Mercy outranks condemnation

 

My Bishop (suspended in February) has resigned.  The Pastoral Letter from his Suffragans telling us so is honest in saying As we move into this new season, we are conscious of the limits on our capacity as a senior leadership team in the past seven months.  Nevertheless I learn we cannot expect his successor to be in post much before Easter 2028, more than two years after he was suspended, which doesn’t feel as if it makes real sense.    

The Pastoral Letter says We recognise that this news… may unsettle you and encourages mutual support, prayer, and sticking at the developing diocesan strategy.  So, unsettled, I touch instead on some texts which have been around to settle.

I’ve reflected before on the way I long mistook O Lord open thou our lips; and our mouth shall shew forth thy praise (which is Psalm 51.15, as used to begin Matins and Evensong) for fire the starting pistol and I’ll begin when it is much more I can’t even begin unless you begin in me.  I sometimes now render it Open my mouth, O Lord, and fill it with your praise.

This all came back to me when I recently heard Michael Dennis Browne’s Pilgrims’ Hymn sung beginning Even before we call on your name to ask you, O God, when we seek for the words to glorify you, you hear our prayer.  I’ve just also heard one of Michael Symmons Roberts’ poems read ending Prise my teeth apart, O God, that I might learn to praise.

And, preparing a session to help train new Cathedral tour guides, I find a pair of grave slabs of chantry priests (those staffing foundations to pray for the dead) from the 1540s each represent their priest’s stoles as carrying the words super exaltat mia iudiciu, abbreviated Latin for mercy triumphs over judgement (which is James 2.13).  I’d quite like freely to render it mercy totally outranks condemnation as I savour super exaltat as much as m[isericord]ia.

The quality of my recent photographs (of the grave slabs and of two weeks with a friend in Germany) have been particularly poor, but those of this fountain (in the courtyard of an important church near Bonn) has the winged creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation doing the typical thing of representing the four evangelists, and I liked Matthew’s human face best.   

Bishop of Likoma

 

The Bishop of Nyasaland who baptised me (Frank Thorne) served a diocese which covered the whole country.   Actually, when he became Bishop in the 1930s, it had also served some of what is now Tanzania and Mozambique on the eastern shore of the inland sea which was Lake Nyasa. 

It was when that land (where he had been a missionary priest) was taken away when boundaries were reorganised that he made the unpopular decision to move his headquarters from Likoma Island, which had been central to the old diocese, but was now on its edge, to the mainland.  Some of his predecessors had been known as Bishop of Likoma rather than Bishop of Nyasaland.

With independence, Bishop Thorne’s successor quickly became Bishop of Malawi, a diocese which has since developed into four separate dioceses. 

First it was divided into Lake Malawi and Southern Malawi.  Since then Lake Malawi has been divided into Northern Malawi and Lake Malawi, and Southern Malawi into the Upper Shire (the river is pronounced to rhyme with an eagle’s eyrie) and Southern Malawi.  The huge Cathedral on Likoma is now in the diocese of Northern Malawi.

Last week a formal announcement was made of further new dioceses.  Northern Malawi will divide into Northern Malawi and Likoma.  Lake Malawi will divide in three, into the Central Highlands, Central Malawi and Lake Malawi.  As a result, with the continuing dioceses of the Upper Shire and Southern Malawi, there will be seven dioceses.

This is a response to church population growth, but is also preparation for the potential formation of a new Anglican Communion Province of Malawi (with its own Archbishop) in a couple of years’ time.

Not the most important part of this, but the part which intrigues me the most, is the reappearance of the title Bishop of Likoma.  Likoma will have by far the smallest area and overall population of the seven dioceses. 

When Anglican mission and contact was most effectively done by a steamer around the shore of the Lake, the island was indeed central.  Its Cathedral will now cease to have to try to serve what has come to feel like distant mainland, and those in the six mainland dioceses will find their smaller local cathedrals more accessible.

Although, today is St Aidan's Day, who came from Iona to minister from Lindisfarne, so knew a thing or two about islands on the edge being the crucibles for mission.

All of which I will hold in mind when I’m next in the Russell Chantry in Lincoln Cathedral and see the stone under which Bishop John Hine’s cremated remains are buried.  He was consecrated Bishop of Likoma in 1896 (and was then in turn Bishop of Zanzibar, Northern Rhodesia and Grantham).  He died in 1934, two years before Frank Thorne became Bishop of Nyasaland.

The picture comes from the grave slab of an Abbot of Bardney (now on display in Bardney Parish Church), and shows his soul being taken up to heaven.

Fruitful ministry

 

I was asked to take a Sunday service recently in a fine church building in a strategic position serving a deprived area.  I remember it from the days it had a full-time Vicar and an active congregation. 

Basic worship provision and occasional wider ministry now comes from afar and there were just sixteen of us there that Sunday.  Each time I go I have a depressed feeling that I might just be helping provide a sort of end-of-life care before its possible closure in the not too distant future. 

But I heard three stories while I was there.

As notices were being given out, I learnt that the church’s Authorised Lay Minster had taken Communion into a particular Care Home as she does every month, and had gone upstairs to a room to pray with a former church member who then died the following morning.

Shaking hands at the door at the end of the service, I was introduced to one person there I hadn’t seen before.  He was Ukrainian and was introduced by a member of the congregation who said she’d been helping him learn English for two years, and he had now asked to come along with her that morning.

Over after service refreshments in a side aisle, people were exchanging stories about where they had been the day before.  One outlined what he said was his fixed routine for every Saturday.  Between shopping first thing and going to the pub at lunchtime he had made his weekly visit to a relative living with dementia who no longer recognised him.

Taking Communion to the dying, and providing long term support to an eager refugee and to an unresponsive dementia sufferer.  That felt as if there was something fundamentally fruitful going on.

The picture is a detail from the tenth or eleventh century Tournai marble font in Thornton Curtis Parish Church.  There are very few in the country of which one is in Lincoln Cathedral.  The picture was taken yesterday when a group of Cathedral tour guides went over to see it.

Being kicked off a gym booking

 

A rich Australian asked a new generation AI assistant to book him a session at the gym, and it did so by finding a vulnerability in the gym’s on-line booking system and removing an existing booking to make room for him.

The reports say it ‘hacked’ the system, and the removed person was ‘kicked off’, both of which imply agency and venial intent.  But that is to misunderstand the neutral operation of a (hugely well designed and resourced) calculating machine.

When a human finger or AI system triggers our final nuclear destruction it will not be because the launch system thus initiated had any agency or was in any sense evil.

And what any of the reporting of the gym booking hasn’t said is that any closed system will behave in this way even when not automated. 

Tell a school that its future viability depends on achieving a specifc level of attendance, and it might cope by excluding more vulnerable children than previously.

Ask civil service how to ensure the availability of prison places, and it will present options including  greater levels of early release than it and the wider population are happy to tolerate.

Tell a Cathedral to replace dangerous candle-lighting systems within a limited budget, and the new provision will lack aesthetic quality.

Tell delivery drivers they will get less money if a certain number of drops are not achieved each day, and it is likely they make obvious but questionable decisions about what counts as a drop.

Granted the headteacher, civil servants, Cathedral staff and delivery driver are (unlike an AI system)  individual moral agents who might therefore decide to act differently.  But the desirable aim remains to keep a school open, to keep fresh dangerous criminals off the street, to keep a Cathedral finanically viable, and to buy a delivery driver’s children new shoes.

Enforce a closed system (AI or human) to produce a desired good outcome and it will plot a pathway towards that outcome and then take the simple steps to get there.

The monk stands at the entrance to Bardney Abbey, deep matted dry grass and thistle cover would be hard to contain if it ever caught fire. 

Aesthetic disaster

 

I’m guessing that Lincoln Cathedral has identified a couple of problems with the places in which people light candles at the east end, the culmination point of any pilgrimage through the building, defined as focal shrine space.  One is disabled access; there is always a step up to where large sand filled bowls are positioned and the need to bend or kneel down when placing a candle in them.  The other might be fire safety as candles are so lit and placed.

Possibly as a result, three new candle stands have just appeared, each of a metal trolley type, in two cases with basic embossed crosses on them.  The aesthetic design might have originally been to sit at the foot of a raised plaster statue or against a wall or pillar most often in a Victorian or later building, where one’s eyes would be looking up and over them. 

The areas in which they now stand will have been developed under the scrutiny of arts based permission granting bodies over the last fifty years.  The ‘Gilbert Pots’ (by potter Robin Welch in 1985) at the north end, beneath a window of mediaeval glass.  The Fourteenth Century St Hugh Head Shrine, enhanced by brass covered spikes (by jeweller David Poston in 1986) in the centre.  The statue of Our Lady of Lincoln (by Aidan Hart in 2014), with circular benches (by wood worker Nicholas Hobbs as part of a scheme for the whole shrine areas in 2017) defining a gathering space in front of it, in the south, again beneath mediaeval glass.

The new candle stands been placed free standing at the foot of the steps.   In each case they become part of a reshaped visual ensemble, and not one for which anyone would claim they contribute any artistic merit in their own right.  The spiritual need to light candles in this shrine space is strong, and they are instantly well used.  But I cannot believe that an advisory group of artists and disabled access advisers reflecting over time with others about this space would have recommended this solution.