Mind Space

Easter

 

At Grace we celebrated Easter with an early morning communion service and breakfast, followed by a walk in Osterley Park for hardy souls willing to brave the snow. We created some liturgy in the service, which has become the last entry in the 2008 Grace Lent Blog. Do take a look at the Good Friday entry, And you held me, by Anna Poulson. This is the most beautiful reflection on the Passion I've read in a long while, and it's shaped my Easter.

Technorati Tags: Easter,Grace,blog,communion

Nazir-Ali's view of Britain

Over the weekend I struggled to write something on the shortcomings I see in Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali's article in the Sunday telegraph about the demise of Christian Britain and the rise of Islamic fundamentalist no-go areas. In particular I wanted to argue that Christians should celebrate and nurture the presence of all major faiths in this country, and suggest that Nazir-Ali's views seem grounded more in the persecuted churches of his native Pakistan than in Britain today.

Then I saw that the Church Times leader column has beaten me to it, and argued more cogently and concisely than I was able to. The link is free to access this week, but may require subscription afterwards.

Technorati tags: Nazir-Ali, no-go areas, fundamentalism multifaith

The Coventry Litany of Reconciliation

In searching the web for something else, I stumbled upon this litany of reconciliation from Coventry, whose city and cathedral (above) were devastated by bombs in the second world war. I love its simplicity and its unsettling quality. It may be just the thing for Grace on Saturday, suitable inclusivised, of course.

UPDATE: I've replaced the original text of the litany below with the version on the Coventry Cathedral website, which is in inclusive language. The litany is said every Friday lunchtime in the Cathedral.

All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,
Father Forgive.
The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,
Father Forgive.
The greed which exploits the work of human hands and lays waste the earth,
Father Forgive.
Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,
Father Forgive.
Our indifference to the plight of the imprisoned, the homeless, the refugee,
Father Forgive.
The lust which dishonours the bodies of men, women and children,
Father Forgive.
The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves and not in God,
Father Forgive.
Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

Technorati tags: Coventry litany confession reconciliation worship liturgy

The Truth Isn't sexy

I've spent a fair amount of time this week handing out beermats similar in style to the image above. Sometimes I was wearing a dog collar, and people expressed shock that a vicar should be distributing such material. The headline reads 'Natasha's been a naughty girls', and the text below says,

She tried to escape from her traffickers. Instead she was imprisoned, beaten and forced to have sex with up to forty men a day. Her pimp says he will kill her baby if she tries it again.

The truth isn't sexy.

It's a campaign against sex trafficking led by a small group of inspired volunteers from the UK emerging church network. On Saturday they oprganised a 'pub crawl' in Croydon, and I went along. Instead of drinking lots of beer, we offered campaign beer mats and posters to the managers of each of the pubs we stopped at. My group visited eleven pubs, and nine took beer mats. In the other two, the manager was out, and the staff didn't have the authority to take them. No-one refused point-blank.

I've just spent the last couple of days at the chaplaincy stand at the Freshers Fair at Thames Valley University in Ealing. As well as telling people about the  chaplaincy, I handed out TTIS beer mats, and got into a lot of conversations about sex trafficking. It got the message about sex trafficking out to a lot of students, and it was an effective piece of chaplaincy work as well; everyone knows that I'm the chaplain, and something of what I stand for.

 

The next pub crawl is in Ealing on Saturday 17th November, beginning at 11:30. It's being organised by The Truth Isn't Sexy in conjunction with Grace and the TVU Chaplaincy. I'll post more details on the blog when I have them. Everyone is welcome, provided you are old enough to enter a pub.

Technorati tags: The Truth Isn't Sexy, sex trafficking, prostitution, slavery

Off with the Collar!

Listing to the radio whilst in bed yesterday morning, I struggled towards wakefulness to listen to piece advising clergy to remove their dog collars in public. The piece, broadcast on the Radio 4 Sunday programme, said that clergy are attacked more frequently than other professions, and advised that for safety's sake there was no need to wear clerical collars in the supermarket.

To me, the clerical collar is  a kind of uniform that I wear when I am at work, and want to be recognised as a priest. It sets up a barrier for some people, but it gives permission for others to come and say hello. So when I'm walking around the university where I'm the chaplain, I usually wear it. When I'm in a meeting, in the supermarket, or just walking down the street, I take it off.

I know colleagues that wear them almost all the time; I have some small admiration for people who can live with boundaries blurred to the extent that they want to be available to people as priests even when they are doing their shopping, but I need to hold a clearer distinction between 'work' and the rest of life. It's not that I won't stop and chat or help people in the high street; but I do it on my own terms, rather than advertising that I am there to be approached by people I don't know. It's to protect my sanity as much as my safety.

Technorati tags: clergy, clerical collar, dog collar, safety

What's a cathedral for?

That St. Paul's Cathedral should put on an event like 'Costing the Earth?' is great. It's the church engaging with a critical issue of today, and showing that Christian faith has a contribution to make to the debate.

Sitting behind me were a group of american students who were studying engineering for development. I knew because they were talking rather loudly before the lecture began (and competing as to who had done work experience in the remotest place on earth). At one point they discussed the architecture of the St. Paul's Cathedral. "Yuh, I went to Rome last year, and St. Paul was, like, the first Pope in Rome." After the lecture they rushed up to get Jeffrey Sachs' signature. I don't think it's too big a jump to deduce that their interests were in development, not theology. But that's great, in my book. They came into a church because the church engaged them in a subject that was important to them. And if they got a glimpse of God at the same time, fantastic!

It's what a cathedral should be for.

Costing the earth? the quest for sustainability

This was the title of last night's St. Paul's Institute lecture.  The speakers were the american economist and UN advisor Jeffrey Sachs,  and Nicholas Sagovsky, Canon Theologian at Westminster Abbey.  This is a long post, but such a good lecture that I thought it worth recording.

The lectures and discussion were first-rate contributions from the leading thinkers in the field of sustainable development. Sachs spoke first, defining development and sustainability, and then describing how our present development is unsustainable. The headlines;

• In the last 200 years the earth has seen a 100-fold increase in economic throughput, achieved by burning fossil fuels. At least another 6-fold increase can be predicted from the industrialization of India and China.
• Over this period the concentration of atmospheric CO2 has increased from 280 to 370ppm, and is rising by 2ppm every year. We are approaching a catastrophic limit leading to nonlinear change. Whether that limit is 500 or 600ppm is irrelevant.
• We are also approaching catastrophic limits in  the nitrogen cycle, depletion of fish stocks, acidification of the oceans and extraction of groundwater.

So far so dismal. But what he said next was quite remarkable. This isn't a word-for-word quote, but my attempt to record the sense of what he said;

We have got into this mess through a massive fit of absent-mindedness. No scientist ever gave a thought to the effects of  pumping CO2 into the atmosphere until relatively recently. This is great news! Now that we've come to our senses, human ingenuity can get us a long way towards solving the problem. For example, carbon sequestration is one of a number of technologies that can avert disaster.

We cant stop the car, but we can turn the wheel... but one of the men at the wheel is George W. Bush, and he is diverting our attention away from the critical issues and onto his war on terror.  When we realise what the critical issues really are, we'll all be on the same side.

Nick Sagovsky responded by asking 4 questions. Sachs' answers are in italics.

1. There is evidence that inequalities lead to unhealthy societies by feeding our desires for more. In turn this leads to unsustainable development. So shouldn't development be about  not just raising the poorest people out of deep poverty, but about making people more equal and so restraining our appetites? Reducing inequalities will reduce the societal frenzy the fuels development. But this will be politically painfully and the lifting of the poor out of poverty is more pressing and more tractable. We need to learn to slow down, reflect more and consume less.
2.  How do we construct global governance that allows us to address these issues? The process in the UN leading up to the war in Iraq has weakened the institution at a time it needs to be strengthened. The US deluded by the myth of its own power. It could not mend Iraq let alone solve the problems of the middle east. The world has always had bloc warfare, but now we are so overcrowded and interdependent that the world cannot afford it anymore. But how can we learn to change?
3. How do we break the economic dominance (and contribution to GNP) of the arms trade, that poisons the world and kills the poor? The idea that the world economy could not do without the contribution of the arms trade is a myth. We could easily slough off the arms trade and not lose industries. We don't need to produce cluster bombs and depleted uranium in order to keep people in jobs.
4.  How do we regain a notion of global commons in the face of rampant commodification of air, water etc? Social Christian doctrine is vital in reminding us that we are not just consumers. But there is a practical problem: how do we handle the tricky goods for human life? if we treat the ocean floor as commons, anyone is free to take a factory ship to destroy the ecology without restriction We need something that protects the common good, but neither global commons nor commodification do the job. Trading schemes may do the job, but we are not yet at the stage of having consensus that resources cannot be accessed without restriction.

The next and final keynote event in this series is a panel discussion entitled 'Does creating wealth cost the earth'. St. Paul's Cathedral, 7 November 18:30. It should be good.

On being a newbie in church

It's often said in church circles how difficult it can be for newcomers to visit a church. "Yeah, yeah, of course it's true, but at our church we are friendly, and it's easy for new people to feel at home". Or so I thought, until I started to be the newcomer at some friendly and welcoming churches. As an Anglican priest I've got more chance than anyone of knowing what to do and how to fit in. But visiting a new church is very hard. Who do I talk to? Will I stand and sit at the right moment? Can I overcome my irritation that some bits of the service aren't how I'd like them to be done? Perhaps worse than not being welcomed is being  made too welcome; some churches have formidable welcomers who won't let you go until they've told you the history of the building, a rundown on all the vicars in the last century, and signed you up for the men's breakfast/Bible study/basket weaving circle. Once I scurried quickly away at the end of the service before I had to talk to anyone other than the vicar. Perhaps I'm temperamentally suited to 8am Book of Common Prayer. If only they weren't at 8am...

The serious point of this is that going to church for the first time is a lot harder than most of us 'regulars' would believe. Perhaps all church leaders should have one Sunday a year where they go somewhere as a visitor, so that they don't forget how uncomfortable it is.