from the edge

Saturday 29 July 2017

Dreaming Up a Church

At school, when it was too wet to play lacrosse (O happy day), we did country dancing in the gym. One of the dances involved going to the back of the line and partnering the last person on it, so that you would both eventually end up at the front. I think the dance was called ‘Strip the Willow’. Correct me if I’m wrong. But if I am right in my recollection of ‘Strip the Willow’, or even if I am confusing it with another dance, the basic pattern has stayed with me as a blue print for ecclesial life; how the Church could yet be, and how this new joyous way of being could liberate it into becoming the kind of Church which the Lord of the Dance might like to be a part of.

I think he probably is a part of it. It’s just that the Dance has moved on. Reels and country dances have a way of moving on by shifting the focus and altering the plane of action, so transforming the action itself. It is this shifting and re-focusing which the institutional Church needs to allow itself to do, if it is to keep dancing with its Lord, and if it is to survive at all. I say allow, because the movement is not a plan to be decided upon by those at the top and then enacted by those at the bottom as best they can. It is not a strategy for keeping going. It is the energy in which the Church should live and move, the energy which it breathes and then releases into the world. Or which it wilfully refuses to breathe because it is afraid of the risks entailed.

This is not as abstract as it sounds, any more than the Dance is itself an abstraction. Nevertheless, it does require some right side of the brain thinking, to acknowledge and borrow from a much more complex line of thought.[1] The Dance is a pattern, a collective creation, energised by the measure of its music which is its heart beat. The music is too fast, too compellingly joyous, to allow for strategy, for watching one’s back lest a fellow dancer fill our place unobserved. The Dance is not a competition in which one person or group feels threatened by another. Fear plays no part in it.

What makes the Dance a living Church, as opposed to a fearful and disconnected institution, is the will to love, at least for the duration of the Dance itself, in other words on this side of eternity. It moves in tandem with the changes, chances and inexplicable suffering (seemingly allowed by God) of this transient world. Given such a fluid, and at times frightening, situation, there is little time to do anything other than love. This is another skill which the institutional Church seems to be in danger of losing. The momentum of its collective inner life is slowing down because it has forgotten how to love. So it is losing the measure of the Dance.

Part of the problem, indeed most of the problem, is one of separation. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel puts it well ‘To what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another, “We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn”'. (Matt.11:16) One half of the dance, the clergy hierarchy (especially those at the top of the line), has become dislocated from the other, from the people who the clergy exist to serve, the people at the bottom of the line who are ‘playing’ and ‘mourning’. So it feels to those who are either at the bottom of the line or outside the Church altogether, that the clerical hierarchy is doing its own thing, its own private dance, one which is completely detached from the people, despite the fact that the people are the other partners in the Dance.

What practical solutions can we offer to save the Church’s true life in the Dance? We could begin, perhaps, by breaking the existing clerical caste system, which is still redolent of class and privilege, though not restricted to either, and which is currently stuck in a mould, or cast, of its own making.

The cast reveals striations of love which have become set in stony hearts. In order to break these hearts – and they do need to be broken, so that those called to be bishops, priests and deacons, can relearn to love their people, the people at the top end of the line need to link up and partner with those at the bottom. This is fundamental to the sacramental commission given to them. We love in and through our sacramental ministry, particularly in the celebration of the Eucharist which we take from the altar to the world.

In terms of ecclesial life, such a partnering would require two ‘givens’; the first that no ordained person should be doing a desk job and the second, that every ordained person should be mentored, or partnered, by a lay person. All clergy would be non-stipendiary. In regard to mentoring, we would begin by drawing on the skills, life experience and wisdom of older lay members of our churches, who might well be paid. These older members (aged at least 60, but preferably older) would mentor those clergy from whom current leadership expectations are the greatest; in other words, bishops, archdeacons, area deans and/or ministry area leaders. These expectations ought, one hopes, to diminish as the existing hierarchical structure is gradually dismantled. We could begin this dismantling process with all clergy being elected or sponsored by the members of their church (as happens already in some denominations) and bishops being elected for a fixed term by clergy.

But what, the reader is now probably asking, is to be done about the running, or management, of the fabric of the institution, its buildings, real estate and pension schemes, to name only a few? To which the answer might be, is it too hard to believe that there are not willing, and perfectly able, retired people who could do this (remunerated) work? Perhaps someone reading this post could make some practical suggestions in this area. Meanwhile, let’s dream of a Church which recognises and honours its Lord when He turns up unexpectedly, hoping to join in the Dance.[2]



[1] I am indebted to Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emmisary – The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, London (2009)
[2] This post is a development of some of the ideas I shared in an interview with Mark Tully for the BBC’s Radio 4 ‘Something Understood’ July 16th, 2017

Wednesday 19 July 2017

Broken - Making It Real

I have only just started watching the BBC drama Broken. As with all good fiction and drama, you sense truth before you even read or see it which is why, perhaps unconsciously, I put off watching the programme until a couple of days ago. Now, three episodes in, I feel as if I am holding my breath underwater, desperate to surface but also needing to dive deeper. It’s what happens when we experience moments of genuine truth, moments which give us permission, even oblige us, to let go into what it really feels like to be someone else, or to really be oneself.

Such moments of truth face us with our own brokenness. Good drama, and this is of the very best, suspends disbelief. In other words, it not only tells you the truth through stories, it melds with your own story. Or, and this is the harder part, the things it tells you, the memories it triggers, are truer and more painful than you ever allowed yourself to believe.

Of course, there was bound to be sexual abuse at some point in this story. Abuse, after all, is big in the Church. I have only watched the first three episodes of Broken. I am trying to give myself gaps, rather than watching one every night until I get to the end of the series. Triggered memories need time for processing. Triggers are a deep down re-playing of events and the circumstances which surrounded those events, even if the events being portrayed on screen are different. The events and, more especially, the truth about them, re-surface in translation, so to speak.

This is when ‘disbelief’ is ‘suspended’, so allowing the truth lodged in a person’s memory to emerge. In the case of Broken, pain is re-experienced and worked through in the consecration, the ‘embodiment’, of bread and wine at the Eucharist, but the pain is not healed. Being a priest has not salved Father Michael’s wounds. So the viewer suffers with him – again.  

Of course, sexual abuse is not the only truth revealed in Broken. There are other paths of suffering which viewers will walk down, if the memories are triggered. Among them, the agonising path taken when we walk alongside someone who is trying, at great personal risk, to do the right thing, to speak the truth to power, in this particular case.

All of these dramatic associations, strike a kind of echo across generations and within lifetimes, my own included. They are an echo not only of suffering, but of our need for God. Coming to terms with our need for God, perhaps for the first time, is not the same thing as needing to fabricate a ‘god’ which will cushion us from pain. There are many such gods, and they usually lead to addiction of one kind or another. Addiction does not heal pain, although it may numb it for a while.

The God we need is already in the pain we are in denial about, as that same God is in the Catholic boyhood of Father Michael. God is bound up in it, part of it. Father Michael’s memory of sexual abuse is also tied to a particular poem, The Windhover, as is his priestly vocation.  The pain, the calling and the poetry are one.


All cries to God are poetry. Sometimes the cries are silent. They are a wordless praying that takes us beyond formal religion and yet, as we see in Broken, they are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are the dereliction of God on the Cross, made concrete in the breaking of the bread, and in the preaching of the sacramental word, as they embrace our painful memories. In them, we are in God. The praying, or yearning, is in all of us, as we strive to hear God’s voice in the word, and sense his ‘at-oneness’ with us in the broken bread and wine outpoured.  God in Christ meets us silently in these mundane attributes of formal religion, so that the brokenness of our lives can be made whole again in his brokenness. 

Thursday 6 July 2017

Armageddon - or possibly not

Source: BBC
I was still at my convent boarding school when the Cuban missile crisis peaked. They were thinking of ringing our parents to ask them to take us home. Maybe it was the end of the world. We were told to pray, not that we really understood the scale of the threat in relation to ourselves, still less to the wider world. We did sense something unusual, though, about the school possibly having to close down in the middle of term, so it was vaguely frightening, even if the fear was sugar-coated by the prospect of an extended half-term break.

I cannot say that I was truly afraid of what might happen over Cuba. My earliest memory of fear was on my stepfather’s boat. I was about five and the crew would play at dangling me, screaming and kicking, over the side. That was real fear. Real fear, the kind that grips and paralyses a person happens when the threat is direct, immediate and personal. All three apply to the individual and to the collective in equal measure. Those who have experienced war will recognise this.

But there is another variant on fear, which is the vague fear we have all learned to live with. It has its peaks and troughs. Right now, given the situation in North Korea and the leadership vacuum in America which has helped to ramp it up, you could say that it is peaking, perhaps like the Cuban missile crisis with which I am sure it is already being compared. And there are other fears swirling around, most of them having to do with the instability of financial and property markets, along with climate change and the medium to long-term effects of Brexit. Added to these are the ‘plagues’ said to presage the end of the world, the zika virus, if you live in South America, being one of them.

All of these fear triggers have, in one way or another, happened before, with huge cost to human life and happiness. As a result of them, many people have ceased to believe in the existence of an all powerful God, still less a merciful and wise one. They will say that those who persist in believing in such a figure are clinging to some kind of psychological prop which enables them to get through life and to manage their fear. But getting through life, whatever it throws at us, by simply managing fear, is a thin substitute for a life lived in, with and through God, as it was lived for us in Jesus Christ.

What we are given in Christ is an altogether different way of managing fear. It is the last thing most of us would think of doing in frightening situations, although with wise leadership and a less frightened electorate we might limit, or even prevent, most of the fear situations which face us today. Instead of succumbing to fear, we are told to keep our inward eye firmly fixed on the embodiment of truth, the Word made flesh, the Christ walking towards us on the turbulent water. This is the ‘way’ and the ‘life’ that enables us to deal with fear.

If we return to the Armageddon-like representations of the current North Korea nuclear threat, one thing is clear: There is unfinished business, and North Koreans, who are ruled through fear, are not allowed to forget this lest they cease to be quite so fearful. North Korea is technically still at war with the US over the carving up of the country and the ensuing Korean war. No peace treaty was ever signed. This possibly deliberate oversight has led to a great deal of loss of face for the ruling dynasty of the north, beginning with the present incumbent’s grandfather. Powerful and morally weak leaders find it hard to cope with loss of face, except through violence.

In the context of Korea, Trump has added to the existing problem of loss of face by upping the ante in regard to violent retaliation and thereby provoking the already angry Kim Jong Un who, like Trump, is a powerful and morally weak leader.  Narrow readings of religious texts do nothing to allay our fear of the end of all things being brought about through the hubris and stupidity of President Donald Trump, and the hubris and cleverness of Kim Jong Un. In fact, it is being exploited in certain religious contexts for political power-driven purposes. The exploitation of fear through religion is a long way from the kind of life Jesus was talking about when he spoke of himself as the ‘the way, the truth and the life’.

What then can Christians learn from their own Leader about managing the world’s fear? Many of the key exchanges which take place between Jesus and powerful people, as well as those who fear them, are contained by the words ‘You have heard that it was said ... but I say to you’. In other words he calls us to convert fear to something resembling the honouring of the enemy – you might call this love, although perhaps not immediately. I think Jesus may have been talking about something resembling ‘chivalry’, which is not an exclusively masculine virtue, incidentally. Rather, it is a sense of the need to brace oneself for the best we have to give when it comes to the things we fear. Those who lived through the second world war, if they are reading this, will remember what bracing oneself for the best one has to give entailed. So will the doctors and muslim taxi drivers who rushed to the scenes of the recent terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. I think that they were able to call on something within them resembling chivalry, or honour, perhaps even love.

All of this may not seem to relate directly to what we are feeling about the possibility of a nuclear attack by north Korea, unless we can conceive of a way of ‘centering down’ to that place of goodness and honour which lies somewhere within even the worst of us. Centering down to the best that lies within us does not involve an introspective search for the good in ourselves. It is more a case of being available to it, should it suddenly emerge and surprise us. Coming to terms with our own goodness can be frightening at times.

When it comes to managing fear, in relation to ourselves or events in the wider world, this is only possible when we are willing to allow our fear to be ‘converted’, or turned into something else, by God. We do this in and through our life in Christ. We do it collectively as the Church and privately as every single individual who secretly wrestles with fear. We do it by wanting, more than anything, to see our fears, both public and private, finally overcome by the peace which comes with courage and must ultimately end in reconciliation.