Author Archives: Elizaphanian

About Elizaphanian

Rector of West Mersea

Christianity has declined because it no longer believes in magic

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Eucharist icon

Some thoughts prompted by reading John Michael Greer here. JMG says, “I’m far from the only person to notice that something very strange has been happening to Christianity for quite a long time now. The liberal denominations that used to be the mainstream capitulated to atheism back in the 1950s — you’ll have to look long and hard to find ministers in any liberal church who actually, literally believe in the objective reality of the God whose weekly worship they’re paid to conduct—and now function mostly as charitable foundations and political-action committees with a sideline in rites of passage.” Then later on he says, “Valerie Flint, in her brilliant book The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe, has documented that a core reason Christianity was able to spread so rapidly across Europe, winning support from local warlords and kings, was that Christian monastics and clergy earned a reputation for being better at magic than their Pagan rivals: better, that is, at delivering the goods that religion is supposed to deliver.”

I think there is a very great deal of truth in this (I leave aside the category mistake that JMG makes about ‘God’ and gods).

Specifically, I see the death of the mainstream churches (in the West) as rooted in a surrender to a scientific spirit which – as part and parcel of that spirit – also rejects any acceptance of magic and (what is commonly called) the supernatural.

If the church doesn’t dispense magic – and the most magical elements of Christianity are the sacraments – then it no longer has a spiritual purpose, and JMG’s description is justified.

Magic here must be understood in its proper sense, not Harry Potter-esque action at a distance, but rather as the changing of consciousness in accordance with will. In Christian terms it is about the renewing of our minds.

How many clergy actually take spiritual warfare seriously in their daily lives? I am only beginning to, and I am aware of how far I have to go in developing this, yet I am very conscious that – most especially from the viewpoint of the institution – I am a bizarre outlier. It’s a marker for how far the scientistic spirit has taken root within the church itself.

I am conscious of having written about this in greater depth in my book: “With you is my contention O priest!” I am quite certain that unless we attend to this deep spiritual wound within our common life then everything else we do will be of nothing worth.

Which is another way of saying: the first commandment must come first, and because that is laughed at within the church, this is why we die.

(Perhaps the problem is that different factions within the church claim the right to say what the first commandment means. At least the RC church doesn’t have that problem.)

Something to add to my musings about the Church of England. I do not yet have a solution; but I am working on it.

First they came for the white man

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Many will be familiar with the message shared by Martin Niemoller, a German Pastor who spent seven years imprisoned by the Nazis:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Niemoller’s point is a profound one. If we allow a society to develop which victimises a particular class of people, then a dynamic is established which will end in our own destruction. A system that requires sacrifices and scapegoats will slowly work its way threw a list. In the Nazi society, the scapegoats were principally the Jews, but also gypsies, homosexuals and handicapped. We now view such a society with utter horror. Yet have we gone too far in the other direction?

Consider briefly the story of James Damore, a former employee of the internet company Google. Google is officially committed to diversity and inclusion, that is, they are concerned to ensure that they are not prejudiced in how they recruit people to work for them. There has been discussion within the company as to why, despite their best efforts, the ratio of male to female amongst their employees was heavily skewed towards men.

Damore wrote a memo drawing on research in the human sciences which indicates that there are significant differences between men and women. These show up not just in terms of intellectual capacity for certain tasks, but also in terms of interests. Damore argued that whilst there were things that could be done by Google to make it a more welcoming environment for women, there may be certain innate constraints that would mean Google would never gain a perfectly balanced ratio of male and female employees – and that this was OK. He called for a conversation around these topics.

For this, Damore was fired from his post.

To my mind, this story sounds like a description of a witch-hunt. The modern gods of diversity and inclusion were offended, and so the source of the heresies needed to be hunted out and expelled from the community. Doubtless there are now many employees of Google enjoying warm fuzzy feelings of self-righteousness – “we’re the good guys”!

What happens when perfectly calm and rational debate is silenced in this way? As Tyrion Lannister put it, “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” Acting in this way simply gives fuel to those who are much less calm and rational, such as those who recently gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to march for ‘white supremacy’. Whenever I see such a situation I am reminded of the words of Kahlil Gibran, “for what is evil but good, tortured by its own thirst, and forced to drink of stagnant waters”.

James Damore is a white man, and that means he is – to use the contemporary jargon – writing from a position of utmost privilege, and as a consequence his words do not need to be considered on their own merits. When there is a struggle for power within a community the different tribes within that community will use all sorts of ways to signal their membership of one tribe or another, and that signalling will serve for the deployment of various sorts of power.

So, James Damore, who is both white and a man (two strikes against him) articulates views that threaten to disrupt the pursuit of what are seen as the highest goods (diversity and inclusion) and is thus deprived of his employment.

The pursuit of diversity and inclusion, what might be thought of as a programme of ‘anti-Nazism’, or a Niemoller manifesto – include those who were excluded! – is now embarked upon the same path as Nazism itself. It has found a scapegoat to embody all that is evil, and will work with all the forms of power available to it in order to victimise and expel that evil. The evil, of course, is the white man.

The challenge is not simply to avoid the manifest evils of Nazism but to engage much more radically in interrogating the human desires which gave rise to such evil. Without this, one form of Nazism (white race is all good!) is simply replaced by its inverse and equal (white race is all bad!). We need to shift away from thinking of human beings as members of categories at all.

What I have in mind is Martin Luther King’s vision of people being judged by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin. Whenever we treat a person as a member of a category we go wrong. That category can be anything we choose – black or white, rich or poor, Christian or Muslim, gay or straight or otherwise engaged – but when we treat a person simply as a member of a class, rather than treating them as a unique individual with their own identity and character – then we are on the dark road that leads to the industrial elimination of that class.

We have to be more creative, honest and open in our search for improving our world, and not rely upon the lazy virtue signalling of the politically correct establishment.

What is the music of Jesus?
Sermon for West Mersea Patronal Festival 2017

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I had planned to make these remarks at our AGM this year, but for many good and varied reasons there were very few of us at that meeting, so I have kept them back for a more popular occasion.

When I was on retreat last December I read Amanda Palmer’s fascinating book ‘The Art of Asking’. In amongst other things she discusses her accommodation in New York when she was just starting out. The landlord was clearly a remarkable character, who was concerned as much to establish an artistic haven as to maximise his rent. He saw his role as one of enabling others to flourish creatively, rather than to do so himself.

That struck me as being very close to the role of incumbent within a parish. “In the beginning was the Word” and that applies to each of us individually, we each have a word from God that we need to speak. We often call this our ‘vocation’ – the word that God spoke which gives us life.

You are each marvellous and amazing and miraculous and wonderful – my job is to help you become all that you were originally created to be.

How might that be done?

I want to share with you an ecological term of art, which is legibility. If we think of an old growth forest then we are considering something complex that has been built up over time. Comparing that to a modern commercial tree plantation it is easy to see how that is more ‘legible’ than the first – much more efficient, much more capable of being exploited by the landowners. Similarly, if we compared the City of London with all its small streets and byways with a modern city, say Milton Keynes or an American city, the latter are much more ‘legible’ than the former.

St Peter and St Paul’s is an old growth forest, a medieval city. My role is to curate that variety, sometimes pruning, sometimes fertilising, but always with a view to preserving the breadth of life that is possible in this place. What I believe we need to avoid is an emphasis upon what is legible, able to be controlled from above, which sees human beings as resources to be extracted in favour of a different agenda. This may mean that not everything we do will make coherent sense; it means that we will have to live with frustrations and contradictions.

For this to happen, however, one thing is essential. In our common life together lots of decisions need to be made, small and large. We need to respect and affirm our differences from each other. As St Paul puts it, the head cannot say to the foot we don’t need you. We need each other! But we can only do this if we love each other more than we love our own preferences. Our unity is in Christ alone.

To that end, the PCC have supported me in developing what we have called the “Big Sing”. This is an informal and relaxed service which is designed to reach those who haven’t been reached, or who have been put off, by what we do as a church. One remark that has always stayed with me from the priest of my sponsoring parish, where I began my own journey to fulfilling my vocation, was “the empty seats also have a voice”. I believe that it is essential that we reach out to those who are not part of our fellowship. The Big Sing will not be for everyone – there will be more emphasis upon modern styles of music for a start – but I would ask you to please support it, please invite a friend if you think they might enjoy it.

Which brings me to a point about our church more generally, at a wider, perhaps a national level. I am a fan of Game of Thrones, both the books and the television series. It is a fantasy sequence, a sort of cross between The Wars of the Roses and Lord of the Rings. The foreground conflict is about the struggle between various noble houses for control of the throne of the kingdom, hence the title ‘Game of Thrones’. Yet overshadowing that conflict is the looming reality of an army of ice zombies that are about to march south upon humanity, who represent the real danger.

I rather think that this describes our own beloved Church of England. We squabble simply because we are not spiritually serious. We have taken our eyes away from the most fundamental concerns, and now we waste our time bickering about secondary questions – adiaphora.

What would it look like if we were spiritually serious? I recently had a conversation with Ian (organist) which I have been thinking a great deal about. Ian pointed out that if he wanted to learn about Mozart, he might read all sorts of good books about Mozart’s life, be taught lots of interesting things about his relationships, his context, his life and death – but if he never heard Mozart’s music then the most essential element of who Mozart was – his vocation, his ‘word of God’ – would be missed.

So the question becomes: what is the music of Jesus?

My answer is a work in progress, but at the moment it looks something like this: Jesus was a teacher, yet to say that ‘the music of Jesus’ was his teaching would, I believe, remove the most essential thing. For Jesus’ teaching was almost always embedded in the whole of a life. Jesus spent his ministry performing signs, acts of power which were often healing or exorcisms. It is these ‘signs and wonders’ that I believe to be the music of Jesus, and I believe they culminate in the events of the great three days, that is, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday.

More particularly, I don’t believe that we can capture the music of Jesus simply by considering his works as ‘doing good’. Please don’t misunderstand my point here. I do believe that it is the work of the church to ‘do good’. I have been struck by the accounts of the Grenfell Tower blaze, and the way in which the local churches became community hubs of service and aid. As Giles Fraser put it, the churches did the most essential things right: they opened their doors and turned their lights on, and the community was able to use them.

Yet I believe that the church can become distracted by thoughts of ‘doing good’, because it is in fact much easier (and more socially approved of) than the harder spiritual tasks that we are in fact called to. The feeding of the five thousand was not a proto-food bank; rather, it was a highly political event which had, amongst other things, a dismantling of social divisions at its heart.

Put simply, the music of Jesus is both more political and more spiritual than ‘doing good’ can capture. This is why our worship is more important than anything else, why we need to root our lives in the sacraments which shape us spiritually. Politics and spiritual warfare fit together like hands and gloves – it is not an accident that Jesus was executed by the state. I believe that it is only through a concentration on the spiritual essentials that we will gain the spiritual maturity that we need to cope with our differences.

I believe that there is a particular genius to the Church of England, to being a broad church, pursuing a via media between different extremes, within which a large variety of people can find spiritual nourishment and healing. I have been influenced greatly by the Tractarian movement, what is now called ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ which has a three-fold emphasis: the claim that God became physical flesh; that we can meet God through the physical substance in the Eucharist; and that we are called to serve the physical flesh of Christ in our neighbours. There is one comment from a key leader of the Tractarian movement that has served for me as something of an aim and guide, not as an achievement(!), and it is this: “Even if the Church of England were to fail, it would still be found in my parish.” (John Keble)

May we show forth something of the spiritual power of Christ as we find our own vocations here on this wonderful island of Mersea; may we hear the music of Jesus, and play it for others to hear as well. Amen.

On the importance of character arcs

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Matthew-CrawleyIf another character – Falcon, or the Winter Soldier – takes up the shield of Captain America, he will not be Captain America. I want to know the story of Steve Rogers.

If another character – like Jane Foster – picks up Mjolnir to become ‘Thor’, that will not be the story of the Odinson.

Most human stories have no wider significance. There are no wider lessons to be learnt. They are tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Those are not the stories that I wish to invest my scarce and precious time absorbing. ‘Life is hard, random accidents happen at all times, beware’. Thank you for telling me something that I did not know.

Think of Brienne in Game of Thrones. If she doesn’t end up with some sort of decent narrative closure with Jamie then that will be a very long story without much meaning (there is some meaning already, I’ll grant that). Whereas if Jamie, for his crimes, is exiled and has to spend the rest of his life confined to the island of Tarth… well, that’s a story worth telling.

All this is triggered by my disgust at the show runners of Downton Abbey. A clear dereliction of duty. The soul of the story has gone – why continue? A mere accumulation of events, and what is the significance in that?

Have Conservative hopes gone up in smoke?

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The appalling tragedy of Grenfell tower has come very rapidly to symbolise all that is wrong with right-wing beliefs. Here was a tower block that had no water-sprinklers installed, that had the wrong sort of cladding, that was overcrowded – and it was in the one local authority that best epitomises excess wealth. Here the obvious story is one of heartless landlords pruning back their costs and the iniquities that follow from handing over to private capitalists the responsibility to ensure that public housing is safe. In short, this is what happens when you let rapacious right-wingers run the system for private profit – death, horrible, horrible death.

All this as the cherry on top of the cake which was the 2017 election – I suppose that the only thing that Conservatives can feel grateful for is that it didn’t happen immediately before the election, otherwise it would be Jeremy Corbyn grimacing outside number 10. He, after all, was the beneficiary of ‘the big mo’ – momentum – and enjoyed a huge swing of support amongst younger voters. There is clearly something remarkable about Corbyn, a premium upon authenticity, which allows him to engage with groups that have previously had little interest in the political process.

So are the Conservatives now completely stuffed? Brexit seems to be going wrong, the Prime Minister has been stripped of all her authority and most of her dignity, and public opinion appears to have settled on the idea that Conservatives are selfish and wicked. Is there any way back?

I rather think there is. More than that, slightly dependent on when it takes place, I would put good money on the Conservatives winning an outright majority at the next election. Why would I say that?

Well, in the first instance, this last election campaign had to be one of the most atrociously led and managed of any conducted by a major party since the war. To turn an opinion poll lead of over 20% into a hung parliament six weeks later takes a quite phenomenal level of incompetence. The fact that it began by focussing exclusively upon the personal qualities of the Prime Minister herself means that she has to bear much of the burden of blame. Yet what that also means is that she will not be allowed to lead the Conservatives into the next election, and it is therefore reasonable to expect that the outcome will be better for them.

Secondly, in the light of the popularity of the Labour manifesto’s commitments, and the opposite situation with the Conservative, we can anticipate that the policy platform proposed from the right will be both more coherent and more attractive than what was offered this time. Again, this can only help.

Third, there is a good chance that the recommendations of the boundary review commission will be implemented in the life-time of this new parliament, which would be worth around twenty seats or so, dependent on all sorts of assumptions (many of which, admittedly, were shown to be foolish by the last results).

More than all this, however, I suspect that the Conservative party will remember what it is that has made it (reputedly) the most successful political party in the Western world: that is, it will remember how to be ruthless in the pursuit of power. By this I don’t simply mean that our present Prime Minister is living on borrowed time. I mean that there will be a thorough investigation of what the Conservatives have done wrong and what Labour did right, and there will be shameless stealing of both programmes and methods as the Conservatives seek to entrench their hold on power.

What I would expect is that, in a few years time – once Theresa May has absorbed as much public hostility as possible and become our Lady of Sorrows – she is elegantly replaced by a leader who knows how to emote in public in an engaging way; someone who can use social media effectively; and someone who can sell whatever Brexit compromise has been reached by that point.

I suspect that whoever that person is will be a socially-liberal Tory. Since the seventies there has been an increasing tension within the Conservative party between the more traditional social conservatives with values that might be thought of as ‘country’ – call these the ‘Tories’ – and those who are more concerned with free-market economics, with values that might be thought of as being more financially focussed – for now, call these the ‘Conservatives’.

What Grenfell has crystallised, I believe, is a thorough rejection of ‘Conservative’ values in the sense just described. That is, in a society which well remembers billions of pounds being handed over to subsidise incompetent bankers and preserve their bonuses, voters simply will not believe that there is not enough money to pay for adequate housing for every member of this nation. Rather, arguing for the benefits of a private sector approach simply comes across as heartless and grasping, a ploy to preserve benefits for the elite whilst ignoring the plight of the poor. There is no future for that approach.

However, looking at the larger picture and the wider political movements (of which Brexit itself is a prominent part) there is clearly a place for a politics which emphasises the values of a community. Not an abstract community defined from above but the natural and organic sort of community that spontaneously develops amongst people of good will who live in close proximity to each other – that which has been seen most vividly in the streets of North Kensington as the community there has rallied around to support those who have lost their homes at Grenfell. Those sorts of values fall very naturally into the ‘Tory’ framework I mentioned above.

I said ‘socially liberal Tory above’, by which I simply mean someone who is comfortable with the main elements of the sexual revolution and gender equality as I can’t see any mainstream leader being successful if they try to go against those things. It would be best if such an acceptance was unquestionable, and could not be portrayed as a purely political gesture.

Does such a creature as a socially-liberal Tory exist, or is this just a product of fevered and wishful thinking? Well, this isn’t a prediction for her future career trajectory, but Ruth Davidson really does seem to tick most of these boxes… Watch that space.

Deal or no deal?

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deal no deal
With all the language flying around about whether “‘no deal’ is in fact a bad deal. It is the worst of all deals” (Corbyn) or “no deal is better than a bad deal” (May) we need to be a little clearer about what is being discussed.

There is the existing acquis with the EU; this will come to an end at the end of March 2019.

After that, there are actually (at least) two distinct things that need to be done.

The first is the setting up of all the normal agreements that apply between sovereign states, as regards air transport for example. The second is what falls under the heading of a ‘free trade agreement’.

To be clear about the difference, consider that Canadian airlines happily flew to EU destinations prior to a free trade agreement being put into place last year.

Setting up the first sort of agreement will be a lot of work but need not provide any insuperable problems, so long as there is sufficient political will. After all, it is essentially about a re-branding exercise, rather than having to change what is presently happening. Setting up the second sort of agreement is much harder, for a free trade agreement is much, much more complicated.

Much of the doom-mongering about Brexit rests upon a conflation of these two agreements. So visions of air travel coming to a halt are based upon the notion that the first sort of agreement will not be implemented. I consider this quite a remote possibility – not impossible, just very unlikely. There will be dozens of civil servants on both sides whose sole job rests upon making sure that the world doesn’t come to an end in March 2017. I have every confidence that all the small details will be considered and an agreement signed.

With regard to a free trade agreement, I believe that the UK could *survive* without one, if need be, and I am philosophically inclined towards a more radical ‘unilateral free trade’ option, with some safeguards (eg to protect the NHS against predatory US health industries). Again, there could be a free trade agreement, as all the necessary elements are already in place – it’s a question of preserving something that already exists rather than creating something new out of nothing. However, I do remain sceptical that sufficient political will be generated in good time, so we do need to prepare for the hardest of Brexits. (Although, if in February 2019 Theresa May changes her mind and applies to join EFTA, I’m not sure what the EU could do to stop her!)

The reason why I used the word ‘survive’ above is because I am now much clearer about the costs that will come when we come out of the single market. Those costs will be real. However, they don’t make me regret supporting Brexit. I rather look towards where we shall be – as a sovereign state once again – in twenty, thirty, fifty years time. The EU will have gone through a ruinous time and may well not exist in that time frame, and even if it does, it will struggle with all sorts of financial and social catastrophes. We as a nation will be much better off outside that vortex rather than inside.

With a hard Brexit there will be five to ten years of significant economic pain (assuming the no-free-trade position remains). Those parts of our economy that have been most thoroughly integrated into the single market will bear the principal cost, and will be forced to adjust or die. Yet over the longer term, exposure to larger worldwide markets that are growing more quickly is a recipe for faster growth and more secure jobs.

This is the case that Theresa May needs to be making, rather than simple counter-productive sound-jibes against Jeremy Corbyn (whom I like). May has led an appalling campaign, revealing her own worst tendencies (that have been known about for some time). She needs to raise her game, and we as a nation need to raise our game. We are about to be launched from the side of a large passenger liner into choppy seas. Whether that liner is about to sink or not is no longer the most important question; rather, we need to steer a very clear course to ensure that we navigate our own waters successfully.

The tightrope we must walk

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tightropeI write this article a few days after the latest terrorist atrocity in Manchester, and I wonder what is the right word to describe what has happened. Clearly there is a link between this barbarity and previous barbarities in Stockholm and Paris and Nice and Westminster and Florida and the rest. Should they be called ‘Islamic terrorist acts’? I would say that there is a lot of justification for doing so, for such acts draw upon a long tradition within Islamic thought going back to Muhammed himself.

To do so, would, however, open myself up to all sorts of problems that might make my main points irrelevant; or, if not irrelevant, at least unheard. For as soon as the word ‘Islamic’ is deployed in this context, then the clouds of politically-correct opprobrium descend, accusations of Islamophobia and fascism are made, and all rational considerations depart.

Yet this is also why the police force in Rotherham turned a blind eye to the systematic child abuse perpetrated by those of a particular community in that town. They were afraid of being called racist. As a result thousands of girls suffered horror. Perhaps the only courageous path is also the only honest path – we have to start using the most accurate language to describe the problems that we face. In Manchester, as with Westminster and all the other atrocities, what we face is a form of Islam.

How might we engage with and overcome such a problem? There is a tightrope here that we must walk across with great care.

The recent election in France, to my mind, portrayed the two sides of the tightrope, each one representing a fall into the abyss, two equal and opposite catastrophes. The first catastrophe is Macron, representing an unfettered globalism, where nation states are simply inefficiencies to be overcome by technocratic capitalism. Human beings, both individually and as persons bearing particular cultures, are simply resources to be deployed in the great march towards making more money. Such an approach is both dehumanising and ecocidal, a last flourish for the 1% before the deluge.

Yet Le Pen also offered a catastrophe, one of dehumanising nationalism coupled with a near-imbecilic economic policy. Human beings, when threatened, have a long-studied tendency to scapegoat others when confronted with challenges to their well-being and their world-view. When all that has been held sacred by a community is laid waste, and insult is added to such injury by the suppression of truthful discussion, then the subsequent anger seizes upon the closest available victims on which to vent their furies.

The Macron catastrophe leads to an abolition of meaning, where all are dehumanised in order to worship Mammon. The Le Pen catastrophe leads to a moral collapse, where all are dehumanised in order to worship a reactionary fantasy.

There is a tightrope to be walked between these two options, and we cannot walk upon that tightrope without an honest and truthful account of what is actually happening in our society.

Which means, to my mind, that we have to speak openly about several things. The first is that we have to say that there is a problem with the Islamic community. It does not affect the whole community but it does represent a significant part – a part which is convinced of the inferiority of Western ways of life, and the need to attack such ways using violence. There needs to be an honest conversation about the roots of such attitudes within broader Islamic patterns of thought. Without this discussion, without this ‘bringing to light things now hidden in darkness’, the control of this conversation simply passes to the most extreme voices, and that serves nobody’s best interests.

We also, however, need to talk honestly about the nations, about England and Britain, and about what it means to become a part of such a nation. Much of the contemporary secular mentality is premised on the notion that nations are, as such, obstacles to be overcome in the pursuit of a better life. This doesn’t just apply to economics, where the expansion of ‘single markets’ reduces the role for national governments in order to maximise profits. Rather, the nation as a source of stability and identity, a focus for loyalty and thereby a ground for community cohesion, needs to be affirmed explicitly and confidently by the whole range of our leadership.

Lastly, we need to talk about religion. Most especially we need to understand the way in which discussion of religious issues in our society are bedevilled by our own peculiar history. We need to understand that our professed ‘enlightenment’ and release from traditional religious beliefs has served merely to blindfold and handcuff us in this present crisis. Without a coherent understanding of the role of religion within our national life, and most especially within the life of those who wish to destroy our culture, we will forever be compelled to robotically reiterate moronic mantras like ‘this has nothing to do with Islam’ and we shall suffer the inevitable consequences.

We are so much better than this. We need to avoid such politically correct platitudes that avoid addressing our crisis; we also need to avoid all forms of scapegoating and victimising that pretend to wash our hands of any role in what has gone wrong.

Rather we must engage forthrightly, honestly and courageously with our present predicaments, naming truthfully what is presently happening and yet not collapsing into a reactionary fantasy seeking a restoration of what has been.

We have a tightrope to walk. It is a tightrope made of truth, a tightrope that leads to a hopeful future for all who live in this land, where all give their active consent to a form of life that preserves the peace between all our communities, where we no longer fear to wake up to headlines announcing yet another slaughter of the innocents.

May our political leaders find their proper balance as they seek to carry us across the abyss.

Seeking an obedient via media

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In the light of what is happening in Newcastle, I have started longing for a clearly articulated and authoritative Anglicanism – an obedient via media.

What I am thinking is that the con-evangelical position on the Bible is not sustainably Anglican (as it denies the present authority of the church) and the trad-catholic position on women in ministry is not sustainably Anglican (as it also denies the present authority of the church).

We won’t get anywhere until we understand what the authority of the church both is and is for.

If we believe – as I believe – that Christ granted authority to the church in many matters, and that the Church of England truly bears witness to the gospel (which is what clergy stand up and say in public before they get started in any ministry) then a key part of bearing witness to the gospel within the context of the Church of England involves offering due obedience to church authorities – on matters of interpretation of Scripture, the ordination of women, and indeed anything else that they may choose.

The situation in Jesmond could not be more egotistical if it tried. It is pride, with all that that implies, including the consequences both temporal and spiritual.

I rather think we need a restoration of classical Anglicanism. Hmm – where do I go to find that?

Living with illusions

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juncker maySo Juncker has said of May that she is living within an illusion.

He may be right. It may well be that the British government has not yet fully appreciated the sheer technical difficulties involved in trying to remove ourselves from the EU whilst simultaneously trying to form a decent trade deal (decent for both sides).

And yet… I rather think that there are illusions on the EU side too, the largest being the very idea that a nation can flourish outside of the EU, that such a nation might be, not just politically and spiritually but materially better off – this cuts at the very heart of the EU’s raison d’etre.

What was it Mark Twain said about not being able to convince a man of something if he is paid not to believe it? And who pays Juncker?