Finally- choices…

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I have hinted a few times here that we are facing a major life change. At last, I have come to the point of having to actually make some choices. They amount to one of the following;

  1. An application for a new social work management job, managing all adult care (currently I manage Mental Health services.)
  2. A demotion to a team leaders job.
  3. Redundancy.

I also have, for the first time after 2 years a date – the 27th of July – by which everything will be concluded (although I have learnt to distrust any deadline made in this process!) I need to make my choice by the end of next week.

In many ways however it was a choice I made some time ago because I am just about at the end of my coping skills with my current job.

This is in part because of the natural process of working on the very edges of society for nearly 22 years, attempting to balance what often seem like mutually incompatible priorities- the (still mostly primary) hope that social workers have of really helping people/making a difference, and the agency responsibility to manage budgets and police the welfare state.

It is also because of the total lack of respect that wider society has for the things that social workers do- despite the fact that we have yet to find any other profession or any other mechanism that will do the things that we do. And some of the things that I have done and people I have met along the way you would not believe…

Then there is the increasing grinding pressure of regulation, scrutiny and performance management. The things that are quantifiable and therefore to the interest of the system are often the things that I have very little interest in. It is almost impossible to measure things like improvement in wellbeing, lives subtly changed because of the chemistry of kindness and respect. Social workers now spend 80% of their working lives in front of computer screens. Tell me where and how this makes sense?

Then there are the senior managers. Some appear to be suffering from some kind of psychopathy- I can never work out whether the job did this to them, or they rose so high because of (a.) their inability to see any colours other than black and white, and (b.) their utter lack of interest in anyone who did not directly enhance or threaten their careers. (The former are courted, the latter ruthlessly destroyed.) The end result is toxicity in the heart of a profession that is supposed to be all about caring.

Finally there are the suits. It probably says something about my career that I have always refused to work in a suit. I often feel slightly self conscious about this as I am frequently the only man in a room that is not wearing one. But the suit has come to represent something to me of what I am NOT. That is not to say that every person dressed in smart business wear in councils is somehow suspect, sold out- I have met many lovely suit wearers. It is just that suits are power statements, and I am much more interested in making real connections with people. It has become something of an overvalued issue for me, so much so that I am considering renting a tuxedo for my last day in work- catharsis by cummerbund.

The choice to leave will mean large amounts of uncertainty for both me and my family. But right now it feels like the only choice possible, and this is both tantalising and terrifying in equal measure.

International Woman’s Day…

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Today is International Woman’s Day.

I wondered about the need for a day to celebrate half of us- seems a wee bit of an over generalisation. Perhaps it might suggest too that all the rest are ‘men’s days’.

But then again perhaps they are right;

  • Women make up half of the world’s population and 70% of the world’s one billion poorest people.
  • Women work two-thirds of the world’s working hours, produce half of the world’s food, but earn only 10% of the world’s income.
  • Of the 500,000 women who die in childbirth every year, 99% live in developing countries. In other words, in developing countries, a girl or a woman dies every minute giving birth.
  • Two thirds of the 800 million adults who lack basic literacy skills are women.

(Figures from Traidcraft. You can donate a few quid towards their work to support women to help themselves here.)

I can change little about the justices and injustices of this wonderful broken world we live in, apart from little bits of money here and there, and perhaps some words.

Because I still hope that poetry might find cracks and widen them.

I read an interview in which the opening lines of this poem were spoken by a mother over her daughter, and they did something to me. I hope that you will forgive this white, middle class man for presuming to use the voice of a woman in this way- as some of the words were hers…

I have a dream for my daughter

That she may live a life

Better than mine

That this plastic bowl I fill with water

Might one day be plumbed-in porcelain

That the cotton dress worn thin by the rocks I wash it on

Might become a pressed skirt and blouse all office white

That these Flip Flops sewn with telephone wire

Might be breathed upon by some God-mother

And become instead

An English bicycle

.

I have a dream for my daughter

That she may not be owned

Or used

Or victimised

She will be strong

Like bright green bamboo

She will speak

And men will listen

Weeping…

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Today I watched a woman weeping

There were no tears

No wracking sobs

Her face bore no visible contortions

Instead she smiled and spoke of minutiae

To we, the ephemera

Made tiny and two dimensional

By the towering cliff she hung from.

 

She wept

And I watched.

Cardinal O’Brian compares Gay Marriage to the laws on Slavery?

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Did anyone hear this discussion on the radio this morning? Cardinal O’Brian, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland was being interviewed about same sex marriage and made some rather startling statements.

I found it really hard to follow some of his logic, even as someone who has been in and around churches all my life.This is what he was saying;

If we allowed gay marriage, it would amount to ‘shaming’ the country.

We would be taking standards that are ‘human rights’, from the UN declaration of human rights and turning them on their head.

We would be redefining marriage to something it is not, as marriage could only happen between a man and a woman.

He then compared gay marriage to what might happen if the government suddenly decided to legalise slavery. Thought this a ‘very very good example of what might happen in this country’.

Then he started to describe the ‘thin edge of the wedge’, referencing the Abortion Act in the 60’s.

I could start to tell you my position on this issue, along with whole pages full of justifications. I could get into the relationships between scripture and culture, and the authority of certain OT texts.

I could also discuss the position of love as opposed to legalism, and the fact that sexual ‘sin’ has taken far to central a part in our understanding as opposed to (for example) gluttony or usury.

I could also tell you how bored I am with the way church is ripping itself to pieces with this issue. How hard hearted and foolish we look from the outside. How different camps use this issue as a ‘totem’ of acceptability.

I could wonder aloud why we could not just agree to disagree and focus on finding a path of grace to walk on for our own lives.

And I could describe the feeling I have that this issue will look and sound very different in 30 years time, in the same way that remarriage after divorce and (dare I say it) slavery are viewed as theologically different now than how they have been previously.

I could also talk about how church leaders who seek to ‘defend’ the church, or take us back to some mythical state before ‘progress’ damaged and destroyed our Christian way of life are often talking utter nonsense. As if God is not big enough to stand up for himself.

But rather than all of this, I will just say that the Cardinal made an ass of himself.

Is God inspired by our politics?

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Interesting article in the Guardian about a study led by Lee Ross of Stanford University in California into the interaction between faith and politics.

 …the Jesus of liberal Christians is very different from the one envisaged by conservatives. The researchers asked respondents to imagine what Jesus would have thought about contemporary issues such as taxation, immigration, same-sex marriage and abortion. Perhaps not surprisingly, Christian Republicans imagined a Jesus who tended to be against wealth redistribution, illegal immigrants, abortion and same-sex marriage; whereas the Jesus of Democrat-voting Christians would have had far more liberal opinions. The Bible may claim that God created man in his own image, but the study suggests man creates God in his own image.

If you are like me, you are right now deciding that those whose political views you do not share are the ones who have invented more of their Jesus than you have.

Because basically Jesus is like a really good version of me. Me on a good day.

 Preachers, politicians and co-believers tend to emphasise and de-emphasise different aspects of the Christian canon; so conservative Americans study the Old Testament with its homophobic rhetoric and eye-for-an-eye morality, whereas liberals look to the New Testament Jesus who was sympathetic to the poor and the meek.

Evangelical politics is not, of course, limited to the US. Many social conservatives in the UK align themselves with the Christian right, and MPs such as Nadine Dorries take inspiration from US campaigns against abortion or gay rights. But perhaps the most striking aspect of the study is that it turns on its head the claims by many religious politicians, such as Republican nomination candidates Rick Santorum (“I’m for income inequality”), Rick Perry (“Homosexuality is a sin”), or the UK’s Nadine Dorries (“My faith tells me who I am”), that their politics is inspired by their God. This study suggests instead that their God is inspired by their politics.

I suppose this was the risk God took in giving us all free will.

The foolishness, the folly of God.

Who lies like a bound lamb on the altars we build.

Today I was not Murun Buchstansangur…

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After a particularly brutal week, there was a chance that today could have gone something like this;

(This post bring back lots of memories! Can you believe that this was a children’s programme back in the 80’s? This one seems to recommend idleness and alcoholism! I confess to a slight affinity to Murun Buchstansangur- perhaps related to the general melancholy that seems to be his watchword…)

After a morning seeking motivation, I eventually sparked into life, and re roofed my workshop and the bike shed- both damaged in the big storm. Quite a productive un-Murun like day in the end.

The postman brought me a letter today, offering me jobs that I do not want, or redundancy. It has been a long time coming (2 years of rumour, misinformation, bad communication and often downright overt rudeness) and despite having made my decision some time ago, it was still something of a shock to the system.

Murun does not seem to need a job. I wonder who pays his mortgage, or re-roofs his sheds?

Greenbelt 2012 early line up announcements…

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Greenbelt festival is ages away. I have a whole load of things between me and it.

However, it looks like I will be doing something this year with ultrasonic speakers- some technology that projects sound on a carrier wave, making it into a narrow focussed beam that you can limit to a spot some distance away, or even bounce off objects. We are going to use it to project poetry and sounds recorded on small Hebridean islands during our up and coming Wilderness retreat trips.

So (you heard it here folks!) the first announcement of the line up for Greenbelt festival- Chris Goan!

I understand entirely if this does not raise the heartbeat, but I was looking at the GB website today, and noticed something that certainly got my attention;

My all time favourite musician/songwriter/poet is there this year- Bruce Cockburn. This man’s words and music have been my companion and inspiration for 20 years and more. So famous in his native Canada that they put his face on a stamp. This is from the first ever album of his I bought back in 1989;

Also confirmed are the wonderful Bellowhead- a collection of musician who play folk/jazz/punk like you have never heard before. We have a few of their albums but have never heard them sing live. Check this out;

Wilderness retreats- new FB page…

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On a day when everyone seems to be talking about Google’s new (non) privacy policy, I have been trying to dip into the world of marketing. However, lacking the multi billion pound machine that Google can bring to bear on our consciousness, I settled for the creation of a new Facebook page all about our up and coming wilderness meditations.

If you are a user of FB, then I would be honoured if you would visit and give it a ‘like’. I think that this helps in some way, although I am not quite sure why!

Even better- why don’t you come along? There are lots of photos on the page to give some kind of flavour of how lovely these places are.

Travelling well with the Jones’s…

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Many of you will already follow the on going adventures of the Jones family- Andrew (aka TSK) Jones blog is after all essential reading for many of us who are interested in what is happening on the edges of the known (and not yet known) Christian world.

A year or so ago, the family were living in Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland, when they bought an old truck, converted it into a living/entertaining space for themselves and all sorts of others. You can read something of their adventures travelling through Europe, Asia and North Africa here.

The point of all this travelling was to connect with all those small beautiful projects, and small and beautiful people who were working out the mission of Jesus in the lesser known places, and to support and encourage them.

It is an adventure that many of us feel a combination of envy, admiration and incredulity in relation to. It seems both bonkers and wonderful at the same time.

Anyway, the point of this post is to give a plug to Andrew’s new book project- you can pre-order it in order to support the next phase of the Jones journey, into Asia.

Details of the book, and how to order are all here.

We need people like the Jones clan to remind us that other ways are possible, and that other lives in far away places might teach us much about our own, so go on- order the book now!