#OccupyWestminster and Common Worship

A few weeks ago I was in a room in Westminster Abbey from which a previous Archbishop of Canterbury was arrested and taken to be executed. I was there, in the company of some rather eminent theologians, to listen to American theologian William Cavanaugh give a robust defence of religion against its secularist critics, particularly addressing the charge of religious violence, by highlighting the inherent violence of the nation-state. The irony of the context was noted at the time, but none of us could imagine how much that irony could have been intensified in a matter of weeks.

For Cavanaugh, alongside other such leading lights in the theological world as Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank and Sam Wells (now Vicar of St Martin's-in-the-Fields in London, and also in the room at the Abbey that day), the worship of the Church shapes its participants in a kind of politics that is quite different to the dominant politics of the world that we live in, the politics of neoliberal capitalism, of democratically-sanctioned state violence and the all-consuming power of global corporations. More than that, the Church's worship doesn't just shape worshippers for political engagement in the world - the Church enacts a different, resistant, even revolutionary kind of politics in its worship. For Cavanaugh, "the Eucharist" is "an alternative imagining of space and time which builds up a body of resistance to violence, the body of Christ. This is a body that is wounded, broken by the powers and principalities [of the world] and poured out in blood offering upon this stricken earth. But this is also a body crossed by the resurrection, a sign of the startling irruption of the Kingdom into historical time and the disruptive presence of Christ the King to the politics of the world." (William T Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imgination, p.7)

And then I saw photos yesterday of Westminster Abbey, surrounded by a ring of police, 'protected' by the power of the State against a crowd of disabled people, protesting against the government's removal of the Independent Living Fund. Church staff had, it seems, called in the police when the protesters started setting up tents and gazebos on the lawn outside the Abbey.

The scenes were reminiscent of those outside St Paul's Cathedral a couple of years ago, when the Occupy LSX encampment was evicted by the police, at the request of the Cathedral authorities. At that time I'd felt not only embarrassed by the Church's stance, but deeply sad at an opportunity so spectacularly missed, for the Church of England, for once, to place itself on the right side of history, receiving the gift that the occupiers were offering them; offering hospitality, sanctuary, even, in the midst of London's privatised 'public squares'; but more than that too, humbly 'venturing out' into the tented city, not as host but as participants among others, engaging together in the globalizing wave of questioning and re-imagining of which the Occupy movement had been an iconic part.

This time, at Westminster Abbey, was worse - not just because the Church showed it had learnt nothing from the Occupy/St Paul's encounter, but because those who were setting up tents on the Abbey lawn could not so easily be dismissed as 'middle-class hippies' (however inaccurate that might have been of Occupy LSX), but were, very visibly, physically vulnerable disabled people, many in wheelchairs, whose access the police were able to restrict, even before the ubiquitous 'kettling' manoeuvre, simply by removing various makeshift ramps from the site in question. That was some of why I tweeted last night: "Yet again CofE’s public face is that of the oppressive, defensive neoliberal state and not the vulnerable."

The particular irony, of course, is that Westminster Abbey, like St Paul's Cathedral, is a place where Christian worship has taken place for hundreds of years, where the Eucharist - which Cavanaugh holds up as the 'resistant politics' of the Church - has been celebrated daily, tens of thousands of times over its history. Surely - at least if the logic of Cavanaugh et al is correct - these should be the places par excellence which have formed Christians in the habits of resisting the violence of the State, and of a Christlike solidarity with the vulnerable and excluded? Surely these should be the places where there is not even an 'ethical dilemma' in situations like this, where the response is instinctive, shaped by years of repeating the 'political' liturgies of the anti-Empire Church?

But of course, there are caveats from the theologians of 'liturgical politics': "All of this sounds wonderful," Cavanaugh admits, contrasting the liturgies of the Church with the blasphemous 'liturgies' of the State, "but we must confess that it is the shrivelling of this vision within the church that has allowed the flourishing of ersatz realities... [State] liturgies have succeeded in imagining communities because Christian liturgies have failed to do so in a fully public way. As the church expanded after Constantine, Christian worship was not centered on the parish but on the whole city... The church sought to replace the pagan cult of the city with the Christian liturgy. Therefore, Christian worship on the Lord's Day and other feasts generally took the form of a series of services in churches and public spaces, linked by public processions, totaling six to eight hours. Here was the church taking itself seriously as nothing less than 'the embodiment in the world of the World to come.' Much of this way of imagining the world has been lost as the liturgy has shrunken to a short semiprivate gathering." (Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy, p.122)

When pressed, with concrete examples of liturgy's apparent failure to form counter-cultural Christians, Cavanaugh et al respond by telling us we're not doing the liturgy well enough, and if only we did it better, things would look very different. We're not taking it seriously enough. The church isn't taking itself seriously enough.

But yesterday's events at Westminster Abbey don't quite fit that script. If there's one thing Westminster Abbey does, it's take itself - and everything it does - seriously. It is, perhaps, the epitome of the Church of England taking itself seriously. And that, here, seems to be the problem, rather than the solution: here, cross and imperial crown nestle together, the liturgy of the Church and the liturgy of the State are indistinguishable, because they are one and the same. If there is revolutionary potential in Christian worship, it has been neutralised in Westminster Abbey.

Apart from, yet again, the pain and embarrassment of association, through the Church of England, with what 'we' did to a group of disabled protesters yesterday, what's disturbing for me, as Rector of Hodge Hill, is that since at least the 17th Century, the 'common prayer' or 'common worship' of the Church of England has decreed that what they do in Westminster Abbey, we do, in some kind of similar form, in our little Anglican church here. If Cavanaugh and friends are right, that there's something about our liturgies that profoundly shapes, if not actually constitutes, our 'political' habits and responses, then however much I might protest that here (in Hodge Hill) we're an inclusive church, here we're a politically radical church, here we're engaged in building new patterns of relationship and society as the neoliberal world crumbles around us - if we too are tied up in the 'common worship' of Church and State, then we're surely sunk.

But it's clearly not quite as simple as that. Hodge Hill Church is not Westminster Abbey (thank God!). We are not likely to host any coronations here in the near future. We are about as far from the 'centres of Empire' as you can get, demographically if not geographically. Our worship here looks, sounds, feels very different to what they do in Westminster Abbey (and, don't tell anyone, but we also sit rather loosely to the expectations of 'common worship', and that's not just because we're an Anglican-URC ecumenical partnership). But all of that is only half the story, I would suggest. Because I'm not convinced our worship is the only thing that shapes us, by any means. I think our engagements 'out there in the world' shape us just as much, if not more, than our worship in church does. And we have learnt - and are continuing to learn - here how to receive, with humility and expectation, the gifts offered to us in those encounters and engagements, even when those 'gifts' feel initially awkward, uncomfortable, or even hostile - from strangers, as well as friends.

And perhaps that's the most important difference between we Christians here in Hodge Hill and those who have been in charge of Westminster Abbey and St Paul's in their brushes with 'Occupiers' over the last few years. They, there, have had lots of practice at welcoming and honouring the rich and powerful (and, in a lesser way, anyone who is paying to come and look around their beautiful buildings). We've had lots of practice at being displaced, homeless, and dependent on the hospitality of our neighbours. And that, in turn, has shaped our worship, as much, if not more, than the other way round. Of course, we have much less 'symbolic capital' to play with in Hodge Hill - few people (even locally!) are going to notice, or care, if a few tents popped up on our church building's front lawn, and so any response we were to make, equally, would hardly make political waves. But we will, of course, continue our little, barely-noticed acts of hospitality and receptivity, solidarity and subversion, trusting in the power of tiny mustard seeds to grow, in the infectiousness of the microscopic germs of the kingdom of God. And, despite the shame of being Anglican on days like today, we will continue to hope and pray that our Christian sisters and brothers who find themselves in places of symbolic and political power, will rediscover in their own ways the subversive challenge of the gospel, and of the worship of the Christ who was crucified by the powers-that-be.

#TrojanHorse, #BritishValues & troublesome faith

In the wake of OFSTED's publication, this week, of a series of weirdly incongruous reports on Birmingham schools (and nurseries) in the spotlight of the so-called 'Trojan Horse' investigation (downgrading a secondary school from 'Outstanding' to 'Requires Improvement' in a matter of months; slating a Nursery school for not including, in its Behaviour Policy, an alertness to "identifying and minimising extremist behaviour"), David Cameron has seized on the opportunity to argue that schools should be teaching and promoting 'British values'. And in case anyone was wondering, these values include "freedom, tolerance and respect for institutions".

Now, I think there's a real case, and opportunity, for a 'big conversation' here in the UK, particularly in England perhaps, about the kind of 'common ground' we (and I use 'we' knowing that that 'we' spans differences of class, ethnicity, faith, culture, age and much more) want to claim to inhabit, and to offer as a common heritage to our children. And I would be surprised if a British Prime Minister didn't air his or her opinions about what such 'common ground' might look like. But I do seriously think that David Cameron's 'values' miss the mark with a quite drastic naivety, if not something more sinister.

There is something unsurprising about an Eton-educated Conservative Prime Minister telling us that we should respect the institutions of the State, but I struggle to find a way of understanding it that doesn't make it sound like an order. Or perhaps it's a desperate plea? I'm not a great historian, but my sense of British history is that any respect we've ever had for institutions has always had a sense of irony about it (if not downright cynicism), and certainly in the last few decades that irony has slipped towards a very justified suspicion, if not contempt. Politicians, press, bankers, police, and yes, the Church too - all have revealed not just fallibilities, but to a greater or lesser extent systemic prejudice, greed, self-protection, abuse and corruption. Relationships of 'respect' have broken down significantly, and not because 'the British public' have somehow simply become less 'respectful'.

At the same time, with more than a little (unacknowledged) irony, we hear of Conservative MPs filing complaints to the Charity Commission against Oxfam, of all organisations, for 'getting political at home' when they should, apparently, be getting on with their proper job of 'feeding people abroad'. And we've heard more from the Trussell Trust about the angry threats from the heart of the Department for Work and Pensions to 'close them down' if they persist not just in feeding the hungry, but in asking why they are hungry in the first place. And of course at the heart of the 'Trojan Horse' investigation is an intense suspicion, by central government, of a whole collection of schools and their governing bodies, within a wider sustained attack, financially and politically, on Birmingham as a Local Authority. 'Respect for institutions' is, it seems, something we are expected to be rather selective about.

From a Christian faith perspective, I find myself with at least two pressing thoughts.

First is a sense that people like Cameron - and here he may well be representative of 'government in general', as exactly the same could be said of New Labour - fundamentally misunderstands and distorts what faith 'does', as they cast it in instrumentalising language. Faith, they seem to think, teaches (or should be teaching) 'freedom, tolerance, and respect for institutions'. Faith builds (or should be building) 'social capital' in our neighbourhoods and wider society, understood as helping people 'get along together', avoiding uncomfortable things like 'extremism' and 'rioting', and maintaining the social, economic and political status quo. The trouble for people like Cameron, is that in real life faith might sometimes do those things, but it also, often, does rather more awkward things like:

- opening up spaces for people to express strong emotions (anger, frustration, cynicism, weariness, fragility, to name but a few)

- promoting quite 'counter-cultural' (i.e. to marketplace or government) norms, values and 'rules' for living, such as self-emptying, forgiveness, transformation, risk-taking and openness to learn from others

- intentionally accepting those who have been rejected elsewhere

- challenging what others – including creators of theories - accept as the norm, as part of a critical rather than an uncritical consensus

- fostering the responsibility to be prophetic in situations of injustice, and a 'politics' that goes far beyond representative democracy

My second thought returns to the question of 'institutions'. For Cameron, Gove et al, it seems the only real institutions are those of the market and the State, with the latter as servant to the former. 'Society' is imagined as what William Cavanaugh calls a 'unitary' or 'simple space', characterized by a duality of a powerful, centralized, hard-boundaried State on the one hand, and individual, property-owning, competing consumer-subjects on the other. In contrast, Cavanaugh offers a picture (drawn perhaps from an over-idealized reading of Medieval Europe), of 'complex space', where "authority was often marked by personal loyalties owed in complexly layered communal contexts", where "social space was completely refracted into a network of associations" not simply 'intermediate' between state and individual, but with their own particular 'ultimate loyalties'. The role of the church, Cavanaugh argues, is to "at every opportunity, 'complexify' space, that is, promote the creation of spaces in which alternative economies and authorities flourish." The nation state, he says, "is neither community writ large nor the protector of smaller communal spaces; rather, it originates and grows over against truly common forms of life... the nation-state is simply not in the common good business."

The 'Trojan Horse' saga is a product of, and an excuse for deepening, the British state's stripping away of 'intermediate' associations and institutions (such as governing bodies and Local Authorities) in favour of the kind of 'unitary, simple space' that Cavanaugh describes so forcefully and - I think, in our current context - convincingly. But it also highlights the misunderstanding - whether naive or wilful - that 'faith communities' can be, or should be, understood, treated, instrumentalised as such 'intermediate associations' themselves, rather than mediating a quite different form of sociality, and a quite different form of authority: for Christians, the God who calls not 'servants' but 'friends', who 'puts down the mighty from their thrones and exalts the humble and meek', who 'feeds the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty'.

Notes:

- C Baker & H Skinner, Faith in Action: The dynamic connection between spiritual and religious capital, William Temple Foundation, 2006, pp.12-13

- William Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State and the Political Meaning of the Church, 2011, pp.19, 32, 41-42

So who's 'radical' then?

Last Friday/Saturday, I spent 24 hours in the company of some wonderful people, in the serene surroundings of Salisbury Cathedral Close - perhaps England's oldest 'gated community' - discussing the meaning(s) and future(s) of 'radical theology'.

And yes, the ironies were noted. And, to some extent, explored.

One of the things we wrestled with was who was there - and why - and who wasn't. I think without exception, none of us would have called ourselves 'radical theologians', even if some others might use the term of us. If anything, most of us struggled with a persistent, nagging feeling that we weren't half as 'radical' as we could/should be. And we could certainly think of, and name, plenty of people that weren't there who were much more 'radical' than we were. 'Radical theology', perhaps, is almost always a call from beyond ourselves, a call to include, to move, to push or stretch or struggle further.

Most of us, in one way or another, were enmeshed within institutions. Most of us were Anglicans - that in itself highlighted a whole load of 'radical Christians' from non-conformist (not to mention Catholic and Orthodox) traditions beyond our rather 'established Church' huddle - and many of us worked within the structures of the Church of England, or colleges and universities within institutional academia. But at the same time as we named those locations near to 'centres' of power, we also named our ambivalences, our dis-eases with those centres and structures, our sense of being simultaneously close to their 'edges', of resisting their weight, their pull, their dominance. And their were costs, hurts, pains that went with that sense of 'bi-location'. In that, perhaps, was a certain kind of 'radicalism'.

We were helped to chart some of the terrain of 20th Century 'radical theology' in the UK - particularly clustering around the focuses of (1) economic injustice; (2) the politics of identity (gender, sexuality, ethnicity, among others); and (3) questioning and deconstructing dominant theologies of God (e.g. through the non-realist tradition, but much broader than just that). We explored the intersections between these (if you're female and not 'white', for example, you're more likely to be poor; hierarchical theologies of an autonomous King-God have been used to legitimise poverty and manifold social exclusions), we asked how much these broad movements might be said to have 'succeeded' (do equalities legislation and international debt relief count as 'successes', even in a world that sees Food Banks and Nigel Farage both on the rise?), and we began to wonder what the new 'edges' were when some of what was once 'radical' has become 'mainstream'.

Although the tone of the gathering was warm, friendly, and overridingly positive, some 'others' did emerge, sometimes having to be named as 'elephants' in the room. One was the institutional Church's ever-growing obsession with numerical growth (aka institutional survival), and a 'strategic' management culture which presumes to be able to 'deliver' it - the peculiar mix of an outwardly confident evangelicalism and an unspoken, but apparent, desperation. Another was the apparently all-consuming dynamics of neoliberal global capitalism, however 'orchestrated' or otherwise we saw them to be. And a third was the movement that calls itself 'Radical Orthodoxy' - more tricky, this one, as one of RO's own primary targets is neoliberalism, but its fondness for an idealised medieval Church and its arrogant presumption to 'out-narrate' all other narratives and theologies left it with little in the way of enthusiastic support in this particular room.

So where did we get to? In many ways, it was 24 hours of 'throat-clearing', of 'readying the ground' ready for seeds to be planted. One seed that had just begun to germinate by the end of our time together was around the question of 'where we find our hope'. What are our sources, theologies, and practices of hope, in our contexts, at this point in the early 21st Century where hope seems to be pretty thin on the ground? We committed ourselves, together, to go away and intentionally attend to, and reflect on this question, to let it infiltrate and permeate our thinking and acting (for some of us that includes our reading, writing and teaching, but also our engaging, relating, listening and most practical 'doings'), and to seek to bring those fragments together, over the course of the next year. There are 'radical theologies and practices of hope' out there to be identified, gathered, shared and celebrated - and perhaps we can be some of those that do that work of identifying, gathering, sharing and celebrating.

But there were other questions too - related, almost certainly - that offered teasing loose ends to tug at...

Is attention to place 'radical', within the 'dis-placing' dynamics of global capitalism? Is place where economic injustice is seen most clearly, and yet also where a host of differing identities find themselves in contact, potentially in relationship and interdependence? Is place where God-talk can be challenged and re-invented in both its radical immanence and its radical transcendence?

Is 'church' something that we can just let get on with whatever it is it is doing, leaving - with liberated indifference - the 'desperately-managed-survival thing' to do its thing, and trust that 'church', in some form, might be unintended outcome rather than focus and direct objective of our struggles and creativity?

Is there a vital key to be found in the connection between 'mysticism' and 'activism' - that only in seeing, experiencing, practising our connection to everything that is, can we discover right and radical actions towards everything that is?

Does our faith give us the self-discipline to hold off the inclination to blame, even those who are giving obvious offence - not refusing action or resistance, but being able to identify within ourselves the same capacities that we see in those others, and to find ways to be penitent, publicly, which invite others - even our most difficult 'others' - to join us?

What are the nouns, the apparently 'fixed states', that we deploy in our everyday language and thinking, that need to be turned into verbs, dynamics which can change and be changed? What happens, for example, when we see 'poverty' as the dynamic of 'impoverishment' - or 'God' as the dynamic of 'Godding'?

Can we do radical theology from places of joy and beauty, as well as from places of pathos and suffering? Is it even possible to 'do radical theology' in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral?!

I would add one more question. At times in our conversation, hopeful possibilities were offered as potential 'third ways' between two uncomfortable poles. Political 'Third Way' language also made its appearance once or twice. I found myself wondering how often 'third ways' are either possible or even desirable. It struck me that much of what we touched on - with our words and, in more vulnerable moments, with the wounds that we carried - did not allow for happy, easy 'third ways', but rather testified to the necessity of staying in, dwelling in, negotiating and bearing the pains of the 'broken middles', where we find ourselves inhabiting both the 'centre' and the 'edge' and know that the two cannot be brought together. Discovering a language, and embodiments, of hope in that - apparently endlessly - 'torn place' is perhaps our greatest challenge.

Voting and not-voting, for 5-year-olds

I came back from the Polling Station yesterday evening to be interrogated by my bright, questioning 5-year-old son, who was in the middle of bathtime. "Daddy, who did you vote for?"

I explained to Rafi that I'd thought long and hard, and had decided to write "None of the above" across my ballot paper.

"So if you didn't vote for anybody, what happens then?" he asked, sensibly. I took a deep breath, and tried to find an answer that made sense to me, let alone him.

I explained that, of the four 'choices' I was given, the UKIP candidate represents a party who think many - or most - of his friends and classmates shouldn't be allowed to live in this country (in fact, to extend the logic to its conclusion, shouldn't exist at all). I explained that the Conservative and LibDem candidates are part of the parties who are in charge of the country at the moment, whose economic priorities have made the majority of our neighbours poorer, and who have enacted brutal, degrading and destructive policies on people that I have come to call friends, forcing them to go hungry or cold, causing them huge stress, distress and physical illness, and making them think they are worthless 'human waste' from the social machine.

And I said to him, with deep sadness, that the only other candidate, for the party of Ed Milliband who once came to visit us and on whose knee a rather smaller Rafi sat, represents a party that lacks the courage and imagination to present a credible alternative. She also lives on the other side of the city, which is interesting, for her knowledge of, and relationship with, the people she has now (we know this morning) been elected to represent. Rafi asked if she was going to move here now. I said we should ask her.

I also explained that Uncle Tim, our friend, neighbour and retiring Labour councillor, has spent 3 years being passionately committed to using his position to help his neighbours when they've been in need, to help us make our neighbourhood a better place, and to campaign for issues of justice, local and wider. But just because he's done a fantastic job, that doesn't tell us much about his successor.

I explained that feeling that you have to choose between 4 unsatisfactory candidates/parties is not a 'free choice', and that choosing not to choose is also a choice. It potentially increases, marginally, the risk of a 'more worse' outcome rather than a 'less worse' outcome - but just think what would happen if we all decided to make this particular choice...!

And finally, and most importantly, I explained (the bath water was getting a little cold by this point), that politics has very little to do with voting. The important stuff happens after election day. Some of that is about what the elected representative then does with the position they find themselves in. But so much more - the really crucial political work - is what each of us does, day to day, with the little bits of power and connection and influence we have, on the streets of our neighbourhood, and in how we engage with those in decision-making positions, and how they engage with us.

I don't think Rafi's likely to become a politician any time soon. But I'm very, very glad he's getting political.

#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