'Community Resilience' & its redemption?

Is 'community resilience' redeemable? Is it a concept even worth trying to redeem? Is it possible to highlight and strengthen a local community's social - and other forms of - capital, while at the same time building, and not disabling, its collective capacity for political - even utopian - imagination and active resistance to the structures of the status quo? These are the questions with which I ended my previous blog post.

Resilience and human geography

Today I've had the chance to read another, very helpful, critically reflective piece, 'From resilience to resourcefulness: a critique of resilience policy and activism' [Danny MacKinnon & Kate Driscoll Derickson, Progress in Human Geography (2012) 37(2) 253-270]. In their critique, the authors make three key points:

1. The concept of resilience, precisely because it is 'derived from ecology and systems theory, is conservative when applied to the social sphere ... privileg[ing] established social structures, which are often shaped by unequal power relations and injustice... [and] also clos[ing] off wider questions of progressive social change which require interference with, and transformation of, established "systems".'

2. Resilience tends to be defined 'externally' and 'top-down', 'by state agencies and expert knowledge in spheres such as security, emergency planning, economic development and urban design', and thus 'invariably place the onus on individuals, communities and places to become more resilient and adaptable to a range of external threats ... serving to reproduce the wider social and spatial relations that generate turbulence and inequality.' (This is Evans & Reid's key point in the paper I explored previously).

3. '[T]he concern with resilience of places is misconceived in terms of spatial scale... rely[ing] on an underlying local-global divide, treating scales such as the 'regional', 'urban' or 'local' as self-contained systems, thus 'foster[ing] an internalist conception which locates the sources of resilience as lying within the particular scale in question', while obscuring the reality that 'the processes which shape resilience operate primarily at the scale of capitalist social relations' (i.e. national and trans-national). (pp. 254-5)

Although MacKinnon and Derickson acknowledge that, 'among oppositional groups and campaigns', 'resilience' langauge 'is meant to prefigure alternative social relations in which social and environmental well-being is the system which is to be privileged (i.e. the resilient system) with capitalism seen as one of a number of disruptive and destructive forces', they conclude that the term has been so co-opted to be irredeemable, and go on to propose an alternative concept that, they suggest, better addresses the 'uneven access to material resources and the levers of social change' - or, in Spivak's words, better 'cultivate[s] the will to social justice' among everyday people' (p. 255, 263).

'Resourcefulness' as an alternative

What MacKinnon and Derickson propose instead, then, is the language of 'resourcefulness'. Firstly, they suggest, 'resourcefulness' is meant to focus the spotlight on how 'resources' (and power) are distributed, and to 'problematize' and contest the inequalities that emerge:

'The normative vision that underpins resourcefulness is one in which communities have the capacity to engage in genuinely deliberative democratic dialogue to develop contestable alternative agendas and work in ways that meaningfully challenge existing power relations.' (p. 263)

Secondly, they suggest, 'resourcefulness emphasizes forms of learning and mobilization based upon local priorities and needs as identified and developed by community activists and residents'. In contrast to the 'top-down' definitions of resilience, 'resourcefulness' is intended to promote a kind of 'local autonomy' understood as 'the ever-contested and never complete ability of those within the locality to control the institutions and relationships that define and produce the locality'.

Thirdly, addressing the issue of a false 'localism' which fails to recognise the interactions and power-relations between different spatial scales, the authors argue that 'resourcefulness' is 'not only spatially grounded in identifiable local spaces', 'focusing attention on the need to build capacities at community level,' but also 'outward-looking', 'open and relational in terms of both recognizing the wider politics of justice that often underpin local activism and emphasizing the need for alliances between community groups and broader social movements'.

Finally, 'resourcefulness' is offered 'as a process, rather than a clearly identifiable condition, amenable to empirical measurement or quantification. As a relational concept, resourcefulness cannot be understood as something communities possess to varying degrees. It is the act of fostering resourcefulness, not measuring it or achieving it, that should motivate policy and activism.' As a tentative framework undergirding the term, they propose four key dimensions: (1) an attention to the 'Resources' available (including e.g. spare time, social capital, organizing capacity, etc.) and their distribution; (2) 'Skill sets and technical knowledge' (e.g. in governmental procedures, finance and IT); (3) 'Indigenous and "folk" knowledge' (including cultural 'stories of origin', sense-making stories and shared visions); and (4) a cultural and political 'Recognition' which 'promotes a sense of confidence, self-worth and self- and community-affirmation that can be drawn upon to fuel the mobilization of existing resources and argue for and pursue new resources.' (p. 264-5)

There is much to be said for MacKinnon and Derickson's critique, but I must admit I'm not entirely persuaded by their alternative. 'Resourcefulness' is a good, evocative word, but while it deliberately foregrounds the question of the distribution of resources, I can't help thinking they're trying to have their cake and eat it. Can 'resourcefulness' really, at the same time, highlight inequalities (in 'resources') and yet resist measurement or quantification? Is 'resourcefulness' inherently and insistently a 'process', or is it just as vulnerable as resilience to becoming crystallised as a 'condition'? Neoliberalism's proven ability to co-opt the concept of 'resilience', even when the concept has been employed at a 'grassroots' level, suggests that 'resourcefulness' might not be immune to a similar kind of appropriation - I can imagine David Cameron quite easily conjuring up images of a wartime popular 'resourcefulness' in the midst of the London blitz - thereby 'disabling' the necessary 'politics of resistance' in exactly the same way that Evans & Reid so powerfully highlighted in 'resilience rhetoric'.

Resourcefulness in the wilderness: four 'arts' of survival and resistance

As a practical theologian, working with critiques of resilience like Evans & Reid's and MacKinnon & Derickson's, I find myself driven back towards theology for alternative metaphors and practices. Christian faith began in the context of an all-powerful Empire and huge inequalities, and while it has by no means been immune to being co-opted and domesticated by the 'powers that be', it has shown a remarkable capacity to reinvent itself, from the edges of the dominant regime, as challenge and alternative. (We might even call it 'resilient', if that wasn't the term we were currently trying to disentangle!)

In her remarkable book Sisters in the Wilderness, Delores Williams explores at length the 'survival strategies' deployed by African-American women, from slavery to the present day. While acknowledging that even these strategies can themselves be ‘exploited’ within the African-American community and in the churches, Williams concludes her study by outlining four such strategies, or ‘arts’, which have managed to ‘keep the community alive and hopeful’:

• An ‘art of cunning’, combining knowledge and imagination with ‘manual skill and dexterity’, ‘a wholesome shrewdness’ that ensured individual survival and ‘economic well-being’;
• An ‘art of encounter’, combining the twin ‘movements’ of ‘resistance’ to, and ‘endurance’ of, oppression – and knowing when to deploy one, and when the other;
• An ‘art of care’ - a ‘commitment, devotion and love’ not just for their own children and ‘the lovers in their lives’, but also ‘for their extended families, for their communities and for their churches’;
• and an ‘art of connecting’ - with the right people, and ‘the relevant social, political and religious structures’, that could improve the well-being of African-American women, men and children, educationally, politically and spiritually. (Sisters in the Wilderness, pp.236-8)

There are resonances here, for me, with MacKinnon & Derickson's conception of 'resourcefulness', but while that concept is targeted - with considerable effectiveness - towards questioning the distribution of resources, Williams' interconnected 'arts' do much better, I would suggest, at being explicitly relational, dynamic and contextual. They name the tension between 'endurance' and 'resistance', and they quite deliberately 'connect' into the larger structures of power.

'Distancing' and 'being liked'

Evans & Reid, discussing the cultural and political representations of American life post-9/11, point to another alternative to the governing discourses of vulnerability and resilience, encapuslated in Thomas Hoepker's photograph 'of people in Brooklyn relaxing and enjoying life against the backdrop of the attacks' on the twin towers.

The image, they suggest:

'unsettl[es] the dominant aesthetic dialectic of initial vulnerability and subsequent resilience. Instead, it depicts a perfectly normal state of affairs that was permitted by a certain distancing from the action. Indeed, as it emphasises, proximity alone offers no such guarantees for the constitution of a shared sense of experience. Many were far more deeply traumatised by viewing the unfolding of events thousands of miles away on televised screens than the subjects in Hoepker's frame.' (Evans & Reid, p.88)

Reading this, I hear more than incidental echoes of a reflective piece by Girardian theologian James Alison in the wake of 9/11, 'Contemplation in a world of violence' (Chapter 1 of Alison's brilliant On Being Liked).

Alison describes the way what was an essentially meaningless act -  'some brothers of ours committed simple acts of suicide with significant collateral murder, meaning nothing at all' - became a spectacle endowed with huge symbolic power, because of where it was (the World Trade Centre in New York), and because it was already under the spotlight of 'rolling cameras and a hugely powerful media network'. 'There took hold of an enormous number of us a feeling of being pulled in, being somehow involved, as though it was part of our lives.' Alison names the outbreak of unanimity in grief, and a fear 'not unrelated to excitement', and a sense in which '[w]e were tempted to be secretly glad of a chance for a huge outbreak of meaning to transform our humdrum lives, to feel we belonged to something bigger, more important, with hints of nobility and solidarity.' (pp.5-6)

In a quite stunning reading of the Gospel of Mark's so-called 'apocalypse' (Mark 13), Alison argues that Jesus is seeking to wean his hearers away from the seduction of, and addiction to, 'the apparently sacred world of apocalyptic meaning', the world of 'wars and rumours of wars', where 'order [is] based on sacrifice'. He instructs them, says Alison, 'not to allow themselves to be pulled by their desire' or their fear, into that 'world which others will want to create'. He warns too of the inevitable violence from that 'order' against those who 'break the unanimity which is demanded' by it. (p.10)

Jesus talks of, and lives out, 'a quite different power coming, scarcely noticeably, in the midst of all those things', 'a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it' - a power which reveals us human beings 'categorised' as nothing else other than 'created', which means, in Alison's terms, 'liked spaciously, delighted in, wanted to give extension, fulfillment, fruition to, to share in just being'. 'In the midst of the false manufacturing of meaning and frightening power displayed by the satanic [Alison uses the term quite technically for the kind of 'fascination' or 'addiction' he describes above], we are being taught that our being liked and held in being is at the hands of something infinitely more powerful, infinitely restful, and we can live without fear.' (pp.13-16)

'Personally,' Alison concludes, 'the strongest feeling I have had over the last few months is the quite unexpected discovery that I am no longer frightened of Muslims, and that I like them, and that this is only the beginning of discovering what it will mean to rejoice in them and see them as part of an "us". Is this not the deepest act of treachery against the satanic order which was turned on in a part of all our minds and hearts by the events of 11 September 2001? And where on earth will it end?' (p.16)

Why have I spent considerable space here dwelling on this 'reading together' of the events of 9/11 and one of the weirder chapters of Mark's gospel? What Alison does, in a significantly deeper - and obviously more explicitly 'traditioned' - way than Evans & Reid's interpretation of Hoepker's photo, is point a way out of the captivity to the all-consuming 'unavoidable vulnerability - necessary resilience' narrative of Ulrich Beck's 'risk society'. Neither Alison nor Hoepker deny the tragic realities of death and violence where they happen, nor do they seek to freeze our instincts to compassion for those who are suffering, but they do seek to remove us from the kinds of manufactured fascination that insist 'There Is No Alternative', and demand only resilience, and not resistance, from those who the system ensures remain the most vulnerable.

What emerges, between Hoepker and Alison, is a kind of 'distancing' that functions as almost as an ironic opposite to the rich and powerful's 'gated communities' - a joie de vivre, not without compassion, but which rejects the fear-inducing 'securitisation' stories which seek to divide people from one another. It embodies the particular kind of 'indifference' that, in Pete Rollins' terms (which I've explored previously), rejects the 'token gestures' and the 'perverse protests' (which can enable us to feel like rebels for a while, but often turn out to be simply 'release valves in the system, opportunities for people to resist in a way that [is] ultimately authorized by those in control') in favour of 'insurrection', simply 'living a different life', building something new in the shell of the old, 'changing the system by ignoring it'.

Can 'resilience' be redeemed?

The critiques of 'resilience' language from Evans & Reid and MacKinnon & Derickson hit their nails squarely on the heads. But as with any word, it is the context and associations within which the word finds itself that create the parameters of its meaning. 'Good' words will always be co-opted and distorted - and that should not simply drive us to find a different word (as exactly the same dangers will still apply), but to work on the connections and webs of meaning which surround the words we use.

The core of Evans & Reid's argument was that the way resilience rhetoric has been deployed, functions to disable resistance among the most 'vulnerable' at the same time as it effectively removes the social bonds between the endlessly vulnerable and 'those who have the ability to secure themselves'. This 'containment' of the 'vulnerable', and indeed of the 'powerful' too, in their own forms of high-security prison, and their physical, relational and psychological segregation from each other, are echoed in MacKinnon & Derickson's critique discussed above - that the spatial scales of 'the local' and 'the city' are isolated from wider spatial relations which produce and reproduce unequal distributions of power and resources.

While the engaged 'arts' of 'resourcefulness' proposed by MacKinnon & Derickson, and fleshed out by Delores Williams, ironically it might be in the kind of 'imaginative distancing' which emerges from Hoepker's photo and Alison's exegesis, I suggest, that 'resilience' language could be 'redeemed'. It is a very specific kind of distancing, as we have seen: from the 'sacred centres' of power which generate the discourse of the unavoidable necessity of both 'vulnerability' and 'resilience', and perpetuate and deepen inequalities and segregations.

In Hoepker's photo, we witness an outbreak of what Ivan Illich calls 'conviviality', a distinctly embodied, attentive, face-to-face enjoyment of the company and friendships of other human beings in a way that resists, or better is outside the grip of, the technocratic, instrumentalizing drives of the systems and power structures of the modern world. Conviviality has a scale, a pace, limits that are appropriate to the kind of activity it encompasses - but limits which create thresholds for hospitality. As such it resonates closely with the more positive, grassroots uses of 'resilience' language - but at the same time refuses to be commanded, co-opted or corrupted by governments and the powers of global capital. If for some the word has resonances of exclusive champagne dinner parties, it refuses to be so confined, and is in fact alive and well in low-income neighbourhoods, resisting and ridiculing the stark choice offered within the governing language between 'hard-working' or destitution. It is not a 'means' to any 'end' other than itself, it cannot be the focus of any 'strategy' - and yet, at its carnivalesque best, it is infectious, catching, overflowing the local and disrupting the established systems and regimes of 'order' at national and international scales too. The ripples of the 'Occupy' movement and its 'politics of recognition', for example, have been felt far beyond the steps of St Paul's Cathedral, or the railings of Zuccotti Park.

'Learning how to die'

In Alison's more explicitly theological 'distancing' too, we witness a particular kind of breaking down of 'containment' into what we might call 'overflow': attentiveness not to the spectacle, but to the human faces obscured by it, in the context of the infinitely more powerful and yet infinitely gentle 'liking' of creation by God, enables the discovery, and the 'living-into', of an inclusive 'us' which - as he puts it - is 'treachery' against the established order of 'us and them'. Evans & Reid, following Cornel West, seek to liberate the 'resilient subjects' from their imprisonment by inviting them to 'give up the prospect of self-renewal' and 'learn how to die', 'turning your world upside-down' in the process and 'actually liv[ing] more intensely and critically and abundantly' (Evans & Reid, p.97). It is inescapably theological language, which Alison would ground in the very particular death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth ('a creative acting out and living so-as-to-lose to the sacrificial game in order to undo it'), and to which fellow-theologian David Ford brings a particular clarity:

“the wisest way to cope [with being multiply overwhelmed] is not to try to avoid being overwhelmed, and certainly not to expect to be in control of everything; rather it is to live amidst the overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others. That is the “home” or “school” in which the practicalities of coping can be learnt.” (David Ford, The Shape of Living, p.xxv)

Perhaps, after all, resilience language does need to be jettisoned. Conviviality, as Illich describes it, turns out to be a very particular form of 'being overwhelmed' - a form which, within Ford's theological ecology, includes 'facing' and 'feasting', singing and dancing, thanking and lamenting, and more. From a very particular kind of vulnerability comes an 'overflow' of both joy and responsibility which cannot be contained by locality, ghettoed or gated communities, or structures which perpetuate inequalities. At the same time both liberating to 'live outside' the system, and liberating to engage with and resist the system as it is, it allows us to recover, among other things, a utopian imagination of the kind that Thomas Moore envisioned: 'a site of human togetherness and shared access to resources' (Evans & Reid, p.97).

We are being invited, I suggest, to engage in the practice what feminist theologian Sarah Coakley describes as a kind of receptiveness or 'contemplation'. When it keeps silence, it is certainly not being silenced: rather, she says, 'it is the voluntary silence of attention, transformation, mysterious interconnection, and (in violent, abusive, or oppressive contexts) rightful and divinely empowered resistance: it is a special "power-in-vulnerability"... Contemplation engenders courage to give voice, but in a changed, prophetic key' (Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the self: an essay 'on the Trinity', pp.84-85).

And that voice, as founder of community organising Saul Alinsky knew well, depends on a receptiveness to discovering a utopian imagination, and a freedom to start living it into reality, before our acts of resistance to the injustices of 'the world as it is' can be more than simply 'perverse protest'. We need to deliberately shape our political actions, Alinsky would insist, 'simultaneously to declare the unjust way to be untrue and to present a possible alternative through which all may flourish.' There has to be 'a constructive alternative', argues Luke Bretherton, such that 'the declaration of a "No" to something is always premised on the prior celebration and upholding of a "Yes" to another way, a way in which both oppressor and oppressed are invited to participate' (Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics, p.79). In other words, conviviality and resistance - both rooted in but overflowing the local - go hand in hand.

'Community Resilience' & its dangers

For the past 3 years or so, I've been playing around with the concept of 'community resilience' and its value for neighbourhoods like my own.

It's 'hot' language at the moment, popping up all over the place, from papers emerging from thinktanks, like DEMOS' Resilient Nation, and the much more 'earthed' and practical examination by the Carnegie Trust of resilience in rural communities, to policy documents published by the UK's 'Risk & Regulation Advisory Council' and the United Nations Development Programme. It's also fed - and this should ring a warning bell or two - by trends in philosophy (a shift from dealing in utopian ideals to a philosophical realism needed for 'coping in an intractable world'), politics (a 'localist' focus on 'what communities can do for themselves') and economics (what you can do when, so we're told, there's 'no money' for the kind of - supposedly - 'transformative' investment in 'community regeneration' that went on a couple of decades ago).

'Community resilience', in short, is about the 'personal and collective capacities' to survive and thrive in a world that is rapidly changing, unpredictable, and, in many different ways - from climate change to terrorism, from epidemics to austerity - potentially or actually hostile. It focuses on the 'assets', 'capitals' or 'resources' of local communities; it emphasises the positive 'agency' within communities in response to disruption and change; and, as a 'science', treats communities as complex, multi-levelled 'systems' including, in its broadest formulations, the ecosystems within which human communities are embedded.

In fact, the roots of 'resilience thinking' lie in engineering (how materials 'bounce back' from shocks, and resist under pressure), in social psychology (how individuals survive and thrive through, and after, stressing and traumatic life experiences), and in ecology and 'environmental management' (often deploying sophisticated mathematical modelling of a system's 'capacity to absorb disturbance and still behave in the same way').

There's a lot to commend a 'resilience' approach to communities:

•  The systems approach of CR relates individuals and households, to the community itself, to the wider environment, in a complex and ongoing interaction
• CR encourages an honesty about the potential ‘hostilities’ of the wider environment – particularly in the present time of international economic turbulence, severe government cuts, and global climate change
• CR describes a neighbourhood not just in terms of its ‘indices of deprivation’, but pushes towards ‘a fuller understanding of the collective history of [an area]’ (including ‘how they have been affected by previous economic decline, the impact of in-migration, their connectivity to any remaining sources of jobs’)
• CR’s positive, ‘asset’-focused approach, in contrast to prevailing ‘deficit’ models, values ‘what is’ in a neighbourhood, including the skills and gifts of local people
• Rather than a ‘top-down’, ‘professionalised’ approach that encourages ‘passivity’ and ‘dependency’ among local people, CR looks for, encourages, and focuses on agency and participation by local people – and brings individuals’ stories of resilience into the discussion of the community level
• As a move away from ‘regeneration’ language, CR makes it clear that communities can not be ‘made better’ simply by investing large amounts of money
• CR is interested in more than ‘coping’ or ‘stability’, but in ‘flourishing’, often ‘despite extraordinarily tough experiences and environments'

But there is what one author has called a 'dark side' to community resilience, that I'm finding more and more troubling.

One aspect of this 'dark side' lies in what 'resilience' is often defined 'against': 'vulnerability'. The working assumption is that communities find themselves in a potentially - and often, actually - hostile environment, and that resilience is about reducing a community's 'vulnerabilities' to 'a broad spectrum of risks' (as the DEMOS report puts it), including 'threats like terrorism and organised crime', 'hazards such as flooding, heat waves and snow storms' and 'major accidents' such as the King's Cross fire. But, as Ulrich Beck has repeatedly reminded us, the general fear and anxiety of a 'risk society' allow some, in the 'security business', to profit. Risk 'is not synonymous with catastrophe. Risk means the anticipation of the catastrophe', and as such, shapes our imagination in a way that 'becomes a political force that transforms the world'. Who decides what is and is not a risk, and why should we believe what they tell us?

There is more to it than that, though, and it emerges from community resilience's origins in ecology. Resilient systems, the scientists, tell us, are those which have a level of diversity, modularity (where 'subgroups of components are strongly linked internally, but only loosely connected to each other') and tight - but not too tight - feedback loops (where 'the consequences of a change in one part of the system are felt and responded to in other parts'). There is much to learn from the science of resilience - for example, about decentralizing control within institutions and networks; an increased awareness in the developed world of the consequences of our actions in the developing world; and the vulnerabilities built in to the dependence of a town or estate on one supermarket's supply chain (and the 'efficiencies of scale' that it promises), contrasted with everyone growing their own fruit and vegetables and sharing between them. There is an element of redundancy in resilient systems (the exact opposite of 'optimised efficiency', in fact), a more-than-optimal 'surplus', which enables an 'adaptability so that life may go on living despite the fact that elements of our living systems may be destroyed'. Such 'redundancy' is not tragic when it relates to supply chains or a garden's vegetable crop - we can probably cope if the cabbages don't appear this time - but what does 'redundancy' - the tolerable loss of certain 'elements' of the system - mean when applied to a neighbourhood? Is community life to simply 'go on' as the lives of some community members are destroyed? As some human beings within the neighbourhood are ground down, pushed out, broken?

Of course this is never explicitly said when 'community resilience' is invoked, but the question must be asked: where is the 'cost' of resilience to be absorbed? The question is sharpened when the focus is widened beyond an individual neighbourhood to the society of which it is a part. When a government advocates 'community resilience', is it, in fact, demanding it of those deemed most 'vulnerable', and insisting that their vulnerability is an inescapable part of their condition? Resilience rhetoric has as its target 'the insecuritisation of the most at-risk which politically threatens the security and comforts of those who are sufficiently protected' [Brad Evans & Julian Reid, 'Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the resilient subject', Resilience (2013) 1:2, pp.83-98] and, at the same time, places the responsibility for 'resilience' squarely on the 'at-risk' themselves. As Zygmunt Bauman sharply puts it, '[l]eft increasingly to their own resources and acumen, individuals are expected to devise individual solutions to socially generated problems, and to do it individually, using their individual skills and individually possessed assets.' [Bauman, Collateral Damage, p.17] For 'individual' read 'or communal', and we get close to the heart of the problem of 'community resilience' rhetoric.

What we're witnessing here is, as Brad Evans and Julian Reid argue, neoliberalism's 'politically debasing reduction of resistance to resilience': '[b]uilding resilient subjects involves the deliberate disabling of the political habits, tendencies and capacities of peoples and replacing them with adaptive ones.'

'To increase its resilience, in other words, the subject must disavow any belief in the possibility to secure itself and accept, instead, an understanding of life as a permanent process of continual adaptation to threats and dangers which are said to be outside its control. As such, the resilient subject is a subject which must permanently struggle to accommodate itself to the world, and not a subject which can conceive of changing the world, its structure and conditions of possibility.' [Evans & Reid, p.85]

If resilience rhetoric functions to disable resistance among the most 'vulnerable', at the same time it effectively removes the social bonds between the endlessly vulnerable and 'those who have the ability to secure themselves', creating gated communities for some, who are able to 'outsource the need to be resilient to other elements within the gated system ranging from barbed fences, physical walls, surveillance technologies, catastrophe-proofed architectures, insurance premiums to armed guards patrolling the perimeters.' [Evans & Reid, pp.96-7]

Is 'community resilience' redeemable? Is it a concept even worth trying to redeem? Is it possible to highlight and strengthen a local community's social - and other forms of - capital, while at the same time building, and not disabling, its collective capacity for political - even utopian - imagination and active resistance to the structures of the status quo? These are the questions for next time...

In this new year...

In this new year

I will

not check Twitter

while the kids are splashing

in the bath

and put away

the phone and iPad and laptop

by 10pm

and go to bed

counting

the things

I have been thankful for

today

and try to remember

to do the laundry

and give up

Amazon.co.uk

and walk more

and try again

to grow vegetables

and embrace

disappointments

lightly

and spend a day

each month

with some nuns

and hand-write

plenty of thank-you notes

and pray

for those

I've said

I'll pray for

and go swimming

in the odd gap

in my working week

and grab

more chances

to go on hot dates

with my wife

and think twice

in the middle

of arguments

and turn anger

into action

and not just retweets

on Twitter

and work on

quality not quantity

with friends

and strangers

and knock

on more doors

to find out

what

my neighbours

care about

and take

the time

to read

novels

and poems

and spend

more time

eating and drinking

and pick up

some new

jokes

and celebrate

more

of the small things

and breathe

more consciously

and write

a PhD

and less

ambitious

'To do' lists

Waiting for dawn to break (Midnight Mass sermon 2013)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

Open doors, inevitable disappointments, and the stable in the world

We've found a great re-telling of the Christmas story for this year's Christmas Eve All-age Nativity Service. Called 'Knock Knock - Who's There?', it revolves around a door, through which enters each character from the story, finding their way into the stable. It ends with a reflection on Holman Hunt's famous painting, 'The Light of the World'...

Jesus is knocking at our door, the reflection suggests - the door of our home, our life, our heart - and he is waiting for us to open up, invite him in, to be our friend. It's a simple - and, to many of us, familiar - message. The trouble is, I'm not sure I know what it means any more - if I ever did. Maybe the childlike simplicity of a 'Yes' is enough, at least as a beginning, or even as a repeated practice over the years.

But 'what happens next?' is my 'wondering' question. What is it that then makes a difference to our lives, to make it 'good news' worth sharing, in neighbourhoods like mine, among friends and neighbours who are struggling to make ends meet and put food on the table; who are out of work or in insecure, zero-hours, low-paid work; on whose doormats the latest ATOS work capability assessment has landed; whose sense of pride or self-esteem is constantly battered by media labelling, stereotyping and demonising; or who rarely encounter the friendly face of another human being, other than the occasional professional, dealing with their 'problems' (or dealing with them as a 'problem')?

In Hodge Hill, we (Hodge Hill Church) have been running 'Open Door' for almost a year and a half now. A drop-in, now twice a week, for a couple of hours on Tuesday and Saturday mornings. A place where you will always find a warm welcome, the offer of a cuppa and some toast, some friendly people to talk with, and some practical support using computers and accessing the internet, putting together a CV and searching for jobs, finding advice on benefits entitlements, and more. It's run by volunteers, on a shoestring, and one of the most important things about it is that we're interested in the people who come through the door not as 'clients', but as people who come with gifts, passions, knowledge, and skills (even if they might not be the kind that would instantly find their way onto a CV or job application), and that Open Door is a place where such strangers can become friends, where such gifted people can find ways of saying 'I can', among their neighbours, and within the wider community.

Open Door has been an early example of the Birmingham-wide network of 'Places of Welcome' which has begun to emerge from the Social Inclusion process in the city, and at times has been hailed, even in the upper echelons of Birmingham City Council, as a great example of an innovative, sustainable approach to supporting local people - at a time when Neighbourhood Offices and advice centres run by paid staff are being stripped to the bone by wave upon wave of funding cuts rolled down from central government. We're certainly quite proud of it - never more so than when someone who began as a 'visitor' ends up not only with a satisfying (enough) paid job, but also as an Open Door volunteer, welcoming and supporting fresh visitors through the door; or when another Open Door 'visitor' finds herself gradually more and more embedded in all kinds of other neighbourhood activities, from Women's Group to community lunches. At its best, it encapsulates so much of our proclaimed vision as a church here, of 'Growing Loving Community - in the love of God, with all our neighbours, across Hodge Hill'.

But...

There is, inevitably, a 'but...'

There are times when the open door has to close. There have been times where we've had to say, politely but firmly, 'I'm afraid that's not what we're here for', and had to ask people to leave. There have been times when the door, then locked, has been hammered and kicked repeatedly, out of anger and frustration.

And there have been plenty more times when people have gone away disappointed. Because they have been seeking something, and not found it. Because they have needed a particular kind of help, but we've not been able to give it. Or because life has simply been shit, and actually, short of a cup of tea and a listening ear, there has been nothing any of us have been able to do, in two hours one morning, to make it any less shit.

We will probably disappoint - if we haven't already - those senior Council officers who hailed our boldness and innovation. Apart from anything else, the numbers through our Open Door are pretty small. The numbers 'into work' (one of those ever-present, all-demanding statistics of 21st Century Britain) are even smaller. Our 'volunteer base' is committed, but fragile, and although we have pretty much managed to open the door every week of the year, with a week off each for Christmas and Easter, our rota is always vulnerable to one or two people being struck down with flu, or having to attend to a family crisis.

One of the dangers, when you call something 'Open Door', or when you stick up a strapline about 'Growing Loving Community', is that you will inevitably disappoint. Not everybody, all of the time. But probably most people, sometimes. Because such phrases describe our highest aspirations, our best intentions. And as limited, fragile, complex and entangled human beings, we are rarely able to reach our highest aspirations, or consistently carry out our best intentions. We certainly can't - and don't pretend to - meet the 'targets', solve the 'problems', or provide the 'models' that the world of spreadsheets would like to demand of us. But even by our own measures, our door cannot always be open, and we are not always as loving (or as growing) as we would like to be.

Instead, we offer something more modest. While it is rarely possible to be clear at the outset what we can do and what we can't, we try to do what we can. We try to prop the door open as wide as we can. We try to let 'growing loving community' shape as much of who we are and what we do, as we can. And when we fail, or find our limits, or just get it wrong, we try to be as honest as we can, and seek out ways of mending and reconciling, rather than attempting to cover up or run away.

The liberation, in it all, is that we are not, ultimately, the Innkeepers of the stable, 'keeping the door', issuing the invitations in, and deciding when there is 'no room'. We too are invited guests, having to bend our heads low, just like everyone else, to get through the door, and finding our places amidst the hay bales and stench of animal faeces. The door, in fact, has been flung open, never to be shut. We are all, already in the stable. Our job is to let our eyes adjust to its shadows and, by the strange light that seems to come from the newborn child in the manger, to recognise around us all those strangers who are in fact our neighbours.

On our 'Journey to the Stable' this year, we have welcomed more than 200 local school children into this awe-filled place, and moved a few of them to tears in the process. On Christmas Eve, that stable, of cardboard and straw, will occupy the centre of the worship space at church, and we will all, defying the laws of physics (but perhaps just within the laws of Doctor Who), be invited into it. And as we hear, and join in, the words of the beautiful song of John Bell's that I've copied just below, I hope we will discover afresh that the doorway into the stable is, in fact, the doorway into our neighbourhoods, and into our world.

1.         The love of God comes close

            Where stands an open door

            To let the stranger in,

            To mingle rich and poor:

            The love of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

2.         The peace of God comes close

            To those caught in a storm,

            Forgoing lives of ease

            To ease the lives forlorn:

            The peace of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

3.         The joy of God comes close

            Where faith encounters fears,

            Where heights and depths of life

            Are found through smiles and tears:

            The joy of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

4.         The grace of God comes close

            To those whose grace is spent,

            When hearts are tired and sore

            And hope is bruised and bent:

            The grace of God is here to stay

            Embracing those who walk his way.

5.         The Son of God comes close
To those who wait tonight.
To those who sit in darkness,
He comes to shine his light.
The Son of God is here to stay
Embracing those who walk his way.

                      John L. Bell  © 1988, 1997 WGRG, (v.5 altd.)
Iona Community, Glasgow G2 3DH, Scotland

On being a recovering hypocrite

I've been feeling a bit of a fraud recently.

On one side of this particularly uncomfortable coin are some real causes for celebration. (I would say 'pride', but that would be to give the game away too quickly, and probably - hopefully - to judge myself a little too harshly, which is at least sometimes a temptation I find myself falling into. So let's stick with 'celebration' for the moment...) The fact that the values, principles and practices of asset-based approaches to community-building (ABCD for short) have found their way to the agenda of the Church Urban Fund (a 'toolkit' for churches, in development) and, via a barn-storming speech from the Archbishop of York this week, the Church of England's General Synod, is something that I'm delighted about. That some of the stories of our accidental adoption of an ABCD approach here in Hodge Hill have made their way into these 'official' public domains - such as the story of our fabulous 'Unsung Heroes' event of March 2012 - is really encouraging for us here (and, yes, if I am proud of anything, then I'm certainly proud of the visionary, energetic, passionate, committed people that I live among and work alongside in these neighbourhoods, and within Hodge Hill Church's 'extended family'). And to lead a couple of workshops on ABCD at the CUF annual conference a couple of weeks ago, both fully booked, both full of energised, enthusiastic people saying 'yes, this makes sense', 'yes, we're doing this', 'yes, let's start connecting', and the like... well, that's given me real hope that we might just be onto something, and that there's energy for a real movement within church communities for this kind of approach - just as there obviously is in all kinds of other institutions, networks, and neighbourhoods, where our friends at Nurture Development, Barnwood Trust and others have already for some time been working hard and seeing all kinds of encouraging fruit.

But still I feel a bit of a fraud. And I think it's for a couple of reasons.

One reason is that (in the words of a wonderful story that I have both heard told and told myself a number of times now) when I've talked to people about the ABCD stuff, I've been really aware that "I'm not going to tell you anything you don't already know." On a very important level, it's not rocket science. Starting with what people and neighbourhoods and communities have, instead of with what they lack, is not a complex idea. It's actually very easy to explain, and to get hold of. And to many, many people, it is simply common sense.

Another reason for my fraudulent feelings is slightly more complex and subtle. And that's the reality that, at least here in Hodge Hill, our 'putting into practice' of an ABCD approach has had its ups and downs, its stumbles and falterings; we've got it wrong as much as we've got it 'right'; it has taken large amounts of time and patience; and the 'big idea' has often been evidenced in very small-scale practical 'successes'. The various exciting things that we're able to say that we're doing here and now are, without exception I think, all quite fragile. There has, as yet, been no dramatic, widespread 'revolution' here. At best, there are some people - a very slowly growing number of people - who are able to tell a different story about their neighbourhood, about their church, and at least sometimes about themselves.

There is a bigger, deeper reason underneath both of these, though...

I recently bought a book which quite grandly entitles itself as 'The Intentional Christian Community Handbook'. I tend to be rather wary of anything that proclaims to be 'The... Handbook'. The thing that redeemed this book, at least as far as its cover went, was the subtitle: 'For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus'. That works a lot better for me. I can recognise in myself an Idealist, a Hypocrite, and a Wannabe: a Wannabe disciple of Jesus; and a Wannabe asset-based community builder.

The thing about the asset-based stuff is that, while on the one hand it is 'common sense', our 'common sense' as a society, as institutions, as neighbourhoods, as individuals, has all too often been co-opted, distorted, marginalised, in the interests of what I've begun to call (with shades of Old Testament prophet frustration) the 'idolatries' of money and of 'service-provision systems'. We have bought into the 'big lies' that money is the thing that, more than anything else, determines what is of value and what isn't, and that, more than anything else, enables us to achieve what we most desire - when, in fact, the things that are of most value, and that we desire most of all - love, friendship, community, for example - can't be achieved with money at all. We have bought into the 'big lie' that the things that we most need are best provided by comprehensive systems - and that the way we should relate to those systems is as 'clients', 'customers', or 'consumers'. We have allowed ourselves to be convinced that what we most need for our safety and security is police; that what we most need for our health and wellbeing is doctors; that what we most need for our children to learn and grow and flourish is schools; that what we most need in our ageing and dying is care homes...

Now I realise I'm treading on dangerous territory - that I risk being misunderstood as, or coopted into, advocating the 'austerity agenda' of our present coalition government: that we can't afford to sustain these creakingly ineffective public service machines and we'd be much better off just letting the market provide us with what we want, and letting the 'Big Society' get on with doing its job without the interfering State getting in the way. Please don't misunderstand me. I don't believe the current regime has the best interests of people in neighbourhoods like mine at its heart at all, but the best interests of the companies that will make vast profits from taking over what were once 'public services' and offering those services to those who can afford them, and can afford the luxury - or at least the imagined luxury - of 'choice'. I don't believe that the 'Big Society' will suddenly spring up in neighbourhoods like mine, while the ever-shrinking, asset-stripping State disinvests in them, and allows our once 'common wealth' constantly to 'trickle up' towards the '1%' of the country's super-rich and super-powerful.

But I do think we need weaning off our addictions. We need to rediscover our vast 'common wealth' as truly common, but we need weaning off our addiction to believing money on its own is 'the answer' to any question, when the answer is almost always love, care, friendship and community. And likewise, we - 'professionals' and 'clients' alike - need weaning off our addiction to the kind of 'service provision' that defines people in terms of their lacks, deficiencies, needs and pathologies; that isolates them from each other and from their networks and communities; that creates and sustains dependencies on 'experts' and 'systems' that, in turn, need a steady stream of the 'needy' to justify and sustain their own existence - that have to position themselves as 'the answer' to questions they themselves have defined, when, again, the answer is almost always love, care, friendship and community.

So my own feeling of being a fraud goes deeper, I think. I am not only a fraud and a hypocrite, but also a recovering addict. If I'm keen to be part of growing a movement around asset-based values, principles and practices, then I think what I'm discovering is that we're a movement of recovering addicts, who have got as far as acknowledging that we've got an addiction and are wanting to change.

Two recent books are helping me begin to get a handle on what I'm trying to say here. One is by Christian community worker Dave Andrews, Out And Out: Way-Out Community Work; the other is by the Franciscan priest and founder of the 'Center for Action and Contemplation', Richard Rohr, Breathing Under Water: Spirituality and the Twelve Steps. Dave Andrews draws heavily on Rohr's book, and both, as you might have guessed, draw heavily on the insights from the 12 Steps movement which began in the 1930s as Alcoholics Anonymous, and now has millions of individuals across the world attending meetings every week.

I don't have much first hand experience of the 12 Steps movement, and I'm only beginning to digest the insights from Andrews and Rohr. But I have a hunch that they're on to something really important, for all of us - and particularly for those of us who are people of faith, and those of us who are committed to building community starting with what we have, and not what we lack. I'll try and share what I'm learning, as this journey continues, but I think what I'm wanting to do here is throw open the invitation to others - to you, whoever you are - to join in the conversation. I think we need, need perhaps quite urgently, to start addressing our addictions. And to do that, we need each other.

So, anyone for therapy? Shall we do it together?

And that's why I wear a white poppy: on our failure of moral imagination

I've worn a white poppy for a few years now. I can't make any grand claim to be radical, pioneering, trend-setting - it's something I 'caught' from friends whose commitment and creativity in real, costly work for peace and justice far exceeds mine. But I am increasingly convinced of its importance as a small, symbolic act, within a 'big picture' of global scope and deep seriousness.

Red poppies & 'future soldiers'

This was the moment it got to me this year. A photo, shared by a friend on Facebook. Now, I know nothing of the story behind this picture. (That, in itself, is one of the big issues about Remembrance Sunday / poppy issue - a multitude of individual, deeply personal stories are entangled in some powerful, largely unquestioned 'big stories'.) I can make no judgements about the personal reasons behind the T shirts, and the photo. But as a symbol - and it's certainly a photo that 'says something' profoundly symbolic - it's tragic, in the most literal sense.

I'm reminded of the origins of the white poppy, in a request from war widows to the Royal British Legion to put the words 'No More War' in the centre of the red poppy - and when the Legion refused, in the determination to develop an alternative symbol that bore that same message. The white poppy began with the insistence that the future could, should, must be different: we remember, not to fall into and repeat the same tragic violent entanglements again and again, but to seek an alternative future, a future where war is not an inevitability, a necessity, a normal part of life.

The tragedy of the photo, then, is that the future it imagines is a future where today's children have become tomorrow's soldiers. A future where war remains a given - an inevitability, a necessity, a normal part of life. It's even more tragic, though, because these 'future soldiers' are smiling. War, and the armed human bodies that make war possible, are not simply inevitabilities, necessities, normality - they are, in at least some sense, something to look forward to, something to be proud of.

Of course, there's nothing about the colour of the poppies that makes all the difference to the message of the photo, just as there's nothing inherent to a red poppy that means its wearer is explicitly or implicitly promoting future warfare. But the fact that such an image can be cheerfully posed for, taken and shared is witness to a wider, national - global, even - failure of imagination. And the white poppy, in even just a small way, probes that failure, that dominant, unquestioned story, and invites, provokes, the imagination of alternative possibilities.

Fig trees & 'proximate' relationships

Something similar was highlighted in the recent trial of the 'Waddington 6', which I was privileged to witness. The six men and women broke into RAF Waddington, creating a hole in the fence inviting others to follow them. They began planting a peace garden, and splitting up, searched the base for the control centre for the armed, unmanned drones that have been attacking unsuspecting, often civilian, 'targets' in Afghanistan for the last few years. Their stated aim was to enter this 'war zone', to interrupt the drone controllers, to prevent casualties and deaths in Afghanistan.

The trial judge, 'with a heavy heart', felt he had no choice but to find the six guilty, on the basis of the lack of 'proximity' between the protestors and the potential victims of the drones. The protestors, however, were working within a different moral imagination, in fact, an imagination that in many ways more accurately reflects the interconnectedness of our globalised world: that children at school and families celebrating weddings in rural Afghanistan are as much our 'proximate' neighbours as those people who live next door to us, or share the same queue in the supermarket.

The difference, of course, is in how we feel about those different neighbours, and that is in great part shaped by how we are told to feel by those who dominate our media, our politicians, the purveyors of the 'big stories' within which we so often, unquestioningly, live. And that is another reason why I wear a white poppy. Because the 'big story' behind the red poppy is about remembering 'our' war dead, supporting 'our' troops, taking pride in 'our' nation - at the expense of 'them', the 'enemies', or even simply those countless innocent others who are not 'us'. The white poppy says that 'they' are our neighbours too, that 'their' lives are just as precious, that 'their' deaths are just as grief-worthy, that 'their' future is inextricably tied up with 'ours'.

Remembrance Sunday in Hodge Hill

Tomorrow, Remembrance Sunday, people of all ages will come to church in Hodge Hill. Many of them will come wearing red poppies. Quite a number of them will come with personal losses and wounds from at least one World War, and from other conflicts in which the UK has participated over the years since WWII. Some will come with pride in servicemen and -women who they have known. Some will come with pride in a nation which, at its best, they believe acts with restraint, decency and humanity.

And as their priest, I will invite them to lay their red poppies down, in the circular space of the worshipping community, close to the altar of communion and the font of baptism. And I will lead them in prayers of penitence, both individual and corporate, for the violence of our world, our nation, and for our part and our complicity in it. And then, after our sharing in two-minutes' silence for 'all who have given their lives, or have had them taken away, in the war and violence of our world', I will invite them to take up a white poppy, as a sign of their own personal commitment to seeking peace and justice in our own lives and relationships, in our own neighbourhoods, in our world. As their priest, I will then lead them in the celebration of the Eucharist, remembering together the one and only 'sacrifice' - we will affirm - that truly inaugurates a world of peace, the loving-even-to-death of the innocent victim of the world's violence, in whose resurrection he returns to us breathing not revenge, or resentment, but forgiveness and peace.

Many of those who come to church tomorrow will, at the end of the service, pick up their red poppies again and replace them in their button-holes. Perhaps for them the red poppy does not mean what our society's dominant stories say it does. Perhaps it does, and our shared liturgy will simply have not changed their minds and hearts on the matter. But I live in hope that, even in small, barely perceptible ways, our words, symbols and shared actions tomorrow will open at least a crack or two in our world's 'business-as-usual' for an alternative imagination, of a world where Afghans are our 'proximate' neighbours with whom we have relationships of compassion and joy, a world where 'future soldiers' are an oxymoron, because war is finally no more.