Westminster Faith Debates - What does the Church of England offer the next generation?

What is good about the Church of England? Is there a reason to continue? These are two of the questions which emerged in the course of the last of the Westminster Faith Debates on the future of the Church of England. They are two questions which, taken at face value, appear pessimistic but which are in fact a sign of the Church’s character and resilience. The Church of England is a Church which can ask questions. It also endures, and is likely to go on doing so, albeit in a different form, because, for all its idiosyncrasies, as well as its plain injustices, it keeps faith with God. So in this respect, the Church of England is as God’s people (along with some of their leaders) have always been. It is human and fallible, but it is also a home where people can experience transcendence, where they can see and know God.

Seeing and knowing God inevitably returns us to ourselves, or at least to an examination of what we, as a Church, suppose ourselves to be. The most difficult aspect of self examination is that it can take a person into a place where they are tempted to give up on themselves, to think of themselves as of no value and of their lives as utterly futile. Paradoxically, this kind of despair also comes with denial, with the conviction that this is the only way we can be.

Last Thursday’s debate challenged this assumption. One of the panel members described how a life threatening illness had brought her to a moment of truth about herself, of coming to terms with who she really was and of daring to be that true self to her church. The Church of England, it seems, has come to a similar point in its life. It has arrived at a tipping point, a time of reckoning. This time of reckoning represents ‘crisis’ to use an alliteration of the Greek word for ‘judgment’. The last of the debates on the future of the Church of England amounted to the recognition that it is in crisis, that the Church as we know it is slipping into irreversible decline, that it needs to take stock not only of where it is, but of who it is, and that this ‘taking stock’ will also take the Church to a new place. It is a place, as one speaker noted, where the Church of England may yet represent something more than being one of the principle guardians of our national architectural heritage and become what it is meant to be, the visible, though still flawed, image of God in the world.

To this end, it is becoming clear that the Church needs to let go, or die to, those self perceptions and the way they inform its attitudes to marginalised groups. It also needs to let go of the fetish of unity. This does not mean that it should be unconcerned about unity. Rather, as one speaker suggested, it should develop a unified approach to faith in solidarity with other religions, especially in the face of global religious extremism and violence. In the meantime, much more work needs to be done in the field of reconciliation among its own members.

The opening speaker told of the need for the Church to repent of its homophobia and of the damage which it has caused to individuals and to the life of the Church as a whole. But repentance cannot come without reconciliation, anymore than reconciliation can come about without real regret for the harm that has been done. So we need to ask ourselves what reconciliation and repentance really mean and what they entail for the Church. Do they mean trying to agree on things which we shall probably never agree on, or worse, pretending to do so? Do they even mean agreeing to disagree? Neither of these options have yet proved to be of much use in bringing about reconciliation and repentance. The one is about trying to square the circle and the other is a diversion which does not take us anywhere.

What does take us somewhere is grace, a gift which comes free and often unrecognised, from God. Grace is a dangerous gift because it changes us and so changes the way we see others. Its fire consumes the Church’s false self. But the Church has become so comfortable with its false self that it is in danger of becoming inured to the work of grace and thus risks losing sight of who it really is and of its true purpose. Its false self, which presents as the ‘institutional church’, gets in the way of grace and of what the true Church has to offer the next generation. What the true Church has to offer is the reality of God’s presence in its life, and consequently in theirs, and of his loving purpose for his world which is the world they will inherit. As things stand, the Church of England’s attitude to LGBT people begs the question of what kind of God it actually worships.

On the whole, those who want to find God in the context of a church will endure a certain amount of uncomfortable liturgy and dress sense, whether traditional or not, if they feel God’s presence and love around them. What they will not endure is theology taught on the basis of prohibition and exclusion and which portrays God as commanding and controlling. This is not a God who they would trust with their deepest and most private fears and longings. Neither does this God give shape or meaning to their lives. So what they are really asking is, does this particular church convey the reality of God as a truthful witness to his love, and can they bring all that they are, and all that they have, to its service without fear of rejection? Sadly, the answer is often ‘no’.

The problem lies, once again, with the Church’s apparent rejection of grace. It is grace which enables vision, and those who are looking to the Church for meaning and purpose for their lives will look first to its leaders to supply that vision. Leaders therefore need to be open to God’s transforming grace because they are called to remind the Church of its true self, not by the persona they project, but by being true to who they are. As one speaker said, leaders, as well as those they care for, will only lead in a visionary way when they do so from their own ‘inner place’. It is how leaders and church people live out what they believe and pray which ultimately defines the true Church and makes it attractive to future generations.

Politicians - What are they (in it) for?

Something is wrong when an elected representative of a civilised country is so confident in her superior standing with regard to the citizens she is elected to serve that she is able to make graphic and disparaging comments on Twitter about someone whose vote she presumably would like to keep. Something is wrong when another highly placed politician makes arrogant aggressive remarks to a police officer. Something is also wrong with a police force which seems to operate on a points basis whereby ‘performance’ matters more than people, whichever side of the law a person appears to be on at the point of arrest or detention. Something is wrong with the way we do politics.

We have a political system which relies on trust and accountability, if it is to function for the greater good and so enable us to remain a free society. The greater good is the basis of good governance and ought to be the underlying motivating factor for anyone who seeks election. But the good is easily compromised by the all too human tendency to literally ‘err’, to use a rather old fashioned sounding word for what otherwise might be called sin. To err is not simply to make a mistake. It is to go wrong. In the case of politics and public service, to err is to stray from the path of a commitment to serve the electorate or those to whom public servants, such as the police, teachers or doctors, have pledged themselves.

But to return specifically to politics, all of this begs the question of motive when it comes to seeking public office. The cynic would say that a person only seeks to be elected because they desire power. The cynic has a point. To begin with, and as a person of integrity, the aspiring MP may only desire a little power, enough to ‘make a difference’, enough to ‘influence’.  But power is addictive, which is why it never satisfies and invariably corrupts.

Standards and norms for civilised behaviour, including at times the law of the land, impede power satisfaction. They get in the way and this, as we saw in the cases of both Emily Thornbury and Andrew Mitchell, leads to frustration, anxiety and aggression of one kind or another. Addiction to power requires determination and aggression for the power need to be satisfied but, like other addictive habits and substances, the need is never fully met, with the resulting frustration playing itself out in the kind of macho aggression to which we witness almost daily on the floor of the House of Commons.

Irrespective of gender, those who are addicted to power are also testosterone driven, even if the ‘drive’ is purely subliminal. The Emily Thornbury tweet may have been made in haste in a surge of subliminal power driven energy – or frustration, but it revealed the fact that power matters to those who hold it, irrespective of gender. Power is more necessary to them than the people who gave them power in the first place. We can draw similar conclusions from the final outcome of the Andrew Mitchell ‘Plebgate’ affair. Being testosterone driven, whether your are male or female, gives you permission, it would seem, to be as rude, arrogant and indifferent to the humanity of the persons you are there to serve, and in some cases to the rule of law, as you like.

This aggressive power drive lodges itself in a person, overtaking that initial calling to work for the common good and threatening the innate goodness, the inner light, which made it possible for them to discern and obey that calling in the first place. The more aggressive the power drive, the further it drives politicians and others away from that inner light, and the further they err from the truth of their calling.

What seems to be happening, therefore, is that a kind of powerful negative energy is at work driving leaders and politicians of all persuasions away from their true calling which must have originally been a desire to serve the whole nation with the best of themselves. Power addiction causes us to lose sight of our higher nature, the best of ourselves, to the point that it is hard to believe that we were ever capable of speaking or acting wisely or in a spirit of sacrificial service.

In all of this, it is easy to forget that the best of ourselves is not, strictly speaking, ours to own. It is a given. The best of ourselves is pure gift. It comes by God’s grace, as it did in the case of my neighbour whose passport was delayed in this summer’s notorious bureaucratic mayhem. She appealed to our MP who took the time and the trouble to ensure, with constant re-checks, that her passport was processed so that she and her partner were able to go on holiday. Was this political vote-catching on the part of the MP? I would say it was grace surprisingly at work in one powerful person.

Something similar happened when David Cameron took an interest in a skate park which has just been built near our local town. The skate park has hit a sudden and very belated planning objection which threatens it with destruction. The Prime Minister asked to be kept informed of developments when he originally met the person responsible for the project. We hope that when he is informed of this setback the grace will be there. We believe that it will.

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. 

Reclaiming the Centre

Today I signed a petition for the overturning of yet another death sentence which has been handed down to a Christian woman living in a Muslim country #saveAsiaBibi. The last one I signed concerned a woman in the Sudan. This time it is Pakistan. There are probably many more such barbaric sentences being inflicted on women, and not only Christian women, which we never hear about. Added to these are the innumerable atrocities being perpetrated against women and girls by a criminal organisation which has somehow morphed into an ideological movement having nothing whatever to do with the religion it claims to stand for.

This has happened, in part, because the West and its allies did not heed the signs early enough. One of the reasons why those signs were not heeded lies in the fact that most people are unaware of the innate power of religious conviction and of its potency when that conviction is allowed to become detached from its primary source in God. Conversely, secular ideologies which were originally rooted in a love for humanity, have also been twisted out of all recognition into a warped form of religion. From Marxism we get Cold War style Communism which lingers on in North Korea, displaying itself to the world as a form of 21^st century emperor worship. North Korean communism is its own religion. So too with Islamism whose religious totem is a black flag, exhorting a hate driven ‘worship’, the sign of a warped version of a good religion.

Religion gets twisted out of shape when its worship spirals away from its true ‘centre’, so that ‘the centre cannot hold’ to borrow a line from W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming . The three Abrahamic religions find their true centre in God and in the fear of him, a fear which is felt as reverence, as love answering love. From this fear comes wisdom. Wisdom brings a certain kind of understanding about God, a deep sense of God ‘holding’ humanity and that humanity also ‘holds’ God for as long as it lives in the love of him. Love answering love is the essence of worship. It is also where the real power of religion lies, a power which changes us.

Last night CNN’s Christiane Amanpour heard Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the billionaire Saudi businessman, say, quoting a verse from the Quran, that ‘God will not change you until you change yourself’. He also declared that the funding of Islamist extremists ‘has been stopped completely’. We hope, and we trust, that his remarks were made in good faith. They certainly reflect the real meaning of Islam, which is peace. They also resonate with the inherent truth which pertains to all three of the Abrahamic faiths, that God asks us to change, to be conformed to his love.

The Prince was speaking of a change which is about re-orientation of personal, ideological and national loyalties, as well as priorities. This kind of change requires a complete turning about to face the One God, the God of Abraham who is also the God and Father of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. So the Prince was really speaking for the majority of the world’s people. We all need to change in this way. We all, in our different religious contexts need to turn away from warped versions of our religions and face the one true God, as we come to him from one of a number of directions.

This change of orientation comes with what the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic faiths call ‘the fear of God’. The fear of God is closely associated with wisdom. Wisdom is a particular kind of understanding which pertains to how God wishes to deal with the world. His dealing with the world begins and ends with the making of peace, but peace can only come about when human beings are prepared to work with God’s purposes for the world, rather than against them. It can only come about when enough people want to see justice and righteousness prevail for all.

This is a difficult and often complex matter. For one thing, the justice and righteousness which comes with the fear of God also belongs within the contextualities, or ‘habitations’ which have been shaped within the history of cultures and nations, the histories of different peoples. But it is, nevertheless, the same justice, the same righteousness, which God desires for Muslims and Christians in Syria and Iraq, for Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians, in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel. Desiring this justice, and the peace which it brings, is a sign of the kind of change of which Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal was speaking. It is a sign of repentance and therefore of hope, and of God’s unfailing power to save humanity from itself.

Entertainment values

Is bad news entertainment? Perhaps it is entertainment only to the extent that the bad news is happening somewhere far away. When it comes closer to home it gets less entertaining. The idea of Ebola becoming a reality here in the UK, or of the imminent possibility of a terrorist attack on our streets or public buildings, changes the way we see things. It also begs the question of what it is we want from entertainment.

Does entertainment need to provide a means to escape from whatever grim realities are around us, or which affect our individual lives? This does not seem all that likely, given the number of films and television dramas which are anything but escapist. Take the new series of Homeland, for example. One would like to think that the plot and action are too bad to be true – not that they are in any sense artistically bad, only that they give us what we are used to seeing every evening on the news with a bit extra. We are accustomed to bad news and have grown to expect it, so perhaps the only entertainment which is bound to be a financial success, at least with TV and film, needs to be bad news.

At the entirely opposite end of the entertainment spectrum are the kind of films and programmes which entertain by taking us back to a world when even bad things don’t seem so bad, at least not when they are cleaned up a bit for us 21^st century viewers. Consider Downton Abbey, for example. Unless you were poor and ‘in service’, or had committed a social sin, like having a child out of wedlock, life was predictable and secure – and even quite pretty. This is a brief and perhaps slightly unfair description of what those of us who are glued to Downton on Sunday evenings thoroughly enjoy. Downton  provides us with a temporary respite from the realities of today, even if the realities of yesterday are somewhat sanitised. At the same time, it is a salutary reminder of how unreal life could become if enough people were to buy into a delusory socio-political scenario pertaining to a ‘better’ past. Such beguiling scenarios are not difficult to create, as we are seeing not only in Downton, but  in the rapid and alarming rise of UKIP.

UKIP’s rise in popularity has, of course, nothing in common with Downton Abbey. While its leader’s earlier gaffes and old world bonhomie almost qualify as entertainment, recent by-election victories suggest that UKIP might yet emerge as a far more disturbing reality in the sphere of English politics and needs to be taken seriously. It is disturbing because UKIP profits from fear, ignorance and a degree of political incompetence on the part of the main political parties and works all three to its advantage. In other words, it tells people what they think they want to hear. Don’t all political parties do that? I hear you say. Possibly. But the fact is that we tend to believe who and what we want to believe, provided they either make us feel secure and safe, or promise wealth or power of some kind to the individual. This bears some relation to the way in which both the media and the viewing public seem to be confusing entertainment with reality, and possibly missing out on something important as well.

One of the most challenging realities facing us at present is that of religious faith. Faith is a reality not only because it plays such an obvious part in making peace and alleviating suffering on the one hand and, on the other, in creating or prolonging existing conflicts, but because it carries in its ‘DNA’ life and truth for humanity. Good religion, real faith, enables us to become the people we were always meant to be. This is why Christianity has enormous entertainment value because at the heart of the Christian faith is the idea of relatedness, relatedness between human beings and their vital relationship with God. On this latter relationship everything else depends.

The Christian faith has much to say to us through the medium of film, whether or not a film is overtly religious. While there have been blockbuster films, as well as musicals with a Christian theme, I do not think many of them take us much further than superficial entertainment. I say this despite the fact that I came back to faith partly as a result of seeing Jesus Christ Superstar. Since that time, the late 60’s in New York, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in films with a Christian message, and biblical films especially. I do not think this interest is waning. In fact biblical films and stage productions are growing in popularity, even if within mainly Christian circles. But they still need to touch a wider audience.

Some almost do, but not quite. Take Noah, one of the most recent biblical film releases. Wonderful effects and some compelling performances, but I did not come away from it feeling that my life had been changed, or that it was saying more to the world about the human condition in relation to God than is already being said, and sometimes better said, through secular films. In fact, most good films do not have a religious agenda at all, and yet they often have something to say about the human condition and sometimes, implicitly, about God. The Day After Tomorrow springs to mind, despite its dramatic weaknesses. These films speak of a reality which has to do with the stark choices we are faced with concerning good and evil, light and darkness and with human destiny itself.

Biblical films need to mirror something of this reality as it is for us today. They can do this to a certain extent by telling the old stories with the help of sophisticated special effects. The more these effects mirror the realities we witness daily on the news, the more entertaining the film will be. But these realities, terrifying as they are, are by no means the whole picture.  Something more needs to be said.

To this end, much could yet be done to connect Christianity and the bible with other faiths. In the ‘end times’ we are promised that the tree of life, which is the Cross, is for ‘the healing of the nations’. So if we are to read the signs of the times correctly, films will need to widen their frame of reference when they are dealing with the bible, or with any other faith text, so as to allow us to see the whole picture, the reality of good and evil as it is played out on the world stage today.

Good and evil are more nuanced than ever. We know so much more than we did when the bible was written, although the work of biblical scholars suggests that the editors of the bible were wise enough to realise that this would be the case. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and knew at once that good could be used to evil ends. In other words, they knew and both relished and feared, their own propensity for what the bible calls sin. Sin translates into selfishness, greed, the lust for power and ultimately hatred itself. Nowhere is this more true than in the context of religion. The sins of religion are therefore more subject to judgment than any others. Could this be a new and more challenging area for biblical films to focus on in the future?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Last week’s murder of Alan Henning has generated shock waves both here and abroad, a mixture of grief, anger and sheer incomprehension. Why did this happen to such a person? The only explanation we can possibly imagine is that a vital human connection is  missing in the psyche of the man who perpetrated this act. This is what shakes us. Something has been ruptured in this event, something which we take for granted with regard to our shared humanity – ours and those who murdered Alan.

This sense of rupture raises a number of questions concerning what it is to be human and whether there comes a time when people who commit such crimes have wilfully allowed themselves to be uncoupled from their own humanity. There is something about beheading another human being which suggests severance.

It also begs the question of whether evil is inculcated over a period of time and, if so, where does it come from? The one who indoctrinates another person into doing evil must himself, or herself, have learned evil from someone else. Or is a person born evil? This is one of the profound questions faced so courageously by Lionel Shriver in her book We Need to Talk About Kevin. Shriver’s book concerns evil and the individual psychopath. But ISIS represents collective evil, a quasi, even if wholly imagined, emerging ‘state’ which would be shaped and held in place by psychopaths.

The characteristic of psychopaths, whether they act as individuals or as a group, is that they seek out the innocent. Pogroms, holocausts and acts of ethnic cleansing are the work of a psychopath ‘collective’ hunting down and exterminating the innocent people they fear. Evil always fears what is truthful and good.

The murderous activity of ISIS will ultimately reveal itself as the act of  people who are afraid and, since fear generates more fear, their act creates shock waves of fear which extend outwards like earthquake tremors into our own hearts. This is the fear which we must all resist while at the same time asking why such things happen. The asking is important because it is part of faith, and therefore part of the resistance to fear.

Human beings have been asking why innocent people are allowed to suffer ever since they first questioned the meaning of their own existence, and the existence of God. But the question is, paradoxically, part of the answer, part of the meaning. Consequently, our humanity is diminished from the minute we cease to ask ‘why?’ in the face of evil and suffering. Persecutors have always known this, as do  powerful people who  inflict suffering and silence on those they control. In silencing them they seek to diminish or eradicate their humanity which is their inherent goodness and the truth which they speak. Their inherent goodness and unflinching truthfulness is also what makes for resistance in the face of evil and suffering, a stubborn refusal to accept what seems like God’s refusal to answer the ‘why?’ question.

Asking ‘why?’, is part of faith. It forces us out of complacent thinking in relation to suffering, especially when suffering obliges us to examine our views of God, including whether God exists at all. This does not mean that suffering is itself a good thing, as the prophet Job eventually realises. The book of Job seeks not so much to answer the question ‘why does God (if there is one) allow good people to suffer?’ as to expand the human heart’s capacity for faith in a God who, despite suffering, purposes all things to the good for those who love him, as the apostle Paul later writes in his letter to the church in Rome. Despite this, Job does not experience a happy ending. The children who died will not be restored to him. What he does learn, however, is that it is in suffering itself that God’s purpose for the good is worked and will be finally achieved.

The book of Job tells us that evil is overcome by the kind of faith which is rooted in a seemingly unwarranted love for God. It seems unwarranted because God appears indifferent to Job’s suffering. This brings us back to the goodness which was in Alan Henning and to our own ‘why?’ questioning in relation to his death. How do we deal with the fact that there appear to be no easy answers to the question? And how do we deal with the fear tremors which the event has generated, apart from engaging in retributive violence of one kind or another? We deal with both by joining with Muslims in asking the ‘why?’ question. As Christians, we also deal with it by the response already given to us in our own faith, the sure knowledge of the saving power of God enacted in and through Jesus Christ.

Faith in Christ is not a panacea. It does not lead to happy endings, or deny pain, or act as a guarantee against violence and evil. This is because faith is a proactive response to God’s loving invitation to live in union with him. It is a decision of both heart and mind, taken even in the face of evil and suffering. It is also ‘graced’ by God, so that it both frees and empowers.

Faith is a decision to ‘stand’ in that place which God chose to place himself, the place of human suffering and of death. The Greek word for ‘cross’ is rooted in the word for ‘stand’, Greek being the language of the New Testament. So to ‘stand’ in that place is to stand by the Cross of Christ where we find that we are accompanied, or rather met and embraced, by Christ in the suffering of innocent people like Alan Henning and in the grief of the vast majority of Muslims who deplore his murder.

The Cross is both the first and the last place where we encounter God as one who is totally ‘for’ all human beings, and in solidarity with them, especially when they suffer. In this mysterious way, he is the answer to the question.

True authority and the conflicts of today

Jesus provokes the religious leaders of his time in a number of contexts. He disturbs the status quo by threatening individual power bases, including religious ones. He outrages the authorities by openly challenging them in his teaching and through subversive behaviour, such as driving out the money lenders from the temple. But most significantly, he threatens their authority by winning people’s trust. He connects with people. In other words, he connects with the truth which they inherently sense but seldom hear spoken, or witness in the lives of the powerful. In Jesus they experience truth as something understood at a primary level of human consciousness. They experience truth, rather than just hear it discussed. This is what makes the authority of Jesus recognisably authentic.

Authority comes with trust. True authority is always given, or entrusted, but it does not always come with power. In fact, Jesus refused to be seduced by power. As a result, his authority challenged and disturbed the powerful. The authority of Jesus was not the same as political power. Through the authority given him by the Father, he inspired and changed lives and convinced people of the love of God, but he did not get rid of the Roman occupying forces. Instead, with the authority given him, he radically changed the destiny of the world. He set it on a different course.

It is authority and not power that is needed today with regard to the conflicts raging in the Middle East. We need an authority which is vested in God’s love for all of humanity, and so capable of changing the world, but which at the same time has been entrusted to our leaders by us, through the democratic process. Trust has to have been earned if authority is to be freely given. It is probably fair to say that political authority is rarely earned in the way God would have it earned, with the exception of one or two rare individuals – Myanmar’s President Aung San Suu Kyi being one which springs to mind.

Entrusting authority to world leaders does not exempt the rest of us from taking responsibility for what they do with it. So they should know that we expect and demand that the wisest, most truthful and most judicious course of action be taken in our name. For us at present, this involves taking responsibility for our country’s active engagement in  a conflict which has been brought about by violent extremism borrowed from religion, and from the lust for power. There are issues of genocide, our own security and that of other countries at stake, all of which return us to the question of authority rightfully earned and exercised in the interest of the freedom and safety of all. ISIS has no such authority. This is also true for those who facilitate or support its actions.

People of faith, as well as those who do not think of themselves as religious, should give religious and secular leaders who are engaged in the urgent business of defeating this particular evil their full and heartfelt attention. Giving such attention is a business which concerns us all. Attentiveness means being alongside the world’s leaders in heart and mind,– in other words, in that part of the heart which also thinks. This does not mean agreeing with them. In fact attentiveness will inevitably face us with some uncomfortable truths regarding other conflicts that we have caused, been involved with, or simply stood by and allowed to happen, Gaza and Israel being one of the most recent examples.

Nevertheless, where there is a heart and head attentiveness, there is also hope. We have had brief and surprising glimpses of what this kind of attentiveness could lead to. Who, for example, could have imagined that a group of leaders whose countries have long distrusted one another and, in some cases, declared themselves to be in a state of mutual enmity, would sit around a table in order to plan how they might best work together to overcome the evil being manifested through the murderous activities of ISIS? The scenario is of course far more complicated, but something of wisdom and common sense is at work here. Something of true authority is being exercised. It shows that an evil which is everyone’s problem requires a concerted and judicious response. If, either as individual nations or collectively, we do nothing, we shall all be responsible for a growing violent anarchy which is capable of doing immense harm to those its perpetrators hate most. This is true both in its own sphere of influence and in the wider global context.

But we are also implicated when we act. This is why trust is so badly needed in politics today. Exercising authority in a judicious way means doing the right thing for the right reason. But this can only be done with the support and trust of a majority who want the same just and peaceful outcome, including those of us who may not be 100% sure that a particular course of action is the right one tactically or as part of a broader strategy, but do know that we need to act. 

Exercising authority in the way God would like us to exercise it begins with humility. It means that the authority given comes with an awareness that our human and often short term thinking does not always turn out for the best for the greatest number of people. Such authority involves us all, so let’s try to be more deeply attentive to those who are accountable to us for the decisions they make in our name. 

On Dying

Last week I was privileged to be at the bedside of a man who was dying. I say privileged because the experience was akin to what I feel when I approach the altar before celebrating the Eucharist, a sense of being on holy ground, in the immanent presence of God and, like a number of Old Testament prophets who found themselves in a comparable situation, having nothing to say. It’s not that I had nothing to say to the man who was dying. I had nothing to say to the fact of death itself. There is a built-in instinct to talk in the presence of death, knowing that a person’s sense of hearing is the last to go, and in the mistaken belief that our talking will somehow assuage their loneliness, or their fear of oblivion, as well as our own. Being at the bedside of someone who is dying obliges us to think about our own mortality.

As a child, I had a recurring nightmare of being the only person left alive on earth except for one ancient spectral figure who would one day meet me over the brow of a sunny hill. I later recognised different versions of the same nightmare in my everyday unnameable fears. Most of us experience unnameable fear from time to time. It is like waking from sleep, disorientated, having dreamed of being in some unfamiliar and perhaps threatening dimension from which one has not fully returned. These are the disorientating fears which inform all our other fears and return us to the fear of oblivion which is the fear of death itself.

Viewed as part of our fear landscape, the idea of death has something to teach us about the everyday fears which beset our lives. Am I intelligent? Will I be accepted? Will I fail? Am I loved? Will I be remembered? Each of these fears is, in its way, the spectral figure waiting to confront us over the brow of the next hill. They embody the fear of ultimate nothingness, the fear of oblivion. They also return us to ourselves and to our own life span, to who we are in relation to other human beings and in the continuity of time as we know it. They are the fear that we have not done enough, been enough, lived enough.

Who we think we are, or want to be, will often accord with the perceived expectations of someone who we may have feared in earlier life, a parent, a teacher, an admired or envied sibling or friend. All of these fears can be summed up in the fear of failure which is closely linked to that of loss. Loss begins from the moment we are conscious of our own mortality. Failure and loss are both significant because they pertain to the concept of judgment and to what lies beyond judgment, the unknowableness of death.

The fear of judgment is greater than the fear of death itself because judgment determines what will ultimately happen to us. The fear of judgment pertains as much to the present moment as it does to the dimension of eternity or, if we are young enough, to what we will make of our lives in the relatively near future. In terms of existence itself, there is, in the human psyche, a sense of the determining moment, one which has to do with oblivion, or death, versus eternal life. This sense of the ultimate, of something following death (even if that something is oblivion or nothingness) is common to everyone, irrespective of whether or not they have a faith. For those who do have a faith, a deeply embedded fear of judgment therefore governs who we are, and what we do with the present moment.

But for us at the moment, whether or not we are accompanying someone who is dying, or perhaps facing death ourselves, facing the emptiness, the ‘nothing’, can become the beginning of a fullness, a presence which consumes all fears. In it, we are reminded not only of our mortality but of the mystery and joy of our existence. We sense that some greater creative power deliberately, of his own will, desired, and continues to desire, that we not simply exist but that we be fully alive from the moment of our conception into eternity itself. He desires and purposes this eternal life within the re-creative energy of his own love and we are invited to play an active part, to make conscious choices which will accord with this purpose. To this end we are given two great gifts, the ability to think and the capacity for love. We deploy these gifts in the present moment. Both work together, but it is the capacity for love which determines the outcome of judgment and our ultimate destiny.

Love is not something that we can resource from within ourselves, or plan and deploy in a bounded and rational way. It is sourced from within God and therefore unlimited, unbounded. The choice we are given, beginning in the present moment, lies in allowing this God, who is love itself, to claim our lives as they have been, as they are, and as they will ultimately be in death and in the decisive moment of judgment. So judgment is a two-way decision, but one in which God has already chosen us. All that remains is for us to say ‘yes’ to his invitation to be in union with him.

Separate lives

My computer clock allows me to inhabit three different time zones, something which has become necessary since our children went to live in Australia and the US. When I glance at the time it is as though the three families are living in a single coordinated triangular relationship. I can place myself in their situation, according to the time of day, and be with each one of them in the moment. This gives a sense of continuity and context to those other moments when we are all awake at the same time and can touch base verbally, and sometimes visually as well. But the line is often fuzzy, and time short, so that we must ‘find’ one another very quickly when we do manage to connect.

Finding one another is crucial to understanding. It is about keeping the line clear. We don’t always give enough time or effort to really ‘finding’ those who matter to us when we are with them all the time. Perhaps this is also true of nations. Nations can take proximity and a longstanding relationship for granted, and unexamined longstanding relationships are bound to ‘break up’ sooner or later.

This is what I find difficult about the idea of Scotland breaking up from the rest of the United Kingdom, the sense of impending rupture and dislocation which will entail the loss of that commonality of spirit which makes for friendship and which holds families together.  It is the same as the ‘bond of the spirit’ which holds us together within the Trinitarian life and love of God. A ‘yes’ vote for separation could mean that we are at risk of losing each other in ways which will be irreversible, because separation also makes for the deepening of distrust. Without trust nothing can heal or be made new. Going our separate ways, becoming dislocated, will not heal the harm we have done to one another in our shared history. Neither will the vague concept of affirming Scotland’s national identity.

If you are Scottish and have always lived in England your identity will be layered, but not compromised. It would be pointless to try to affirm it politically because it will have been formed from within more than one culture context. Being a triple national myself, I don’t see my identity as located in any one nationality. My identity has to do with being part of a much bigger picture, being part of its life and of the life of all the elements which make that picture what it is.

 As nations, we are part of each other and of the mystery of creation, whoever we are and wherever our roots are. The real challenge lies in staying focused on the work of painting the bigger picture. This means working together, picking up on the past, learning from it and using what we have learned to make a new creation.  The bigger picture is an ongoing new creation which we make together with the Master artist who alone can heal and work all things to the good for those who love him.

If the debates leading up to this referendum have taught us anything, they ought to have taught us that we need to heal together, whatever the outcome of the vote on Thursday, although it is hard to see this happening if the ‘yes’ vote prevails, given the fissiparous and all pervading nature of the breakup that such a vote would entail. Administrative problems at every level should give pause for thought, at the very least.

Whatever our nationality, many of us will grieve, should the ‘yes’ vote win, not because Scotland wins political, fiscal or monetary independence but because of the separation and loss which such an untimely and shallow victory would bring. Separation always brings loss, whereas autonomy with interdependence makes for vital and creative relationships. Such relationships depend on trust in the political system itself and, most importantly, in those who are accountable to us in that system. The wise and judicious devolution of power and accountability is the first step towards re-building the kind of trust needed for Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland to work together for a better future. It might yet be just possible.

Loving and learning - Some thoughts for Freshers' Week

The beginning of the academic year coincides with the season for Harvest thanksgiving. Although I live in the country, where the size and quality of harvest depend on the climatic vagueries of the British Isles, I am also aware that harvest is not just a matter of crops, livestock and garden produce. It is about life itself. Our whole lives are a harvest, at whatever stage they have reached, and in them we are responsible for the lives and harvests of others.

Those who are either returning to university, or going there for the first time, are embarking on a new stage of life’s harvest. Academic work, like the physical work of farming, is concerned with sowing and reaping, to borrow from a well known harvest hymn. It is primarily concerned with being open to receiving the seeds of wisdom, the kind of wisdom which will help today’s students shape their future and with it that of society.

Society is composed of human beings. It is made up of a dense web of interconnected relationships, beginning with those of a person’s immediate family. That primal family relationship connects persons to each other and, over time, integrates them within the system we call a free and democratic society. Integration is not about being subsumed or swallowed up by the greater whole, still less by any one ideology or political system. It is about being a mature human being, ready to assume responsibility for other human beings, beginning with our immediate neighbour. It means knowing that we can make a difference to society.

The purpose of education is therefore to prepare people, from the age of about 5, or perhaps younger, to take their place in a free and democratic society and to work towards enhancing and preserving it. When it comes to higher or further education, enhancing and preserving the things which make for democratic society are not only a matter of acquiring skills and qualifications, important as these are in their particular contexts. They are a matter of learning how to think in a way which is worthy of our humanity. In other words, the purpose of higher education is to learn how to think in order to be able to help others to become fully human. This ultimate end is also God’s purpose for his world, and hence for society, because God is concerned with our humanity to the point that he assumed it himself.

Where learning is undertaken for the sake of the other, in other words for the greater good of society, it acquires the characteristic of love. This changes the way we think about the subject being studied. First, because allowing love to motivate our learning takes us out of our individual selves. Loving what we learn, or learning with the heart, inevitably distances us from our own individual objectives; my career, my earning power, my status and standing vis a vis that of others in my peer group. Secondly, it motivates the learning process. The love of learning makes clear our reasons for choosing any given subject and provides the focus and energy needed to stay the course to the end.

Many people starting their university life are not at all sure why they are studying the subject they have chosen. Perhaps someone has advised them that it is what they are most suited to, or it was a spur of the moment decision. They somehow fell into the subject and, as a result, may never engage with it in any depth or with any degree of real love.

Learning has to be undertaken for its own sake, in other words in love, before its harvest can be deployed for the good of others. The love of learning for its own sake imparts a deeper meaning to the subject chosen, because love involves self giving. Every minute devoted to the study of any one subject, every lecture to which full attention is paid (including the less interesting ones), every seminar or tutorial, every essay or presentation, is a visible enactment of the love which powers the work and will continue to power whatever it becomes in the coming years.  

Self giving love expresses itself in learning as disciplined argument coherently expressed. Disciplined thought and clarity of expression give us permission to feel passionate about the subject we are studying. Passion follows discipline, and not the other way round. Passion without discipline simply degenerates into opinion. A university degree is therefore not a piece of paper certifying that we have a right to an opinion. It certifies to the fact that we have learned to think rationally and that we are considered ready to put our intellect, or whatever professional skills we have acquired, to the service of others. It also signifies that our learning is ongoing, that we are always learning in order to understand more deeply the purposes of God for the world of today.