Oxford Faith Debates - How can diversity become a strength?

I have a small dog who wants to consume her very large bone in my study. This would make my working environment smell of meat, so the bone is to be eaten outside. Being an obstinate little dachshund she is trying to gain access to the warmth of indoors via the cat flap, her usual way in, but she is prevented from doing so by the size of the bone. I feel for her in her predicament because there is a hard frost outside and she does not have much fur. Consuming the bone in the cold would put an end to the pleasure for which it was intended.

This little scenario faces me with a reality about my responsibility for all whose lives touch mine. I am responsible for their flourishing. In the case of the dog, I can decide whether to make the bone experience good and pleasant, as it was intended to be, or I can simply not care. I can tell myself that as long as she has the bone, she should be happy. She is only a dog, after all.

Last week’s Oxford Faith Debate on unity, diversity and the future of the Church of England comes to mind as I ponder the bone situation, and its implications for taking responsibility for one another’s flourishing. In the life of the Church, we are responsible before God for the fullest possible flourishing of all its members. This begins with taking responsibility for the one we perceive as ‘other’ or, even if we don’t care to admit it to ourselves, as ‘deviant’. The two most contentious areas of debate which dominate the life of the Church of England at present concern otherness.

In this respect, two things came through very clearly during Thursday’s debate. The first was that being polite and nice to each other in public does not exonerate us from the harm we do to each other in private or, for that matter, through the internet. The second, a variant on the first, is the mistaken idea that acknowledging the other is all that we need to do in order to convince ourselves and the world that we are truly the body of Christ. But to merely acknowledge the other is not enough to sustain the life and unity of the Church, because acknowledging is not the same as embracing that person as one who is absolutely vital to the flourishing of the body.

Embracing the other involves honesty, accountability and transparency, leading inevitably to mercy and love. Mercy and love are the product of truth. They come when truth has been told and heard, and  its effects healed, by all the parties involved. They do not come with punishment or exclusion. So if diversity is to enrich the life of the Church and lead to a new and vital unity, we need to embrace one another’s full humanity, so that it can flourish as it is and we can live in truth. In other words, we need to be human together, because if we are not human together we are not the body of Christ.

This is where talk of acknowledging another’s position is distracting to the point of irrelevance. Talk of acknowledgment affords a loophole for avoiding our responsibility before God to embrace one another in our full humanity. It is not honest. It is a relational fudge. Acknowledgment is not the same thing as touching the one who is ‘other’, as seeing their face and experiencing their need and pain.

All of us, wherever we stand on any one issue, are in the habit of ignoring the pain of the minority. On Thursday the minority was the Executive Secretary of Anglican Mainstream, the only person on the panel publicly representing that particular theological position. Whether we agreed with him or not (and most clearly did not) does not ultimately matter very much. What matters, and what mattered in the context of the debate, was our failure to take responsibility for that person’s pain which, though specifically his, was also ours. It was human pain and we shall all be held accountable by God for his human pain, just as he will for ours.

Perhaps this is why we did not really resolve any of the disputes touched on in the debate, or reach anything beyond what one contributor rightly called ‘subjective unity’. Subjective unity, he said, is provisional and to this one might add that it is provisional because it is not strong enough to bear the load of diversity and difference. This is because, as another contributor put it, we define our identity on the basis of who we are not. It is our insecurity which ultimately defines us and becomes the collective ‘driver’ of any one group. In other words, we are driven by fear rather than by the will to love. 

  

Our collective identity as Church derives from the fact that we are given to each other, and to God, in Christ. Our true identity is therefore only to be found through creative interchange in Christ. Creative interchange means that Christ becomes as we are in order that we might become as he is, both in the fullness of our individual humanity and in our diversity as Church. These two aspects of our identity, the individual and the collective, are what ought to make the Church a sign of hope for the world. 

The strangers we need

Last week Ed Miliband was castigated by the media for furtively handing a homeless person a coin – or was it a note? It seems the reporter was as unsure about what Miliband was doing, as he was himself. Did he give because not to have done so would have made him look heartless? Or is he, just like the rest of us, embarrassed and just a little fearful when confronted by destitution? It seems that the priest and his two helpers, who were arrested in Florida (also last week) for feeding homeless people in the street, felt no such embarrassment or fear.

What makes for such a radically different approach to human need? Overcoming fear is the key to answering that question. Overcoming fear begins with unpacking just what it is that makes us afraid in any given social situation. When it comes to encounters with homeless people there is a mixture of things, some of them having to do with a personal sense of shame or guilt, others with the human being in front of us, how they actually ‘present’, and others with the locality or environment in which we meet them.

Locality is more complex than it might at first seem. If there are not too many other people around, especially if the area is moderately wealthy, the potential giver feels physically vulnerable and at odds with the general scene. This affects how he or she feels about the needy individual. Think what goes through your mind when you pass a homeless person on the pavement outside the restaurant you are about to enter, or one who is near a cash machine. Do you not experience a degree of resentment, either because they spoil the expensive look of the place, and so make you feel compromised, or because they make you feel guilty, and possibly afraid, about cashing £50? Giving to someone in such situations makes the giver feel exposed, not just in the giving, but in the difference which exists between his or her life situation and that of the person receiving.

Life situations are not dictated by merit, or confined to social background. They are just life. Being homeless can happen to anyone. According to a recent report issued by Shelter, homelessness can be caused by personal circumstances combined with a build up of negative factors which are the direct result of the socio-economic climate in which we live. Homelessness can take years to come about and irrespective of details it is always dehumanising. There is ultimately no difference, from a human point of view, between someone who depends on the hospitality of friends or relatives (long or short term), a sofa surfer, or the man or woman sleeping rough.

The one thing that a homeless person needs, as much, if not more, than money, is to be treated as a fellow human being. Serving well prepared food to someone affirms their humanity. It doesn’t just feed them. Homeless people seldom experience the touch of another person’s hand, or eye contact, or a genuine enquiry as to how they got to be where they are. They are just a homeless person, not someone we would make a point of visiting on a regular basis because we enjoy their company. We see them as different, not human in the same way as we are.

It is difficult to connect with a person when one is conscious of difference. Different means strange, and the word ‘stranger’ makes that person threatening to others. It is not that they are physically threatening, but that their situation and sometimes their personalities are difficult to cope with, whatever the extent of our ‘people skills’. This is because something more than skill is required. What is required is real conversation, the product of a moment’s vulnerability in which we connect with their vulnerability, with all the hurts and mistakes which brought them to where they are. Getting into real conversation with strangers makes real demands not only on our time, but on our humanity.

In Florida this week we saw a fearful reaction to homelessness take place on a corporate scale, backed up by law enforcement authorities. Here, it was not the givers of food who were afraid, but the wealthy local inhabitants whose political system allows for a law to be passed which prohibits feeding homeless people within 500 feet of residential property. The law has been instated as a ‘public health and safety measure’ and in order to ‘curb the homeless population’. Such a policy does not sit well with the heavily Christianised Republican politics of that state. Or does it?

Perhaps the Miliband incident and the arrest of the priest in Fort Lauderdale call for a review of our thinking with regard to the integrity of religious faith and how that faith interfaces with politics and the media. All three are closely related because all three play a part in shaping the way we make decisions concerning our relationships with those who are ‘strange’ to us. All three of the Abrahamic faiths, and a number of other world religions, teach us that we need the stranger because it is the stranger who teaches us how to address fear with forgiveness and trust. The stranger teaches us, with incredible patience and fortitude, to forgive our false selves and to begin to have faith in our humanity. 

Oxford Faith Debates - The Future of the Church of England. How can Anglicans of all kinds be engaged in the Church of the future?

Last Thursday’s Oxford Faith Debate at the church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford was a timely reminder of the fact that there are other things at stake, when it comes to the future of the Church of England, than those which have occupied its attention in recent years. In the time scale of eternity these divisive issues will, in any case, be ultimately consumed within the unfathomable depths of God’s love. What is really at stake today, however, is the credibility, and not just the viability, of the Church of England. In this respect, there are only two things which matter: a passionate desire to know and be known by God and a corresponding desire to know and understand others and to take responsibility for the deployment of the gifts which they bring to the Church, and hence to the people the Church is called to serve.

This is not as obvious, or as easy, as it may sound. If, for the purpose of argument, we restrict these two essentials to the life of the Church, we find, as I did for quite a bit of the discussion about how Anglicans of all kinds could be engaged in the Church of the future, that they become occluded by peripheral considerations. Questions of church attendance and how to get younger people there on a Sunday, questions of representation and management, especially where this has to do with authority, are all important, as they would be for any organisation. But few of these considerations have any direct bearing on the central question. While they may serve as checks and balances against which the Church can measure its viability in the present, and have an idea about its longer term future, they do not inspire. They do not draw people to God.

The Church is not an organisation like any other, although there are things which it can learn from the organisational model. The Church is contextual. It is shaped by a particular story and exists in a particular environment for a reason. It needs to be able to communicate what it is about, which is all things pertaining to God and to his purpose for the world, in ways which make it meaningful to those it seeks to reach, not all of whom are shaped by the same cultural context.

The idea that the Church of England is still viable enough to be thought of as the national church begs a number of questions. Is being the national Church a cultural precedent? Is it national because it is established, thereby linking it culturally to England and to English history? What culture is it representing in the multi-cultural, ethnically and religiously diverse society of today (a question which might well be asked during the course of the next Oxford Faith Debate on November 20^th)? And what of the people to whom the specific cultural connections which make for a national established Church mean little or nothing? These are people who the Church needs to reach but who often feel alienated by arcane traditions rooted in the tangled web of its English history and legal system.

During the course of my ministry as a university chaplain and in the context of rural parishes in Wales, I have learned that many people ignore the nuances of establishment vs. disestablishment. They assume the Anglican Church to be the Church of Wales, rather than the Church in Wales, a subtle but important difference. The Church in Wales is neither established or national. It is simply that part (or province) of the Anglican Communion which exists primarily to serve the people of Wales. But like the Church of England we, in the Church in Wales, are not really in touch with those we are here to serve because we are unsure of what we are about, what we have to bring to them from the store house of our particular treasure, from all the gifts which we are given in people, and from the gift of God himself. The Church in Wales is not a bearer of meaning for many people. It is like a frame hanging on a wall minus the picture. It is not saying very much.

I was reminded of this at Thursday’s Oxford Faith Debate. At the heart of the discussion was the unspoken question ‘What is the Church of England really for? What is it about?’ The question pertains to the whole Church, the whole body of Christ, but it also needs to be addressed separately, by each of its individual parts, all those different denominational limbs which make up the body.

Perhaps the question needs to be placed within the framework of another more specific question, as one of the panel members so eloquently stated, ‘How does the Church identify gifts and experiences?’ She went on to remind us of the fact that low morale, among clergy especially, has to do with their particular giftedness not being recognised or used. Gift is more than talent or aptitude. It is not a ‘skill’. It is that particular aspect of a person which is unique to them and vital to the missional life of the Church. Their gift is what makes them the  person they are. That person is called to minister to others as Christ. To ignore their gift is to ignore, or refuse to know, that person.

We only become persons in the fullest sense when we are in communion with other persons, those we know and those we have not yet met, all of whom God would like to know through what the Church calls its ministry. Where the Church erects barriers of gender or status (to name only two), the particular ‘treasure’ which many people bring to its life is lost and the Church, along with those it is there to serve, is the poorer for it with the result that the meaning which people hope to find when they join a church is somehow absent.

The search for meaning is really a search for God. It is a search for holiness. When people come to church for the first time, they are like the two men who approached the apostle, Philip, with a simple request, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus”. Those who remain on the edge of the Church’s life, who perhaps only set foot in a church at Christmas or for the occasional wedding or funeral, would also like to see Jesus. They would like to meet him on other Sundays as well, and in every context in which the Church plays a part. Making this possible is the Church of England’s purpose and its hope for a future.

Poppies

Art affects how we remember. This is why it is sometimes deeply disturbing. Part of the reason why art is at times surprisingly provocative, and therefore disturbing, lies in the fact that art will speak its own truth. That is what makes it art. There is a sense in which neither the artist in the moment of making, or the viewer or participant in the moment of receiving really knows what to ask or expect of art in the final moment of ‘judgment’. The poppy installation around the walls of the Tower of London is art waiting to be judged. To my knowledge no one has yet disputed the fact that it is art. Rather, the contention seems to lie in its apparent sentimentality, that it evades the brutal reality of the War which it evokes. (‘The poppies muffle truth’ The Guardian, Saturday, 1^st November, 2014 and response, ‘Interview’, The Observer, Sunday, 2^nd November, 2014)

 It was ‘set’ by a theatre designer around the walls of the Tower of London, a powerful place of remembrance of events pertaining to those aspects of our earlier history which shame us even today. Good theatre designers do not work to satisfy the limited expectations of either aesthetics or sentiment. They work to allow truth into the light, into the forefront of the audience’s imagination, so that the audience can contemplate that truth and perhaps learn from it. Contemplation involves looking through what we see before us, or sensing a deep and abiding truth behind what we read. Art exists to help us see through, or see deeper into, reality. The best art is, paradoxically, almost always an understatement.

This is why the poppies around the Tower are, for some, offensive. They seem to be a gross understatement of the hideous reality of war, because they do not try to represent it in any one of the many stark realities of which we read and hear in accounts of what is also known as the ‘Great’ War. These are realities which we continue to witness in the conflicts of today. There is a risk that we could even become inured to such horrors because we seldom are given the chance to pause and contemplate the truth about them. They do not seem to be teaching us anything.

But good art does teach because it triggers associations. Sometimes these are personal memories, but in the case of the poppies, they are less immediate, less personal for most of us because we were not alive at the time of the Great War. And yet the poppies speak of  memories which refuse to die, memories which also belong to previous centuries, hideous memories which remain imprisoned in the Tower and in the depth of our collective psyche. The poppies serve as a reminder of these as well, but they do not exonerate. Instead, they invite contemplation and remorse. Remorse is more than regret. It is a profound acknowledgment of  our complicity with sin, especially with the sins of war and the actions or non-actions which cause war.

Wars are too often the result of non-actions, ill considered decisions, or badly thought through reactive responses to a perceived threat. Take, for example, the decision which this government has reached on the treatment of migrants, specifically those crossing treacherous waters in flimsy overcrowded boats.  These migrants are the victims of war. They are also destitute. The government has decided to effectively discontinue being part of a search and rescue operation outside the bounds of Italian waters. The now more limited operation will be thought of in terms of border security, rather than as a humanitarian exercise. As a result, many more of these desperate people will die.

The idea of border security implies exclusion, in other words legitimising the wilful ignoring of the desperate and the dying. Few of us have known what it is to be desperate, which is perhaps why we do not understand the full implication of this decision which is that it dehumanises us. There is no justification for ceasing to be human in regard to the suffering of other human beings. This should give us cause for remorse, the kind of remorse experienced by the rich man, Dives in relation to the destitute Lazarus on his doorstep. (Luke 16:20-30)

There is a gulf of ‘not understanding’ between us and these desperate people, just as there was a ‘chasm’ or ‘abyss’ between Dives and Lazarus in the story told by Jesus to his disciples. Dives could have done something to alleviate the suffering of the man on his doorstep, perhaps if he had taken the time and the trouble to coordinate with others, but he chose the more expedient path of thinking only of his own short term interests. Perhaps he feared the electoral or commercial consequences which rescuing Lazarus would bring on him. Later, with the benefit of hindsight he regrets his decision. He experiences remorse. Despite all this, he is not an altogether bad man. He is ordinary and perhaps not very imaginative, like so many of us. As he languishes in Hades, he asks that his brothers be warned of the long term consequences of selfish short term thinking.

Wars are the end result of not acting in the right way for the right reason in relation to the suffering of others, often because we lack the vision and courage needed at the time. Acting with vision and courage involves risk but, as the parable about Dives and Lazarus suggests, not acting, or choosing to ignore suffering, leads to much greater and more long term risks. Somewhere there is a just balance to be found, between doing the right thing or ignoring it. Where we fail to get the balance right, we get conflict, as we shall soon see with regard to other potential peace threatening situations, such as climate change.

All of these thoughts return us to the poppies around the Tower and to the kind of remorse which they invite. Remorse involves accepting that we have made short term, unimaginative and selfish decisions throughout our history and that these have ultimately led to the most brutal conflicts and to the loss of millions of innocent lives.

Our decisions to alleviate the suffering which leads to war are made by our governments, but we get the governments we deserve even if at times this seems hard to believe. Governments are accountable to us, in the freedom of the democracy which we enjoy, for all their decisions, and we are accountable with them before God. With freedom comes responsibility and with responsibility comes accountability. We are accountable before God for the extent to which we, as a free nation, have either helped to alleviate suffering, or caused it, and in causing it, or doing nothing to alleviate it, set the stage for future wars. The poppies around the Tower of London invite us to feel remorse for the wars which may yet happen, as well as those of the past.