Monthly Archives: December 2011

Giles Fraser talks about the Empire…

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Good discussion on Start the Week this morning on the radio- a kind of ‘anti Xmas’ antidote.

The discussion was kicked off by Giles Fraser, former Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral (remember Occupy-London-Gate?) who suggested that the Christian Christmas was invented by the Emperor Constantine for political, not religious, reasons. It was Constantine that started to raise buildings in celebration of the holy sites such as the supposed place of Christ’s birth.

Constantine has a mixed reputation to say the least. He is regarded by some as a Saint, whose conversion to Christianity resulted in the inherited culture of faith that we in the west still stand upon. He was a saint, however, who also boiled his wife alive in her bath, and ruled by the sword and the dagger.

And there is another way to understand the influence of Constantine- which is to see his combination of church and state as the beginning of the time when the followers of Jesus were swallowed by Empire.

A time which gave us the Nicene Creed– which takes us straight from his birth to his death, with no mention of the messy teaching in between. Jesus fulfils a function of state- making way for Empire.

And a millennia and a half later, we still try to disentangle it all.

How it is that we came to believe that followers of Jesus can live so comfortably within an Empire that encapsulates everything that he encouraged us to move away from? An Empire that promotes wealth, power and conquest above all else? That defends the strong against the weak? That exists to ensure that some people remain poor, whilst others have far too much.

It is a paradox never more obvious than around Christmas time…

 

Pucks glen, carol singing and slipping on ice…

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We have had a very busy weekend.

Yesterday we had visitors, visited, and met to do some planning for an up and coming Aoradh event. This is the event, if you are around this area over New Year-

We are excited about this event- which we will be setting up between Christmas and New Year. Unfortunately Pucks Glen, like the rest of Argyll, took a bit of a battering in the storms, as a result of which it is full of fallen trees in places. Someone has had a go at cutting them into small pieces, but in places the path has been almost swept away.

 

Today we fetched a Christmas tree, went for a walk to review the site of the Aoradh event, then went carol singing around some rest homes before eating together at Paul and Pauline house.

The carol singing was lovely as ever. It has become one of those highlights of Christmas. Today Paul asked all the residents in the homes to tell us the town in which they were born- there were a few locals, but many people had made long life journeys- one man was born in New Zealand.

Dunoon is sheathed in ice. A thin sheet covers everything- and because it has not been very cold today, it is just about a slippy as you could ever imagine. This means that our driveway is unusable, and we have to park at the bottom of the hill and carry things up.

Ice plus dark plus heavy loads result in large bruises. If only I was as agile as our garden guests-

 

Ethical capitalism debate podcast…

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If you are interested in the reformation (or destruction) of our capital driven economic system, then check out this podcast from a recent debate held by the Oasis’s Charities Parliament-

Does capitalism need reforming, replacing or is it fine just as it is?

Listen to the lively debate around the question of our generation with representatives of Occupy London Stock Exchange, former investment banker Ken Costa and Dr Luke Bretheton.

You might also be interested in checking out some of the stuff on the Occupy Movement’s ‘Occupy Cafe’ website. It full of activism, protest and even poetry! Any activist website with poetry will get my vote…

I really liked this for example-

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

~

Whose walls are made of Radio Shacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

~

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

~

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

~

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

~

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

~

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

~

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

~

He gasped, “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

~

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

~

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

~

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

~

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

~

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

~

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

~

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

~

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

~

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

—Tony Hoagland—

There is also quite a lot on the site about faith- and how this might stimulate or oppose activism for change. Check out this or this for instance.

Let’s join in the conversation at least friends…

Rapture rescue…

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Interesting stuff.

Naomi Klein contrasts different responses to global crisis, and specifically uses this term- ‘Rapture rescue’-  a kind of global economic secular event through which some get saved, and others get left behind.

We see this perhaps in the response to terrorism- there is in the West a longing for some kind of second coming to sweep aside the evil and leave us safe in our holy escape pods. Some used to believe that war would achieve this.

Or perhaps capitalism itself could be seen in this way- there are those who believe– who live well and play to the rules of the holy market, and the unfaithful. Some of these can be rescued- but only by becoming like us.

Then there is climate change, which Klein talks about a lot here. Those who still deny the science seem bound up in a defensive wall of self interest. The crisis is external doubt, and the possibility of a threat to a way of life.

The ‘Rapture’ image hit me hard, as it makes a lot of sense- religion is both the engine of our underlying assumptions about the world, and also the means through which we justify and apply a kind of sacred redemption to our actions and lifestyles.

This being true, how might our faith still be an engine, but rather an engine for grace– for us, our neighbours and our environment? How might this  lead us to work for change NOW, not to wall ourselves away from the unfaithful, the undeserving, the already-lost?

Well I liked the simplicity of what Klein said, here-

“If we want the transformation, we can’t wait for it to happen in some massive jolt, we have to plan for it and model it…”

“Only a crisis, actual or perceived produces real change, and when that change occurs this depends on the ideas that are lying around. That is our function, to keep ideas alive until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

We Christians are carriers of perhaps the best ideas- contained within the life of Jesus. Our function is to keep these stories alive, and to try to live them out in our context.

Well our context is changing…

The (dis)functionality of teams…

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I have been spending some longer periods of time with one of the teams I manage- within a larger Community Mental Health Team that I used to work within.

In many ways it is a step back into familiar chaos which is strangely comforting.

Today for instance, we had staff shortages, no receptionist, a person in the building who was extremely (and noisily) unwell and had to be detained under the Mental Health Act. Also we had the usual variety of tensions and frictions between individual team members.

And it is the later that was most noticeable to me in my return. People in mundane group situations are always at their most ‘person-like’. Working closely with others in situations of stress will always make it impossible to hide who you are, at your best and worst.

All the usual characters were there today- the detached, the enthusiast, the out of control control freak, the idiosyncrat, the confidenceless, the overconfident, the people pleaser and the back stabber.

And the mess of me.

Some team situations distil from all this some fine spirit. They are generative and energising- for most if not all. To be part of teams like this is a lifetime high, even if only in retrospect. We are more as a result of being part of them.

Other teams are toxic by their nature. Whole books are written about how this comes about- leadership, followership, vision, poor skill/personality fit. Teams like this need to be taken outside and shot.

The surprise however is that both of these kinds of teams are rare. What is more common are teams like the one I spent time with today- teams full of faults and fracture lines- with some people working full on, others hardly working at all. With all sorts of disatisfactions, hurts and greivances just below the surface.

But still, these teams are productive.

In this case, the product is not easy to define- as it concerns the support of other people in distress, and despite our (dis)functionality, people are received, held, and then sent on their way on the way to some kind of healing for the most part.

Today I feel both hopeful and defeated by this. Hopeful because the humanity in the middle of us has this huge beating heart.

Defeated because the best of us is still beyond.

I think it comes down still to the difference between the efficient performance of a task and- love.

The difference between animal and divine.

The difference between a corporate mission statement, and the Beatitudes…

 

Pregnant…

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A lovely word.

A female word that sometimes excludes men, but more often contains and holds us all.

A word containing the unknown, the still-to-be, the potential to succeed…

And the potential to utterly fail.

It is a word that is synonymous with Advent. Waiting in hope, uncertainty, and perhaps even fear.

Waiting for something to change, for something to be born into the mess of us all.

I read this today– another one of Cheryl Lawrie’s lovely poems.

Perhaps our mistake is thinking
that love will always come
in the shape we have known it:

a happy ending
a new beginning
a christ-child.

In this pregnant pause
while the earth holds its breath
waiting for what
it does not know,
let us have the faith
that even we,
with all our wise
and cynical
knowing,
would not imagine
the shape that love
will take

and instead just
have the faith
that it will come.

Christmas cheeeeeeeese…

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Like many of us, I have been rather hammering the ‘reclaim Christmas from the capitalists’ theme of late. But you really can go too far.

Brace yourselves…

Bless.

The thing is, she seems a really nice person- someone who always looks after everyone all around her. Salt of the earth. Would you tell her? Go on- be honest. You too would tell her how lovely the song is wouldn’t you?

There is a serious edge to these things though. Church and culture. Culture and church. I have heard sentiments like this (even expressed like this!) for years in and around churches.

But it has usually been all talk and no trousers. All tinsel and no gristle.

The edge…

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This is a poem about death, written in around a simple story I heard recently. I am also reminded of this.

“The ocean goes on for ever”

Said the ripple

Just learning how to be a wave

Learning how to catch the reach of the wind

How to rise like an athlete at the drop of a flag

And to skim over the skin of the sea

Fringed by the speed of movement

~

But the ringing horizon was a

Crystalled panning lens

That one day found the edge

Of a jagged shadow

Against which wave after wave

After wave after wave

Was broken

~

“What is this terrible thing” cried the ripple

“That would turn us white then end us?”

~

So an older wave shouldered close

And offered some compassion;

“Have no fear now little one

Let’s roar and make commotion

For what you are is more than wave

You are made from mighty ocean.”