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...

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[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

An anointing (a sermon for 'Holy Wednesday')

Mark 14:3 While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. ⁴But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? ⁵For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. ⁶But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. ⁷For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. ⁸She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. ⁹Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’

We’re not even told her name…

Not in Mark or Matthew…

In Luke, in the house of Simon the Pharisee, she is described as ‘a sinner’. She washes Jesus’ feet with tears and ointment and kisses, and she dries them with her hair. She has shown great love, says Jesus to Simon, because she has been greatly forgiven.

In John, we’re in Bethany – at home with Mary, Martha and Lazarus – and it is Mary – Lazarus’ sister – who anoints Jesus’ feet, and wipes them with her hair. Great love: not for sins forgiven, but for a brother brought back to life.

In Mark and Matthew, we’re in Bethany too, in the house of Simon the leper. But here, the woman is an anonymous stranger – no introductions, no name, no history, not even a word spoken – slipping into the story, and just as suddenly leaving it… But of this woman, Jesus says something quite, quite remarkable: ‘Wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.’

And what is it that she has done? The ointment is the same, and the expense – almost a year’s wages for a jar – but this time there are no tears, no wiping away with loosened hair, and it is not Jesus’ feet that she anoints.  This anonymous stranger enters, breaks open the jar, and silently pours the oil over Jesus’ head. While the women of Luke and John have brought gratitude, love and tender care, Matthew and Mark’s woman has come as a prophet: if Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the anointed one, then it is she who anoints him. Following in the footsteps of Moses, of Samuel, of Elijah, but with a task greater, more sacred, more authoritative than any of them, she has been sent by God to anoint God, to ordain Jesus as priest, to consecrate him as King, to commission him for the way of love, the way of the cross.

And her prophetic work is to pre-figure Jesus’ own passion. Her extravagant, dangerous love, her self-sacrificial service, will strengthen him for his; her unreasonable, use-less ‘waste’ will overflow into his; the suspicion and conflict she provokes will echo around him; and he too, like her, will remain silent in the face of his accusers.

Her work is unsettlingly, profoundly prophetic. But she is also the model of the true disciple. While those around scold and criticise and use concern for the poor as a pretext for their irritation, she knows that this Jesus is one of the poor, that this Christ needs friends, this God walking the way of the cross needs company. She is keeping faith, while those around are losing it; betrayal, denial, abandonment are just around the corner for this Jesus; her faith, her hope, her love, poured over him tonight, will go with him to his death, will be buried with him, will……

But what about us? Where is our ‘way in’ to this powerful story? What place is there for us at the table in Bethany?

Shortly, we will have the opportunity to be anointed ourselves: to have the sign of the cross made, in oil, on our foreheads. Tracing the mark of our baptism: ‘Christ claims you for his own. Receive the sign of his cross. Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified… [R]emain faithful to Christ to the end of your life.’ Tracing a cross-mark, too, from Ash Wednesday: ‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’.

Be faithful to Christ. That is what the sign of the cross means for us. And through the days that follow – through the fear of Maundy Thursday, the darkness of Good Friday, the silence of Holy Saturday – and through those days of fear, darkness, and silence for us and for our world before and after this week – being faithful to Christ is a near-impossible calling. But if the story of this strange, unnamed woman is indeed good news to be remembered, then it is surely to give us courage, strength and hope. Her costly gift is for us too: we too are invited to be anointed with love, for love, and by love – anointed with, alongside, Jesus; anointed for his way of passion and compassion; and anointed by the God who, through a love stronger even than death, can alone bring even what is dead to life.

Changing stuff (2): #CameronJesus, #EndHungerFast & #OccupyOurStreet

I'm still tantalised and frustrated - in equal amounts - by the possibility and difficulty of 'changing stuff' beyond the 'local'. In my last blog, I got all 'eschatological', anticipating future 'victories' in the temporary spaces of the here and now, spaces that might be 'in the system' but most definitely not 'of the system'. I gestured towards those 'thresholds' between 'the world as it is' and 'the world as it should/could/will be', and suggested that attending to those thresholds might make a real difference.

Here I feel the need to get practical again. I felt more than a little irony last Thursday, at the end of a rather long but rewarding day. Around 60 of us had been exploring the huge potential in an 'asset-based community development' approach for faith communities wanting to help draw out and connect up the gifts and treasures within their neighbourhoods, building local power to transform things for the better at a local level. At the same time, I discovered, David Cameron had been telling the world about his sincere Christian faith, how 'the Big Society' was really Jesus' idea, and how he, David, with the help of other good people of faith, was continuing Jesus' work.

Actually, I felt more than irony. I felt a bit sick. The inescapable danger of working away at the neighbourhood level, of championing the power of local people to transform communities, and of connecting local faith communities into that work, is that we get co-opted by a State that is quite happy to wash its hands of neighbourhoods and communities like ours, slashing services and investment and letting 'the Market' do its nasty, destructive thing, and looking to good people of faith to pick up the pieces. Asset-stripping, in the name of 'asset-building'. The 'Common Wealth' statement of 2010 recognised very early on that 'Big Society' was a cloak for radical cuts and disinvestment from the poorest neighbourhoods - and that has been what we've seen. And more than that - we've seen a systematic nurturing of the 'empathy deficit' that not only sneers at the poor, but blames them for their poverty and for the problems that come with it, while the so-called 'squeezed middle' swallow the lie that it's the 'scrounging' poor, not the super-rich wealth-hoarders, who are responsible for our current precarious economic state.

I've suggested in this blog - in a couple of excessively wordy posts that might just have defeated many readers - that while top-down enforcements of 'community resilience' ('you must survive and adapt within a wider system that you can do nothing about') are pretty deadly, there might just be a kind of bottom-up resilience which, rather than being 'contained' in the local, instead has the potential to 'overflow' it - internally, in forms of community ('conviviality' is one word, 'carnival' is another) that elude and surpass government control and even comprehension; and externally, into wider relationships of solidarity, defiance and even revolution. But how, in practice? That is the question.

Over the past year or so, I've found myself participating in processes that have been attempting to 'change stuff' beyond the local. Birmingham's 'Social Inclusion' process I've blogged about here. All along the way it's used the language of a 'new approach' which centres on 'community assets' and 'co-production' all along the way, but has struggled, often, to translate that into meaningful practical change. I've written a couple of laboured, detailed responses to Green Papers (I'm not quite sure why!), but much of the gap between language and practice seems to remain. On the other hand, the wonderful 'Places of Welcome' network that has emerged from the Social Inclusion process has illustrated and embodied exactly what the language has been striving to find - 'this is what it looks like', and it's happening all over the city already.

I've also had a fair amount to do with the 'Citizens' model of community organizing over the last couple of years, and it has much, in its stated vision and values, to commend it:

•  building relationships through careful listening and sharing in ‘one-to-ones’
• growing the confidence, skills and capabilities in teams of local leaders
•  building alliances between faith, education, and labour institutions
• finding common ground across difference in issues of social justice and the common good
• holding those in authority to account on issues that affect the lives of people across the city

But I've had my hesitations too: about scale - the city, certainly Birmingham, is just too big, and the neighbourhood level risks being neglected; about pace - a sense of hurriedness risks putting 'the agenda' over the patient work of listening and relationship-building; and about an approach which, almost by definition, tends to put 'community organizing' before 'community building', the 'hard power' of numbers and structures before the 'soft power' of relationships of trust and friendship, and attends to the 'problems' of communities before really finding out what their strengths are. All of these have led us in Hodge Hill to want to 'stay friends' with Citizens, and to work together 'ad hoc' where our agendas coincide, but not to quite 'take the plunge' of making their approach central to what we do here.

And then, this Lent, I've found myself working with friends and colleagues, driving the 'End Hunger Fast' campaign in Birmingham, which breaks most of the rules I've just set for myself: it all happened in a hurry, it did its best to be not just Birmingham-wide but national, it was - in many ways - all about getting numbers signed up, and it was incredibly issue-focused, about food poverty and the government policies that are currently exacerbating it. But it started, for me, with an invitation from a very good friend, who was fasting from food completely for 40 days - so how could I say No?!

It's still early days, perhaps, to evaluate 'End Hunger Fast' as a campaign. But here are some of the things that 'worked' about it. Firstly, it sparked, and to a great extent 'snowballed', a heated public exchange between church leaders and politicians, in the glare of the media spotlight. With sharp words from Archbishop Vincent Nicholls, and a response from David Cameron very much on the back foot (about his 'moral mission', of all unlikely claims), the EHF letter hit the press hard and, in the process, saw the FoodBank giant Trussell Trust shift from being praised by the government as 'the Big Society in action', to being condemned by an angry Iain Duncan-Smith for pushing a 'political agenda'. Damn right, and not a moment too soon.

Secondly, the invitation to fast itself seemed to catch many people's imagination. An old - almost archaic, for many - tradition, revitalised as an imaginative act of empathy and solidarity. A practice not just for Muslims and seemingly alien to most secular Westerners - but something that has begun to mean something, and do something, once again.

Thirdly, the power of social media came into its own, attaching the hashtags #endhungerfast and #fastApril4th to all kinds of powerful messages, and images of empty plates and fasting people. Thousands have been able to follow my good friend Keith Hebden's 40-day fast, and encourage others to join in in their own small but not insignificant ways.

And then, in Birmingham particularly, we planted a garden shed, 'The Hunger Hut' in Cathedral Square for the duration of Lent, from which we engaged passers-by with flyers, conversation, and the opportunity to come into the Hut to find out more, light a candle to pray, and commit themselves to the campaign. On Ash Wednesday, as Lent kicked off, we invited people to add their thumbprints, in ash, to the EHF letter from church leaders. And around Birmingham, as well as at the Hut, we've been collecting people's stories of first-hand experience of hunger, in 'Hunger Journals' that we're going to submit to the Truro/Field Commission on Food Poverty. There was something about the Hut being where it was, with echoes of Occupy LSX (our wonderful Dean of Birmingham Cathedral was rather less keen on our first suggestion of a tent!), and being there for 40 days, emblazoned with the 'End Hunger Fast' logo and website, that 'interrupted' - symbolically at least, but also actually for many people - the normal flow of city life, in the middle of Birmingham's business district. There was a patience, an endurance, even if it closely followed the last-minute scramble in late February to make it all happen.

The Social Inclusion Inquiry, Citizens UK in Birmingham, and End Hunger Fast. Different approaches to 'scaling up' from the local, to seek to have an impact on the systems and structures which so often have the local in their grip. Attending summits and responding to Green Papers. Building alliances across institutions. Creating an interruption through symbolic action, social networks, and temporary occupation. All have their strengths and weaknesses, opportunities to effect real change and vulnerabilities to co-option and paralysis. But all three point me back towards my neighbourhood, and our messy, fragile, small-scale, slow-paced work of community-building.

At a recent gathering of church leaders from Birmingham's outer estates, we were privileged to spend an hour with a very senior Birmingham City Council officer, in open, honest and humble conversation. At the end of the hour, I asked him what he would like to see, or hear, us outer estates clergy doing as a result of our conversation. He replied that he wanted to see us stirring up local voices, to hold government - national and local - to account. To be catalysts of 'local democracy', far beyond encouraging people to turn out to vote every May.

In a quite brilliant recent blog, my friend and travelling-companion Cormac Russell lucidly outlines the power of 'neighbour power' - how locally-rooted, co-operative 'power from the people' can be what really changes the structures and systems:

If we care about participatory democracy we will go to where the connectors, conductors, and circuit breakers can constructively steward energy in a way that is inclusive and supports people to generate disparate energy into collective democratic power. 

That place is local, hence democracy is not just an ideal, it has a location, and that location is our communities of place. The act of building democracy is therefore an act of homecoming that extends outwards to govern the health, wealth and justice of a nation. And so it is, as well as occupying Wall Street, we must come to occupy our street.

Read Cormac's blog in full - a mere snippet here really can't do justice to it. But that connection between 'Occupy Wall Street' and the occupation of our own streets resonates strongly for me, and keeps nudging me to explore it further. It reminds me of a few dimensions of what I'm involved with here in Hodge Hill that I tend to forget: the 'poetic' dimension, seeking to 'tell our stories', especially the ones that seem to have some symbolic power (Hodge Hill Unsung Heroes and our community Passion Play, to name but two); an engagement with wider bodies and networks of thought, academic and 'critical' in other ways; the way we use social media to get things 'out there' (Facebook locally, Twitter to connect with the wider world, and blogs like this to flesh out some of the detail and explore things at length); and the way we're trying to 'do church' differently, in the round, with many voices heard (in liturgy and decision-making), and doing our best to connect and blur the boundaries between 'inside' and 'outside'.

And I'm reminded, finally, of the intentional messiness of the Occupy movement, and I wonder again if we're treading quite similar paths:

The disadvantage of such leaderless movements is that they allow for no quick resolutions and fixes, and they reduce the expectation of efficiency... Nevertheless, a slower process of addressing and resolving the problems of the world and an efficiency that rests on the shoulders of many may be more effective in the long run... [Also] it cannot be destroyed easily, as the destruction of those whom the system identifies as leaders will not bring the movement to a halt. (Joerg Rieger & Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude, p.81)

Which feels like quite an Easter-y thought on which to finish, for now...

Changing stuff: Reclaim the Streets, Desmond Tutu & the DWP

How do we make things change? Beyond the work of community-building in our neighbourhoods - nurturing places of encounter, building relationships of trust and friendship, connecting people together through their passions, gifts and skills - how do we engage in movements, networks, flows that stand any chance of changing the bigger stuff - systems, governments, widespread prejudices and attitudes, 'the powers that be'...?

I realise it's a big question. But it's one that a lot of people seem to be asking, reflecting on, writing about, talking about at the moment - and it feels urgent, exciting, and more than a little heady to try and enter that conversation.

I've recently been re-reading a quite brilliant book on 'Christianity and Contemporary Politics' by Luke Bretherton, in which he describes politics, within a 'Christian cosmopolitan vision', as involving:

"the formation of a common world of meaning and action within particular places. The formation of such a world entails, on the one hand, the breaking down of those structures and patterns of relationship that exclude vulnerable strangers from this common world and, on the other, the upholding of those structures and patterns of relationship that maintain this world as a common one."

We grow up, says Bretherton, within "concentric circles of relationship", with neighbours near and distant, and, from a Christian perspective, as we seek to love those neighbours we are orienting our relationships towards an "eschatological horizon of fulfillment" - the image is of "the gathering of all peoples to the messianic banquet that has already begun amid the fallen structures of the earthly city". And this "horizon of fulfillment", Bretherton suggests, "both draws in and constantly interrupts all attempts" to make a particular place either "idolatrously self-sufficient" or "totally encompassing" in terms of our "economic, political, and social relationships". So on the one hand, "various forms of nationalism and identity politics overvalue the particularity of a place (be it cultural or geographic)", while on the other hand, "liberal cosmopolitan, global conceptions of citizenship, and the reductive universalism of capitalism" undervalue the particularity of place. [Bretherton, Christianity & Contemporary Politics, p.211]

I find Bretherton's reflections really helpful here, for a number of reasons: he refuses any simplistic polarities like 'now, bad; future, good'; he values and focuses on the importance of place; he embraces difference and seeks not sameness or unity but places where we can 'be-in-common'; and he holds on to an ultimate hope that isn't deferred indefinitely, but is already breaking into the here and now.

Into this 'frame', I find a lot of things beginning to 'fit'. I've blogged here and here at length on my suspicion of 'community resilience' language, as disabling our imagination, desire and agency to change things beyond the local. I'm also more and more persuaded that while 'resistance' language is helpful, to a point, the fact that it is inescapably defined by - even dependent on - the thing it is 'resisting', very quickly becomes problematic, again limiting the possibilities of our imagination, our desire, and our agency.

From an eschatological perspective, instead, we can turn things around and see what currently seems like the 'status quo' (e.g. global capitalism) as in fact 'resisting' that which is coming (i.e. in Christian terms, the peaceful and just kingdom of God). This is what I'm finding all over the place, in non-Christian language, in the writings around 'post-capitalist politics' (see e.g. J-K Gibson-Graham) and the Occupy movement, to name but two. And the resonances between these streams of thought and action, and those of the Christian tradition, intrigue and excite me.

Take, for example, Gibson-Graham's reflection on the 'Reclaim the Streets' (RTS) movement - 'short-lived', 'embodying the political value of interruption (as distinct from endurance)', but 'producing an affective shock wave that reverberates through the brittle architecture of established forms' of political agency and spatial governance. Quoting Rebecca Solnit, they cite RTS's 'incendiary carnival spirit, global Internet communications, and tactics of temporary victory [my italics]' as creating 'part of the vocabulary of what came next'.

I like the idea of RTS's 'tactics of temporary victory'. It reminds me of one of the most profound stories (for me) from the anti-apartheid movement, as told by Jim Wallis, veteran American Christian campaigner for social justice, about the great Archbishop Desmond Tutu:

"A political rally had just been canceled by the white government, so Bishop Tutu called for a worship service instead, inside the beautiful cathedral [of St George's, Cape Town]. The  power of apartheid was frighteningly evident in the numbers of riot police and armed soldiers massing outside the church. Inside, all along the cathedral walls, stood more police openly taping and writing down every comment made from the pulpit. When Tutu rose to speak, the atmosphere was tense indeed. He confidently proclaimed that the 'evil' and 'oppression' of the system of apartheid 'cannot prevail.' At that moment, the South African archbishop was probably one of the few people on the planet who actually believed that. 

"Archbishop Tutu point[ed] his finger right at the police who were recording his words. 'You may be powerful, indeed very powerful, but you are not God!' And the God whom we serve, said Tutu, 'cannot be mocked!' 'You have already lost!' the diminutive preacher thundered. Then he came out from behind the pulpit and seemed to soften, flashing that signature Desmond Tutu smile. So - since they had already lost, as had just been made clear - South African's spiritual leader shouted with glee, 'We are inviting you to come and join the winning side!' The whole place erupted, the police seemed to scurry out, and the congregation rose up in triumphal dancing..." (Jim Wallis God's Politics)

What Bretherton calls the 'eschatological horizon' puts Reclaim the Streets' 'tactics of temporary victory' into hopeful, transformative perspective. Even 'short-lived interruptions' can be glimpses of the triumphal celebrations of Desmond Tutu's 'winning side', especially when the place of those 'interruptions' is hospitable enough to invite oppressors to 'cross the floor' and join those they have been oppressing, glimpses of the 'common world' which Bretherton describes as both real possibility and ongoing task.

Our work locally in Hodge Hill is rather more mundane than the confrontation in Cape Town cathedral, or the 'incendiary carnival spirit' of Reclaim the Streets. But if change doesn't begin where we are, then it doesn't happen, full stop. One of our dilemmas in the last little while has been how closely we associate our twice-weekly Open Door drop-in with the local JobCentrePlus, and the whole oppressively punitive DWP system within which JCP staff have to operate. We have, since we opened Open Door, welcomed quite a number of people who've been referred our way by JCP. And then, more recently, we've discovered that some people coming to us have been told their attendance is compulsory - in other words, if they don't come to us, they risk getting sanctioned.

What do we do with this? Nothing of what we're about wants to collude with the vicious, dehumanising system over which the DWP presides. But we'd rather people came to us than to some of the other places people get sent - one of our regulars contrasts us to a rather more corporate work club where, he says, "you're treated like dirt", pointed to a computer with barely an acknowledgement of your existence, let alone your humanity. We have been very intentional about trying to create a space where relationships work differently, where people are honoured and respected in their complexity and vulnerability, where people's gifts are celebrated and connected together as well as their needs met, and so on...

Resonances come from conversations with other people and places. We've heard recently of a Christian organisation that employs 'relational youth workers' in school settings, often taking 'referrals' of young people struggling within the school system, but seeking to create a very different kind of environment, where young people can be welcomed as gifts, rather than problems, and where friendships can be nurtured, rather than targets striven for. "In the system, but not of the system," is how the organisation describes their role, echoing an old formula from Christian theology.

And food banks too, while deeply ambivalent, are proving, in some places at least, to be the openings to relationships of mutual respect, friendship and reciprocity, and functioning to 'conscientize' often white, middle-class, naturally-Tory-leaning volunteers into an angry disgust at a political system that forces people into a desperate dependency on emergency food supplies.

What we're edging towards, I think, is a description of places, spaces, environments however temporary or fragile, where, to quote RS Thomas' wonderful poem, The Kingdom, "there are quite different things going on". Not separate from everyday, compromised, ambivalently messy reality, but in the midst of it - but "in the system and not of it" - 'threshold spaces', we might call them, from one world into another. This is language with which Christians are relatively familiar. We have been used to talking about it in relation to church buildings, and Christian worship. I want to suggest, picking up on the kind of messiness I tried to describe in my previous blogpost, that it's much less tidy than that. It is happening in spaces unrecognisable as 'church', in canvas encampments and midnight street-walking. It is happening among people who claim 'faith' and many, many who don't. But there is something profoundly eschatological, profoundly hopeful, about what is happening. And it is changing stuff - slowly, perhaps, but it's still changing stuff: one encounter, one relationship, one place at a time.

On dirty blogs & messy church

I've been quiet here for a little while. Not for a lack of thinking about stuff. If anything, it might be a result of too much thinking going on - throwing loads of pieces of the jigsaw up in the air and waiting for them to land in a nice, coherent pattern. But of course, coherent patterns tend to take a long old time to form, and often the only way to find them - especially with jigsaws - is to work piece by piece.

So, inspired by the approach of a new-ish and rather wiser friend and travelling companion along the way, Laura 'Mole' Chapman, fellow blogger and faculty member of ABCD Europe, I feel the need to try what Mole calls a 'quick and dirty' blog. No time to finesse the rough edges. Little in the way of references, academic or otherwise. But an attempt, however messy and vulnerable (in all kinds of ways), to 'reflect aloud', and see what comes of it...

I want to talk about messy church.

Not 'Messy Church', that hugely infectious movement promising a 'new way of being church for families', however irrepressibly attractive its values of 'creativity, hospitality and celebration' might be. 'Messy Church' as a movement has been quite good at articulating its theology from the beginning, and last year saw the publication of 'Messy Church Theology', which not only expressed the theological significance of 'messiness' in the fallibility and unfinishedness of even 'Christ-centred' human life in the present, but kept on returning the question of how we might decide whether 'Messy Church' is really 'church'. There's something about that question that is both intriguing and troubling for me. It feels both worth asking, for the kind of issues it opens up, but also disturbing to make too prominent, as if which side of the line the answer falls, in any given context, is somehow of ultimate importance.

So, No, I'm not particularly interested in here in 'Messy Church' with capital letters. I'm wanting to explore something much more modest, much less 'brandable': something that we might be able to call church, but which is unavoidably messy - and more messy than 'Messy Church Theology' seems, as yet, to allow for.

And I don't think I'm talking about what Archbishop Justin Welby recently referred to, at a recent gathering of the Church of England's General Synod, as the 'untidy church' that lies ahead of us, particularly in the aftermath of deciding - finally! - to ordain women as bishops:

It has incoherence, inconsistency between dioceses and between different places.  It’s not a church that says we do this and we don’t do that.  It’s a church that says we do this and we do that and actually quite a lot of us don’t like that but we are still going to do it because of love.  It’s a church that speaks to the world and says that consistency and coherence is not the ultimate virtue, that is found in holy  grace. 

A church that loves those with whom the majority deeply disagree is a church that will be unpleasantly challenging to a world where disagreement is either banned within a given group or removed and expelled.  The absolute of holy grace challenges the absolutism of a world that says there are no absolutes except the statement that there are no absolutes.

Now, the part of me that is embedded in, and dependent on, the institution that is the Church of England warms to Archbishop Justin's description of 'untidiness'. But it remains an essentially introspective description, an internal conversation. The boundaries between 'church' and 'world' are still drawn sharply, and the 'rightness' of the former still very much asserted. That's still not nearly messy enough, I would suggest.

I'm attracted, too, to what theologian Nicolas Healy calls 'practical-prophetic ecclesiology': the 'grand, never-ending experiment' involving 'ongoing and self-critical evaluation of our ecclesial thought and action', of attention not to allegedly authoritative 'blueprints', but to the complex, fallible 'everyday activity' of what Healy calls the 'concrete church' in each local context in which it is embodied.

But it needs to get messier still, because even though Healy reminds us that 'church' is a messy old mixture of good and really-not-very-good stuff, there's still a working assumption that it's fairly easy to work out what counts as 'church' and what is what Healy calls 'non-church'.

And then there's a quote from Thomas Merton, Trappist monk, writer, social activist and much more. Well, it's not quite a quote, more a half-remembered paraphrase, but the gist of it is this:

"forget about defining and drawing boundaries around 'church', let's just talk about a bunch of people who love each other, doing stuff together".

That's just about messy enough for me. It may well horrify many of my colleagues and sister and brother Christians for not being remotely 'Christian' enough. But in playing with it, I'm not remotely wanting to suggest that the Christian faith has no great gifts to bring to the table, not at all. Just that the kind of spaces I'm interested in, and the human interactions that happen in those spaces, don't in any obvious way map on to an easy separation of 'church' and 'non-church'. I'm interested in spaces where there are "people who love each other, doing stuff together" - people caught up in what theologians John Reader and Chris Baker name 'entangled fidelities', some of whom might name themselves Christians (amongst other things), and others who don't; and doing things that might occasionally look recognisably 'Christian things to do', and at other times don't.

Over the last 3 or 4 years, the ongoing conversation within what we call Hodge Hill Church has thrown up a way of describing what we're about here: 'Growing Loving Community - in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'. It's a good statement, I think, because it seems to describe fairly well what people see when they see 'Hodge Hill Church'. But it's also valuable, I think, because it allows us, very explicitly, to look for, and value, and celebrate those places and moments and glimpses of 'growing loving community' in Hodge Hill that don't in any conventional way look like 'church'. Not so that we can claim them as 'ours', but so that, at the very least, we can recognise a kind of 'family resemblance'. And in that recognition, all kinds of possibilities open up.

A little while ago, a couple of us here were exploring a new course offered nationally by Livability (what used to be the Shaftesbury Society) called 'The Happiness Course'. It's good stuff - drawing on the relatively new field of 'positive psychology' and also on the deep wells of the Christian tradition, but aimed to be accessible both for people 'with faith' and those 'without', and if it seeks to persuade, then it's seeking to persuade people of the value of intentional practices to develop their sense of wellbeing, rather than seeking to persuade people of the 'rightness' of the Christian faith. But there was one interesting divergence between those of us working here and the person we were exploring the course with: for him, there was a deep longing for participants to 'journey towards home' (a 'home' that, implicitly, those running the course had already found); for those of us based here in Hodge Hill, we couldn't get away from the sense that, if there was a 'journey towards home', we are all on it together - indeed, to push it a bit further, we are journeying towards 'the home we build together' (to use Jonathan Sacks' resonant phrase).

Friends and colleagues here, and further afield, rightly want to push me on this. Where is the place for what we traditionally call 'Christian discipleship'? Don't we, as Christians, long to see our neighbours growing deeper into their true humanity, 'in Christ'? Where is the space for 'we Christians' sharing our faith - one of our treasured gifts, perhaps our most treasured gift - with our friends, neighbours and travelling companions?

But in 'messy church', as I'm exploring it, I'm not so sure who the 'we Christians' refers to. Yes, there are some of us that seem to come to conversations with fairly hefty chunks of a faith that we have inherited and explored for ourselves, that might quite straightforwardly call ourselves 'Christians'. But there are others who come with at least fragments of something that looks and sounds very similar, whether 'Christian' is a label that they choose to use, or something they're very clearly 'not', or something that is just much more ambiguous and ambivalent than either of those. And in fact, in messy reality, none of us make complete sense, free of incoherence and contradictions and ambiguities. And those of us who intentionally and reflectively wrestle with this stuff have a sense that there is an ambiguity and a mystery that goes close to the heart of what 'faith' is anyway. So we work hard at working together to create spaces, environments, conversations where the sharing and the exploring and the wrestling can happen, and where we can all learn and grow - individually and together - and where relationships between us can deepen, and where we might more truly embody something of the 'home' that we sense we are journeying towards, and that others might glimpse it too, and that our journeys might join more intimately together.

So bring on the conversation about 'messy church' - whatever it is. It clearly needs a lot more thinking through...

[thanks to Gary Hall of the Queen's Foundation for the Merton 'quote' - he's working on digging out the actual quote, which will hopefully turn up in a future blog!]

Writing in the Dust: an Ash Wednesday sermon

When the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center on 11^th Sept 2001, Rowan Williams, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, was in Trinity Church, Wall St, just a couple of minutes’ walk away. He witnessed first-hand the destruction, death and dust all around. But, as George W Bush within hours of the attacks was already talking the language of ‘consequences’ (by which he meant ‘counter-attacks’) and a ‘war on terror’ (by which he meant more violence, destruction and death), Rowan Williams sensed the need for a ‘breathing space’. Some months later, he wrote a little book called Writing in the Dust, with some brief reflections that emerged from that ‘breathing space’:

“in that space there is the possibility of recognising that we have had an experience that is not just a nightmarish insult to us but a door into the suffering of countless other innocents, a suffering that is more or less routine for them in their less regularly protected environments. And in the face of extreme dread, we may become conscious, as people often do, of two very fundamental choices. We can cling harder and harder to the rock of our threatened identity – a choice, finally, for self-delusion over truth; or we can accept that we shall have no ultimate choice but to let go, and in that letting go, give room to what’s there around us – to the sheer impression of the moment, to the need of the person next to you, to the fear that needs to be looked at, acknowledged / and calmed (not denied). If that happens, the heart has room for many strangers, near and far. There is a global hospitality possible too in the presence of death.”

I was reminded of these reflections last week, on Ash Wednesday, as we began the journey of Lent with the story of ‘the woman caught in adultery’, in John chapter 8 (verses 1-11). It’s a heated moment, with an angry mob dragging the accused woman before Jesus, and reminding him (as if he needed to know) that the Law stated she should be stoned to death. Jesus knows they will seize on his response, whichever way he chooses to act. But Jesus, rather than entering into the heat of the moment, bends down and writes in the dust. We don’t know what he writes, but we do know that in doing so he refuses the quick response, he creates a ‘breathing space’, a pause, which allows some of the heat of the moment to dissipate. And then he responds to their demands with an invitation: ‘let the one of you who is without sin cast the first stone’. The question shifts the focus of attention, from the finger-pointing at the woman, to the accusers themselves. And one by one, they all walk away.

Just before our morning service in Hodge Hill on Ash Wednesday, I was painting the garden shed that had just taken up residence in the grounds of Birmingham Cathedral, the ‘Hunger Hut’, which will, throughout Lent, be a place of information and awareness-raising, a place of conversation and prayer, and a place where people can share their stories and pledge their commitments to act, on the desperate issue of food poverty in the UK, where half a million people last year were forced to use Food Banks to feed themselves and their families, and where 5,500 people last year were admitted to hospital suffering from malnutrition.

My hands, when I turned up at the eucharist, were covered in grey and orange paint. There is an old tradition, in parts of the Church of England, that the priest washes his or her hands before leading the Eucharistic Prayer. It’s partly simply a hygiene thing, of course, touching bread that will soon be eaten. But it also comes, I think, out of a concern for a ‘theological hygiene’: a belief that the priest, before touching ‘holy things’ needs to have ‘clean hands and a pure heart’ (Psalm 24:4). As a priest, I have resisted this tradition, more or less intentionally. Nowadays, I think I’m clearer about why. I try to operate an ‘all or nothing’ (or ‘everyone or no one’) policy instead: sometimes, we will all wash our hands, in our prayers of penitence, as the broken body of Christ (the church), before together we touch and consume the broken body of Christ (the bread). But often, we don’t all get a chance to wash our hands, so I’m not sure I should either – at least, not in a ritualised way. It’s particularly clear on Ash Wednesday, when we are all smudged with black, oily, ashy crosses. But each and every time we come to the table, to the eucharist we celebrate together, we all come with dirty hands. Partly because we have deliberately got our hands dirty in the life of the world. Partly because we are fallible, broken human beings and we can’t help ourselves. ‘Let the one of you who is without sin cast the first stone.’

So Ash Wednesday, unfolding into the rest of Lent, offers us a ‘breathing space’. A space in which we can begin to leave behind our knee-jerk tendencies to point the finger of blame at others. A space where we discover that we all come with dirty hands – and in so doing, are able to begin to discover a real solidarity with one another, with our friends, neighbours, and even enemies. And a space where, despite our dirty hands, we are not condemned, but touched with God’s love; where we are given, into our dirty hands, the broken, healing body of Christ.

#EndHungerFast prayers for Ash Wednesday

Let us pray for our neighbours,
for the cross-scarred body of Christ,
and for all creation, saying:
God of life
hear our prayer.

For those among us who go hungry today:
that they may be fed.
God of life...

For those among us who hunger for justice today:
that they may be energised and sustained
in their restlessness to speak and act for change.
God of life...

For those among us who rest in satisfaction and security today:
that they may be unsettled and disturbed
by the calls from the wildernesses.
God of life...

For those among us who are treated as worthless today:
that they may be raised up with dignity and joy.
God of life...

For those among us who work to welcome, listen and support:
that they may be blessed with patience and grace.
God of life...

For those among us who hoard power and wealth for themselves,
and who make decisions indifferent to those they will affect:
that their hearts may be melted by the warm wind of your compassion.
God of life...

For those among us who will seek to keep this Lent
in solidarity with the poorest,
in contradiction to consumerism,
in the compromised, broken middles of our world,
and yet in hope of transformation within and without:
that we will all catch glimpses
of your face in our neighbours, near and far,
of your Spirit in the cracks in our systems,
and of your kingdom taking root and blossoming in our midst,
in Jesus Christ, our brother and Saviour.
Amen.