Women bishops and the Church of England - from death to life

In the week that the arch-traditionalist Revd. Philip North refused Episcopal consecration from ‘tainted’ hands, including those of his own archbishop, we also see the Revd. Libby

Lane consecrated as the first woman bishop in the Church of England. ‘What a piece of work is man’ – forever trying to square the circle in order to keep the show on the road, if you will pardon the mixed metaphor.

The Church, in its effort to keep going in the face of tacit or open misogyny and homophobia, has become a squared circle and is in danger of grinding to a halt. Wanting to please everyone all of the time, in the interest of maintaining a spurious unity, leads to a standstill situation.  We are trying to keep going without first having done the hard work of reparation, the servicing of the Church which involves listening, hearing, understanding and loving one another unconditionally. This is what brings life and enables real unity and, later, forward movement.

However, there is a sense in which trying to please everyone all of the time does enable a little forward movement to begin. It does so when the desire and the collective will is for a shared life in God. This is not bland piety. It is the hard reality which faces us when we place our humanity ahead of our concerns for the institutional church or for the individual’s professional advancement in that institution. Our humanity consists in who we are as persons before God, and as we are known to one another.

As far as I know, Bishop Libby Lane was not a ‘key player’ in the inside deliberations of who would be the first woman bishop for the Church of England. She is, to many of us, an unknown, a King David figure. The young David was sought out and anointed while he was in the fields tending the sheep, over the heads of his elder brothers. Like David, she is a bit of a surprise.

Bishop Libby Lane’s consecration is a major step in the right direction when it comes to forward movement, but more is needed – not just more women bishops, but a re-humanising of the Church and a re-ordering of its priorities, priorities which until now have consisted of the upkeep of safe and predictable career paths mainly intended for men. We need more surprises. But, paradoxically, hope may be on the way, through the unlikely source of management. Driven as we are by internal politics, the professionalization of the work of priests, and by management-style mission agendas, the human beings caught up in these processes may yet rise up and protest. Hopefully, Bishop Libby will be one such human being. Meanwhile, we in the Church in Wales, which voted for women bishops but has so far failed to deliver, hope that new life will appear through a new management initiative, the creation of ministry areas.

Management thinking, and the creation of ministry areas, justifies itself on the basis of cost effectiveness and vague talk of mission and the empowerment of the laity, by which it means the people who come to church. All of this is alright as far as it goes but it does not go far enough. It is the people who do not go to church, because they are put off by misogyny, homophobia and clericalism, who need to be empowered. Many are understandably cynical but there is also good will out there, as I find when I happen to be wearing a clerical collar while shopping or paying the toll fare in order to cross the Severn Bridge. I get an encouraging smile where others perhaps do not. 

The smile and friendly word is not about recognition of status. It is about recognition of God’s unconditional love, made flesh in his Son, operating within the contexts of day to day life and made visible in the Church’s ministry. The Church, and people wearing clerical collars, irrespective of the colour of their shirts, exist to make that love known and, more importantly, experienced, by all whom they meet, including those who may not go to church or who do not think of themselves as religious. The essence of mission is therefore not what we say or do, but what we are. The task of managers in the Church consists therefore in making it possible for those they manage to be recognisably what they are called to be which is Christ in the world.

This is also what empowerment is about. To empower is to liberate. Good management is a liberating process. In the Church, it ought to enable those who minister in God’s name to recognise and fully ‘comprehend’ the pains and joys of others. This comprehension, or ‘holding’, is part of God’s ongoing work of creation and salvation. The two words are rooted in the Greek words for ‘life’.

For Christians, the work being done in all of us through the Holy Spirit, whether or not we go to church,oHo is about real life and practical action, so it is not enough for those who minister, whether lay or ordained, to be nice people with a sense of humour. They need to be people whose humour comes from an understanding, a connectedness with a God who laughs with us. The parables of Jesus were not told as grim morality tales. They were often jokes, and jokes only work when they are told from a place of empathy, rather than one of cynicism and judgement. Humour is central to salvation. Gloomy religion and solemn clergy do not speak of the salvation offered in the person of Jesus.

All of this brings me back to the kind of hope which Bishop Libby’s consecration offers both the Church and the world. There was a spark of real affection and humour which passed between her and those around her in the moments which followed her consecration, and a sigh of relief when the lone protestor failed to ruin it. We hope, and we pray, that this affection will prevail against all that is barren in our Church. We hope that the laughter will overwhelm the cynicism, that it will bring life and hope out of a death situation which has lasted for far too long.

Random acts of joy

A couple of nights ago we skipped the news and went to the circus instead. How frivolous and irresponsible was that at a time like this? the little voice counselling doom and despair kept telling me. How could anyone allow themselves to be distracted from the brutality going on around us? Places like Syria, Iraq and Nigeria, all of them controlled to a greater or lesser extent by the forces of evil at work in IS, al-Quaeda, Boko Haram and the various splinter groups, not to mention corrupt governments, working with them to a greater or lesser extent. Is it right to forget for a moment, by going to see Cirque Beserk at the Hackney Empire, that women and girls are being enslaved and that whole peoples are being subjected to a medieval nightmare?

Guilt and doubt are the great killers of fun because fun allows us to forget. It affords a time of respite. This is why banning fun is the essence of evil. It is also why poisoning religion by banning fun has long been the stock in trade of the evil one, and of his agents. The evil one, far from being an allegorical figure with horns and a pitchfork, is more like a virus which attacks us where we are most vulnerable, beginning with that aspect of human nature which we call spiritual, or religious, or our human consciousness. Consciousness or, to put it in religious terms, conscience, is where we differentiate between right and wrong, between what makes us fully human and what dehumanises or depraves the human spirit.

To begin with, and for most of us, the evil one works most effectively through counsels of doom and despair, accompanied by the voices of accusation and deception. In the very moment of full and uninhibited enjoyment of Cirque Beserk, I am accused of cowardice and moral turpitude as I sense the enemy questioning my enjoyment of such a distraction. Surely my attention should be fully taken up with the suffering and deprivation going on in the world? This private deception plays itself out within a wider psychological context. We are a chronically anxious society, deceived, as individuals, into thinking that if I do not hold up the world like Atlas, it will be overrun by these dark forces and it will all be my fault.

For this kind of deception to be effective, so that evil can take hold and do its malicious work, all signs of uncomplicated, selfless and at times even ‘pointless’ joy, or fun, need to be eliminated. It follows that joy, or fun, is probably the most powerful weapon we have at our disposal in the context of what is often referred to as ‘spiritual warfare’. Spiritual warfare is what all people of good faith, irrespective of their religion, are engaged in at present, even if they would not necessarily call it by that name.

Spiritual warfare centres on joy because joy is of the essence of creation itself. Evil, or the evil one, attacks the goodness of creation and of human beings by first destroying joy. If God is love, and if all things have their being in him, he rejoices eternally in their goodness. He ‘sees’ that they are good, to paraphrase the beginning of the book of Genesis. In this joy over the goodness of things, and of people, he also ‘comprehends’ darkness. In other words, he takes darkness into himself and transforms it through the love which is constitutive of his own being. Joy works through love and sustains all things. Human beings are entrusted to work God’s love into the world through joy – or what we call fun.

This is what happens in the circus. Circuses are contexts in which fun is given at great risk and at great personal cost. The woman hanging upside down on a rope some twenty feet above ground depends on the knots she will have tied herself and on the three pairs of hands holding the rope at the other end. The tumbling acrobat, if he misses his appointed landing spot, could be seriously injured, or even killed. We hardly dare watch him – and yet we do, not because we relish danger for its own sake but because we, like his colleagues waiting with a safety mat in case he misses his landing spot (I won’t spoil it by saying more), are willing him to be OK. We are also laughing with him and with his colleagues when he executes the act with flawless grace. The relentless joy of rave-type circus music, sustains the process and adds to the fun in the most surprising way.

And then there is the clown. His act is rooted in 17^th century Commedia del Arte, a popular form of street theatre in which human nature and human folly are portrayed through stock characters. The clown shows us to ourselves and gives us permission to laugh kindly at ourselves and at human folly. Laughing at ourselves without feeling guilty or afraid cures self deception and all the deceptions which we cherish about those who we fear or dislike. It allows love to happen.  

The clown is therefore one of the great healers of the human spirit. He is the Christ figure in our midst. He appears in every random act of joy, in shared and generous fun where all kinds of risks are taken for the sheer goodness and beauty of the moment, and in laughter that is entirely devoid of malice. The gates of hell will not prevail against it.

Je suis Charlie Hebdo - The truth of the matter

I have started to notice when a few weeks go by without a plane crash or terrorist attack taking place somewhere in the world.  Perhaps this is because we are now so conditioned to expect the unexpected that we are permanently braced for the worst. Being permanently on red alert is also a way of telling ourselves that we are not really afraid, that we are ready for whatever life throws at us, including random acts of murder. Various levels of ‘terror alert’ help us to do this.  

Those who commit acts of terror aim to exercise power by generating a climate of fear. Terrorism is terrorism, after all. Generating fear is the way people who crave attention, recognition, or even worship, get their megalomaniac ‘fix’. In the case of Jihadism in its current manifestations, megalomania is delusion dressed up as religion. It is not true religion.

True religion is about having a deep relationship with a loving God, both individually and as God’s people, in the sure knowledge that all people are God’s and that all are equally valued and loved by him. False religion is ultimately about the worship of oneself and forcing others to worship the person I call ‘me’, often because the false ‘me’ is driven by self hatred of one kind or another. False religion, and the megalomania it engenders, often appears in personality driven worshiping contexts pertaining to any one of a number of religions, just as it does on the global political stage. It becomes dangerous and violent when driven by lust for power and the desire for control over the lives of others, even if this is not recognised by the person or persons concerned. True religion begins with renouncing power and control over other people.

Truth exposes delusion and so does true religion. But this exposing can work both ways, like a double edged knife. Insofar as true religion, and the truth through which it speaks, exposes dangerous delusion, it also exposes our own fears and ourselves for what we are, both privately and publicly. The truth does this by naming and shaming those who threaten us and, in so doing, by naming and shaming our own fears, hatreds and delusions. Once we have faced these inner wild beasts, we can lay hold of them, understand them and deal with them. We can even laugh at them. We can understand and laugh at our fear of being attacked by crazed religious extremists. Political satire, whether or not we always like or agree with it, helps to make this possible.

Cartoons are really drawings in the sand. For some, they can be powerful solvents of toxic fear. But while they may come across as  temporary things, quickly forgotten and easily erased by the artist, they also leave an indelible mark on the collective inner consciousness, the place where hatred is engendered through fear, the one feeding continuously on the other until they erupt in violence. The artist who draws in the sand deals in powerful subtleties. He or she reveals both truth and delusion.

There is an occasion in the life of Jesus of Nazareth when a woman is brought to him who has been caught committing adultery, a flagrant breach of Jewish law and of the bounds of respectability. When asked who should throw the first stone, he responds with a question and with a drawing in the sand. The question and the drawing clearly belong together. The question pertains to a collective and private fear of judgment and to the delusions of power and of being beyond reproach cherished by those who believe they have the right to judge and condemn others. “Which of you is without sin?” he asks. “Let him throw the first stone.” Jesus knew the truth and saw the delusions which come so easily to those who wish for power, or who perhaps already have it.

What did each person see written in the sand as he dropped his stone and turned away from the woman? It was probably no more than a single word, or a quick line drawing unmasking a delusion about the kind of person he was, or about what he secretly wished he was. The delusion and the desire had made him single minded, even fanatical, in the practice of his religion. False fanatical religion expressed itself in a desire to punish someone else for his own self hatred.

We are seeing something like this being worked out through the language of religious violence today. The criminal so called Jihadists who act out their fantasies in Paris streets and supermarkets are really no more than disillusioned people who are full of self hatred. They must be stopped, wherever they are, both there and further afield. But simply stopping them, with force if necessary, will not diminish their hatred or their fear and it will not diminish ours either.

In order to finally rid ourselves of the fear and the hatred which feeds violence, we have other work to do. We have to use the other side of the double edged knife to exorcise the sins of injustice committed against Arab people in the past century and in which we have all played a part. Violence and hatred will only be fully quelled when we have taken away the deeper and perhaps only partly recognised ‘drivers’ of the current violent episode. This is the wider and far more significant truth which cartoonists need to be drawing in the sand.