#Rev, broken arms & little Easters

So this series of Rev has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least. We’ve been through the twists and turns of the Church of England’s negotiation of inter-faith relations, same-sex marriage, and some of the harder safeguarding issues us vicars occasionally get confronted with. We’ve laughed – for some of us both knowingly and a little nervously – as the desperately overconfident numbers-driven machinations of the Church’s hierarchy have been laid bare with uncanny accuracy, and treated with deserved irreverence: what parish priest will not recognise a Diocesan strategy-cum-training-programme with a focus closely resembling the inspired ‘IED – Invade, Evangelise, Deliver’?!

But all of this, as the series cantered towards its all-too-early conclusion, receded into the background, became almost mere scenery, as the quite brilliant writers – with an emotional subtlety that nevertheless frequently left us viewers feeling clobbered, winded – brought to centre-stage Adam and Alex’s marriage, his drunken but not utterly unanticipated kiss with Head Teacher Ellie, the clergy disciplinary procedures prompted by jealous Reader Nigel’s formal complaint, and the closure of the ‘failing’ St Saviour’s Church. Plotlines converged, characters and relationships fell apart, in what could be seen, from many angles, as a pretty comprehensive tragedy.

But it’s not simply a tragedy. It becomes entangled, in the final two episodes, in the Church’s journey with Jesus through Holy Week and into Easter. It enacts a Passion, with Adam at its centre: a kiss – and the report to the authorities by a ‘friend’ – which betrays him, another friend who ends up denying he even knows him (with multiple cock references for good measure), a man in power washing his hands of responsibility (the kindly but institutional Bishop who ultimately finds Adam ‘innocent’, but places the burden of the church closure firmly on Adam’s shoulders: ‘if you resign, I can’t save St Saviour’s for you’), and finds Adam carrying a large, heavy, wooden cross through the streets of the city (delivering it to a colleague for a Palm Sunday procession), jostled and jeered at, spat at and wounded, stumbling and falling along the way as he presses on, through the night. As dawn breaks, on a hill overlooking the city, as he dances deliriously (singing ‘Lord of the dance’), Adam is joined by a shellsuit-wearing, tinny-holding, cliché-spouting ‘God’ (in the form of Liam Neeson), to whom Adam confesses, ‘I’m trying to keep something alive but I don’t think I can do it’. Amid the clichés, Adam’s companion reaches out his hand to touch him on the shoulder, saying, ‘We all have our crosses to bear – I understand, Adam, I’ll always be here’. And then he vanishes.

Where does the rollercoaster go from here? I settled in to watch the last episode expecting an ‘Easter’, but having no idea what that Easter would look like, or how we would get there. Adam, collarless, volunteering in the local shop while applying for management consultancy jobs, shows many of the telltale signs of going through a breakdown, while the closed St Saviour’s is boarded up and fenced off ready for the land on which it stands to be sold to the highest bidder. Colin, having made it clear to Adam that what he’s done – destroying St Saviour’s – is up there above the Holocaust on the list of worst things in the world, runs out of the shop clutching handfuls of stolen stuff, including a chocolate Easter egg which he feeds to his beloved dog, Bongo, a meal which proves fatal to his canine companion. Adam retreats to bed, engulfed in grief and God-knows-what-else, half-whispering, half-sobbing the Beatitudes (‘blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth’), deaf to his daughter Katie’s crying in the room next door.

It is Alex who finally takes charge, visiting Head Teacher Ellie at school to tell her she forgives her and to enlist her in her plan; and then getting Adam out of bed at 5am in the morning – Easter morning – to take him to St Saviour’s, where all of them – the ‘crowd of lost, hopeless, annoying people’ as Alex later calls them – are waiting for him. He runs away, and Alex goes after him. He must do a ‘last Easter service, a final goodbye’ – not for him, but for them. ‘I’m not their priest any more,’ he protests. ‘You gave up being a priest for Lent,’ she responds. ‘Well done. I don’t blame you. But now we need you back. And can we please finally christen Katie?!’

And so they return to the church steps, keeping vigil around the Easter fire, passing the light to a new Paschal candle, and joining together, loudly, to the uncomprehending annoyance of the neighbours, in the Easter greeting: ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ Archdeacon Robert hands Colin a spade to prise open the locked church door, Alex clothes Adam in his robes and dog collar, and Adam prays: ‘Dear Lord, I seem to be back in a cassock again. You won’t let me go, apparently. Is this what resurrection is?’ And they baptise little Katie, by candlelight, and her cries at the shock of the water on her head end the episode, the series, and – will we see it again? – perhaps ‘Rev’ for good.

I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one who was in bits at that moment – and I can still feel tears welling up as I recall it now. Among the many ways in which it struck me, I was left with a strong sense that this was an immensely faithful Easter story.

In what was effectively a ‘series review’ of Rev in the Guardian on Monday, a piece rather strangely written and published before the final episode was aired (and presumably not seen by the author), James Mumford criticises the ‘pernicious’ success of Rev as ‘imposing its own outsider viewpoint’ in its representation of the church, in a way in which ‘the devout do not speak for themselves’. In ‘both a lack of creativity and a failure of representation’, he says, Rev ‘denies the rich diversity of the church in England’, operates on the assumption that faith is ‘purely personal’, ‘not something held in common’, and not ‘transformative’: ‘Perhaps the show’s most wonderful character, the drug addict Colin, is a parishioner Adam is genuinely friends with. But there’s never a question of faith freeing him from addiction.’ Mumford offers a hypothetical plotline from ‘an insider viewpoint’: a woman knocked over in the street, ‘[h]er spine damaged, comes to St Saviour’s and asks for prayer. With low expectations Adam agrees but suddenly she claims she’s been healed and runs down the aisle.’

Now apart from its lack of acknowledgment of the number of ‘insiders’ on Rev’s writing and advisory teams (there are generous handfuls of ‘Rev’s in the credits at the end of each episode!), and the point about comedy that it misses in imagining that somehow Rev’s portrayal of the Church of England should be a bit like the BBC’s policy on party political balance, what really annoyed me about James Mumford’s review is its complete inability to acknowledge faith, personal and shared, as written all over, and under, every moment of drama and comedy in Rev. It’s particularly ironic, in fact, that Mumford was so impatient to criticise the programme that he couldn’t even wait for its Easter morning to come.

My 5 year-old son broke his arm just before the Easter holidays. Well, technically, in fact, he had his arm broken. He’s had no sense of anger at the person who did it, but has been deeply sad about missing the first half of the summer term’s football training. He’s obsessed with football, and when we’re out and about, or just in the back garden, he can’t be restrained from kicking a football about, or even making ambitious sliding tackles on someone else who happens to have the ball. As concerned parents, we regularly have to remind him he’s broken his arm – but because his arm is in a plaster cast, it seems he imagines he’s invincible. Yes, something went wrong, he knows, but nothing further can go wrong now, he reckons.

Plenty of my fellow Christians seem to operate with a faith either of the ‘invincible plaster cast’ variety, or of the hypothetical healing story variety. Resurrection faith is either protection, or liberation, from the tragedies of day-to-day reality. It happens instantly, and it lasts for ever. Easter morning comes, and everything from now on is as bright as the mid-day sun.

But the Easter faith that I know doesn’t work like that. Healing, where I’ve witnessed it, seems to be mostly a life-time of ‘two steps forward, one step back’ (and that’s at the most positive end of the maths). Lots of stuff – trauma from the past, feelings of inadequacy, fears about the future – never ‘goes away’. There are lots of decisions we make, with the best possible intentions and good faith, that seem to cause as much harm as they do good. We feed our beloved dogs chocolate because we know they love it, and then they die. A plaster cast on an arm doesn’t stop us falling off a climbing frame and breaking a leg.

In Hodge Hill, we’ve got into a tradition of keeping our ‘Easter vigil’ on a patch of wasteland, at the edge of our estate, that’s been abandoned for decades. Much of it is knitted with brambles, and a dumping ground for fly-tippers. And we meet there, as the sun goes down on Easter Eve, and we light our lanterns, and we tell stories. Rarely are they stories where everyone lives happily ever after. Many of them are stories which catch tiny glimpses of healing and life and hope, but amidst fragilities and struggles and brokenness that simply don’t go away. That wilderness gathering is a place of lament, as much if not more than a place of hope.

And then we return, the next morning. It is still a thorny, rubbish-strewn wasteland. And all we do is light a candle, and shout – with the same neighbour-annoying loudness of Adam and his friends – ‘Alleluia, Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluia!’ And then we carry the candle through the streets of our estate, and into church. It gets blown out constantly, by the slightest breath of wind, or by our movement as we walk. And we have to painstakingly re-light it at every stopping-point along our route.

Later in the morning, and on every Sunday throughout the 7 weeks of Eastertide, we pass the light from that Easter candle through our gathered congregation, from person to person – an awkward, sometimes uncomfortably slow, process, clumsily passing on the little flame of one tea-light to the next. And every Sunday morning in Eastertide too, we make a space for people to share their ‘resurrection stories’: again, often in awkward silence, waiting what sometimes seems an eternity to ‘hear to speech’ a few, often quite tentative and stumbling, testimonies to glimpses of healing, forgiveness and renewal amid life’s ongoing hurts, struggles and tragedies.

We still do a fair bit of shouting and singing, but I hope something of what we do is faithful to our reading of the gospel stories of resurrection. A sense that it doesn’t all suddenly turn out right, that fear and bewilderment accompany resurrection, that there are slow, painful journeys of ‘working through’, and that when disciples return to the city with good news, they are also returning to a place of threat, vulnerability and violence, much of which they find they themselves are implicated in. As theologian Shelly Rambo teases out at length, in her reflections on those who live with the memory of trauma, there is a sense in which, even come Easter Day, the trauma of Good Friday remains – the enduring, broken ‘middle space’ of Holy Saturday becomes the space in which we work through what it means for love to also be part of that ‘remainder’. Or, in Adam’s words, ‘you won’t let me go, apparently – is this what resurrection is?’

The Easter morning gathering of the cracked, the broken and the divided, slipping through the prised-open door of St Saviour’s with their Easter candle and a baby to baptise, embody perfectly the shared faith of the Christian church as I know it. Even the Archdeacon is there, leaving aside for the moment his preoccupation with ‘church growth’ – and his preoccupation too, in perhaps a telling parallel, with himself. We know in that moment that Adam has not left the priesthood – has not even yet left St Saviour’s, even though he will do. And although perhaps in this moment the script does not quite do justice to the faith we see – those gathered are united through their belief in Adam, we’re told, even though it is clear that’s far from the full story – we do see in Adam’s ‘grace and anger’ – which his wife Alex saw in him many years before, for which she first loved him, that which makes him a priest – not the saviour of St Saviour’s, but a visible, truthful, authentically humble, doggedly persevering, and quite infectious, resurrection faith. “Blessed are the cracked,” as a recent travelling companion of mine has written, “for they shall give light.”

Holy Saturday reflections

As well as my own wanderings/wonderings here, I wanted to share some of the best from today:


Reflections on Holy Saturday with Shelly Rambo, author of 'Spirit & Trauma: A Theology of Remaining'

Giles Fraser, 'The one day when Christians and atheists sing from the same hymn sheet'

Rachel Held Evans, 'Holy Week for doubters'

Barbara Brown Taylor, 'Learning to wait in the dark'

And this wonderful poem, that sums up what a little handful of us in Hodge Hill have been doing this evening, in a wasteland on the edge of our estate:


We told our stories -
That’s all
We sat and listened to
each other
and heard the journeys
of each soul.
We sat in silence
entering each one’s pain and
sharing each one’s joy.
We heard love’s longing
and the lonely reachings-out
for love and affirmation.
We heard of dreams
shattered.
And visions fled.
Of hopes and laughter
turned stale and dark.
We felt the pain of
isolation and
the bitterness
of death.
But in each brave and
lonely story
God’s gentle life
broke through
and we heard music in
the darkness
and smelt flowers in
the void.
We felt the budding
of creation
in the searchings of
each soul
and discerned the beauty
of God’s hand in
each muddy, twisted path.
And his voice sang
in each story
his life sprang from
each death.
Our sharing became
one story
of a simple lonely search
for life and hope and
oneness
in a world which sobs
for love.
And we knew that in
our sharing
God’s voice with
mighty breath
was saying
love each other and
take each other’s hand.
For you are one
though many
and in each of you
I live.
So listen to my story
and share my pain
and death.
Oh, listen to my story
and rise and live
with me.


(Edwina Gateley, in Celebrating Women)

Holy Saturday & brutal Empires: where are we?

"My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"

It is yesterday's cry, but it echoes through today. 'Holy Saturday', this 'in-between' day which, if we put ourselves in the place of those who went through it for the first time, was no kind of 'in-between' but simply 'the day after'. The loss, the grief, the trauma fresh and raw of what they have so recently witnessed. And the future, if anything, full of fear, anxiety... and emptiness.

Jesus' question - just before he died - was 'where is God?'. It is a fair one, for all of us, on days like today. But there is the parallel question too: 'where are we?'.

The dominant story of Jesus' death tells of the disciples - male - who betray him, deny him, abandon him. A community, broken, which breaks up, fragments, disperses, dissolves.

At the edges of the dominant story, submerged, overlooked, is a counter-story. Of a handful of women, who stay, and wait, and watch - albeit from a distance. Who, after the death, take the body down from the cross and lay it to rest, do for it what needs to be done, before Friday sunset and the beginning of the Sabbath prevent any further activity.

There are parallels - I don't want to claim any more than that - with the excavative work of Jewish feminist theologian Melissa Raphael's reflections on the Holocaust (The Female Face of God at Auschwitz). The mainstream of post-holocaust theology, she argues, has shied away from finding any 'place' for God in Auschwitz - rightly rejecting the ancient tradition of biblical and rabbinic Judaism which 'saw suffering as the divine punishment for Israel's transgression or disobedience', but going further, speaking of God's 'hiddenness' in Auschwitz, as divine mystery, as a deferral to human freedom, or, most radically, as morally complicit by 'turning a blind eye to Jewry's abuse'. God did not protect or save his people, so God either 'turned his face away' from Auschwitz or (as in Elie Wiesel's most well-known work, Night) God died there.

But for Raphael, these theological traditions fail for being patriarchal through and through - even in their most radical 'protest' form: 'the classical attribute[s] of omnipotence and mercy [are] still predicated of God and the protester is angry that God chose to refrain from its exercise.' In evidence-driven modernity especially, the 'dissonance' in a story of a God 'who promises protection and then, empirically, fails to deliver it' leads to one conclusion: 'God can no longer be trusted'. If, as in Psalm 22, God is 'one who abandons us and is silent in the face of our suffering,' says Raphael, then 'there can be little to experientially distinguish this God's silence from his non-existence.' It is with the 'Who?' as much as with the 'Where?' of God in Auschwitz that Raphael is concerned: 'what is to be distrusted is not God but a particular model or figure of God'; 'God's silence in Auschwitz was the silence of an omnipotent God-king who was never there in the first place, but was one who reigned in the minds of those who required divine sanction for their own hierarchical rule'.

Into the silence left behind with the disappearance of this patriarchal 'god', Raphael painstakingly retrieves echoes of a ‘counter-tradition’ from within Judaism, and a ‘counter-testimony’ from Auschwitz. In contrast to an ‘interventionist’ God, with power over life and death, who, for some reason, absents himself from Auschwitz, Raphael seeks to uncover a God who is first and foremost present. ‘Presence, a keeping watch, is a function of love. A present God paces back and forth, circling the object of her concern; an absent God seems to have walked away’. Judaism has traditionally named the immanence of God ‘Shekhinah’ – and this is the name Raphael seeks to rediscover as being most faithful to the God who did not forsake the Jews of Auschwitz: Shekhinah is ‘the real presence of a suffering God’ – not, as in Christian tradition, incarnate in a human individual, but with, among, even as the assembled community of Jewish men and women. The ‘power’ of God in Auschwitz, Raphael argues, was not in God’s ability to stop the destruction of relationship – what a theology of ‘covenant’ affirms, however, is ‘the infinite flow of God’s power’ to renew relationship. Furthermore, it is in the embodied relationships of the people of Israel that this ‘transformatory power’ of love ‘makes itself felt in the world’ – paradigmatically in the act of welcome, ‘the one seeing and opening to the other’.

Raphael retrieves and uncovers, however, not just a largely overlooked theological tradition, but also the largely overlooked stories of courageous, persistent physical care by women and among women in the camps of Auschwitz. The Holocaust attempted – so often successfully – to isolate human beings from each other, and desecrate their personhood to the point of erasing it, through the destruction of the gas chambers and the mud and filth of the camps. One woman, Olga Lengyel, recalled the ‘struggle to overcome the disgust we felt for our companions, and for ourselves’. But struggle they did: with defiance, longing for liberation, love and the most basic practicality, the testimonies of many women in Auschwitz describe how moments of touch, wiping, and washing – even the barest, most ineffective gestures towards genuine washing – became moments of restoration of relationship and personhood, whether for the living, the dying, or the dead.

In that place where Jewish women’s personhood ‘was getting ever less perceptible’, so too, consequently, was the presence of God. ‘Shekhinah did not hide her face,’ rather, it was hidden by ‘the holocaustal assault’ itself; when human faces were hidden behind ‘the accretion of filth’, so too was God ‘de-faced’. And yet, in the similarly barely perceptible – because not powerfully dramatic or explicitly ‘religious’ – ‘ordinary’ actions of women, in the midst of the ‘wholly non-ordinary’ conditions of Auschwitz – in the simple, emblematic action of ‘wiping filth from a face’ – God’s face too was made visible to those with eyes to see it:

when a woman lifted up her cast down face to the summons of her mother, daughter, sister, or friend it caught the reflected light of the Shekhinah on its upturned surface, reflecting the glory or kavod of God’s face back into the world – even a world which was, for them, over, and a world which, become Auschwitz, had turned God away at the gates. … Rabbinic midrash compares the Shekhinah or divine presence to light, to what shines. ‘Washed’ by ersatz coffee, urine, brackish water or love alone, the reflective face lit God’s way into, through and out of, Auschwitz.[1]

Melissa Raphael is doing Jewish, not Christian, theology; her focus is Auschwitz, not Golgotha. I find myself wanting to share her reflections and her un/earthed stories primarily for their own sake, wary of repeating, in even a small way, Auschwitz’s evil of turning human beings into ‘functionaries’ rather than ‘subjects’, ‘means’ rather than ‘ends’. But reading Raphael as a Christian has been revelatory for me: the testimonies of the Jewish women of Auschwitz shed new light on the face of the God we share; their stories open up the possibility of recognising God’s presence where God is seemingly nowhere to be seen. When those around me are singing of the Father who ‘turns his face away’ unable to look at the one who bears ‘my sin upon His shoulders’, from my guts I agree with Raphael’s verdict: this God – and the theologies that make so much of both His omnipotent ‘power to protect’ and human ‘free will’ – ‘can no longer be trusted’.

And  Raphael prompts me, as a Christian, to search the witness of the gospels for, and bring to light, the counter-story of the crucifixion: those women who wait, and watch, and who do the little they can, with care and tenderness, for the dead body of Jesus. Included among them, too, are the woman who, days before, extravagantly anointed Jesus - who Jesus himself said 'anointed me beforehand for my burial'. And also Joseph of Arimathea, quiet ally of these women, who appeals to Pilate for the body, and gives his newly-cut tomb for the burial.

Melissa Raphael dares us to perceive the ‘crucial link between God’s being made present and the seeing and touching of faces and bodies that have been made unseeable and untouchable’; she challenges us to read ‘the religio-ethical response’ of ‘staying by the side of the other’, as itself ‘the essence of presence’. Might we also dare to imagine that, in the small, faithful fragment of loving community which accompanies the body of Christ from cross to tomb – a community of women and men who embody their love in purposeful, socially dangerous, physical care – there is incarnated the abiding presence of God?

I am helped a little further along this path by another feminist theologian, this time a Quaker, Rachel Muers, who, in her careful deconstruction of our cultural fascination with 'the power of speech' and the 'war of words' which silences the weaker and more marginal voices, instead calls our attention to 'the strength of listening'. Building on the work of Nelle Morton among feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s, Muers suggests that listening, rather than being a response to prior speaking, is actually itself prior to speech: if an environment of attentive listening is created, it can 'hear to speech' the as yet unheard:

women ... were enabled to tell their stories and describe their experiences by the prior and continuing presence of the listening group. As Morton saw it, the speech that emerged as a result of the “hearing to speech” was genuinely new; stories and insights were articulated in ways that the women in question had not previously found to be possible. This speech was only able to come about in the context of a “depth hearing.” Women described being “heard to their own stories,” being heard “all the way down” to the point at which utterance became possible. The whole process drew Morton to speculate about what could have been involved in “a hearing that is more than acute listening. A hearing that is a direct transitive verb, that evokes speech – new speech that has never been spoken before.”[2]

Might we be able to say, then, that the women who watch and wait near Jesus' cross, are also listening - in fact, hearing him to speech in his cry of God-forsakenness? Might we even dare to say that the silence of God at Golgotha is the silence not of an absent patriarchal saviour, but of a present, hearing God, embodied in those women?

This is, in case you missed it, deeply political stuff. In the face of a brutal Empire that dehumanises, marginalises and finally disposes of its troublemakers, its 'abnormal' and 'deficient' ones, its 'human waste' - these faithful women witness (they see, so they can tell), hear (enable the voice of protest to be heard) and care (do what they can, physically, to rehumanise, against the system).

They also, critically, return. After the Sabbath day of rest, as soon as they can they return to the tomb, carrying spices prepared to anoint the body, to finish the 'last rites' for their loved one who has died. Undeterred by the apparently immovable stone sealing the tomb, they return anyway, wondering among themselves who they will find to shift it for them, but not paralysed by that not-knowing. And whatever they encounter there, mysterious and inexplicable though it may be, causes them to return again - to the city, where it has all just been happening; or (in some versions) to Galilee, where it all began. The message they go with is the injunction to 'go and see' - and, before long, emerges even more clearly as an injunction to enter the fray just as Jesus did, to live life in the midst of, but against the grain of, the Empire, and to engage others in that process of penitential, transformative engagement.

The women remind me of the work on mourning by the Jewish philosopher Gillian Rose, who reacts against what she calls 'aberrated mourning' or 'melancholy' in the face of suffering, brokenness and loss. While on the one hand, Rose rejects simplistic attempts to 'make sense', which fail to take the time to mourn and shut down questioning in efforts to regain 'security' (e.g. the 'heroic soldier', 'good versus evil' and 'redemptive violence' narratives), she also recoils against the tendency - particularly among many postmodern thinkers - to 'keep the wound open' in a passive melancholy without end. Instead, she proposes the self-reflective, active work of what she calls 'inaugurated mourning' which, as one of her commentators puts it, 'gives voice to suffering, creating a space for stories to be told and listened to - a space in which pain is acknowledged', but leads always towards a questioning, an attempting to understand - a 'contextualisation, towards a consideration of the broad social, political and historical processes that have influenced present circumstances', and a returning, a re-entering the fray - 'a being-in-the-world that is embedded both in local community and in wider social structures' - rediscovering one's agency, however risky that might be.[3]

What Rose describes, and names elsewhere as the work of dwelling in the 'broken middle', is hardly a triumphant resurrection narrative. But then, I'm not entirely sure the gospels offer us one of those either. What the Christian church offers us is an Easter season - 7 whole weeks of it, longer than Lent - to begin to grapple with what the absence and elusive-but-transformative presence of the risen Jesus means for us, and for the world. I am left wondering - a good Holy Saturday practice - whether Rose's 'broken middle' may be the space within which we are invited to do our grappling...

---

[1] Melissa Raphael, Female Face of God, pp.105-6. 

[2] Rachel Muers, Keeping God's Silence, p.50

[3] Kate Schick, Gillian Rose: A Good-Enough Justice, pp.46-51

Waiting for dawn to break (Midnight Mass sermon 2013)

[a bit of a rough and ready draft, with deep gratitude to Julian Dobson, whose brilliant blogpost ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’ (http://livingwithrats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-truce-and-common-christmas-story.html) helped both shape and 'earth' my more disparate thoughts]

The rabbi asked his students: “How can we determine the hour of the dawn, when the night ends and the day begins?” One of the students suggested: “When from a distance you can see the difference between a dog and a sheep?” “No,” answered the rabbi. “Is it when you can tell the difference between a fig tree and a grapevine?” asked a second student. “No,” the rabbi said. “Please tell us the answer then,” said the students. “It is dawn,” said the wise teacher, “when you look into the face of another human being and you have enough light in you to recognize your brother or sister. Until then it is night, and darkness is still with us.”

Two years ago, in the middle of this church, a tent appeared, just before Advent, with a sign over its opening, ‘Welcome to the Kingdom of God’. It was a sign of revolutionary hope, at a time when tents were springing up all over the place, from Egypt’s Tahrir Square, to Wall Street and the City of London – canvas occupations of places the powerful thought they had under control; places where, all of a sudden, the hungry were being fed, all who were sick were being treated, the voiceless were being heard, impossible dreams were being dreamed.

But then, what? What has changed? A question echoing down the years not just from 2011, but from two millennia before. “Beneath the angel strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong.” What has changed?

In the House of Commons last week, government ministers and their colleagues laughed and jeered, or just didn’t bother turning up, for a debate on the causes of the spiralling increase in foodbank use, and then within days launched vicious attacks on the Trussell Trust, Church Action on Poverty, and others for daring to ask why people are going hungry in one of the richest nations in the world.

Less reported, for the first time this Christmas, people in prison have been banned from receiving parcels from their loved ones, including stationery, books, and clothes – under new rules introduced by the Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling.

And then are stories which won’t reach the newspapers at all, of men and women, young and old, stripped of even their pittance of jobseeker’s allowance over Christmas, for reasons as arbitrary and as unjust as not being able to attend the JobCentre because of a hospitalising illness.[i]

It is still night, and darkness is still with us. There is not enough light, it seems, to look into the faces of our fellow human beings and recognise them as our sisters and brothers. We are still too immersed in our own ideologies, our own self-interests, our own agendas, to hear the love-song the angels bring.

And yet...

In a Mexican slum there is a destitute old woman who each year puts up an extensive nativity set. The Christ Child is in the centre, of course, and around him she places dozens and dozens of figures of people and animals. This is no matched set! None of the figurines match; and they are not in scale with each other, some only an inch high, some several feet tall. She just clutters the set with whatever figurines she can find. But there is a great truth hidden in this mish-mash of nativity characters. Although the senora cannot read or write, she has seen something that is all too easily missed. In the Bethlehem stable, there is room for all. From the highest to the lowest, from king to shepherd, from old woman to new born baby.

On one level, it is merely a chaotic, mismatching nativity set. An eccentric tradition. A futile gesture. But on another level, it ‘prefigures’ a different world, a place where ‘what-is-not-yet’ breaks in to ‘what-is’. Just like the alternative spaces that Occupy Wall Street, Occupy London Stock Exchange, and many more, created. However fragile, however temporary, however imperfect. Places in which to practice living differently. Places where we can learn to recognise each other as sisters and brothers.[ii]

The pictures of Rembrandt are striking in many ways, but perhaps most so for the way he uses light and shade. Have a look at his picture of the Nativity. There is a man with a lamp, but the stable is not lit by the lamp. The light comes from the manger, the light from the newborn Jesus lights up the faces of those around him, enabling us to see them, and enabling them to see each other.[iii] This is where night ends, and dawn begins. In the stable. In the manger.

On the day of Nelson Mandela’s funeral, I led a small, quiet Requiem Mass in this church. I was accompanied by five men, as they remembered the uncle of one of them, who had recently died. They came from five different African countries, countries which have, at times, been at war with each other. Congo, Burundi, South Sudan, and others. And as we remembered those who had died, and shared bread and wine together, we recalled the words Archbishop Rowan Williams had used recently to describe Nelson Mandela:

“Most politicians,” he said, “represent an interest group, a community of people who vote for them and whose interests they serve. Nelson Mandela was different; he represented a community that did not yet exist, a community he hoped would come into being.”

‘Prefiguring’ a different world, a place where ‘what-is-not-yet’ breaks in to ‘what-is’. A place not fully a reality in today’s South Africa, by any means. But a place glimpsed, touched, tasted.

And I was reminded too of the words of another Archbishop, Christoph Munizihirwa, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Bukavu, Zaire, who was killed by Rwandan soldiers in the process of surrendering himself, in the hope that two companions might be able to escape in his car:

“One cannot wait for conditions to be easy in order to act,” said Archbishop Munzihirwa, not long before his death. “People of good will must never be disheartened... There are things that can be seen only with eyes that have cried... In the midst of it all, the seed sown in the soil of our heart slowly germinates. God knows that there is no better way for him to express himself than through the weakness of a child. This is love telling us that it comes unarmed.”

The seed in the soil. The light in the stable. The tent in the city square. The nativity scene in the slum. The prisoner who forgives his enemies. The martyred Archbishop. The child in the manger. These are the small, fragile beginnings of revolution. And those in power do not like them one bit. And so they send armed police in to clear the tents. They attack churches and faith organisations for ‘scaremongering’, and, bizarrely, for creating the demand for food banks in the first place. And a threatened king in Jerusalem orders the massacre of all Bethlehem’s babies.

And what do we do? We keep on beginning the revolution. Returning to the stable. Planting new seeds. Putting up new tents. Forgiving new enemies. Hearing to speech as-yet-unheard voices.

There is a place not far from Reading in Berkshire called ‘Christmas Common’. It is the site, according to the history books, of a Christmas truce in 1643 during the English Civil War. A dangerous, if fleeting, moment of daring to recognise enemies as brothers or sisters, even in the darkness of the battlefield. But Commons like Christmas Common – and perhaps even a Common much closer to home – are also enduring places of shared resource, open to and cared for a whole community, places where ‘commoners’ of all backgrounds and circumstances can meet each other as equals, as neighbours, as sisters and brothers, and work, and play, and eat, and celebrate together.[iv] We have a dream for just such a common in the wasteland we’ve renamed ‘Bromford Meadow’. A seed sown in the soil, slowly germinating.

Our twice-weekly 'Open Door' is another such space where 'what-is-not-yet' breaks in to 'what-is'. It is what it says: an open door. And a warm welcome, a hot cup of tea, some friendly faces, and listening ears. A place where people might come in with 'I need', but discover among friends an 'I can', perhaps for the first time.

We get a taste of ‘what-is-not-yet’, too, every time we share communion together, whether it’s shared in a circle, where we can see the faces of our sisters and brothers; or shared in a moment together, each waiting to eat until all present have food in their hands – our own small ‘prefiguring’ of the time when no one goes hungry.

In 1990, the year that Nelson Mandela made his ‘long walk to freedom’, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (who also died this year) was translating a Greek epic telling the story of the Trojan War. It gave him some of his most well-quoted words. They are words for a night like this, as we celebrate once again the Word-made-flesh, and as we wait for dawn to break:

“History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme” 

---

[i] I’m deeply grateful to Julian Dobson for highlighting these 3 examples in his brilliant blog post, ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’ (http://livingwithrats.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/a-truce-and-common-christmas-story.html)

[ii] See e.g. reflections on Occupy’s politics of ‘mutual recognition’ http://www.opendemocracy.net/participation-now/rc-smith-richard-gunn-adrian-wilding/alternative-horizons-understanding-occupys-po

[iii] E.g. http://my.opera.com/Anvui/albums/showpic.dml?album=5055882&picture=76437382

[iv] Julian Dobson, ‘A truce and a common: a Christmas story’

Living abundantly within limits: resilience, ABCD & intentional community

There's an exciting feeling of 'things coming together' at the moment. I'm someone who gets excited easily, but this feels particularly significant. It's a convergence of different trains of thought, but also of different trajectories of action - and when the thinking and the doing start joining up, then I reckon it's worth taking quite seriously.

One of the bits of 'joined up doing' is around food. I've blogged several times here about the rise and rise of FoodBanks, and on some of the many dangers of embracing them with enthusiasm. Locally, one of the things we're trying to work out is how to link up the desperate - and politically disgraceful - need for emergency food provision with opportunities for those 'in need' to maintain (or rediscover) some dignity, pride, a sense of giftedness, and the possibility of being a valuable contribution within their community. Inspired in part by stories from 'The Stop' in Toronto and other initiatives closer to home, but perhaps even more so by some of the passionate and gifted local people who are wanting to work together to may our neighbourhood a better place, we're exploring on our estate how we can develop 'community gardening teams' to help people with their gardens, pass on gardening skills and wisdom, and start transforming patches of wasteland into attractive, wild and fruitful green spaces. We're exploring how we can connect up neighbours with gardens they can't care for, with neighbours who want to grow stuff but don't have the space. We're exploring how we can get Firs & Bromford growing fruit and veg in every available plot of land, to supply a regular 'farmers' market / cooperative shop / community cafe' with fresh produce, alongside home-made jams and freshly-baked bread, alongside healthy cooking and eating sessions, and bring-and-share community lunches featuring speciality dishes from our many different cultures. The plan is that those who temporarily find themselves in need of emergency food supplies can also find themselves much more permanently immersed in a thriving ecology of growing together and eating together, giving and receiving, learning and sharing.

This movement towards local food links up with some 'big thinking' being done in the interrelated and overlapping fields called 'transition', 'permaculture' and 'community resilience'. An incredibly important report was published a few weeks ago entitled 'Climate after growth: why environmentalists must embrace post-growth economics and community resilience'. It was co-written by Rob Hopkins, the inspirational founder of the Transition Network, which began not too many years ago in the Devon town of Totnes, and is now a global phenomenon. At the heart of the report is the (deeply political) argument that 'the nearly ubiquitous belief of our elected officials ... that addressing the climate crisis must come second to ensuring economic growth' is utterly 'wrongheaded', and for two reasons: firstly 'because it underestimates the severity of the climate crisis', and secondly 'because it presupposes the old economic "normal" of robust growth can be revived'. Instead, the authors argue, we have entered into an era of "new normals" - in terms of our energy supply and consumption (because 'the era of cheap and easy fossil fuels is over'), our climate (with dramatic changes and severe shocks becoming a rapidly-intensifying reality) and economics (because consistent growth is no longer possible, after the end of cheap oil, and with debt mountains growing ever-larger).

Adjusting to these 'new normals' requires 'one common strategy', they argue: building community resilience. In practice, this includes developing 'community-owned, distributed, renewable energy production', 'sustainable local food systems', 'new cooperative business models, sharing economies, re-skilling, and more'. All of these initiatives are 'inherently local', and start small, but are already 'spreading rapidly and creating tangible impacts'. 'Done right', say the authors, they can 'serve as the foundation of a whole new economy - an economy comprised of people and communities that thrive within the real limits of our beautiful but finite planet'.

It's hopeful language, and the initiatives described in the report and the many more found within the Transition Network are real embodiments of hope-in-action. Across the world, at a neighbourhood level, people are beginning to do what is necessary to live within the limits of 'what is possible' for the future of our planet, and for our generations to come. Although the initiatives are almost entirely happening 'from the grassroots', it is, in many ways, a movement 'from the outside-in': it begins with the urgent, global limits on what is possible for our planetary sustainability (energy, climate and economy), which shapes action at a local level. Thinking global, acting local.

A lot of this resonates with an approach I've explored here a lot, that of asset-based community development (ABCD). But there is, I think, a difference of direction. If the direction of 'transition' and 'resilience' is from the 'outside-in', from what is possible global to what is necessary locally, then the direction of ABCD is, in many ways, from the 'inside-out', from what is necessary (locally) to what is possible (locally) - thinking local, acting local. Our basic human needs for health and wellbeing, safety and security, raising flourishing children, and ageing and dying well - among others - are best met by, and within, our local communities, through neighbourly relationships and communal activity. ABCD points us to the abundant possibilities we discover within community, when we decide to do 'what is necessary' ourselves. This is not - emphatically not! - to say there is not a place for institutions, and for the state as the 'institution par excellence'. But it is to put those institutions in their place, to be clear about their limits. We cannot know what we need (in the way of support or 'expertise' from such institutions, professionals, systems), until we know what we already have. We need to start with the question, 'what can we as a community do for ourselves?' before we can ask the question 'what do we need other people to do with us, or for us?'.

Into this swirling mix of connections I need to drop another one. This may be the point where some readers have a knee-jerk reaction towards the door (or the 'close' button), but I'd plead with you to stay with me, if you possibly can. The 'third dimension' for me in this big 'join the dots' exercise is 'intentional, Christian community'. 'Intentional' in the sense that hopefully is reasonably obvious: not just 'doing church on Sundays', but a deep, reflective commitment to 'living in community', 24/7, and drawing on the depths of our faith tradition to shape and resource that 'living'. Here in Hodge Hill, we're exploring this 'intentionality' in a number of different ways.

As a church, we've just launched an 'offer' - to congregation members, and to those who count us as their friends and travelling-companions - of a twice-yearly conversation with a 'spiritual companion', to explore our own personal sense of 'life balance', to be thankful for where it feels 'good', and to identify areas where we'd appreciate some help, or where we'd like to try something new. The 7 'dimensions of spiritual well-being' that we've decided to structure these conversations around are:

1. CONNECTING, welcoming and listening - finding ways to connect with other people, to offer hospitality and welcome others, and to be people who listen with care and attention, to friends, neighbours and strangers
2. DOING (with and for others) - finding ways to share our God-given gifts and skills, alongside and for the benefit of others, as well as ways to encounter God's presence in the work of our daily lives - nurturing humility in service, and action-in-solidarity
3. Presence, healing and PEACE-MAKING - seeking God's 'shalom' (wholeness, peace, justice, and the integrity of the natural world) for our lives, our communities, and in our world, through our relationships, our actions, our choices and our lifestyle
4. GIVING & RECEIVING - finding opportunities to generously share our gifts, time and money with others, and to receive in gratitude from others
5. LEARNING - broadening our minds and our horizons, and learning new skills, and in particular, going deeper into the Bible and 'inhabiting' the Christian story, firing our imaginations in new ways
6. PRAYING - finding ways (which work for us, now) of holding ourselves, our lives, our neighbours and our world to God, and opening ourselves to be sustained, energised, inspired and challenged by God - a 'mindfulness' that renews and sustains our compassion
7. RESTING & PLAYING - finding spaces to have fun, recharge our batteries, be ourselves, and enjoy the company of others - including celebration and feasting - renewing and sustaining all that we are and all that we do!

Five of these are remarkably similar to, or certainly deeply resonant with, the '5 Ways to Wellbeing' promoted by the (non-faith-affiliated) new economics foundation: 'connect', 'be active', 'take notice', 'keep learning' and 'give'. They're things that are good for us - for all of us - and we think they happen to be good for our communities and our world too. Alongside this 'offer' of companionship, we've been exploring, for some time, the possibility of a 'community house', where people can come and live and 'do community together', while actively seeking to build relationships of trust and friendship with their neighbours, and nurture a place of hospitality and prayer. A place of both 'engagement' and 'retreat' - an experiment in 'living a balanced and connected life' in the midst of a busy, urban neighbourhood. As I've blogged recently, we've had our ups and downs with this dream, but we're beginning to see some real, concrete (well, brick and grass, at least) possibilities emerging - but also the possibility of deepening and broadening the 'dispersed' (rather than 'residential') community of those of us who already live and/or work locally, by exploring and developing a shared 'rule of life' which might connect our local (and sometimes more explicitly political) 'activism' with some spiritual, relational, earthed 'foundations', in a way that might just possibly prove attractive to other friends and travelling companions in other places.

Now I realise the content of these last few paragraphs may well feel, in the words of one of my closest friends, 'a bit of a left turn'. But for some of us, at least, this is where all the dots begin to join up: the global and the local, the human and the non-human worlds, the necessary and the possible, living within limits and living abundantly, the 'outside-in' and the 'inside-out'... 'Spirituality' is a notoriously woolly, slippery word, but if it describes something that is about the whole of our being and our living and our relating, that allows us to embrace tensions and contradictions and 'otherness' and new discoveries, that gives us a deep grounding that allows some kind of 'centre to hold' while 'things fall apart', then what I am talking about here is the beginning of a spirituality of resilience and community building. Just the beginning. There is plenty of work to be done to 'flesh it out', articulate it, and live it out thoroughly and painstakingly and fully. But a beginning is the only place we can start, and this is my beginning, and potentially a beginning for many of us in Hodge Hill, and perhaps even beyond.

There is, inevitably, at least one more thing to be said. And that is to reiterate the point that 'doing what is possible and what is necessary' at the local level is no kind of excuse to let governments and those invested in the world's money-systems off the hook. We need not just for local experiments to become infectious, but for a growing movement for the just redistribution of money, resources, power and value so that 'what is possible and what is necessary' can be done on national and global scales too.

I'm currently reading two books about 'revolution' (among many others!). One is by a Christian, Ray Simpson, the founder of the Community of Saint Aidan & Saint Hilda. Ray's book describes The Cowshed Revolution: a new society created by downwardly mobile Christians. Features of this 'new society' include:

1. a relational economy (rather than a selfish one)
2. a sense of continuity (between, in Edmund Burke's words, 'those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born')
3. a 'freedom that is accountable to natural justice' (where 'the market' is 'harnessed to social responsibility')
4. subsidiarity (the principle 'that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organisation which can be done just as well by a smaller and simpler organisation')
5. restorative justice 
6. land cannot be bought without taking into account the natural and human life it supports
7. the media celebrate the common good, not what degrades
8. social wrongdoers are named and shamed through public information procedures
9. those who model goodness are honoured

While Ray has gathered plenty of evidence of small-scale, largely Christian-rooted, experiments with this 'downwardly mobile' trajectory, there aren't many pointers to it 'taking root' more widely. My other book, on the other hand, is by social theorist Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, and it describes some recent, large-scale revolutions - however partial and faltering - and how real change has swept across nations, continents, and the planet itself. From Egypt to Occupy Wall Street, Castells analyses the dynamics of these revolutions, and identifies some common features:

• they are networked in multiple forms (not just electronically)
• they become a movement by occupying the urban space - 'challenging the disciplinary institutional order by reclaiming the space of the city for its citizens'
• movements are local and global at the same time
• movements are viral (because 'seeing and listening to protests somewhere else ... inspires mobilization because it triggers hope of the possibility of change')
• they are usually leaderless movements, horizontal and cooperative, where the transition from outrage to hope is accomplished by creating highly reflective 'spaces for deliberation'
• they are, at least in principle, non-violent movements
• they are rarely programmatic, but are aimed at changing the values of society, and so are political in a fundamental sense
• they generate their own form of 'timeless' time - on the one hand living day by day, 'not knowing when the eviction will come, organizing their living as if this could be the alternative society of their dreams'; on the other hand, 'in their debates and in their projects they refer to an unlimited horizon of possibilities of new forms of life and community emerging from the practice of the movement' - 'they live in the moment in terms of their experience, and they project their time in the future of history-making in terms of their anticipation'

As a Christian theologian and (at least would-be) community activist, Castells analysis excites me. It raises the possibility of thinking globally, acting locally, with the possibility of infectious, global consequences. It challenges me to sustain those reflective 'spaces for deliberation' among my friends, co-workers and neighbours, and to venture together into those urban spaces that need reclaiming for us citizens. And it highlights what we Christians call an 'eschatological' perspective, of seeking to 'live the future in the now' such that no experiment in 'doing things differently' is irrelevant.

The dots are joining up for me. I wonder how they join up for you...?

We had a dream: on hope deferred, and the connecting power of lament

We had a dream. Timely words, in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous speech. Timely perhaps, but the mood is one not of energised hope, but of crushing disappointment.

We had a dream: a dream of a 'community house' on our estate in east Birmingham; a place of community-within-community, where people would commit to 'doing community' in the deepest sense - living together, sharing the work of keeping the house going, pooling their income (vulnerable stuff!), and even more vulnerable, sharing their lives with each other with a level of intimacy that only comes when you regularly have to share a kitchen, a bathroom, a living space, and a generous dose of your soul, with all its ups and downs and rough edges, with other living, breathing, fragile, messy, human beings. And then 'doing community' in the wider sense too - getting to know and making friends with the neighbours around them, and opening their home outwards as a place of hospitality - with a really decent kitchen and an even bigger living/eating room, a place where big and small conversations could happen, and a place where people could, if they wanted or needed to, pause and pray.

That was our dream.

And we'd find the perfect place. It had been empty for the last 3 or 4 years. Before that, it had been the local clinic for families to come and meet with midwives and health visitors. A house that, with some work and investment, could accommodate 6 bedrooms upstairs, and a big kitchen, a huge living space, and one or two smaller rooms downstairs.

And even better, our bold and imaginative church council had found the money. From the sale of our old church site, with all the shock and loss and grief that had gone with that - but which has also released a great deal of vision, and energy, and passion for becoming again a church truly rooted in, and connected across, its local neighbourhoods - a vision of 'growing loving community, in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'. From that loss, possibilities have emerged and been grasped, and our church council had committed a really substantial amount of that sale money to this new venture.

And so yesterday morning, with dreams and visions, hopes and possibilities bubbling up inside us and bursting to come out, seven of us went to the auction. It had been a journey at least three years in the making. We'd waited a year and a bit for Birmingham City Council to do an 'options appraisal' on the old clinic building. We'd come within a hair's breadth of the Council agreeing to do a 'community asset transfer' on the building, in recognition of the potentially huge social impact of the plans we'd put to them. But money concerns had won the day, and they'd decided to auction it off to the highest bidder instead. We'd done our sums. It seemed pretty clear to us that a property developer wouldn't make any money on it, buying to convert into houses or flats to sell on again. We went with a lot of hope, and a banker's draft.

The auction was a bit like having your team get to the cup final, but the match only lasting 2 minutes. Our hearts were in our throats. We got into the bidding... but very quickly, the price went way beyond what we could afford, or justify for the building. It was sold to a property developer, for almost twice the auctioneers' guide price - a crazy price, that left even our agent lost for words.

In the blow of a hammer, our dreams and visions, our hopes and possibilities, were shattered. We left quickly, nothing to wait around for, and went away to drown our sorrows together in mugs of tea.

I was absolutely exhausted, drained. I still am today, 24 hours later. It feels in many ways like a bereavement. Echoes return to me of those two disciples of Jesus heading wearily back home to Emmaus after the events of Good Friday - "we had hoped..." they say, sharing with a stranger their shattered dreams, with the melancholy confusion of those who can't see any way ahead, any future worth contemplating. I suspect many of my companions at the auction felt similarly, and many more who had been waiting at the end of a phone for some news from us.

I still feel deeply sad. There's some anger bubbling away too, linked to some 'if only's... If only Birmingham City Council had stuck with their glimpse of a community-centred vision, held on to the possibilities of a building they owned as a real community asset, and not given in to the all-too-obvious pressure to raise money wherever they can - at the expense, ironically, of the communities they are meant to be serving. Because the money the Council gets from the sale, they will use to pay off debts from compensation claims, claims that have arisen because of the Council's discriminatory pay policy for many years - another 'if only'... And even bigger than particular decisions, by particular councillors or officers, I find myself with that big 'if only', knowing that yesterday, in that auction, money won - that all-consuming systemic lie that only money has the power to do and decide and determine the stories we live, that it is only in money's terms that we know what (and who) is valuable and what (and who) isn't, and that those with the most, win, and those with the least, lose. If only things were different...

I am transported back to what we Anglicans call 'Holy Saturday' - the day before Easter Day. Except in so many ways it's not 'the day before' - it's simply 'the day after'. The day after the crucifixion, the death. A day not of hope and anticipation - because in that first Holy Saturday there was nothing to anticipate or hope for. A day simply of nothingness. Of nothing to do. Nothing to hope for. No future to glimpse, no possibilities to reach out for. I've written before about what we did on Holy Saturday evening this year - simply sitting together in our local patch of 'wasteland', as the sun went down, sharing not so much 'stories of hope', as I think I'd initially intended, but stories of 'hope deferred', of hope longed-for. Sharing, perhaps more accurately, our laments, our deep, heart-breaking 'if only's. A lot of what one of my very good friends and co-workers here described himself doing yesterday:

Walking home found myself praying (As sometimes happens) about the days events and as I was naming situations, issues, people etc. I found myself shouting out: 'Bloody hell God there's a lot of shit going on!!!' Some might say that's disrespectful but it's what was on my heart #Lamenting #Faith

And I realise that there's something immensely significant in those moments. Over the past 18 months or so here in Hodge Hill, we've come to live and breathe the language of 'asset-based community development'. It's implicit or explicit in a lot of my blog reflections here. At its simplest, it's often said to be about putting relationships between neighbours - mutual, reciprocal relationships - at the heart of all we do, and "starting with what's strong, not what's wrong", with the 'assets', the 'gifts' of a neighbourhood and its people, rather than its 'problems' - approaching with a "glass half full" attitude rather than the more dominant "glass half empty" mindset. But however much truth there is in those sound-bites, there's an 'underside' that also needs articulating: the best kind of 'asset-based community development' is also, inevitably, 'vulnerability-based community development'. I was reminded of that in a powerful conversation with my good friend Cormac Russell just earlier this week. It is perhaps not irrelevant that the beginnings of 'ABCD' terminology emerged in a conversation between a community-builder and a powerful economist, and the 'assets' language was the economist wanting to translate the messy work of community building into the 'respectable' language of the academy. The language of 'gifts' is, I think, a much better 'fit' in the real world of neighbourhoods - and while our gifts may often be "what's strong" by our normal judgements, so often the most precious gifts we can share are our gifts of vulnerability, of fragility, of weakness. It can often be our vulnerabilities that drive us to connect with our neighbours, and it is almost always in our vulnerabilities, our 'daring to expose' something of ourselves that feels a little fragile, that we allow our more distanced relationships with strangers turn into the mutual, reciprocal relationships of passion and care that we call 'friendships'.

Bitter disappointments, losses, and pain can too often isolate us from other people, seal us off in our own private world of grief. Our Western so-called-'developed' society has crystallised and cemented technologies and expertise that do, and encourage, exactly that. We are pushed into ways of coping that are about creating and reinforcing securities, walls, defences around our vulnerabilities that allow us to project an external strength that enables us to 'keep fitting in' to socially acceptable patterns of behaviour.

But the 'empty half' of our glass can also, in some environments (or cultures, or conditions of hospitality, let's say), be precisely the thing that enables us to connect with others. What we call lament - grief and disappointment expressed, made public, shared - can clear a space, a breathing space, a waiting space, a listening space, which can enable genuine, deep, authentic community to grow.

In the waiting space that I find myself, with other good friends and travelling companions, currently inhabiting, I am wondering about that dream that felt so shattered in that auction room yesterday. I find myself wondering about the relationship between, on the one hand, the very obvious value of 'having a place' where 'we' can offer hospitality to others, and on the other hand, the deep-rooted longing for bricks and mortar that 'we' can call 'ours', at its most human a longing for home, but at its worst an 'edifice complex' that is more about security, control, and a kind of public power. I find myself wondering whether, and how, that intimacy of community, that vulnerable exposure to each other, that is found when you share a house, might yet be discovered and practised within a neighbourhood, even if we are, at times, divided by our bricks and mortar. I find myself wondering how much we, the church in Hodge Hill, are still being called to live out of our 'homelessness', our 'exile', our dependence on the hospitality of our neighbours - because in that experience and practice is something that profoundly connects us to many of our neighbours (near and far), and to the roots of our own faith - to our incarnate, homeless God. I find myself wondering whether there are times and seasons for these different ways of living - and whether this particular season is turning, or simply deepening. And I find myself wondering what strangers we might encounter, as we continue walking along this road, today, or tomorrow, or next week, or beyond, who might give to us a glimpse of a new future, a new possibility, springing up in the cracked earth of our current lament.

We had a dream.

Dreams are fragile, and we are invited to 'tread softly' on them. They can also, sometimes, be stubbornly persistent.

We have a dream. We are still here. We are waiting, lamenting, longing, looking, listening, wondering.

One great Irishman shared a treasure or two from another this week. Cormac Russell, echoing Seamus Heaney, invited us to "walk on air against your better judgement".

We continue walking here.

Re-imagining & insurrection: starting from the local

Many of the pieces of 'grit' that for me challenge, nurture and inspire the pearls of bright ideas begin in conversation with my great friend Tim. He's a CEO of a great little charity called Worth Unlimited, that works with some of the most marginalised young people in some of the most marginalised communities around the country, 'building hope, unlocking potential, realising worth' as their strapline puts it. He also happens to be a member of my congregation, and one of my local Labour councillors. We're both enmeshed in national, historical 'institutions', and although we might place ourselves somewhere in the uncomfortable edges, borderlands, of each other's, neither of us can quite get away from them entirely.

Last night we were wrestling with the challenge and possibility of 'reimagining' our society, something I began to explore in my last blog post. Tim suggested that where the Occupy movement fell down was that they were asking exactly the right question at exactly the right time, but weren't able to clearly and coherently articulate an alternative to the neoliberal capitalist system that seemed - at least for a moment - to be crumbling around us. And then, it seemed, the moment passed, and the system continued on its merrily ruthless way, sustaining the wealth-amassing of the richest and slashing the incomes, the opportunities, the resources and the safety nets for the poorest. By contrast, Tim pointed out, the Amish communities in North America have, we suspect, sustained their simple way of life, barely touched by the global financial crises of the last few years. There are alternatives to the apparently all-consuming system - we just need to look for them, and have the imaginative courage to contemplate them.

'We need a new kind of Opposition', I argued in my last blog post. And Community Organising and widespread Time Banking, I suggested, are two key ways of finding it, and bridging the 'empathy deficit' which so poisons 'professional' and 'mass media' politics today. But there is more...

Before 'organising', there needs to be 'community'.

As a Christian theologian, I am reminded of the work of Stanley Hauerwas and those who have associated closely with him. Hauerwas, in a simplistic nutshell, argues long and hard that the Christian community - 'the church' in its local form - should be the location of an 'alternative society', where human beings are formed (from birth upwards) in a different way, with a different kind of imagination, speaking a different kind of language, and acting in a different kind of way, to that of those 'outside'. Hauerwas writes persuasively - and he could never be labelled 'conservative' in any conventional sense: he warmly embraces same-sex relationships, for example, he is unambiguously anti-capitalist, and he would give his life in non-violent resistance to the militarist violence of the world.

But there is more. As important as Hauerwas' 'turn to community' is, highlighting as it does the kind of 'ideal' that the Amish communities we've already mentioned might almost embody, the danger of Hauerwas' rhetoric is that encourages Christians to retreat into their enclaves, away from 'engagement' with their non-Christian neighbours. And also, in fact, it simply doesn't do justice to the way Christians are shaped both by their participation in church communities and also by their participation in neighbourly relationships, in other (non-'Christian') organisations, in economic exchange, democratic politics, and so on. What one of Hauerwas' friends and critics Romand Coles calls the 'radical insufficiency' of each of our traditions, organisations and communities, Hauerwas will never quite acknowledge about the church.

From 'church' to 'neighbourhood'

What we're trying to do in Hodge Hill is a bit different. Shaped and driven by the values of compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope we Christians have learnt within our faith tradition, we are committed to being present and active in our local neighbourhood, seeking out and celebrating those values in our neighbours and other local organisations, of other faiths and of none, and finding common ground in those values to work together to re-imagine and experiment with 'growing loving community' in this place. It's untidy, messy even. It's often fragile. It's certainly not always 'successful', in any conventional sense. It relies both on using the power we have (sometimes), and just as often - if not more - on giving it away, or simply letting it go. It sometimes involves taking the initiative, but often involves waiting for others to do so, or responding creatively ('overaccepting', I have called it) to those things that are already underway or just beginning.

We have a long way to go here before we could even begin to claim to be comprehensively re-imagining what 'community', let alone 'society', might look like. The 'Transition Towns' network is an inspiration to me, and I know other friends and neighbours round here, as to the kind of direction we might find we're heading in: a holistic approach to community that includes, centres itself on, the earth itself, that seeks a high level of self-sufficiency - not as individuals, but as a neighbourhood - and that dares to say, loud and clear, 'enough is enough'. But even 'transition towns' are on a journey, rather than 'got there' - and are far from a comprehensive, or clearly-heard, voice in national political conversations. They are good on 'green issues' - but what are 'transition towns' doing about welfare, or adult social care, for example? It would be good to hear, and see, what the possibilities might be, when you start the journey from somewhere radically different.

Insurrection: 'change the system by ignoring it'

With all these thoughts buzzing around my head from last night to this morning, my much-longed-for Saturday morning lie-in didn't really happen. Instead, I reached for one of the books on the 'to read' pile beside my bed, and dipped into Peter Rollins' challenging, provocative Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine. In the chapter entitled 'I Believe in the Insurrection', he reminds us, via readings of Batman (The Dark Knight) and The Matrix trilogy, why 'trying to change the system' (the 'token gesture') and 'attacking the system' (the 'perverse protest') both ensure that the system never changes. The 'token gesture' (giving to someone in need, volunteering at a homeless shelter, channelling millions of pounds from Wayne Industries into fighting Gotham City's baddies) might give us a sense of meaning, but can simply mask the oppressive structures and systems that create the needs. Our 'direct and passionate protests' against the system, however, can be just as 'perverse', enabling us to feel like rebels for a while, but often simply turning out to be 'release valves in the system, opportunities for people to resist in a way that [is] ultimately authorized by those in control'.

Rollins suggests a different way, a way with echoes of Hauerwas, but pushing further than Hauerwas would want to go. 'The way of Resurrection life', says Rollins, is 'a way of living that is able to short-circuit the present social, spiritual, or political order' - that is able to 'change the system by ignoring it'. He cites Mother Teresa as an embodiment of this different way: 'who no more protested against the caste system in Calcutta than she affirmed it. She simply lived a different reality.' For Rollins, in fact, Mother Teresa embodies the bigger argument of his book: in committing to her work with passion, while holding a 'deep inner agony and emptiness', Rollins sees her as someone who undertakes a journey, shaped by the story of Jesus, on which all Christians are called to embark: beginning with 'giving up everything for God (Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane), through the act of giving up everything including God (Christ on the Cross) to the point at which we become the very site of God (Resurrection life).'

In the UK today, and perhaps in the world more widely, we urgently need to find a way beyond the 'token gesture' and the 'perverse protest' which allow the system to 'go on' as if there really is no serious alternative. While Rollins helpfully calls me back to my faith, and my faith community, in 'changing the system by ignoring it', he doesn't immediately seem to allow for the messy experimentation within a neighbourhood, to which we're passionately committed in Hodge Hill, and in which we are glimpsing real signs of hope, and alternative possibility. But the kind of 'a/theistic' journey that Rollins sees embodied in the life of Mother Teresa is, I suspect, the kind of journey on which we all need to embark in our neighbourhoods, and our country, for the world to really be changed. We need to come face to face with the impossibility of community: with its inherent brokenness, because of the fragile, broken human beings that make it up - and we need to be able to lament this, with anger and deep sorrow, without clinging to a facade of innocence, but in a way that goes beyond 'perverse protest' or violent scapegoating - in a way rooted in what theologian Andrew Shanks calls the 'solidarity of the shaken'.

This might, if people like me are very lucky, turn out to be a valuable contribution that the Christian church could make to wider society - a witness to that brokenness and impossibility, held together with a witness to hope and possibility; a witness to the possibility of facing up to the brokenness in ways that don't do violence, and don't fall into despair or cynicism. It should, both locally and nationally, be a cause for the Christian church to engage in tactics - opportunistic openings - rather than strategies - those 'grand visions' so beloved of politicians, managers and - at times - bishops and priests (as I have, boringly often, suggested here before).

But ultimately, it is the calling for all of us, as human beings together. To embark on a journey where we find ourselves 'giving up everything for community', through the shock of 'giving up everything including community', to discovering a radically new way of life in which everything has changed, our human brokenness has not been eradicated, and yet love and justice reign. On that journey of re-imagining, of resurrection, of insurrection, we are best of starting the only place we can: exactly where we are - on our street, in our neighbourhood. But it will lead us to the ends of the earth.