Our Father at the Cinema

The banning of a Church of England advert for prayer consisting of the recitation of the Lord's Prayer has undoubtedly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people watching the ad and hearing the prayer! It has also stung the Church of England and, indeed, many people who count themselves Christians and can't see what all the fuss is about, or who regard the ban as an attack on freedom of speech and religious belief. Even the Prime Minister commented that he thought it all ridiculous, perhaps reflecting a sense of shock that, in a nation that has until recently regarded itself as Christian, this could happen.

"The Lord's Prayer may be committed to memory quickly
 but it is slowly learned by heart.' F.D. Maurice
photo www.footstepscm.wordpress.com

Digital Cinema Media, who imposed the ban, state that their decision is based on anxieties that the ad 'risked upsetting or offending audiences'. More importantly, I think, they also state that showing it would run contrary to their policy of not screening ads that 'in the reasonable opinion of DCM constitute political or religious advertising.' They hold that 'a clear neutral stance remains the fairest policy for all and allows DCM to treat all political and religious beliefs equally.' This is a very coherent position. The Church of England's legal department have stated that this decision may give rise to legal proceedings though it's difficult to see on what grounds they would succeed since the Equality Act 2010 makes it clear (Section 13) that discrimination depends on a person or company treating A differently from B - it's not discrimination to treat all entities equally well/badly (sometimes called the 'bastard to everyone' defence!) So the debate is centring on 'giving offence' and the fact that there is no 'right not to be offended' in British law. 

I've recently been to see Spectre, Suffragette and MacBeth and I wonder how I might have reacted had any or all of them been preceded by the screening of ads with an uncontextualized and unexplained recitation of, say, the Tephilla and Shema (Jewish prayers) or verses about alms-giving from the Koran or a demo of the principal positions in Tai Chi. I imagine I would have watched politely and even been quite interested but I would have been puzzled about the relevance and purpose of showing them. And I might wonder whether, next time, there would be Pagan, Buddhist, Humanist or Sikh ads and where this was all leading.

Odd, this move to advertise the possibility of prayer. We are told by various surveys that between 65% and 80% of the population prays. We know that a lot of people use the Lord's Prayer; as the churches have hastened to point out in defence of the ad, billions of people around the world use it every day. We know that, as well as people of faith, some people who regard themselves as agnostic or of 'no religious belief' pray at times of extremity. We know that prayer is profoundly and intrinsically bound up in the way we live and that to separate it from this whole-life context runs the risk of emptying it of much of its power. We have the example of Jesus who appears to have taught the Lord's Prayer to His followers, at their request, and then trusted the example of their prayers, lives and words to spread it. And we have the example of the relative ineffectiveness of teaching the Lord's Prayer to generations children at school by staff who do not share the faith, as has happened over the last 40 years.  So what is the ad setting out to achieve and what can we learn from the reaction to the ban?

If the idea was to communicate that everyone has the option to pray, it was unnecessary. In my experience people know that. If it was to remind people of the existence of the church or the words of the central Christian prayer, there are probably better ways to do it. If it was to invite people into a relationship with God and with other people who pray using the #justpray hashtag as I suspect it was, then OK, but let's recognise this for what it is, namely, an evangelistic enterprise using competitive, consumerist tactics to influence people's spiritual practice and choices. I'm not convinced that this is where the church best puts its effort and money.

Strangely it is in it's own miscalculation that the Church of England has succeeded. Due to the DCM ban, thousands of people have sat quietly in their own homes and places of prayer and meditation and considered the relevance, power and challenge of these ancient words. The prayer Jesus taught His followers is based on even older prayers from Judaism. Who knows what the fruits will be? Who says spiritual benefits are not born of mistakes? There's something about redemption here. But there ought to be something, too, about honesty. We live in a religiously diverse society where faith or belief systems that assume, as of right, to have a voice that is denied others are dangerous. Jesus lived at the cross-roads of the main trade routes of His time where several of the world's religions were in evidence. He seems to have trusted to the fruits of a life of genuine prayer over-flowing into action to persuade people to try prayer out for themselves. 'Jesus was praying in a certain place and after He had finished, one of the disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray.' (Luke 11.1) Attempting to join the maelstrom of consumerist advertising, though well meant, is not necessarily the same thing and is not quite where we should put our faith or our hope for the future of Christianity.     

What's in a Name?

It hugely disadvantages women that, part way through our lives, most of us change our name. We may do this more than once. I married when I was 38 and already had publications and a career in which I was widely known by my birth name. I did try to use my husband's lovely and distinctive name for a while but people kept on reverting to my old name and, temperamentally, I think I was averse to losing the deep connections to my roots.  A bank manager told me not to worry - I could compromise and 'have as many names as I liked so long as I did not use any of them fraudulently!' So, for quite a while, I struggled with the attempt to have a 'professional' name and a 'family' name. It didn't really work. On one memorable occasion I went to speak at a conference just after moving house. At the reception desk I attempted to register but to my embarrassment I couldn't remember which name I had booked under or my new post code or whether I had told them I was a vegetarian! The receptionist looked at me very strangely! So, after experiences like this, I reverted to keeping faith with my birth name. I suspect that, had we had children, their arrival would have been the point at which I would have given in and conformed to the use of my married name.

One of the pieces of advice given to me when we married was that to change my name would mean that I 'lost' all my publications to date. In fact, I realise, I would have lost much, much more. For example, I recently thought of a school friend. I wondered what she's doing now. I knew that she'd done some research so I looked for her online. Nothing came up and I realised that I do not know her current name.   Women lose contact with each other. They become invisible to colleagues, they disappear off friends' radar, work radar and even out of history when they change their name. They are denied the power of continuity of identity.

There's been a petition doing the rounds recently inviting support for mothers' names to be recorded on marriage certificates beside fathers'. I'd go further and encourage women to keep their birth names when they marry. Norway has a tradition that women do this; male children then take their father's name and female children, their mother's. This is one way to avoid the loss of identity that many women face on marriage. It would also do away with the dilemma of what happens about your name if a marriage ends.

All this matters, I think, because in western society personal identity shapes an individual's life very profoundly. To look into someone's face, to know who they are, to hear their words, to see their nuanced feelings and to appreciate something of the continuity of their story is vital in allowing them full participation in economic, community and social life. (Just think, today, of how the press are trying to get at Jeremy Corbyn on the grounds of the consistency or otherwise of his political beliefs!)

Here's a list of famous women you may not immediately recognise by their surnames yet they used these names for substantial parts of their lives:

Barbara Betts,
Marie Sklodowska,
Elizabeth Stevenson,
Mary Bourke,
Angela Kasner,
Golda Mabovitch,
Joan Anderson,
Eartha Keith,
Eva Duarte,
Margaret Roberts,
Dorothy Crowfoot,
Indira Nehru,
Margaret Jackson,
Agatha Miller,
Theresa Brasier,
Audrey Ruston

But you will instantly recognise the ones who did not change their names:

Joanne K Rowling, 
Florence Nightingale, 
Marie Stopes, 
Barbara Hepworth, 
Nicola Sturgeon, 
Harriet Harman, 
Judi Dench, 
Betty Boothroyd, 
Enid Blyton,
Shirley Bassey

Names are not a trivial matter. They are highly significant. Don't give yours away too easily! Among the list of women who changed their name, it's probably due to their first name you have recognised them. This is the case over much of history - we know the few women we know by their familiar name and this in itself cuts down the number of women we can recognise without confusion.

Refugees, Climate Change and Prophetic Vision

Emma Thompson was interviewed by Emily Maitlis of the BBC's News Night a couple of days ago here The interview ranges over a number of topics - arctic oil, climate change, the Mediterranean refugee crisis and the relative merits of the Labour and Green parties. At one point, Thompson is pressed on her priorities by Maitlis - why is she campaigning against the oil companies' plans to drill for oil rather than throwing her weight behind campaigns to help the refugees? Her reply is that the two issues are directly connected. If the arctic drilling goes ahead, its effects will mean that the current refugee crisis 'will look like a tea party,' to use her words. If present global warming continues unabated, and oil extraction in the arctic is not stopped, Thompson says that the prediction is for world temperatures to rise to unsustainable levels by 2030. This will mean an explosion in the numbers of displaced people as large populations attempt to resettle in response to devastating climactic events.

I was impressed by Thompson's clarity in holding together the short and medium term prospects. We live 'on the edge' so to speak. We are rapidly approaching the point where transition from dependence on oil will be forced upon us. The sooner we start to take this seriously, the gentler the transition may be for our generation in the West. However,the reality is that it will not be a period of gradual evolution for many of the populations of the world. Global warming will lead to currently unimaginable levels of war, civil strife and displacement of peoples. 

There is an extra-ordinary passage in the Synoptic Gospels where Jesus makes predictions about the destruction of the world order of His day. This material, which includes what is often referred to as 'the Abomination of Desolation', occurs in Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21v.5ff. Jesus' thinking and words seem to blur the detail of His contemporary situation in Jerusalem and the Roman Empire with a much more far reaching vision of turmoil in the distant future. This is rich soil for theologians to pick over as they try to disentangle the specific events to which He may be referring. In a similar vein, a friend who had worked in central Africa was on a thirty day retreat at a convent in the UK at the time of the first massacres in Riwanda. She had no access to the news but suffered very disturbed visions of darkness and blood and rivers of people trying to escape some unidentifiable force. These visions, she felt, could not be entirely explained by her own knowledge of the local situation, though she knew of some of the pre-massarce social tensions.

There is something in Emma Thompson's interview that reminds me that intuition and imagination borne of long reflection and put alongside a thorough-going, detailed knowledge of particular situations produce what we might call 'prophetic vision'. It also convinces me that there is 'something in the air' about the changes ahead of us today. The immediate challenges to re-home refugees and establish a compassionate relationship between Europe and peoples fleeing the parts of the Middle East torn apart by violence may, in fact, be birth pangs of a more radically changing world order than we like to think. Hence the resistance in things both great and small. I'm pretty sure that those who heard Jesus' words squirmed at His bluntness and downplayed or ridiculed what they heard. Prophecy can sound out-of-step to the point of bizarreness but it also has that 'won't-go-away' edge and that odd mixture of detailed knowledge and universal relevance. However much we rail against voices that appear to overstate the case, the tectonic plates of our world order are shifting. The relationship between the so-called developed world with its over-powering economic structure and the previously less well resourced countries is changing; the relationship between world faiths and secularism is changing and, above all, the climate is changing more than almost any of us are ready to acknowledge.

Luke's version of the 'Abomination of Desolation' is preceded by a tiny vignette. The first 5 verses of Luke Chapter 21 give us one of the best-known the stories in the Gospels; the widow who gave her mite. She put a tiny offering of two copper coins into the Temple's Treasury. Jesus, ever one to observe the minute detail of a situation, says, 'I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; for they contributed out of their abundance, but she, out of her poverty, put in all the living that she had.' It is in response to being moved by the gift the poorest person brings that Jesus' discourse about world events arises. Refugees bring gifts. The poorest and most vulnerable people remind us that we are all vulnerable and connect us to one another and to the vast forces to which we are all susceptible. Jesus' sadness and contempt was for those who behaved as though they were safe, untouchable, secure. 

Emma Thompson on climate change and refugees - Newsnight

Orthodox Insight

Time to Take Action for Refugees

I didn't vote for the government we have in the UK. Since the General Election, we have quickly seen all too sobering evidence of the direction in which they want to move the country. I cannot support their attitude to border control and I note the fact that legislation is making it easier for human trafficking to flourish. Some of the stories I hear about the changes in benefits and the effect of the 'bedroom tax' demonstrate a bureaucratic disregard for the reality of living with poverty and disability while trying to access work and contribute through volunteering. 

I'm grateful to a friend and fellow blogger, Tim Sorrell, for drawing my attention to the words of Herman Melville, a nineteenth century poet and novelist who was, himself, no stranger to poverty and bankruptcy. He wrote 'Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms of the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed and well-fed.' This accurately sums up my view of the approach taken by the current government to a number of groups of people in this country and beyond its borders. 

But Melville's cri de coeur also resonates with personal challenge.

The news in the last week of people losing their lives while attempting to find refuge in Europe has shocked and upset many of us. How can we make a meaningful response? One way is the political path. Germany has set its face to welcome 800,000 refugees and migrants this year and friends report seeing posters saying 'welcome to refugees' in places like sports stadiums and bus stations. Britain, by contrast, has grudgingly taken 220 of the 4.1 million Syrians who have fled their country since the start of the current crisis. We have given Syria financial aid and sent a ship to the Mediterranean but these are not adequate solutions to a growing refugee situation. Contact your MP and speak to your local councillors. Is your town/city one that welcomes asylum seekers and refugees? Find out about and share the stories of refugees in your own area. Good places to start are car parks ('Can I wash your car?'), refuge tips and laundrettes where it's often possible to get into conversation with people who have recently come to the UK or who are in contact with those who have. Churches and Mosques often have asylum seekers and refugees in their congregations. As we have seen in the reaction to stories in the press this week, there is power in real life stories to shake us up, shame us and motivate us to begin to turn the culture of suspicion and fear around.

Refugee Action here has comprehensive information about volunteering, campaigning, donating and fundraising and can put you in touch with what's happening in your local area. 

A charity that I think is inspirational is Musicians Without Borders. Their strap-line is 'War Divides, Music Connects'. Their work allows people of different cultures to come together and share on an equal footing the joy of music making. Music is really powerful because, for the duration of performance, it dissolves the preconceived power relationships and allows for a deep psychological meeting place. You can find out about their work and join in here

Local Pound, Local Punch?

I notice that Exeter is the latest city to launch its own local currency here. Similar ventures have happened in Brixton, Lewes, Totnes, Stroud and Bristol among other places in the UK. This set me thinking about the purpose and feasibility of 'local money'.

Economics as practised globally are designed to attract money upwards; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Large corporate chains extract money and siphon it away from the community where it is spent. Sometimes there are small schemes to invest a tiny proportion back into the local community. I'm sure we can all think of the supermarkets that present us with a token so that we can choose which local charity to support. I'm not knocking this - it certainly makes you more aware of local charities - but it's a mere drop in the ocean.

A local currency is an intervention that can help reverse the trend. Used in conjunction with Time Banks (where the currency is hours), LETS (Local Exchange Trading Scemes) and Credit Unions, a local currency encourages investment into the community, into local jobs and businesses and into the skills of local people. As we all know, paying off the UK's debt (and I'm not making a party political point here) will continue to require reductions in centralised public spending and this, in turn, is going to require local communities to be more  resilient and self-reliant. So the time is right to consider the impact a local currency might have on your neighbourhood.

How does it work? Well, there are lots of different models world-wide and in the UK some of which have been in operation for over 20 years. Generally, a local currency operates alongside the national currency. It stimulates custom for local shops and businesses, encouraging them, in turn, to use local suppliers. This raises the acquisition of gardening, agricultural and small scale manufacturing skills among the local community and improves the range and profile of the local job market. It encourages life-styles that combine national and global work with local activity. Besides setting up a local currency, communities often make it possible to invest in local share schemes, to contribute renewably-sourced energy into locally owned energy schemes and to borrow from community controlled Credit Unions. All money systems are meaningless without trust; local schemes enable the building of a deep level of trust and understanding between individuals and businesses serving the same area with its common needs. Often the result is a flowering of co-operation and creativity in terms of local projects. One business's waste may be a valuable resource for another, one business's skill requirements may overlap with another's and so on.

The aim is not to abandon global currencies but to move gradually toward a healthier and more sustainable relationship between global, national and local control of economic organisation.  What is sought is to create a diverse system of alternative currencies and financial institutions that are able to function robustly alongside the current energy intensive, globalised, corporate systems that dominate our vision of the economically possible. Over time this will lead to more human-scale, locally appropriate solutions to the challenge of providing and distributing essential resources. Local communities will have more influence in deciding what goods and skills they need and there will be a reduction in the transportation of goods. Low carbon solutions to energy demand can be sourced and one big result is what has been called 'the mindful use of money' where cause and effect are more locally controlled and there is a corresponding focus on local priority and need.

Naive and unrealistic or the only way to survive global warming and the peak oil crisis? To find out more, an interesting read is Peter North's Local Money: How to Make It Happen In Your Community, published by Transition Books, 2010. As well as looking at the philosophy and history behind local money, he examines in detail some of the schemes in operation and outlines the kinds of context in which local currencies have emerged and flourished through a process of committed learning-on-job.

A little of What You 'Like'

There's no cost to 'liking' or 'favouriting' something is there? It's all too easy to skim down Facebook and Twitter and randomly scatter approval and agreement in all directions. Often 'likes' are used to encourage people or to add weight to a cause that has caught on in the social media sphere. Equally often a 'favourite' just indicates 'This got a nano-second of my attention'. 

Today I liked a photo that's doing the rounds showing a group of Muslims (and, I think, some Christians too - the dog collar was a bit of a give away) holding a banner proclaiming 'MUSLIMS AGAINST ISIS'. As I tapped my ipad, I got to wondering whether any of our more political 'likes' will ever catch up with us. What we like is recorded, measured, monitored, used to frame statistics and used to control what we see on our screens. We are committed. More than we think! If what I say I like today shapes what I am directed to read tomorrow, today's likes will undoubtedly affect my attitudes, contacts and range of knowledge in the future.

Who will notice that you 'liked' certain things 5 years, 10 years, 35 years from now? Maybe, one day, we will unexpectedly be called to account for what we 'like'.

Tribute for Charles Kennedy

Just before the election, I was lucky to meet our labour candidate outside a certain supermarket in the middle of Ripon. We got talking - I wanted to canvass his opinion on care of the elderly and payment of people who are carers for children or for disabled, sick or elderly people. We had a good chat. Then we were joined by a man who proceeded to harangue us both about the alleged dishonesty, corruption and scurrilousness of all MPs. The candidate took it all with good grace despite the fact he could not get a word in edgeways. Eventually I excused myself and went to look for a shopping trolley feeling rather sad. I had listened to all our candidates, labour, conservative, libdem, green and UKIP at a hustings at Ripon cathedral a day or two earlier. A more coherent, committed, engaged group of people who knew and understood their community you could not hope to meet.

I've had the same sense of sadness today following the tributes paid to Charles Kennedy in the Commons. How desperately wrong it seems that it's often only after death we express appreciation for the worth and the service of our public servants. Yes, there's some dishonesty and corruption among MPs and councillors, but the vast majority work incredibly hard to do a job that demands they sacrifice a great number of things most of us take for granted, not least time with family and friends and, in the case of MPs, the relative security many of us have about where we live. Councillors do their work unpaid. I'm always touched by the time councillors give to hear the anxieties, grievances and concerns of their neighbours. In some ways it's harder to do that when you live round the corner and you're going to bump into them again the next day. We've always been fortunate to live in constituencies with dedicated, conscientious, humane MPs who are in touch with their constituents. I don't know where they get their energy and resilience from - it is not easy to work long days, to travel a great deal, to stay sharp in mastering a brief and in debate, to listen constantly, to appear relaxed and sociable and to deal with the pressure of the media. And to look the part and be constantly quickly available which we now expect.

To have given almost your whole adult life to serve in this way is admirable. To have achieved much in doing it is remarkable. To have cared and to have remained human and vulnerable is costly. To suddenly lose this way of life and the daily contact with people who have been colleagues, supporters and friends for years must be devastating. It is a very major bereavement.  

Today I'm cross with myself because I've been meaning to write this blogpost ever since that encounter with our labour candidate. I wish I had done it sooner. I wanted to make a plea that we treat our public representatives with respect and some appreciation.  At least let's give them the benefit of the doubt - unless proven otherwise it seems likely to me that they are people of integrity and concern for others. I may not agree with their views, I may wish to oppose them heartily, but not in a personal way and I am grateful that they were willing to stand for democratic election. If I'm ever tempted to criticise, I might first think that it's more than I have offered. 

Charles Kennedy was a man of courteousness, integrity and courage. Thank you for what you have given and may you rest in peace.
  

God the Holy Trinity, Beyond Gender

God, of course, is God, beyond our wildest imaginings, beyond any human categories. Yet Christians have experienced and known God as a personality (and that in itself is  a metaphor, not a category.) To express how they experience God, Christians, and before them those who wrote the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish communities round the world, have relied on the use of overlapping metaphors. Our experience of God is of a personality with many unfolding, sometimes contradictory characteristics; a being who is mysterious, who is both familiar and terrifyingly strange and whose manifestation in our lives  evolves, changes, waxes and wanes. God is also consistent with God's self and this unchanging core is rather like human personality - we may present ourselves in new and different ways but we can essentially be recognised by others as an individual with a coherent personality. 

The Trinity: Andrey Rublev
15th Century Icon

Christians have understood relationship to be at the heart of what it means to apprehend God. The doctrine of the Trinity helps us understand and reflect on this. God is in relationship with God's self, God can observe God being in relation to God's self, God is in relationship with us and God draws us into this relationship rather as we are invited into the 'conversation' in Rublev's famous icon (above). It is vital to grasp this to understand the Christian concept of Trinity. It's also central to Christian belief that God takes the initiative in relating to humans (revelation) and can also be very elusive or absent (experienced as desolation by the Christian.)

I could probably write another 50,000 words about God before needing to mention God's gender. God is not gendered in the sense that God is beyond gender. But God reveals characteristics that are like those associated with the male and the female human person. To say God is a 'father' or a 'mother' is akin to using other metaphors found in scripture where God can be a 'rock', a 'fortress', a 'shield', a 'King', a 'hen' or a 'shepherd'. We do not mean that God is literally any of these things. They are metaphors. God is like them. Now metaphors can be used in different ways; they are loose and invite exploration. If we say that someone is 'a waste of space' or 'a monument to respectability' or a 'prune' or a 'sweet briar rose', we are inviting the hearer to delve into their experience of waste bins, monuments, squishy fruit and roses in order to understand something about the essence of that person's character. This is how religious metaphor about God works too. Metaphors can be very apt, in which case nearly everything about them speaks of the person's character. Or they can work in a much more limited way so that, for example, just one  characteristic of a sweet briar rose (its smell) reminds us of the person. Overlapping metaphors 'correct' each other - or perhaps it's better to say that they raise more questions that help us to explore what the person is like and even accept paradoxes about that person. How can God protect like a fortress (which is static) and a shield (which moves around with the soldier?) Yet God is frequently described as both fortress and shield:  throughout the Old and New Testaments there is a corresponding tension between times when people experience God as being mainly in one, special, holy place and other times when God is experienced as moving about and being at the heart of the community of believers or even in the heart of one itinerant believer.

So, in this sense, God is neither male nor female. However, most of the people who have written about God, and especially those with power and influence and the means to communicate widely, have been male. This is certainly true since the dawn of Old Testament times down to today. Yet in the scriptures and even in the tradition of the churches there is a lot of evidence of God being understood in terms of female experience. From the earliest times Christians have known that God is not confined by gender, but the church fathers were, well, fathers. They both consciously and unconsciously selected predominantly male imagery and concepts in which to speak about God.(There are many famous exceptions such as the Mediaeval theologian Anselm's use of Jesus' striking image of Himself as a 'mother hen'.)

The writing of the early fathers then came to be overlaid with neo-platonic thinking and with concepts like immutability - God came to be said to be 'unchanging'. (Even 'unchanging' itself is a limited metaphor - I'm unchanging as myself yet every cell in my body will be replaced during my life; the metaphor reveals consistency rather than rigid sameness.) The apparent argument about whether God is male or female is not actually the real argument. The primary disagreement is between those who want to say 'God cannot change, tradition cannot change and God is predominantly male in tradition' and those who understand God in more dynamic terms drawn from texts and doctrines that show God 'repenting', changing God's intention and relating symbiotically and reciprocally to the created order rather as a mother does to her child. (Theologians like Dorothee Solle and Sallie McFague explored this more than 20 years ago drawing on sources from deep within the oldest traditions.) The argument is also about how we use metaphor. When, for example, Jesus said, 'Pray, 'Daddy' (Abba),' was the point of the metaphor God's exclusive maleness or God's intimacy with us as children or both?

This debate is both too hot to handle because it taps into some very fundamental things about male/female relationships and the very basis of Christian theology and, at the same time, open to trivialisation and ridicule - as seen in much of the media and on social media this week. The two are related. It is because some people find this all too threatening and dangerous that there is a great compulsion to rubbish it, often in extra-ordinarily abusive terms. We are into a topic that touches on how everybody feels about their own gendered worth before the God they do or don't believe in and so this is very challenging, potentially explosive stuff. In this sense, the Daily Mail has its antennae well-tuned to be onto a whiff of impending change in the air.

For many years feminist/womanist theology, biblical studies and church history have been relegated to the 'slightly nutty' edge of theological syllabuses. Yes, the sources have been there on the reading lists but many students have avoided them. Books have been relegated to the end of the bibliography along with liberation theology, ecological theology and theology from the two thirds world (where there is much interesting theology that challenges western-centric world views.) Usually the students who have read these books have either been already familiar with the issues or very keen to disprove their validity. But these 'issues' are fast presenting themselves as the most pressing issues of the day to the world-wide church.

If you are not convinced about the need for this debate (which is clearly going to happen whatever we think about it) perhaps I can share a personal insight? When I was about 16, I found myself, while praying, trying to explain to God what it was like to be a woman…..and then the penny dropped! It was one of those revelatory moments when you know the Holy Spirit has been at work: God knows! God understands the nature of your female experience. But the weight of male imagery for God had almost obscured from my vision any sense that God might be inside the experience of women as well as outside it. This is what women continually experience and either accept, rationalise and internalize or question and challenge - the objectification of themselves as 'not the norm.' There is a more powerful story about how this happens to young children on the Blog Because God is Love here God's Gender: A Cautionary Tale.

In conclusion for now (I know this debate will run on and on well beyond my lifetime) I would like to suggest that we all, in the churches on both sides of the argument and none, educate ourselves a lot better about the matter and familiarise ourselves with the resources available for thinking and praying. I also make an appeal for charity and for careful listening. I have expressed my opinion here but I respect the opinions of others and would like to hear without rancour or anger being directed in either direction. Here are some suggested resources for those interested in  female characteristics of the divine nature. They are all available to order and some to read online and should, I think, be part of mainstream theology.

In Memory of Her Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza (New Testament interpretation)

Thinking About God  Dorothee Solle (on radical immanence)

Models of God: Theology for a Nuclear Age  Sallie McFague 

Women's Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History Teresa Berger

Lifting Women's Voices: Ways to Change the World  eds. Rose, TaPaa, Person and Nelson 

Green Frog Moments

There was a cartoon doing the rounds on Facebook recently that showed a recumbent Green Frog having one of those deeply necessary pre-creative moments.

© Silly and Snarky on Pinterest www.pinterest

We all have them! Some of us more often and for longer than others. They're not just moments in our days, but, sometimes, seasons in our lives. I don't know about you, but I can spend hours tending slightly hazy intuitions and driving half formed ideas around in my head. But suddenly some invisible lever will be thrown and I'll sit down, often not even with a plan, and write the thing I've been trying to feel my way towards in a matter of minutes. It may need a bit of revision but I'm often surprised at its coherence and left wondering 'where did that come from?' As T.S. Elliott observed about the mystical nature of writing poetry, 'We do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on.' That could equally well have been said by an artist, musician, sculptor, cook or anyone who approaches life as an opportunity to create.  

One of my favourite sites for inspiration and mental-cud-to-chew is Maria Popova's Brain Pickings. If you don't know the site it's choc full of thought-provoking material for anyone engaged in the creative process here (also on Twitter @brainpickings). She just has that knack of putting together really interesting material culled from the writings of artists and philosophers in all walks of life. She's recently shared a couple of very good posts about writer's block and creativity, exploring the 'circular' nature of the relationship between spirituality and creativity. 

I shared the Green Frog cartoon on Facebook and found that it chimed with a lot of friends. So much so that I half-jokingly suggested we form a 'Green Frog Society' dedicated to upholding the importance of Green Frog Space in our lives. The original cartoon suggested that this was a thing women do more than men but I completely disagree! Men more than welcome as well!

The next thing that happened was that a lovely friend who creates in glass sent me a specially crafted Green Frog coaster for the essential cuppa that accompanies so many Green Frog moments. There I was, working at my desk (and actually I was writing an article that day!) when the postman brought a package. How intriguing! So imagine my delight when out fell...

Green Frog Coaster, created by Jacquie James, Cardiff

I invite you to celebrate Green Frog Space. We need more of it in all our lives! We need to talk about it and share it and, most especially, share its fruits with our friends. When I attended a conference in the Czech Republic, I was bowled over by the way, each evening, people would gather round to share beer and nibbles and tell stories, recite poetry, sing or play a song - often witty and slightly political. It seemed that time taken to create something original which could be shared was really valued.

If you value and want to promote Green Frog Space, share the Green Frog coaster photo however you like, and let me know via Facebook or Twitter (@archdeaconjanet) or post a comment here. 

Meanwhile, I'll enjoy that brain-stimulating cup of tea…

'I Have Come to Bring A Sword'

I was struck by some words of David Monteith, the Dean of Leicester, during a recent interview for a BBC programme about the burial of Richard III. It was just a throwaway line. Asked about the opposition to Leicester Cathedral becoming Richard's final resting place, he replied 'We are used to controversy here. Following Jesus Christ today is not without its controversial aspects.' 

It's certainly true that Jesus Himself generated a good deal of controversy. More than that, He seems sometimes to have deliberately turned His back on courses of action that would have dampened it down.

With the various conflicts going on around the world, I've recently been thinking about some of the very difficult sayings of Jesus - the ones we all like conveniently to gloss over. In some, Jesus appears to say outright that He has come to cause division. For example, the same Jesus who refuses to use violence or force when it is used against Him is reported in two of the gospels as having said, 'Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have come not to bring peace but a sword…' (Matt. 10.34)

What does He mean? Perhaps something along the lines that the result of steadfastly searching out and witnessing to the truth within ourselves may very well set us, at times, against even those we love or those who have shaped us or those we have formerly respected and lived alongside. There is to be 'nothing covered up that will not be uncovered, nothing secret that will not be made known.' (Matt. 10.26) The sword of which Jesus speaks is one that, when wielded, forces us to lay bear and clarify truth in ways that cut right through confusion and dissembling. And we all know that sometimes a spot of confusion and half-truth is much easier. 

The Greek word used in the text for 'sword' is not the soldier's weapon but the 'macharia', the knife used by the surgeon, the barber, the butcher, the gardener and the priest offering a sacrifice. In other words, it is the implement necessary to the small but life-giving separations and deaths of everyday life. Without this knife there is no clarity, no healing, no fruitfulness, no nourishment. In the face of the dangerous scheming and plotting going on around Him, Jesus is talking about a truly radical grappling with truth, one that never compromises, never accepts the half truths and sophistries of political or religious leaders, philosophers or social commentators. Jesus Himself named and faced those who opposed Him with a startling clarity of differentiation. This was true even when the opposition came from His closest allies. Another of the difficult sayings of Jesus which sounds very harsh to our ears is directed at Simon Peter. 'But He turned and said to Peter, 'Get behind me, Satan. You are a stumbling block to me for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.' (Matt. 16.25)  It seems Jesus didn't scruple to admonish in the strongest terms a favourite disciple who tried to prevent Him from facing up to the truth of His calling which was to 'undergo great suffering, be killed and on the third day to rise again.' In order to remain steadfast and act in a way consonant with His own truth, He needed to put distance between Himself and anyone who would tempt Him away from what He knew to be true. 

The 'sword' of which Jesus speaks, then, allows us to depart psychologically from a place of our own dissembling, confusion and self deception and to prepare ourselves to see, hear, speak and act upon truth however unpalatable. It enables us to see the sociologically relative nature of our own 'truth' and the 'truths' of others and to create space where apparently opposed truths can be lived, explored, evolved and understood more clearly. Lytta Basset, in her excellent book Holy Anger, Jacob, Job and Jesus (Continuum, Ottawa, 2007) here, suggests that this radical separation was the function of the sword placed at the entrance to the garden of Eden in Genesis 3.24 'a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the Tree of Life.' What an extraordinary image! This sword will not allow the commingling of that which leads to life with that which leads to death. In its wielding it forces the laying bare of untruths, self-interest, greed and all manner of dysfunction. It stands as a warning and a means of wounding for us all when we follow the path of deceit. Without its separating, defining, wounding power, there can be no growth, no healing, no reconciliation, no way for  human and divine to meet, no way for truth to emerge.

A sword cuts to the quick. The sword of which Jesus speaks creates definition, it allows protected space between beliefs and actions that interfere with one another - a necessary space in which greater clarity and more honestly humble self-possession can be realised. This sword may cause the death of a previous state as being the only way for newly revealed truth to emerge. It may cut deep into the heart of relationships. The truth that breaks out when such a sword performs its excision may cause intense pain, especially where that truth has long been denied, denigrated, twisted or falsified. The eruption of truth may destroy apparent familial or social harmony if it is founded on what Bassett calls the 'lie of violent unanimity.' This process hurts and is akin to the taking up of our cross and the laying down of one understanding of one's life and circumstances so that a better, truer way can be born.

There is a Hebrew expression which means to 'cut the covenant'. It's drawn from very ancient tales of sacrifice in Genesis where the severing action creates the possibility of relationship between God and humans. Without the sword separating things that have become harmful to each other due to confusion or deliberately perverted intent, the truth of relationship cannot be properly restored, whether between individuals, societies or God and human. The processes of growth and healing in the natural world are a reflection of this.

It's sobering to realise that God is at work even in our enemies and those who deny us our 'truth'. If it is true that God will always be a companion in the injustices we suffer, He will also be a companion to others in the injustices we cause them to suffer. God alone can weigh and judge. There is, of course, one more thing to be said about Jesus' declaration that He had come to cause the differentiations and separations that allow truth to be revealed and justice to be done. Although He takes the image of a weapon that is used for violence, His own truth leads Him to refuse to respond to violence with violence. The way He lived His life produced diametrically opposed reactions and He left no-one indifferent, but He did not employ violence to counteract these reactions nor did He allow His followers to do so in His defence.The searing pain produced by this sword is the terrible pain of shedding those things which stand between us and truth, between ourselves, others and justice; it is not the vengeful pain of inflicting on others the hurt we have received or worse.

*** 

Lytta Bassett is a Reformed Minister and Professor of Theology at Lausanne. She was named a 'spiritual master' by Le Monde in 2001. She has written a number of books that offer profound insight into how to move beyond the impasses we experience in conflicts at individual, community and global levels. Holy Anger, Jacob, Job, Jesus is a profound and wide-ranging exploration of Biblical  and theological sources that show how the potentially devastating energy of anger can be transformed into the energy of rebirth and re-awakening.

Report Back; Walk in Her Shoes

Walking 10,000 steps a day seems a wholly inadequate way to put on someone else's shoes. It's just not possible to understand what it's like to have to carry all your family's water five miles a day in temperatures somewhat greater than a British March can muster! But trying to walk this far has made me extremely grateful for the water we have access to and it's made me think a lot about how we use precious resources. 

10,000 steps isn't actually that far. I qualify that statement - if you are carrying water or heavy shopping (try four large bags of potatoes) then it's far too far. But if you are just walking to get from A to B with a moderate sized bag or rucksack, it can be done easily in just over an hour. My  Walk in Her Shoes effort this March has made me realise just how much our society has lost the ability? opportunity? willingness? to walk. 

The school I attended was a couple of miles from where we lived down (or up) a very steep hill. I walked down and up that hill two or three times most days as did my mother who did not drive. We carried shopping and books and even on one occasion a double bass! That was normal, all my friends did the same (possibly without the double bass!). What has happened to us in the intervening 40 years? It now seems that for many people it's unusual to walk anywhere much unless setting out deliberately 'for a walk', that is, for serious exercise.

I've always walked quite a bit but I now realise just how much I've learned to depend on being able to hop in the car in order to save those precious minutes for…well, for what? I hope what I carry over from Lent with me this year will be a new determination to use buses and trams more, to walk to post letters, to walk to evening engagements whenever possible, especially in the summer, and to use lunch breaks and time off for a healthier combination of exercise and getting tasks done.   

If You Want My Vote 1: Care of the Elderly

This is the first post in a series highlighting issues I would like my next MP to address.

It is a national disgrace that a recent report  here  by John Kennedy, Director of Care Services at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and Joseph Rowntree Housing Trust, found that 

78% of frontline workers in our care homes

caring for 400,000+ people

earn less than £6.45p an hour

In 2014 when this report was written, the national living wage was £6.50p. It is now £7.85p. Most of the people who care for our elderly friends and relatives are paid less than the living wage. It's time to revisit our values and make some drastic changes.

I've worked as a nurse, lecturer, vicar and manager. I have never worker harder, physically and emotionally, than during a year I spent working on a psycho-geriatric unit. We did 13 hour night shifts with one 45 minute break. We could not leave the ward as there was no-one to cover our breaks but we were often so tired we would snatch half an hour's sleep in one of the armchairs. We laughed and cried with the wonderful people we looked after, many of whom I still remember and think about 35 years later. We had to use our empathy to guess what those who couldn't communicate easily wanted. We were far from perfect, we did our best. I had the most immense respect for the nurses and care assistants who had been doing this with dedication most of their working life.

What has happened to us that we value the people who care for our mothers and fathers and grandparents so little? They do work that includes personal care tasks many of us would find difficult to do once or twice, never mind everyday - work that is often dismissed as unskilled and menial. They have skills, yes skills, of compassion, physical care, empathy, interpretation, persuasion, cheerfulness, observation, ongoing emotional resilience and self care that many with a lower Emotional Intelligence Quotient might envy. They spend their own energy and emotional health in caring for people who are among the most vulnerable in society. They get to work when it snows and it's foggy and icy or there's a road block. If they can't get there, other staff stay on late or come in to do extra shifts, or sleep overnight in a chair to make sure someone is on duty the next morning. They have to get on with whoever is on a shift with them, whether they know them or not, in order to co-operate in the most intimate of tasks. Their skills and experience cover social care, basic nursing care, mental health care, end of life care. They are advocates for their elderly charges in a society that increasingly finds it difficult to make time and space for the elderly or to listen to them. They work with people with dementia whose next of kin may also have a degree of dementia.

Carers do this 365 days a year so that hundreds of thousands of elderly people are safe and warm and as happy as possible. They enable many other people to go out to work and to fulfil the responsibilities they have for other family members. They save the NHS, which would otherwise be caring for many more elderly people than it does, millions and millions of pounds a year.

We have to rethink the way we pay and support carers.

Contact your candidates or Jeremy Hunt (Con) Minister for Health, Norman Lamb (Lib Dem) Minister for Care and Support, Liz Kendall (Lab) Shadow Minister for Care and Older People. 

Candlemas Meditation

How many times in your life have you heard those haunting words,
'Lord, now you let your servant go in peace,
Your word has been fulfilled,
My own eyes have seen your salvation,
Which you have prepared before the face of all people,
To be a light to lighten the Gentiles 
And the glory of your people Israel.'
Luke 2.29-32

What do these words evoke for you? Memories of school? Your favourite cathedral choir? The scents and light of a summer evening? The dark shadows of a winter night? Or you may think of John le Carre's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and the haunting theme tune from the TV adaption. Or T. S. Eliot's rather dark poem A Song for Simeon?

If you're a clergy person then the chances are you've read those words hundreds or thousands of times as you've led the coffin from the church after a funeral. 'For my eyes have seen your salvation..' the hope toward which life is directed.

Ripon Cathederal

What a wonderful text. You couldn't find a richer one, could you? It has three central themes

• peace - personal and between nations
• salvation - the hope that God's purposes will triumph
• glory - the full slendour of God, the shimmering  presence (or 'shekinah,' the Hebrew word) of God among the people.

Almost too rich a gift for the musical imagination, yet what wonderful things composers have done with it down the ages! So where did these ancient words come from? The Nunc Dimittis is one of a set of three canticles or songs embedded in the narratives of Jesus' birth in Luke's gospel. Three early Christian hymns based closely on Old Testament texts yet pointing forward to the future

• the song of Mary - the Magnificat
• the song of Zechariah (John the Baptist's father) - the Benedictus
• the song of Simeon - the Nunc Dimittis

Luke's narrative tells us specifically that Zechariah and Simeon were filled with the Holy Spirit and, of course, Mary had received the angel's news that her life was to be 'overshadowed' by the Holy Spirit, God's Spirit, when she accepted her call to become the mother of this strangely conceived child. These three songs and the characters who sing them represent the turning point between the ancient traditions of the Jewish people and the coming of Christ; they are songs that herald the birth of the Christian tradition. They form a link between aspects of the old faith of the Hebrew people (notice the reference to Abraham in the Magnificat and Benedictus - the father and symbol of faith) and the expectations and hopes that surround the coming of the Christ, Messiah - the One who would show the people what God is like. The texts of the songs together sum up most of the Gospel - the good news that Jesus preached and embodied.

Candlemas is when Christians all over the world remember the bringing of the infant Jesus into the Temple for his dedication - the occasion on which Simeon utters the words of the Nunc Dimittis. It's a strange story veiled in the mists of time and half-forgotten legend. Who was Simeon? Who was Anna? Where did they come from? Why do they seem to have a special prescience - they know things, they see the future. The text tells us that the Holy Spirit has promised Simeon he will not die until he has seen the Saviour. This strange story is pervaded throughout by the Holy Spirit who is mentioned three times (unusual, in that the Spirit is not often explicitly mentioned in the gospels.) This baby's birth has been the work of the Holy Spirit and it is the Spirit who propels Simeon into the Temple on this particular day. After a life of payer, he's inspired by the Spirit to grasp the moment and to do what his whole life has been leading to, namely to recognise Jesus as the Messiah, the One uniquely sent to show people what God is like. And Anna, the old prophetess is also wise, supernaturally wise beyond all knowing. Notice the gift that accrues to the Christ child from her encounter with him is that he 'grows in all wisdom'. Simeon and Anna are Spirit and Wisdom. This moment is the culmination of their lives, the moment toward which everything they are has been moving. Having seen Jesus and spoken the words of Spirit and Wisdom, they are liberated to 'go in peace'. The Spirit shimmers in the shadows of the Temple; the glory, the shekinah of God is present in the Temple just as our candlemas candles remind us of God's presence and glory in the snowy depths of winter.

And yet...that is not the whole story. The radiance and the peace are shot through with a very real sense of fear and warning. Isn't is true that often our most glorious moments are tinged with an awareness of human frailty and mortality? An anxiety that present joy and assurance will pass? Certainly these emotions are present here. In Simeon's words, there is an awareness of the struggle in this child's life that will lead to the cross. There's an acknowledgment, ahead of time, of the struggle His life will bring to individuals and nations . 'And a sword will pierce your heart,' he says to Mary. 'Many will oppose him' and He will bring division to the world. A moment of painful prescience and luminosity, a fore-knowing and a forth-telling. Just imagine the priest saying something as disturbing as that at a fmily baptism today. Mary, stunned, stored up these words in her heart and, harsh as they were, no doubt they helped her make sense of her strange and unique child's life and to support Him through it to the foot of the cross.  

This text looks backwards to antiquity; it's based on even more ancient texts behind the Greek text that Luke gives us. It connects us to 5,000 years of Jewish and Christian history. Yet it looks forward and warns of what is to come in Jesus' time and of what, for us, is still to come yet. But more than that it invites us to live our lives as a part of what will happen within the complexity of God's purposes. In Lutheran churches, this song is sung or read after the congregation have received communion. It forms a dismissal - 'go back out into the world in peace and live as those who expect and are beginning to know God's salvation; show the glory of God in your living, the beauty of souls rescued from the worst excesses of human behaviour and the luminosity of lives given to God.'

No wonder this text speaks so profoundly to our experience, appeals to our hearts and to our intellect. It travels with us from our deepest and most ancient roots to our personal and communal and global futures and it whispers the hope of eternal life. 

The Hippocrates Initiative

It's always good to discover something completely new. I was intrigued to stumble across a website for the Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine the other day while on an early morning bus in Lancaster (on-bus wifi is a wonderful thing!). The Initiative is all about encouraging people involved in the medicinal and health care professions to write poetry. A prize is awarded annually under three categories  -  to someone who works in the NHS (or has worked there), to a young person aged between 14 and18, and to anyone who enters, globally. In previous years there have been some wonderful poems about the limits to which explorers and athletes push their bodies as well as poems about aspects of caring and what the performance of medical work does to the person practicing medicine.

http://hippocrates-poetry.org/hippocrates-prize

The reason I was so thrilled to find this site is that ever since my early days as a nurse on some very high dependency units, I have found that an excellent way to come to terms with some of the things you see and experience is to write poetry about them. Of course, this doesn't usually see the light of day in the form of publication, but it has often been a way to integrate emotions and to reflect on difficult, sad or challenging situations. The medics I've worked with have often had their own particular creative outlets for the high degree of pressure they face. I've had colleagues who are excellent artists and musicians - one could even be heard practising in the hospital chapel in the mornings before operating. There's something extremely relaxing and restorative about engaging in right brain activity when so much of your professional life involves detailed left brain activity.

One of the great powers of poetry is that it allows you to inhabit a story - to tell it and to reshape in over and over again. (Kirkegaard did this in Fear and Trembling with the profoundly difficult story of the sacrifice of Isaac.) As you retell the story, the narrative enables you to see different aspects of it and this can be a therapeutic exercise, helpful in allowing you to create meaning and revisit or discover the different emotions that a situation gives rise to.

There's always a debate about how far medicine in a high tech setting is a science or an art. Most of us would acknowledge that the best doctors blend the two approaches to what they do, utilising the skills of an artist in finding creative ways to communicate and motivate their patients and also in keeping their own reactions to the inevitable pressures and drama of medicine healthy.

I've been inspired to revisit some of the poems I wrote years ago while nursing and to re-live situations that even now I find it hard to forget. Many of the poems remind me of people and events that have had a lasting impact on my own sense of self - this is the gift of patients to those who care for them. It's been heart-warming to re-live some of those moments from over 30 years ago and to be surprised by the joy and insight and sometimes the sadness they bring. This body of poetry now has a very special place in my life and plays its part in shaping thought and prayer about what I do in the present.

It's a bit late to enter for this year's competition as the closing date in 31st January. However, I now have something to aim for for January 2016! The site can be found at Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine  It's well worth listening to some of the entries from recent years and I found the stories about the people involved inspiring. This is a unique site, hosting information about what has become one of the most influential poetry prizes in the spectrum, linking as it does medicine and poetry, science and art, technical knowledge and imaginative insight.