Two gifts

The section of Mourid Barghouti’s poem Midnight (which she had marked in the copy by our bed) read at Deborah’s funeral yesterday:

The soul retains its passion
even on the cross,
the body has its dance,
even on the ropes.
The war enters into farce:
They bomb a butterfly!
It becomes
even more farcical:
the butterfly has not died
but, with its fragility still intact,
has grown yet lovelier,
towering above the hubris of the general
and his science of war.
Here is half the triumph:
the butterfly, armed with
nothing but its beauty and the thrust of its wings,
enters the contest, sure of death.
It will die, it knows it will die,
– from the qualities of the killer and from its own qualities.
Yet,
from the window of a future despair,
it will return,
flapping its wings in the rooms of fancy.
The soul retains its passion even on the cross,
even on the ropes, the body has its dance.

And the view of the sun on the snow on Pen-y- ghent today (taken by one of her sons from the edge of the site in which she had just been buried).

Deborah

Deborah Mullins, teacher, textile artist, friend of those unjustly treated, greatly admired and loved  

8 September 1959 - 20 December 2020

She died just at the time people would have been beginning Sunday worship on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, reading the same Gospel as was read at our wedding on a feast of the Annunciation: "Here I am, servant of the Lord; let it be as he has spoken".

She and Mary shared a birthday, together singing "Our souls are overwhelmed by God, mercy cascades down the generations, and the promise remains that justice will reverse the inequalities and oppression we allow". 

Ruth for today

When Lord Sacks, the Chief Rabbi for twenty-three years until 2013, died earlier this month, Radio 4 re-broadcast the last talk he had given for it, which I find also to be the last thing on his personal website. 

It was Mental Health Awareness Week and he made a link with the story of Naomi, the almost unrecognisable impoverished and distraught widow returning to her Bethlehem home.  Woven though the book Ruth, he said, is the Hebrew word hessed, a word meaning more than simple kindness. 

Tyndale, he pointed out, invented the English form loving-kindness to translate it.  It is a sort of committed covenant-kindness.  It is what transformed Naomi’s well-being.  It could be expressed in the necessary peer-support and community-support of the bereaved, depressed and mentally ill-at-ease. 

I wonder how far it was his awareness of mental health issues which gave him a fresh perspective on Ruth, or how far his detailed knowledge of Ruth enabled him to give us a fresh perspective on Mental Health Awareness Week? 

In February 2017, I touched on those teaching Christian Theology at Birmingham University in the 1980s: 

Neither John Hull’s blindness nor Frances Young’s son’s disability were simply ‘raw material’ for ‘theological reflection’ but rather the realities integral to their lives, the lenses through which they read scripture, the questions with which they interrogated tradition, the filter through which they sifted other Christians' explorations and experience. 

Later that year, in November, I was intrigued by the ideas of ‘framing’ a picture and of ‘curating’ an exhibition as partial images for preaching: 

What is 'brought out' of both our rapidly changed culture and our faith stories when they are exhibited next to one another? 

Either way, I spoke of local mental health support networks in our on-line worship this morning, and then explored other possible connections in the following parts of Ruth. 

Ruth is only able to glean because (in accordance with repeated injunction in Deuteronomy and Leviticus) those harvesting did not gather absolutely everything from the fields, aware of those who would need to scavenge behind them: the poor, the alien (Ruth was a Moabite), the orphaned and the widow.  I have noticed this many times before. 

I didn’t indulge myself in pointing out the way these categories are those not protected by the parallels trio of market forces, Government protection and ordering, and family-community networks.  Nor did I canter again around the links to the monastic vows of poverty, obedience, and commitment to relationship within the vowed community alone. 

I did (despite my November 2017 warning to myself that an habitual choice of a favourite frame which perhaps unconsciously will only ever bring out a strictly limited selection of colours or features) identify asset stripping and marking the documentation of asylum seekers with ‘no recourse to public funds’ as obvious parallels, and mention how attention to fair trade, Food Banks and overseas aid each might represent a church or village’s alternative understanding. 

Boaz is only able to operate as the re-deemer of the situation (the family or community elder facing a situation which has gone awry and making adjustments to property and relationships as if they were the ones which were already in place) because a better qualified potential re-deemer said it would be too costly for him to do so.  I hadn’t noticed that before. 

I wondered whether genuinely putting-things-right (declaring right-eousness) would always be costly.  I wondered whether placing this next to the personal and business costs of lockdown is the place where current experience and Ruth illuminate each other now.  

Finally, of course, Naomi’s loss of relationship and future is re-deemed by Boaz and Ruth’s child Obed being put into her arms as her own, although actually the child of a distant relative of her husband’s and of her widowed Moabite daughter-in-law.  Obed is to be grandfather of David, among whose descendants was expected to be the ultimate re-deemer.  

For a Christian Advent Sunday, this hope which points forward to events in Bethlehem, the town of David, because he was of the house and line of David. But jumping straight to that simple point might be to short-change ourselves if it isn’t to then exoplore how a very Ruth-shaped the story goes on to be.

A Shifting Constitution

I wrote the following a few weeks ago, but did not post it.  The joint statement today by the Anglican Primates across the British Isles prompts me to do so.

1.  This summary will be superficial, but, as far as I can see, less superficial than most television interviews on the subject at the moment.

2.  For centuries, England (and Scotland, both together as one new United Kingdom from 1703) has had a colonising, exploitative and violent relationship with Ireland, a relationship which continued into and beyond Ireland’s incorporation into the United Kingdom in 1801.

3.  A line was drawn (literally) with a divorce settlement in 1921.  This gave independence to what became the Republic of Ireland, but retained the six north-eastern Irish counties (where a unionist and mainly Protestant majority was otherwise threatening insurrection) as part of the United Kingdom.

4.  At one deep emotional level some of the life of the island remained as if there was a single whole Irish nation.  The Irish Rugby team is still drawn from both the Republic and the United Kingdom.  There is a single Anglican Church for it all, including dioceses with some parishes in the Republic and some in the United Kingdom.  The constitution of the Republic came to claim jurisdiction over the whole island (in practice, an ambition to have eventual jurisdiction over it). 

5.  Whenever national boundaries and the emotional identification of a less powerful population within an area do not fully coincide, levels of discrimination inevitably occur, and some level of terrorist kick-back almost always seems to follow.

6.  So when the Northern Irish ‘troubles’ emerged in the late 1960s it was initially around civil rights which were being denied to many of the nationalist (Irish republican supporting and mostly often Catholic) population by many of the unionist (United Kingdom supporting and most often Protestant) population.

7.  The eventual ‘Good Friday Agreement’ settlement in the late 1990s did something unique and stunning.  It respected both those with nationalist and those with unionist convictions and identities.  The Republic took the extraordinary step of removed from its constitution its claim for jurisdiction over the six counties.  The United Kingdom took the equally extraordinary step of agreeing cross border institutions to be part of future decision making.

8.  One significant factor which made these steps conceivable was the accession of both the Republic and the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community (later the European Union) in 1973.  It came to be as easy to move people, capital and goods across the internal Irish border as across the Irish Sea.  Everything from food standards and human rights came to be identical in both the Republic and the United Kingdom.

9.  Those who warned that consideration should be given to how the United Kingdom leaving the European Union might disturb this balance were dismissed as being part of ‘Project Fear’, and were later promised that imaginative and innovative solutions could easily be found to preserve an open border even when regulations began to diverge on either side of it.

10.  It should have been and it is clear that there are really only three basic possibilities as this divergence begins to happen if one wants to prevent the undercutting of the economy on one side of the border by such things as goods being produced to lower standards or by paying workers less on the other side.

11.  One option would a hardening of the border, with things like customs checks and tariff payments.  This would be as practically challenging as seeking to create a secure economic boundary between, say, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire - a challenge spectacularly increased by the memory that Irish border posts had been magnets for terrorist activity in the past and so might easily become so again.  This option would begin to deny nationalists in the six counties their identification with and free movement into and out of the Republic.

12.  A second option would be a hardening of a new ‘border’ in the Irish Sea between the six counties and the rest of the United Kingdom.  This would be practically equally disruptive to everyday commerce (the example most sited being a supermarket lorry being checked for paperwork on every perishable item on board each time it took a ferry across).  This option would begin to deny unionists in the six counties their complete equality of economy with and their free movement into and out of the rest of the United Kingdom.

13.  A third option would be to secure a level of agreement to keep regulations either side of the border as closely in line as possible.  The great challenge here would be what mechanisms could plan and adjudicate such a thing.  This option would begin to limit the break in governance between the Eurpoean Union and a separate sovereign United Kingdom which was the prized goal of ‘Brexit’ in the first place.

14.  So this is what is sometimes called a ‘wicked problem’, one for which there is no easily available solution.  The present European Union and United Kingdom Governments have done what they felt was as good a deal, as good a compromise, as they could.  It is has elements of the second and third options (12 and 13 above).  The United Kingdom Government proclaimed this to be great, held a General Election to seek a mandate to agree it, and have agreed it.

15.  A Bill is now proposed to allow the United Kingdom Government to make whatever unilateral changes it sees fit to this deal.  Within the United Kingdom, the response of many has been astonishment that what last year was said to be a triumph is now said to be hasty and ill thought out. 

16.  But those in the United Kingdom noticing and discussing such things have mainly missed the emotional register of the response to this in the Republic.  The Bill has been published without any of the consultation or joint decision making envisaged in the Good Friday Agreement.   

17.  The parallel is not exact – but imagine a partner who was abused through a long relationship, then through a short marriage, and subsequently since a divorce, but who had finally come to a new cooperative approach about how to deal with shared possessions and property, and that this has resulted in a legally binding agreement.  The partner learns one day out of the blue that the other partner had repudiated the agreement and claimed unilateral power to change any element of it at will without any external accountability.  It does really feel that bad.

16.  The Bill would allow the Government to make such changes without any parliamentary scrutiny.  And it includes provision that such changes would explicitly never be subject to any legal challenge.  It is not an exaggeration to say that, in the limited areas covered by the Bill, this is a bid for near dictatorial powers.  Sweeping powers do exist elsewhere for the Government use of Statutory Instruments (rather has Acts of Parliament) but there are parliamentary and legal safeguards in place to prevent these being used as quasi-dictatorial powers.

17.  Meanwhile, those in the United Kingdom feeling the impact on themselves may have been distracted by the fact that the particular Prime Minister of the day into whose hands the new powers would be entrusted had consistently lied about the European Union from the days he was a journalist (sacked for doing so) to the days he was making specific the claims in the most recent election campaign (highly rewarded for doing so).  He had also only recently been prevented by the highest court in the land from abuse of prerogative powers.  His Government has even more recently been rebuked by the Speaker of the House of Commons for taking Covid 19 actions without submitting to parliamentary scrutiny.  And so on.

18.  But actually it does not matter at all when creating quasi-dictatorial powers whether the Prime Minister of the day is a charlatan or someone with an acquired taste for non-accountable Government action or a saint.  That is hardly the issue as he or she will at some point be replaced.  The issue is about the creation of such unchallengeable powers at all.

19.  The Lord Chancellor ought to be the one who sees through this.  He gave an interview at the weekend [at the time of writing] which included an apparent admission that he would resign if any resulting breaking of international law went ‘too far’.  So we and Northern Ireland may be about to replace parliamentary and legal safeguards with the safety net of his individual judgement about when our abuse of process and neighbours has become extreme. 

20.  One wonders (as an aside) if he had dreamt when an aspiring politician that he was watching an interview in which a Minister of Justice attempted to reassure people that the abolition of parliamentary or legal scrutiny of an aspect of his Government’s programme did not matter because the watcher could depend on the Minister’s conscience kicking in at an unspecified level of illegality.   If so, he must have imagined that he would be the United Kingdom Minister about to step in and condemn that foreign tin-pot dictator’s Minister, rather than be that Minister himself.

21.  A different bill is making its way through Parliament at the moment.  It not only allows MI5 to behave illegally if it believes this to be in the best interests of the country, it allows the Police, Customs and Excise and others to do so too.  So, for example, the recent compensation awarded because an undercover police officer had infiltrated a group of environmental protesters and fathered a child on one of them would not be necessary in the future.  There is a pattern here.   

The peacock is on a new headstone on a grave in Haworth Cemetery, possibly the most gracious headstone there.

A wake of blooded feathers?

Yesterday morning at St Michael’s, Haworth, our first attempt at Covid-safe All Age Worship was a challenge.  Social distancing somehow trying to meet interactive worship.  Experimenting with the corporate worship just as degrees of local lock-down are about to be re-imposed.  Two dozen people did come.  Enough of them picked up the invitation to bring feathers, and two families were able to use them for a bit of banner making.  We had one household bubble putting glue on the banner from one side, opposite the other household bubble using gloved hands to fix the  feathers on.

Ahead of St Michael’s Day at the end of the month, we were touching on some of the Bible’s angel stories, including Jacob wrestling with an angel.  Jacob emerged with both a blessing and a limp, which is perhaps potentially a likely result of any genuine encounter with God.  I like the allusive nature of the resulting new hanging in church - the departing angel leaving scattered feathers in its wake.

“Empathy is costly.”  So said one of those I visited in the afternoon, reflecting on her emotional reaction to much of the news and the situation of people around us.  “If I didn’t feel so much for others, perhaps I wouldn’t be as anxious,” she was almost saying.  “Being humanly aware is never going to be emotionally easy,” might be another, possibly more positive, take. 

Sympathy is in part what is implied by its linguistic root: syn-pathos - alongside the pain of another.  By contrast, empathy (although actually an early twentieth century English translation of a nineteenth century German psychological term) implies being en-pathos, in the pain of another.  So, yes, empathy is always going to painful; not just alongside someone’s pain, but in it.

Which might give me another very partial tool for explaining the story of God-in-Christ.  God is fully human in Jesus of Nazareth, so it is not strange that God being alongside us like that should be ultimately costly.  “Divine empathy is necessarily a journey towards the cross”?  So those created in the image of God should simply expect to detect some resonance of all this within ourselves?

Finally, touching base with a colleague this morning, we reflected together on the normality (rather than ‘strangeness’) of these times.  Like all the others brought up in relatively prosperous homes in post-War Britain, we came to assume the absence of war, isolation from discrimination, a stable climate, the protection provided by antibiotics and vaccines, freely available health care, a consensus around the concept of human rights, reliable pension provision, and networks of protective insurance. We came to assume a naturally secure context. 

Which, of course, isn’t what most human beings knew through history or know around the world today.  What comes to us as ‘strange times’ alert us to what we should have always have recognised to be ‘normal times’.

I don’t know whether these three things hang together – emerging from the latest bit of struggle both fractured and blessed, feeling the cost of being attentive enough to others distress, finding the upheavals around us reveal what is normal for most people – chasing the scatter of almost blooded feathers (the colour wasn’t planned but came from the boa  donated at the service) behind the disappearing messenger from God.

The nations tremble

From time to time (most recently for special services for Remembrance Sunday, Haworth 40s Weekend and the anniversary of VE Day) I have chosen to have sung I vow to thee my country or Jerusalem. 

Some regular church goers find including these hymns in worship deeply problematic  - and I’ve suggested before that most people recognise one of the chief lessons of the wars of the Twentieth Century to be how positively dangerous ‘love [of country] that asks no questions’ is. 

Others, seeking the church’s hospitality and support to remember those who have been killed in the ambiguities of war and opposition to tyranny, are puzzled at any church’s censorship of patriotic material which appears in at least some church hymn books.

So what I often do is introduce the hymns in their obvious religious context, spelt out clearly in the second verse of I vow to thee my country (where the vision of the kingdom of God is that ‘there is another country... and all her paths are peace’) and allusively in the second verse of Jerusalem (where Revelation’s vision of a new Jerusalem is echoed by ‘I will not rest... until we have built Jerusalem’).

But I’ve now re-visited for the first time in years the image of the page of William Blake’s handwritten preface to Milton on which Jerusalem appears.  I’d simply forgotten how the poem sits beneath an excoriation of the political and cultural leaders of his day (including, as it happens, the Eton/Westminster and Oxford educated Prime Ministers of the time) and their captivity to classical studies rather than biblical fidelity.  

Looking again, I see that the first verse is not actually, as I sometimes too gently suggest in my introduction to it, merely rhetorical.  There is no hiding from the fact that it is actually savagely and sarcastically satirical.  It is really saying something like “nobody could possibly be stupid enough to think that this country is built on Christian values - or that the basis of its commercial innovations and wealth has been anything other than diabolically exploitative”.

The second then has to mean “stoke my zeal and revolutionary commitment to overthrow all this”; Blake was himself even once put on trial for sedition.

And placing a quotation from Numbers at the bottom of the page (“If only all the Lords’ people were prophets”), something I think I did vaguely remember, cannot in context mean much short of “If only more people were woke”.

Which makes it an interesting choice for singing at the party concert concluding the annual season of radically accessible concerts in the Royal Albert Hall each year.

Which sort of brings me to Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory, not habitually chosen for our special church services, nor even printed in any of our hymn books, but which both also claim a  religious position (less than biblical, Blake would notice) that it was Guardian angels who commissioned Britain to rule, that God intended and created the nation’s strength. 

Having significant and amplified voices suggest that it is scandalous that these words might not be sung at the party concert might, to say no more, give a hint as to why our present negotiations about our future trade relationships with our neighbouring countries are not going quite as swimmingly (as ‘oven readily’) as we had been encouraged to believe they might do.

Not, ironically, that many people would be listening.  I’m not sure people have really realised quite what a small proportion of the nation’s population now hear or watch (as, to be clear, I very often do myself) the Boat Race, the King’s Carol Service, the Last Night of the Proms or (with the notable exception of her most recent special broadcast) the Queen’s Speech.  Or, to be honest, adhere closely to the Church of England.  

The very act of still treating any of them quite as emblematically as they once were, and the periodic sometimes apparently manufactured controversies about the dire implications of alterations to any of them, must actually be the things which a modern Blake would have enjoyed ridiculing most - as he would undoubtedly would have trumpted a glorious welcome for fresh zeal in a nation noticing how differently history reads when it is the victims rather than classical heroes and their champions who are placed on our pedestals.

More woven strands

Among the readings set for Sunday is that of Joseph being put down a (dry) well by his brothers.  They had intended to kill him, but one (Reuben) persuaded them on this course of action instead, although his hope of then rescuing Joseph was thwarted when he came back and found the well empty, his brothers having pulled Joseph out and sold him into slavery.

I’ve found pictures of Joseph being thrust into the well and of Reuben’s mournful discovery that he is missing in a Fifteenth Century Biblia Pauperum.  Strangely to modern eyes, they illustrate Jesus’ burial and the discovery of the empty tomb.  Reuben’s “The boy is gone; and I, where can I turn?” is explicitly being seen as a prototype for Mary Magdalen’s “If you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him”.

It makes me notice that neither Joseph nor Jesus are merely found where they had been confined (or merely restored to their old lives), but each is ‘sent ahead’ (one into Egypt, one into Galilee) where new stories are to unfold.

But I also thought of Jeremiah being thrust into a cistern (again a dry one, but muddy enough at the bottom for him to sink into it), which is another of the stories which we are not invited to read at a main Sunday service.

Some of those with influence had been sufficiently unimpressed by his vehement contradictions of the  Government’s repeated insistence that it is coping well with a breaking crisis that they are willing to do away with the gainsayer.  

But a Cushite in royal service called Ebed-Melech (it seems he is a eunuch), confronts the King with the injustice being perpetrated in his name, so that Jeremiah is rescued. 

And it is Ebed-Melech who held my attention.  He might simply be an anonymous ‘servant of the King’ (which is what ‘ebed melech’ means), but he is rewarded by being spared the consequences of the disaster which does quickly befall the King, court and country, and is given great status in the Talmud. 

He struck me how relevant he is as a sort of potential ‘patron saint’ for everyone from whistle-blowers to Amnesty International.  

And (in weeks in which we are reminded how easily black people’s role in our histories are forgotten, marginalised or disguised), it seemed important to notice that a Cushite would come from the Upper Nile valley region; the hero of the story may have been an Ethiopian or (in our terms) Sudanese slave.

Which also creates a further connection in my mind between Hebrew Scripture and early Christian scripture as an Ethiopian eunuch form a royal court makes an intriguing appearance in the Acts of the Apostles.

One strand of story for our time

There is a story, not widely retold, which seems almost familiar in a world in which an absolute monarch can make potentially disruptive members of the royal family disappear, in which dictators can achieve extra judicial executions abroad, in which the commercially powerful can normalise their own sexual exploitation of others, in which mafias can prolong blood feuds. 

A strong aggrieved minority group saw an opportunity to lynch the family of a defeated ruler who they said had once sought their genocide.  The new tyrant was happy to collude; he might have been keen both to win their public favour and to be able to eliminate potential rivals in the process.  Seven men were strung up.  Two were sons of the defeated ruler by one of his sex slaves; her potential use by others had been bid for as soon as he had fallen from power.  Five were grandsons of the defeated ruler, whose mother the new tyrant had once been promised as a wife but who had then married another man becoming the mother of the sons the new tyrant was now able to have slain.

The seven bodies were left exposed, destined to be slowly devoured as a spectacle.  But one of their endlessly exploited mothers set camp at the foot of the gallows and day after day drove off the wild animals which approached.  So the new ruler felt obliged to do one dignified thing.  He gathered the human remains, and also the remains of both the defeated ruler and his much loved son, and arranged their proper burial.

And the re-telling of this story centuries on was recast as one of non-violent resistance of the exploited and abused - risky dignity in the face of oppression, shaming the tyrant into treating the oppressed as human just this once .

Only a possible hint in the story, that human sacrifice might ensure a good harvest, seems strange to us – the new tyrant’s desperation at a prolonged famine had led him to consult with the potential victims of his predecessor’s supposed attempted genocide.  It was also actually a threshing floor which he would soon buy as a place on which to build an altar, the site for a future sacred shrine for his own regime, bringing a plague to an end by doing so.

The story is in 2 Samuel 21.  One of the options for an Old Testament reading at a principal Sunday service this time next year is to read over seven weeks some episodes of the regime of this new tyrant (King David) in 2 Samuel, but this story is never included (nor, more strangely, that of the first foundation on the site of the Jerusalem Temple).  It is also another of the passages skipped over altogether in the pattern of daily readings for Morning and Evening Prayer as well (although 2 Samuel 24’s account of David buying the threshing floor is read at one service each year).  So there is no particular reason why even the most diligent daily church attender should be aware of it. 

This is despite the way there have been periods when the story has been better known by Christians.  Their interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures was sometimes focused on any hint they could find of a story which paralleled that of Jesus.  So they noticed ‘we have no right to put anyone to death’ (2 Samuel 21.4 and John 18.31) and ‘he handed them over’ (2 Samuel 21.9 and John 19.16) and saw this as a deliberate foretaste of Jesus’ execution, also on a hill.  It is striking to me that the nineteenth century French engraving by Gustav Dore, which I found on WikiCommons to illustrate this post, shows the lynching to be by crucifixion, somehow reflecting Mary at the foot of Jesus’ cross.

A different picture of Rizpah driving off birds of prey popped up in a biblical art social media stream the other day, so she is certainly not totally over looked today.  It was what made me remember what was actually Allan Boesak (the South African Reformed Church minister, liberation theologian and anti-apartheid campaigner) reflecting on the story in a ‘Biblical Texts in Context of Occupation’ collection.  

So, once again, I see Rizpah is each mother, wife or daughter of the disappeared or assassinated or casually state-murdered standing out for the dignity of their sons’ lives which mattered and matter, taking what is sometimes the great risk of shaming the overwhelmingly powerful.

Re-reading

I find I have fragments jotted down any of which might have developed into a post on this blog.

Re-reading Judges 3

My periodic noticing of which passages of scripture get jumped over even in the otherwise apparent continuous reading through the Bible day by day at Matins and Evensong brought me (between celebrations of Joshua and Caleb and those of Deborah and Gideon) to wonder why the story of Ehud is one we do not read and which I hardly know– Judges 3 has him deceive the excessively fat King of Moab into a private conversation, his single left-handed plunging of a hidden weapon so deep that the King’s flesh closed in over it, and his calm locking of the chamber leaving the Moabite royal servants unaware of the assassination until Ehud was safely away and it dawned on the servants that the King couldn’t have been on the loo so long and so the door hadn’t been locked for his privacy.  I’m glad not to have to try to preach about it, although the advantage of being left-handed is an intriguing feature of the story.

Re-reading our historical context

It was suggested that 1871-1990 (the period between German unification and German reunification) might be viewed as a single western European ‘Hundred Year War’; the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 marking a shift from conflicts in which the place of what had been Napoleonic France had been the key dynamic to conflicts in which the emerging strong single German state was. 

One could step back and suggest also that the new century-long focus on the dynamic of having a strong single German state might have temporarily masked the importance of the dynamic of having a single strong Russian state – the one Hundred Year War in fact being bracketed by Russian loss of its Crimea ports (1856) and its annexation of the Crimea (2014), with what was in effect a Russian truce-line across western Europe between 1945 and 1990 holding the tension for one quarter of this time, and with what is emerging as the Russian undermining of the new Franco-German partnership (as we might understand the EU) as only the latest stage.

Re-reading our historical process

The whole point of history is that it is re-written.  The craft of the historian is precisely to re-assess, re-evaluate, re-search and then, yes, re-write.  In fact media reports of any historical discovery almost always tediously return to the cliché that ‘history is having to be rewritten’.  This is so basic, how could anyone think this is not the case?  Or think things like the history of African-European relations has been that the Africa has treated Europe as a free cashpoint rather than the other way around? 

Re-reading Luke 6

Which leaves a tiny piece of theological speculation which I have shared with some different clergy groups.  Perhaps the concept of ‘white privilege’ pulls into focus Luke’s quite different take on the Beatitudes (Luke 6.24-26 is not jumped over in our daily reading of scripture, but it is certainly read much less often than Matthew  5.1-11 in public worship): woe to you if  you are rich, well-fed, happily un-bereaved and spoken about highly; if I live in a context in which I can assume my good fortune to be the norm or even the result of my own qualities, I’m likely to fail to see what a dangerously self deluded place it is and what vulnerably different experiences imprison others.     

Warm blossom time

For in the Romans there is an arrogance which no submission or good behaviour can escape.  Pillagers of the world, they have exhausted the land by their indisciminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea.  A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power.  They are the only people on earth to whose covertness both riches and poverty are equally tempting.  To robbery, butchery and rape, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace.

I’ve been returning to a famous quotation in Tacitus’ life of his father-in-law Agricola.  We can make obvious inferences about Roman power from the little which is known about Pilate as Governor of Judea at the time of Christ, but it is all spelt out in the detailed account of Agricola as Governor of Britain forty years later.  And Tacitus imagines (rather than reports, I assume) how a particular British leader would have excoriated his conquerors and what was just being coined as Pax Romana.

Three things strike me re-reading this quotation in the time of Black Lives Matter.

The first is that a campaigner today chanting ‘No Justice, No Peace’ is saying roughly the same as ‘they create a desolation and call it peace’: it is not peace if there is no justice; it is not peace if all opposition has simply been crushed or swept aside.  Tactitus gives us the earliest account of what a native inhabitant of these islands would have thought, so the whole history of reflection in Britain is bookended by cries that the absence of conflict is not in itself real peace.

The second is that, quite unexpectedly now I notice it, Tacitus, a member of the Roman elite, exhibits a remarkable level of empathy and self awareness in giving this account.  Put in our terms, his privilege has not blinded him to the way that privilege crushes those who do not share it.

The third is how almost integral self-interest is to having absolute power (to being ‘top nation’).  One could almost plot onto this quotation things like our own past subjugation of Ireland, slave trading, and making war to enforce drug use on China; our exploitations which we lying told ourselves was good government.  One could almost plot onto it our immediate future’s helplessness to preserve any control of security of the internet, to retain our established levels of environmental and animal welfare, and to prioritise adapting to forestall the climate emergency; our capitulation to the desolating conditions on which we will be allowed to trade peacefully with those now powerful in our place.

I wove the first two of these three striking things into a sermon on Sunday, adding there a third which was the positive possibilities of what looks almost like the first experiment in what being sent out by Jesus should mean (Matthew 10.5-14): don’t rely on having resources to deploy; name and intend peace at every stage; announce God’s alternative way and approach as being within reach; act it out in reconciliation, in bringing new life, in casting out the destructive; don’t be downhearted by the failure of this robust just peace to take root, but dust yourselves down and try planting it again nearby.   

I’ll have to wonder why I sketched out a different third point for this blog post.  It may simply be that I’ve been trying to juggle with some over simplified historical perspective.  

Just as the Hundred Years War of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries was not a continuous conflict but rather a regular flaring up of a single theatre of conflict over more than a century, I wonder whether history will see the conflicts roughly beginning with German unification (1871) and ending with German reunification (1990) as a single ‘Hundred Year’s War’.  

Did Britain, whose Empire had been at its zenith in 1870s, find itself in the 1970s, in the last stages of that war, settle down to a new normal with both the disposal of the final remnants of that Empire and with taking a new part in the close economic and political alliance created by the main protagonists of that single continental conflict in which it had been caught up for those hundred years?  

And, does it now find itself a generation or more later, stepping out (without either Empire or close continental alliance) almost innocent of what being subject to the powerful self-interested misrepresenters of what political peace and freedom will mean?

Meanwhile, the picture is of newly discovered fireblight in our small orchard of fruit trees, widespread and incurable, so the trees will probably need to be taken out, and with much care.  Apparently fireblight doesn’t usually taken hold this far north because it requires sustained warm weather at blossom time, so our wonderful May was not quite the blessing it seemed.

Breath of God

The most arresting and transforming image from worship yesterday was the London church which pictured the crucifixion with the caption ‘I can’t breathe’.

It didn’t need spelling out. 

We’ve been taught that it is suffocation which ends the life of those being crucified; pain and exhaustion means tortured victims can no longer hold themselves in a position on the cross in which it is possible to breathe. 

We’d seen footage in the week of a black community activist’s death as he was arrested; his being knelt upon until the life was squeezed out of him; his final ‘I can’t breathe’ being taken up as the cry of riotous reaction. 

We instinctively make the link: lawful controlling authority’s tendency over the millennia to be almost casual in eliminating those it sees as possible sources of insurrection in the majority community around it; now here yet again as God’s story and our world’s story side-by-side.   

And we know that Covid19's deadly work is when it overwhelms lungs so that even invasive ventilation fails to deliver enough oxygen.

An image of the crucifixion with the caption ‘I can’t breathe’ startles because the crucifixion uncaptioned is such a familiar sight that normally it fails to provoke any real reaction in us at all.

And it is an image which unsettled yesterday because it wrong footed some of the standard worship at Pentecost; pious generalisation trotted out with a broad smile (about the breath of God – and about peace, joy, and forgiveness) can seem glib or superficial if simply spread about as if the Holy Spirit is like a pixie dust which will make everything alright.

We would have been reading of locked-down fear in John’s account of Easter Day:

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’  After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side.  Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you.  As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’  When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’

Perhaps we are being freshly invited this year to pray - tentatively, painfully and realistically - that the gift of the Holy Spirit will do the hard work of properly arresting us and transforming us.  And those with forceful authority around us.  And those most vulnerable to having life squeezed out of them, even alongside their last gasps.    

We do so with a strange recognition that, at the centre of the reading, the newly risen Lord who is suddenly there speaking peace (and who is about to send them, breathe on them, and warn them that there are implications in their reactions to other people’s sin) appears to be recognised and authenticated precisely by his showing them the wounds of his killing. 

May be the whole movement of the passage suggests something strange but essential about the places where our fear will turn into joy.  It is the one who has had not been able to breathe who breathes Spirit on us.  It is the scarred one who sends us to discern where human sin still deeply scars ourselves and others. 

Resurrection possibilities can only ever be squeezed out of lifelessness.  The teachings have always been that it is from apparently dead seeds, often those sown in tears, that joy and peace and forgiveness have a chance of beginning to grow.   

Ferns and prayers

In our desiccations, with those dried up,

we pray:

ever-creative God,

un-curl us. 

In our isolations, with those restricted,

we pray:

human-habited God,

fresh-green us.

In our mortifications, with those disprited,

we pray:

re-newing God,

new-season us.

Rooks and bees

A fresh nest on the statue of St Michael, high on the east front of St Michael's, Haworth, and the nest-building debris below it.

Our favourite bush at the Rector entrance, with the flowers which face the sun coming into bloom first, and one of its early visitors.

Rock, water, sunshine

The Church of England might look different

Almost exactly thirteen years ago, I attempted to help the Deanery (or ‘Mission Area’ as it was briefly fashionable to call it at the time) of which I was Rural Dean to recognise the level of change which we faced, and I was sufficiently impressed with myself both a year later to reproduce much of it as the second post I put up on this Blog and now to want to return to it again.

The physical landscape around us changes gradually until it becomes unrecognisable.  Some change we hardly notice, such as the slow erosion caused by a river.  Some change is observable over a few years, such as the retreat of a cliff.  Some change is instant, such as the result of a levies breaking or land slipping.

In the past, change in the Church of England has been of the first sort.  In the 150 years before I was confirmed in 1974 the pattern of clergy deployment, relating to society, theology and worship... changed fundamentally without any of the individual increments being revolutionary.

In the present, change in the Church of England is of the second sort.  The Alterative Service Book 1980 came and went in just twenty years, and the number of clergy deployed...  [here] today is half the number in the Pastoral Plan of the early 1990s.

What is hardly grasped by anyone involved is that change in the Church of England immediate future will be of the third sort.  The ground beneath us is moving.  The pressures created by the demography of our congregations and the tightening our finances (as well as shifts in society) have been building inexorably.

The demography of our congregations is such that the presence of those who were formed as present and future members of the Church of England in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s has masked the startlingly smaller number so formed in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, but as they begin to die the huge gap is exposed.

The tightening of our finances has reached the point when we need to subscribe... over £100 a day to deploy a stipendiary clergyperson, before we even begin to finance our church activities and buildings; this will continue to increase in real terms....

... on a specific day in the not too distant future the combination of these pressures will mean that we suddenly cease to be able to operate as we are.

Some people of all ages will continue to make Christian commitment, and many people will continue to look to the established church for varieties of Christian ministry, but the numbers of those committed will not be able to sustain anything like our present provision of buildings or stipendiary ministry.

Some small parts of the Mission Area continue to operate as if change is still very gradual...  [so] change doesn’t have to be faced at the moment at all.

But the majority of the Mission Area operates as if rapid change is enough; ... places where ten years ago a priest lived next door a church which was his or her sole responsibility have all ceased to operate in this way; systematic development of authorised lay ministry and alternative worship is common.

Hardly anyone operates as if the major crisis is coming, and the ugly experiences of our Methodist neighbours when seeking to bring together three small churches in the centre of our Mission Area is one indication of why we have shied away from seeking to propose anything bold...

... we know (as the Methodists do) that the personal investment of most of us in the particular congregation of which we are part means that coming to a common mind about which places to identify and then willingly ceasing regular worship in the others is a task which may well be beyond us.

So are we more likely to wait until the levies break or the land slips, until further specific congregations become unviable or until the provision of stipendiary ministry across particular parts of the Mission Area becomes impossible, and make emergency plans in the new landscape only when we can see it?

Since then a complementary evolutionary (rather than geological) image has come to mind, remembering that the mechanism of evolution often appears to have been sudden steps rather than imperceptible increments.

A disaster (of climate or flood or famine), perhaps even a near extinction event, happens.  In happening it creates a pinch point such that only a fraction of a species survives, and new born members of this species will descend from those survivors alone.  Whether it was the unusual length of a foraging snout or the accidental camouflage provided by a minority fur colour or some other suddenly advantageous dexterity or stamina, those without it will have no children.

So, it is not a surprise to find that the sudden closing down of much of our economy put straight out of business some firms which were already precarious, and now threatens to do so for a significant proportion of other previously flourishing small and medium sized businesses as well.

And it is not surprising that serious worries arise about the viability of the business models on which our dioceses and parishes are operating.  Is this the breaking of levies, the slipping of land, the near extinction event, the evolutionary pinch point?  If it is, what will the landscape look like when we set out of isolation?

On Wednesday, the latest in the Bishop of Leeds’ e-mails to his clergy named this fear.

Some of you will be wondering what will happen when we re-enter and re-launch in due course.  I am also aware that there is some fear about the sustainability of the church in the light of an economic depression/recession, loss of finance to parishes and a plunging stock market.  I just want to reassure you that discussions are going on nationally and in the diocese about how to anticipate, mitigate or negotiate the challenges that might confront us.  I am not worried about this at all.  We are a people who deal with reality and work out how to respond faithfully to any challenges that come our way.  We are getting ahead of the game in this, but we don’t have firm data with which to work yet.  I simply want to reassure you that the thinking and scenario planning is being done at every level.  What is clear is that the Church of England might look different in the future – even if our core vocation does not change.

I am grateful for his positive tone.  I just wonder what ‘might look different in the future’, now so clearly named, will actually mean.

Before the sudden crisis, there was already great popularity and significant strategic funding being directed to establish franchises of (and imaginative variations on) the Holy Trinity, Brompton approach to mission and church life.  Perhaps this was already anticipated to be one well adapted potential survivor of and parent of Church of England life.

But has there been real evidence that this or any other model was already particularly well adapted for often ancient parishes churches at the centre of villages of 500, 2000 or 3500 people at present lay-led and largely attended by those in their 70s and 80s whose economic viability has looked vulnerable for some time and might now be suddenly tipped over?

And are those stipendiary clergy most like me (as some of the last 1000 blog posts has sometimes identified and admitted) ill-adapted parts of the present logistical and theological vulnerability? 

Meanwhile, the picture is the Easter garden created in front of the house here.

Waiting in darkness

Parts of the reflections for Thursday and for Saturday from the Bronte Virtual Church blog.

There was a full moon late on Tuesday evening.

This is not a coincidence.  There is always a Full Moon on one of the days before Easter. 

We know that the resurrection happened very early on the first day of the week around the feast of Passover.  And we know how the date of Passover was calculated.  So the early Christians came to celebrate the resurrection on the first Sunday after the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox.

This year’s Spring Equinox was on 20 March.  We had to wait eighteen days until Tuesday’s Full Moon.  We are now waiting five more days for the next Sunday so we can celebrate Easter on its actual anniversary.

Those without modern calendars, and without our convention that the year begins on 1 January, would have thought of it as the first day of the first new week in the first new month (a word which relates to moons) of the fresh new year.

But it places us in a moon-haunted darkness for a few days first.  Jesus is arrested tonight (the Thursday before Easter, Maundy Thursday).  He is executed tomorrow (the Friday before Easter, Good Friday).  And all creation appears abandoned by his absence the following day (Easter Eve, Holy Saturday).

Nothing happens on Holy Saturday

 

Good Friday’s grief and drama were yesterday.  Easter Day’s surprise and celebration will be tomorrow. 

The church has an extraordinary wealth of prayers and activities for yesterday and for tomorrow, because the death and resurrection of the Lord is the pivot on which everything turns for us. 

But it doesn’t for today, because nothing happens today.

Many churches use the empty day to spring clean and to deck the church out ready for tomorrow. 

But this year the church can’t distract itself by being busy like that.  We simply have to sit and wait. 

Perhaps that has always been the point.  We sit, we wait, and we long for God’s promise to become real around us.

There will be a tiny shock of recognition for those doing so who turn the pages of our daily service book to find a prayer composed for today and used for several years. 

It is difficult to think it wasn’t written in the last few days for our situation: 

In the depths of our isolation

we cry to you, Lord God:

give light to our darkness

and bring us out of the prison of our despair.

So, this year, let us not rush on too quickly to trumpet the resurrection which we always know is very close. 

Let us wait alongside those for whom it is not yet close.   

With those in isolation around us,

with those who cry,

with those who cry to you, Lord God:

we pray for the light you promise

not seen by those now enveloped by darkness;

we pray for the hope you promise

no whiff of which reaches those now enmeshed in despair;

we pray for the freedom you promise

no rumour of which is heard by those now most confined;

we pray for love you promise

    not savoured by those now misused;

we pray for resurrection you promise

    not touched by those now held in doubt.

For many it has always been true that the leap from grief to joy has not been instantaneous.  As nothing happens today, we wait and pray alongside them. 

For ourselves, there are also things for which we long (an interesting word in itself). 

If this is the right sort of praying to do today, it is beautiful that the Archbishops’ recent message speaks of us all at the moment “living through a prolonged Holy Saturday”.

We will not see an end to the present crisis any time soon.  But we will do so.

We will not be able properly to celebrate Easter for a little while yet.  But it will come.