Afghanistan and Remembrance

Strong feelings were expressed, and questions asked, at Remembrance this year. I was at St Paul’s Bledlow Ridge, a lovingly looked after village church which is (wonderfully) kept open in the day. There’s a John Piper West window which some see as a vision of heaven. Some people present knew well the village names on the war memorial, and it was good to have a crowd there to keep faith with the dead of the last century’s wars, and show their gratitude for the basics we all easily take for granted, as well as express our pride in the dedication and professionalism of our armed services today.

This year, however, with news reports of a British soldier killed yesterday in Afghanistan, and seven others in the past week, people were asking questions. Remembrance felt very much more immediate than has often been the case in previous years. The people of Wooton Basset have evolved a mark of remembrance and respect, almost weekly of late, to dead service personnel as their bodies are repatriated. Millions of ordinary people are united in their respect and admiration for those who serve in our forces, putting their lives at risk daily for the rest of us.

Everyone this morning very much expressed this admiration, and wanted to show solidarity with our troops and their families in the UK. However, people are seriously uncertain as to the aims of the current exercise. It’s not that they doubt the war is winnable, because nobody seems to know what “winning” would amount to. Many who are entirely supportive of our service personnel feel they owe it to those who are risking their lives daily for us to ask our politicians hard questions the troops can’t.

On a micro- scale our forces are doing what they are being asked to do, whatever the cost. However, the bigger macro aim is unclear, and nobody is hearing a clear or convincing answer to the question of what our macro-aims might be from the politicians who put our troops in danger in the first place. Simply asserting it’s all somehow vaguely necessary, without explaining what and why, is not enough. Those making big sacrifices, along with the rest of us, deserve better. Perhaps greater clarity is unachievable for as long as the Americans don’t know what they’re trying to achieve there either.

It was interesting to be asked, as someone who has studied Victorian history, about our previous three wars in Afghanistan, and what might be learnt from them.

1839-42 (First Afghan War)
This proved that there is no such country as Afghanistan, just a ragbag of local loyalties and warlords. Therefore any attempt to turn it into a conventional buffer state between the Indian empire and Russia did nothing but stimulate Russian interest in the region, and inaugurate a new phase of what came to be known as the “Great Game.” The war proved there’s no such “nation” as Afghanistan except in the vaguest notional terms, and it was an easier place to get into than out of.

1878-1880 (Second Afghan War)
This was the war in which literary fans may recall Sherlock Holmes’ chum Dr Watson served. It demonstrated clearly the utter hostility of the terrain, the limited usefulness of modern arms technology, and the utter impossilibility of imposing coherent government on it, along with the lack of any real British interest in the place.

The British concluded that as long as it was that hostile to Western culture and mores it would be equally hostile to the Russians. The way the treaty of Gandamak broke down, showing itself unnecessary as well as unenforceable, showed the perils of backing any one local leader too closely. Eventually, the British withdrew their resident from Kabul. There was nothing to be gained by interference in the complex internal dynamics of the place, for Britain or Russia.

1919 (Third Afghan War)
This was the shortest Afghan war yet, and yielded only one major additional conclusion of value. What was learnt was that in any operations in Afghanistan ground communications were unnecessarily hazardous. The RAF should therefore be the lead service in any future operations that might need to be carried out in the mountains.

You might think that a flood of ground troops (what some call a surge) could somehow sort everything and transform the place into something other than it has consistently proved to be, in military terms, over the past 170 years. I’m not sure the Russians would agree with you there, after their experiences on the ground in the late eighties. Of course in the eighties the West was arming and resourcing the local mujahideen, but it’s hard to think that was the only reason the Russian occupation failed.

So, it’s time for the politicians who started this war to tell us, and especially the troops whose lives they are risking daily, where and how they think it should end. Osama and chums legged it to Pakistan years ago now, and most money and resource for terrorism comes from Pakistan and Saudi. So what are doing in Afghanistan, and how are going to know when we’ve done it? We’re all ears, and very much hoping the current ceremonies at Wooton Basset will not become a permanent fixture of our national life...

Sustaining the Sacred Centre 1

What kind of business do we think we’re in? The Church’s business is as much to know God and enjoy him for ever, delighting in Scripture and prayer, as it is to undertake organisational and administrative indoor games. The latter matter too, but only in relation to the former, because if all we ever do in Church business meetings is secular Church business, we lose our capacity to do anything after a while.

Our first diocesan prioirity for next year is what we call “sustaining the sacred centre” — nourishing our roots of faith, cultivating our imagination and openness to God, using poetry, song and and art, and releasing creative energy that can only come from deep encounter. Therefore, recently, inspired and organised by Archdeacon Karen Gorham, we replaced a regular area deans/lay chairs business meeting with a day enneagram workshop together.

This revealed the extent to which we have gotten into the habit of trying to transact complex business together with a less than adequate understanding of each person’s God-given humanity to sustain our process. Getting to recognise, articulate and enjoy our differences and particularities has helped us forward immensely. Suddenly we found we could frame and reframe our business questions in appropriate personal as well as theoretical terms. Thus more productive gets done.

Building on Karen’s brilliant idea, therefore, we have just been away with 22 area deans and lay chairs to Glenfall House, Cheltenham, for a 24 hour residential. We took with us some resource clergy — Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga Steele, Dani Muñoz-Treviño, and Ian Adams. All content was fantastically rich, and I’ll try and get to blog all three, but I’ve just got space for one today. Twenty Four hours seemed like a much longer time (in a good way!), and we all left feeling energised and revitalised spiritually.

Ernesto serves in Milton Keynes, and is an artist and priest. He has developed a knack for leading others into biblical stories, especially from the Old Testament, to explore them and enjoy them, then open themselves to creative possibilities in them. We took two stories — Jacob’s Ladder and Jacob wrestling an angel. Interacting individually and together with the text, themes of Solidarity and Struggle began to emerge, and really got us humming as we began to recognise resonances in our own stories from which we identified songs from the backing track of our lives. Using this we tried to identify, personally, symbolic objects and experiences that seemed to capture what God was saying to us about faith as solidarity and struggle. Tim Norwood’s doodle, here, captured some of the images that were spelled out around the room b y the end of our time together.

This may sound slightly weird, but it really opened a lot of spiritual doors for our group. You just explore the text in its own terms, suspending the question “what does it mean?” until you have really interacted with the story at a deep level in its own terms, and played with it and entered into it emotionally and imaginatively. Then you identify a song from the backing track of your own life and experience, and see what images God opens in your mind in response.

For anyone wanting to try this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home, Ernesto has a new book out, Five Stones and a burnt Stick. This takes the reader imaginatively into the Moses story, exploring his intimacy God against the counterpoint of his relationship with his wife. It made me realise how rich the Biblical tradition is, especially once we release it from the tyranny of being rationalised off into abstract ideas, and just let the narrative work on us, like the people did who originally told these stories around iron age campfires...

Automotive Sacre du Printemps

(Assuming a muted reverential David Attenborough Tone)
The Bull BMW has attained full manhood, and lusts for the outdoors, bursting with frustration about his dull suburban life. He spies a petite doe-like white Hyundai, grazing on the tarmac of a Toronto parking lot with an older blue Toyota girlfriend. There is no controlling his seasonal urges, which cannot be denied.
Thus, we observe a rarely seen mating ritual:

h/t mmmikeey . Who tells us the driver is due in Court on 1 December.

Get real! Kill George Herbert!

At home I have a groaning shelf of books published since 1900 about ministry in the Church of England. Justin Lewis-Anthony’s If you meet George Herbert on the Road, Kill Him is the latest and, no mean feat, by far the best. The trouble with “how-to” books about ministry is that they can easily become part of an oppressive structure that keys into a significant vulnerability in sincere ministers. You woke up this morning with 25 things you hadn't done, and felt vaguely guilty about. You read the how-to book, and now you’ve got 35. Could be time to stick your head in a gas oven. Indulging in the wrong kind of how-to stuff, spiced with paperback Evangelical fisherman’s tales by the Successful, does not make you the best priest in the street (shades of the Father Ted “Golden Cleric”) but a nervous wreck. Its nursery slopes are the way to slow death — what some do call burn-out.

Justin’s excellent book does not play this how-to game, although it does end up talking Turkey, with excellent alternative strategies and tactics to help lower spiritual and personal blood pressure, and bring a Kill-George-Herbert priest back from the Church of the Planet Zog into the Church of England.

Justin’s thesis is that we in the C of E have indulged in harmful romanticism about ministry, focussed around a gentle bucolic fantasy about the ministry of George Herbert. Roman Catholic friends tell me of a similar phenomenon in their tradition about the Curé d’Ars. This ecumenical dimension, as well as a certain Cambridge historian’s reluctance to use any “-ism” except baptism, made me judder a bit over terms like “Herbertism” but the term does clarify the discussion and provides a tool to enable us to continue to enjoy Herbert’s sublime poetry without being sucked into a lot of crushing sentimentality and hype about his three year ministry as a parish priest in the seventeenth century, in a parish of under 500, with two curates to do the dirty work.

Back in the late eighties, when I was an urban vicar, I almost had a breakdown through the unsustainable and unrealistic expectations I was putting on myself. I can see it now, but it brought its own tunnel vision at the time. As well as lifebelts from spiritual advisers, teachers and friends, I read Bonhoeffer, then Vincent Donovan, then Martin Thornton, then Rowan Williams, then Sara Savage, as healing and hope gradually dawned. The analytical sections of this book reprised almost exactly the path I found towards recovery. Dame Edna would call it spooky. If I’d been able to read this book years ago it would have saved me a lot of trouble. Therefore I commend this book 110%.

The combination of high fantasy and self-expectations, an apparent duty to say yes to everybody all the time, a one-man-band mentality about ministry, historical romanticism and exhaustion almost got me. Care Bears who attenuate everything else about their lives get crocked. I don’t now mind admitting it, and the more we all admitted our need to be needed, got some boundaries in and stood up to our own fantasies and the cult of nice, the more we could all begin to be half the people God made us to be, as priests and ministers of the gospel.

This book is a vastly intelligent, compassionate, understanding and helpful resource. Some will find it a bit clever, so if you prefer your books stupid, you may be disappointed. Of course, if the cap does not fit you don’t have to wear it. It does fit many of us. The fact is that almost all of us vicars have been on this game for far too long. It has done us no favours. As crocked care bears we may even have sought a way off the not-so-merry-go-round. This book offers the most cogent escape route I know, historically and theologically, as well as practically. Take it, and get a life!

News: the March of Time

I’m delighted to catch Ruth Gledhill’s characteristically clear, honest and illuminating talk from Religion and the News at Cumberland Lodge online — sadly I wasn’t able to join the consultation until the session after hers, and it’s good to catch up. Ruth observes, hitting a very important nail on the head, that the plane that crashes is inevitably a bigger news story than the thousands that land safely. Back in the sixties the BBC, beseiged by letters complaining that only bad news made the headlines, tried to run a programme called “The Positive World” that majored on good news stories. It lasted all of six weeks, if that, before bombing out, via the world service in the wee small hours. Sad, you may say, but this truth reflects human nature.

This ugly something about ourselves sometimes gets blamed on journalists, unfairly. You might as well blame criminal lawyers for crime. Without it they’d be out of a job, but that hardly makes them criminals. There is, however, a severe temptation for people selling stories — “you furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war” was Randolph Hearst’s legendary response to a correspondent’s report that Cubans were not, in fact, murdering and raping Americans left right and centre in 1898. The power Hurst weilded to shape the news was the direct result of the fact that in 1898 only press barons like him had the resources to get someone out to Cuba with a camera, and inflamatory pix back onto the streets of New York in hours. He had the steam press — the only technology to deliver news to ordinary people affordably.

Now turn the clock forward. Pretty much everybody now has the technology to read or tell their own story; and there is no longer any need, or increasingly desire, to pay money for newsprint. I wonder what the new found ability of news targets to answer back does to the exclusivity of any story in conventional media, and what kind of accountability it will require of them.

Looking at online newspaper sites, I wonder how they can raise the quality of outside comment on religious stories, rather than the rubbishy weary procession of same-ish comments from, e.g., about a dozen snarky atheists going on about sky fairies, with equally silly rejoinders. Many newspaper comments seem to come from small coteries of fans and people with axes to grind. Are the crown jewels of journalism changing — no longer the Hearst style news stories of the past century, but what conventionally would have been labeled op-ed?

The journalist whose work people may increasingly be bothered to pay to read will be anyone who manages to draw interesting comment out of ordinary life, rather than the person who zeroes in on potential conflict and drums up a war to go with it. Plane crashes will continue to make the news, but sexing up flights that land safely and pretending they were plane crashes just looks silly. Don’t sex up the material — go for depth, colour and connections. Don’t be anonymous, be yourself and own up to your biases. Above all slow down and reflect.

I was at a London mainline station at 2220 recently, surrounded by piles of newsprint waiting for the pulper. Someone offered me an Evening Standard, now a freesheet. Was I bovvered? The Daily Telegraph (£1) was giving away a bottle of mineral water free with each copy. This was a not inconsiderable offer, as the bottle itself cost £1·55 without a Telegraph. Reading the morning’s news fourteen hours on, noticing the only story I know anything about, the RC ordinariates one, the line between news and comment was so confused, the content so thin, slanted and childishly inflamatory, I thought “If this is supposed to be quality, why would I pay for these people’s take on stuff I don’t know anything about? I’d rather read people who do understand what they’re talking about...”

Human beings are insatiably interested in information. It’s perfectly possible to sell something people actually want or need on its own merits. You can, for example, buy a packet of Nurofen without having to give away a free DVD with it. But the fact people can only shift conventional newsprint with prodigous freebies says everything. If media barons had invested as much in quality journalism, as marketing ploys and production economies, they might now have rather more to offer. But good correspondent journalism takes time and immersion. It costs.

As it was, I had a very good book to read, and bought a hot drink instead, before getting onto a crowded night train home. 4 out of 65 people in the carriage were reading papers, all freesheets.

The delivery of information and news is pretty much down to search engines and the like, spiced by social media and with hundreds of channels of conventional radio and TV, led in the UK by the BBC.

So what business should newspapers actually consider themselves to be in today? Comment and Review, à la Huffington Post? If so they’d need to invest substantially more in journalists and quality. If it’s publishing, iTunes and Amazon are becoming lead repositories of all kinds of media, with increasingly blurry lines between them. Could newspaper groups invent new website activities to add as yet undreamt of value to our lives, within their clouds? Trouble is, Facebook and MySpace are leading the way on that one... Time for newspaper editors to get thinking caps on and start justifying their up to 1·6 million pound salaries, I would think...

Amazon Kindle Preliminary review

amidst a postal strike, illustrating how Royal Mail and their staff are tragically putting their own bsiness down the toilet just now, UPS delivers an Amazon Kindle. As you can see, every Kindle delivered to the UK comes with a free promotional English lady novelist. You just add water or something. I got Charlotte Bronte. Buy 4 Kindles and you get the whole Cowan Bridge clergy daughters’ school, complete with willowy maidens, bread and water and your own Semaphore kit. Just add Crinoline.

Anyway, I haven’t quite worked out how to access all the promotional stuff, but I have been reading a substantial book with the Kindle, Hilary Mantel’s excellent Booker prize winning novel Wolf Hall. The hero is pictured, left, with his own leather-bound reading device.

Some preliminary observations about the kit:

• The screen is brilliant. There are five sizes of text, all very clear, and you can adjust the gaps between words as well as the size. I have been reading the smallest size perfectly comfortably. e-ink is very restful to read, and quite clear enough with a small reading light at night, for those who like to read their novels under the bedclothes overnight.
  
• Content Delivery: The 3G mobile signal, which is slightly questionable in these parts on mobiles, is strong and good on the Kindle. Hilary Mantel’s substantial opus downloaded in just under two minutes.I didn’t think it would make much difference, but the whole acquiring of information is pleasantly smooth and uncomplicated. Buying a book in the conventional way from the Kindle store is also remarkably painless. You just do what you always did on Amazon, and the book appears within a couple of minutes by magic on your Kindle.
  
• Controls, apart from the keyboard, are ergonomically sound and, although I am not proud of the fact, the left hand second control for thumbing through pages is immensely useful if you're reading in bed. Some operations take longer than others, but the general feel for most operations is smooth and non-kludgy. I wish there were a “history” shortcut back to the latest 100 pages read, like on the Sony Reader, though. Maybe there is...
  
  
• The Keyboard is a bit more of a pickle, though it may be that those with more developed Blackerry Thumb would find it more convenient. I am not convinced an iPhone like screen based keyboard wouldn’t have been faster to use. It does however do what it says. Perhaps all such entry devices take a few weeks before they feel natural to use, but I suspect I would be finding the keyboard more ergonomic if I were a spider than as a human being.
  
• Design of books themselves does seem rather easier than on my Sony Reader. I like the system for telling you instantly how far through a text you are (percentage, paragraph number and a bar that fills up), and the system is free of the rather annoying occasional random line breaks that I have hitherto experienced in e-Books.
  
• Content: We Brits are currently allowed US content licensed for the UK market — a goodly but not infinite selection. It's funny what you can and can’t get in a Kindle edition just now. As someone who likes an occasional read in French or German, I do wonder when some of the publishing industry’s copyright walls will be readjusted to allow proper paid access across national boundaries — all it would mean for them is increased trade. I can currently get physical books from amazon.fr or amazon.de, but not Kindle editions. Bah! Humbug!
  

Charlotte has now dissolved into the ether, to be replaced by a plan of the Villa Palladio. Not quite sure what that means.

I will, however, try and post a more detailed review comparing the Kindle experience to the Sony Reader one, sooner rather than later.

Ministry Development Review ahoy

A slightly busy and intense time, including a two night residential learning event at Whirlow Grange, Sheffield’s retreat and spirituality centre, exploring Ministry Development Review. National interim guidance consistent with the new Terms and Conditions of Service being implemented in 2010 has brought together the whole ragbag of schemes that have grown up around England in the past 20 years. This event brought together a dozen of us — bishops, archdeacons ministry development officers and a lay reviewer with commercial HR experience, from various dioceses around the country, from Manchester to Truro.

Events like this are rather like a sit-down meal — a lot depends on who you get on your table. Fortunately, this group represented a wide variety of people with different experiences in all kinds of circumstances, with a real commitment to learning together. Excellently led and enabled by Tim Ling, Paul Wright and Karen West, this course took a notional for-instance MDR and slowed it down, giving us space and time to try it for ourselves, then analyse the key issues and opportunities arising, playing with possibilities and backing up our experience alongside national guidelines and local practice.

As Ministry Development Review becomes mandatory across the Church, and different dioceses roll out new schemes, it’s going to be really important to work at making this tool a real enrichment and support to colleagues in their ministry. That will involve conscious work by all of us, as the reviewees and reviewers we all are.

I can understand some clergy fearing MDR as a bit of secular managerialism they could do without. The only way to win their confidence will be to offer people really helpful, spiritually focussed and honest reviews. This won’t happen automatically. The one thing I learned from this event, above all, was how much there is for us all to learn, especially if we have been in and around ministry review processes for years. For example, I came away realising how much I need to raise my game around defining goals that really are goals, not just worthy bits of work.

I very much hope excellent training like this will be made available everywhere to all clergy and lay people delivering MDR.

Doing this properly will, of course, cost — but it will also benefit everyone especially the people we serve in our day to day ministries, as well as each other and, of course, ourselves.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

Are 400,000 Church of England laypeople, 2,000 clergy and 50 Bishops imminently going to go RC, just to capture the predicted numbers in various Fleet Street Organs? I very much doubt anything like that number are sufficiently into fear, surprise and and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, but we’ll see in a couple of years time.

Ben Hecht once suggested

trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

Indeed. One interesting take has come, not from a journalist, but Oxford Church History professor Diarmaid MacCulloch in the Observer:

John Paul II and Benedict have created the most centralised regime that Catholicism has ever known – a far cry from its state in either the medieval period or the Counter-Reformation. It is with an anxious ear for those alternative voices, not much different from those of mainstream wishy-washy liberal Anglicans, that Pope Benedict seeks to encourage those who think like him beyond the walls, and to bring them inside the fortifications.

Much is left unsaid amid the present triumphalist crowings of those Catholics who see this as a victory over a feeble, tottering Anglicanism, since Anglicans are temperamentally disinclined to blow their own trumpets. The Church of England is not about to disintegrate, as anyone who knows its day-to-day life, rather than listening to what journalists say about it, will be aware. Most Anglo-Catholics and evangelicals are fed up with all the name-calling, intolerance and calls for revolt...

There is one killer fact about the pope's present move. "Traditionalist" Anglicanism is a shotgun marriage between incompatible groups: extreme Anglo-Catholics and extreme evangelicals...

Their alliance with the traditionalist Anglo-Catholics has been one of convenience, because both sides cannot stomach women in positions of clerical authority (for entirely opposite reasons) and hate the idea that homosexuals might be just part of the spectrum of boring normality in God's creation. (Anglo-Catholics are more muffled in their outrage on this one, given how many of them are gay themselves.) So the pope's move will split the traditionalists down the middle and reveal how fragile their alliance is. The best law in church history is the law of unintended consequences.

In one sense, this is a storm in a teacup, stirred by an elderly cleric in the Vatican with a private agenda and a track record of ill-thought-out policy moves. In another, it is a fascinating moment in a confrontation as much a struggle for the soul of the Church of Rome as of the Church of England. Once we have got past the screaming headlines, we should keep an eye open for the real story.

The Church of England has always functioned as more of a coral reef than a model trainset, mainly because that’s how Christianity was usually done in these islands before the sixteenth century, and the English were characteristically averse to clericalism and control. For Protestants unsatisfied by such pragmatism, there were New World colonies. The people with get-up-and-go got up and went, especially after the Civil War, leaving the rest of us a rather pragmatic, unassuming, and messy lump. Since the 1830’s, those sufficiently scared of the modern world to be attracted by New Model Ultramontanism usually ended up by becoming Roman Catholics. Thus all the Vatican politics behind the denunciation of Anglican orders in 1893 — a quaint marketing ploy for a different, positivist, age.

Anglo-Papalism, an idea that first appeared in the last quarter of the 19th Century, only takes in a small section of Anglo-Catholics in the C of E. They may be colourful people, but any historical assessment has to take into account everybody else. Something similar could be said of extreme Prods. The vast bulk of the Church of England has always been more multifaceted, its Protestants closer to Richard Hooker than Walter Travers — boring, but true.

It could be that a Coral Reef Church, with an open and creative base in the Creeds, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, might eventually turn out to be as sound a home for faith and holiness, as one predicated on Imperialism and control. Like Professor MacCulloch, I suspect this question will be answered over the next hundred years or so bottom-up, rather than top-down.