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. 

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.