when required...to meet people as himself and as their selves...

We might say, but he was Christ, the Son of God...he was a man in hte 1^st century without the extra [problems of being a woman, and of course one of the lessons of Lent for us all is how far each of us and the church community as a whole has to travel in order to fully grow into the Likeness of Christ. But that is our calling and we are called, individually and corporately, to grow; to start here and now, to begin again and again.

And at the heart of this humility is seeing ourselves right. You know, one of the key issue with the Pharisee in the story – a much respected movement it should be said – was not his religious commitment but his human inability to see himself aright; and the publican isn’t humble because he’s crawling on the floor, scraping the knee, but because he sees where he is and what he has come to and comes to God with his need, as RS Thomas puts it, as green as a leaf.

Our vision in this life is always limited – now we see through the glass darkly, then we shall see face to face, but Lent perhaps provides an opportunity to strip away some of the layers of deception and see our true selves.

To take hold of the God-given power and energy that lies within us and not pretend that we are less than we are...not to be arrogant about but honest and real...

And also to see our failings for what they are...rarely the crushing beasts we are inclined to make them, but opportunities for change and for commitment...

There is a world of pain and exclusion and exploitation out there and it is affected women and girls particularly...but we in all humility are not necessarily the helpless, but the powerful – the ones who can affect change as much as our sisters and brothers have done before us. And if this seems the counsel of madness to you, then so be it...it has taken women labelled mad from time immemorial to change the world...believing impossible things until the impossible has become lived truth.

Fallen

2011-02-03T09:50:00.000-08:00

Especially for Tom Dare...a two-part poem for literature's most interesting character, Satan. Including the word 'schlong' - just for Tom.

Fallen

Please allow me to introduce myself...

Cat strangler, Host stealer,

deflowerer of simple country girls.

Imagine instead:

a Mustang cruising the city

on a hot summer’s night

a bottle of Jack in my hand

crystal meth scorched head

sugar skulls, Hades rings, on my arms gleaming.

Havana hanging from my lips.

Scouting for the sweetest piece of ass.

The hungriest mouth.

Imagine that.

I’ll be your Simon Cowell, your

Charlie M, your Allen Klein. I can put the

Sven in Svengali. I’ll deliver the Hello shoot,

be the genius behind your most twisted songs:

I don’t do kum bye yahs.

Get your shrivelled schlong

down to the crossroads

I’ll teach you a song.

Your fingers will flame,

you’ll trash cars, make TVs burn. The girls

will fluff you ‘til you scream.

I can show you how to make evil your only good.

The cold is spiteful.

It gets colder every endless day.

Nobody visits.

The TV sucks.

When Dogs Attack.

Snog, Marry or Avoid.

My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding:

You don’t need me anymore.

The greatest trick you ever pulled

was to convince me I don’t really exist.

Pass me my inhaler.

And I only eat when I‘m lonely.

(Don’t judge what you cannot understand.)

It is so dry and cold down here.

What I miss is rain.

The softness of rain.

Mary: Her Kind...an unchristmassy poem for Christmas

2010-12-23T04:55:00.000-08:00

In case you don't know, I am a published poet. I try to send friends a poem for Christmas. Sadly I don't have some people's email addresses so, for you, here's this year's poem. It's written in the voice of one of the key Nativity figures, Mary. It uses as its structure Ann Sexton's famous poem, Her Kind. Happy Christmas!

Mary: Her Kind

After Sexton

I have known the greedy looks of men

their black eyes frightening as night.

I have hurried, busied myself since I was ten

refusing their snares, kept my wits bright:

Lonely child, lonelier woman, hardened mind.

A woman like that is no-one’s possession, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have been a canvas mother to a holy child,

a carved idol receiving prayers from those unable to cope,

been forced to be pure, pious, to deny the furious wild

been stripped of sex as if thus I was a fit focus for hope:

seething, febrile, exploding, confused, disaligned.

A woman like that gets washed away, becomes empty and mild.

I have been her kind.

I have binned the heavy blue gown

escaped the velvet prison, stolen a motor bike,

pawned for a rock of crack the heavenly crown,

shagged some hairy ape, luscious women, ‘cos that’s what I like:

I have refused your dreams, wasted my soul.

A woman like that is free, save your frown.

I have been her kind.

RM. At the Hairdressers. 08/12.