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.

The heresy of wholeness

 

Some approaches to Christian healing might be saying to some disabled people ‘God prefers another version of you’.  But God was subject to our bodily limitations in the incarnation, and still bore the scars of them in the resurrection, so we might better be looking for things to be transfigured rather than ignored or erased. 

This was one of the striking things said at Lincoln Cathedral yesterday by Canon Timothy Goode from York Minster, speaking as a disabled person himself.

Another was his reminder that everything from our church buildings to our forms of church leadership are shaped by ‘ableism’ – one can see around which idealised forms of human being they were designed or developed.

The only depressing thing was that his insights were greeted as innovative.  I’ve reflected here before about being taught theology in Birmingham in the early 1980s where John Hull’s understanding of his blindness, Stephen Pattison’s analysis of what structures reveal about those who create or accept them, Frances Young’s relationship to her son’s disability, and invitations to observe radical care taken with the design of the Balsall Heath Church Centre, led us to think the church would always think this way.

If wounded grace was more central to our theology and lives, Goode said, we would be less fearful people, because we would not have to feel we needed to prove ourselves against a perfect ideal.

Not dissimilar things were being said by Dr Graham Daniels of Christians in Sport on Radio 4’s Sunday Worship today, responding to sporting success and failure rather than to disability.

Our achievements matter, but we cannot always win.  His most careful thought was that successes and failures are expressions of our identity but not the sources of our identity; we are not ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ but human beings who experience successes and failures.  Peter failed, but he was not 'a failure'.

Thinking this way, he said, means excellence cannot enslave, we can lose without being destroyed, and we can celebrate success without worshipping it. 

Meanwhile, the photo is taken from the Shepherds Law hermitage in Northumberland, the home of Franciscan Friar Brother Harold for many years, now redeveloped but as yet untenanted.  A few days in the north-east brought me there and, nearby, to the grave of Josephine Butler, Anglican contemplative and active traditions at their most rigorous.

And I’ve had the news of the death of the widow of a cousin of my father’s aged 98.  She must have been the last survivor among the guests at my parents’ wedding just over seventy years ago.

Day Two

And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters,

and let it separate the waters from the waters.’

So God made the dome and separated the waters under the dome

from the waters that were above the dome.

And God called the dome Sky.

And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.

 

Two sets of Jacqui Parkinson’s mammoth biblical tapestries arrived in the Cathedral this week.  The boxes in which her Threads Through Creation arrived were labelled in a way which made me smile.

I’ve been particularly taken by her representation of the snake in the garden of Eden, which looks like a snake, a falling angel and (to my mind) a missile.  She cites Isaiah 14.12-15 (the fall of an over mighty Day Star and Son of the Dawn), which patristic writers (and then Paradise Lost) interwove with Genesis 2 to make it look as if it was Lucifer who tempted Eve.

In my mind the bible-tradition-reason trio comes out nearer to paying close attention to the bible as text, as interpreted in the past, and as interpreted in our context.  The snake (all that Genesis 2 says is that it was more crafty than other creatures), the Lucifer interpretation (not actually part of the Genesis 2 story), and deep awareness of the damage contemporary knowledge can do, each felt to me to be there.

But it was the second day of creation in Genesis 1 which came into particular focus for me too.  She has ‘God spoke - light’ for day one, which is a sharp way of putting 'let there be light'.  And she has ‘God spoke - water’ for day two, which is a bit of a distortion; the chaos of water, over which God’s breath and spirit moves, is there before day one.

And, although I’m not sure what this points towards, day two is also one of the days on which the writer does not say ‘and God saw that it was good’.

Saying ‘Light’ on day one was about separating light and darkness.  Now, on day two, it is saying 'Sky' which separates the waters still perceived to be above the heavens and the waters below.  What if it is the actual act of separation (of making space, of opening up) which is the fundamentally creative act? 

It continues on day three when the waters below are gathered into one place, separating out dry land (which God saw to be good) and then vegetation followed (which she has as ‘God spoke a green earth’, and which God again saw to be good, the only day this is said twice).

The Cathedral’s new Chancellor gave his first lecture to mark the arrival of the art work, although he didn’t seek to respond to any of it. 

He highlighted the chaos and dangers of darkness and of water, now being contained, and I pressed him a little to emphasise the spaces the separating out created.

He noted that God saying light (making spaces which are not dark), saying dome (making spaces which are not water) and saying green (making spaces which are not barren) over three days allowed the spaces to be populated on the next three days in turn with sun, moon and stars, with birds and fish, and with land animals including human beings.

He also hinted forward to Revelation where there will be no need of light (God will be the light), the sea will be no more, and death (animal mortality) will be no more.  Jacqui Parkinson's work on Revelation is also with us, so that is where I'll need to look next.