blogger's progress

The church has a LOT of meetings but do we stop to really consider whether our default assumption that meeting is the way to go is the right one? There is a case for the opposition …. Meetings can be a huge use of resource when you add up the hours burned, they can convey relatively little information per minute and even less creative synergy unless carefully crafted, easily go off-track, regularly involve such unwieldy agendas that the suspicion is no-one has done the prep necessary to hit the ground running, generate further meetings easily, provide forums for axe-grinding repetition and unenlightening cameo performances, and so on and so depressingly on.

What’s the answer? Dunno. But a plea to at least consider whether we can’t have as our default question “must we meet to crank through a long agenda or is there a more effective way of doing what we want to do?” Think about it in terms of creativity, where were the most creative ideas hatched that YOU were involved in? I bet they were 1-1 or at least small group discussions, if not on-the-job light bulbs going on as surprising connections were made, and most interestingly, often we can’t even trace where the creative stuff was really founded. Seems to me we’ve got to make space for this and it’s easily pushed out by a knee-jerk planning of meetings rooted in part in a lack of imagination, boldness and fear, fear of not keeping everyone in the loop all the time, fear of going out on a limb, fear of doing it differently, fear of what will be said in other meetings….

Of course there are good reasons for meeting sometimes, and I’ve been in some great ones, well put-together, participatory, thought through and generative, vivifying. Which brings me to a whole other question relating to the culture we generate through our meetings. Presumably as Christians who identify our dependence on God and seek to live out of that dependence there should be a focus throughout on discernment and worship. That needs careful handling so that for example individuals don’t use statements like “I feel it’s my vocation” or  “this is what God is calling us to” as trump cards  to foreclose rather than open conversation. But surely there’s something important about practices such as corporate discernment, a mindfulness bell now and then, 5 mins of breathing meditation on God’s abundance and our inability to cope with it, scripture not used at the beginning, put to one side and brought in again at the end but carefully considered verses offered which are shot through the discussion, by one and all, corporate silence at crunchy moments to reflect rather than simply to re-load(!), laughter as an innoculation against the drift to taking our Pelagian tendencies too seriously etc etc. Meeting which reinforces our identity as children of God upon whom we depend and in relationship with whom we are energised, directed and sent.

Thoughts as ever very welcome….

Just been working on the everybody welcome course (www.everybodywelcome.org.uk) and one of the things the course doesn’t really talk about is how much the stranger can be one of God’s gifts to the Christian community. This is important because if we believe God provides the gifts necessary for the future that God prefers and promises each local church, then a key question might be, if we’re not experiencing that giftedness, what are we failing to see and respond to? Over and over again the stranger is a gift to the people of God. It is Melchizedek who brings bread and wine and blesses Abraham. It is Pharoah whose “fat cows” sustain Jacob’s family in times of hardship. It is Balaam who blesses Israel in the sight of her enemy Balak. It is Ruth who demonstrates the faithfulness and imagination Israel will need under her descendent David. Likewise Jesus discovers faith and mercy and gratitude in the stranger, be it the centurion whose servant he healed, the Samaritan leper, the Canaanite woman – and in the parable of the last judgement what is implicit at several other points in the Gospel becomes explicit; Christ is the stranger.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        This is one reason why I think one has to challenge the attitude which says “People come to church to talk to God, not their neighbour”. It may well be that God is arriving for conversation in the form of the stranger! Never mind the obvious point that our inhospitality to one another is inevitably connected to our capacity for hospitality to Christ.

And I reckon it’s a lot more than just thinking as Christians that we have a responsibility for or duty to the stranger. This misses the crucial dimension, that the stranger is a gift to the Church. The stranger is not a drainer of resources but a bringer of gifts… and care for the stranger, offering friendship are to be done not just because here we have a child of God but also because we have here someone precious who will build up the life of the community in some way, even if that gift is slow to be revealed or hard to receive. Christian hospitality understands that the stranger brings gifts and this hospitality understands that generosity leads to replenishment from unexpected sources. This way move from resistance based on anxiety about defending what we’ve got, which is part of what breeds the club mentality. “These newcomers, they come in here, taking our pews, wanting to change things. I have been here 20 years. This is my church”. It’s Enoch Powell theology said Giles Fraser a few years ago, and he says its widespread in the Church of England. It needs challenging….

 The American author, CEO and teacher Max De Pree famously defined leadership as entailing three tasks; defining reality, becoming a servant and debtor and saying thank you. When I first heard these three I was a little doubtful of the idea of “defining” reality which smacked of something potentially autocratic, individualistic and so open to delusion.

But second thoughts are …. on reflection putting it this way does capture something important. We are so easily and unwittingly focused upon immediate problems that we are in danger of our reality being defined by our problems, and so are likely to be shaped by such problems. That really narrows down our field of vision. In terms of faith, one of the challenges is to be shaped by the story of death and resurrection, the life-giving narrative of Jesus Christ. But it’s easy to slip into different narratives ruling the roost, narratives of problem-solving and “when I’ve sorted out these problems it will all be sorted” approaches which bear little scrutiny.

Coming back to De Pree, whether we’re aware of it or not we are continually making choices about how we interpret and read reality. To speak of leadership “defining” reality can help remind us that what we talk about, what we give our attention to, readily and rapidly becomes our reality. In that case, I suppose leadership involves re-directing our gaze and attention, our talk and our preoccupations where necessary.

I guess one question arising is “what am I paying too much attention to?” and “what am I paying too little attention to?” in terms of defining reality, questions for us in our Christian communities too. The Road to Emmaus is a classic example of how the disciples’ reality on the road is initially defined by the perceived failure of Jesus, and resulting disappointment, broken hopes and some anger. Their refrain “we had hoped” is a refrain we easily use in different contexts, attention being paid to unrealised expectations and frustrated longings. Yet by the end of the conversation with the stranger who walks along with them reality is re-defined in terms of fulfilment not failure, bearing fruit in joy, courage and hope. The Risen Lord re-defines reality for them and they rush to do the same for others. Their attention is focused not on their unrealised expectations but what has been realised and disclosed in and through the story of Jesus’ life death and resurrection. In terms of little picture much is the same – materially, physically, economically and politically the situation of these disciples is still precarious. But everything has changed in terms of big picture, making little picture look very different to them. (Though the polar bear pic is a reminder not to ignore little picture….)

So I go with De Pree’s point  in that leadership does involve attending to big picture and that should include defining reality. I’m just a little nervous of this ‘defining’ being understood as an individualistic enterprise given the possibilities of self-delusion. Maybe it needs couching in terms of occasionally being the courage of an individual speaking out, but this defining of reality might more usually be a prayerful  enterprise emerging out of ‘generative dialogue’ together….needing discipline to stick to the resulting definition too….. 

I know, I know, in danger of death by qualification but gotta defend against a leadership mentality of knights on chargers ……

Little Picture, Big Picture

Those pictures of us in our homes that zoom out to satellite views of our house, town, country, planet, galaxy etc till our minds rather give up are handy reminders that perspective and scale can give us very different ways of looking at the same thing. Little picture, big picture. Just been reading Paula Gooder’s This Risen Existence and I was reminded of this by a neat analogy she quoted (pp.5-6) from a BBC Drama, the Second Coming made in 2003. While she reckoned this production was largely disappointing, there was one remarkable scene where the main character was recognised as the Son of God and that moment was described as like a slice of one day being displaced into another: “the event happened Thursday evening and there’s a great big chunk of Tuesday in the middle”. Paula reckoned that was one of the best ways of looking at Jesus’ resurrection – it’s a slice of the end times, happening 2000 years ago. And of course this leaves open the possibility of the event of resurrection (including our own) being experienced by us now, as a slice of the end times. I reckon it’s a helpful image, and so too is the little picture, big picture analogy. In fact the latter might be even better, the little picture being our lives in their everyday detail with the ups and downs, changes and transitions, experiences, decisions and relationships, while the big picture is this resurrection life, our life related to that of the Risen Lord. We could miss seeing this life, a life immediately accessible, but we glimpse it now and then, as for example when in our Christian discipleship we rise above petty retaliation for the sake of another, serve self-forgetfully or allow gratitude to evaporate complaint.

So maybe the challenge is to live out of the big picture a bit more, which doesn’t deny or run away from little picture, because in any case little picture is contained within big picture. But little picture looks rather different within this big picture, and on this view, what’s as important as preparing for big picture Resurrection Life (ie Lent) is getting used to seeing and  living out of big picture, which is what the days of Easter to Ascension/Pentecost or all about. Maybe we could do with more overtly complementing Lenten disciplines with the disciplines we need to cultivate in Eastertide to live resurrection life, not least joy, gratitude and peace…

One of the pressures faced in workaday life is to provide a calm, assured presence which bespeaks being in control, knowing what’s happening and being prepared for whatever eventuality. A veneer of competence and unruffled professionalism. Bit like a swan. One of my concerns with this stance is that I wonder how open we are to change and development when we position ourselves like that for too long. We can become victims of our own propaganda, so much so that we assume we do know what’s going on and how to respond, deafening ourselves by degrees to disturbing new possibilities and failing to attend to what’s provocatively vital in order to grow. The classic example biblically would I guess be the religious leaders response to Jesus. So how do we avoid hardening into ultra-competent but stunted beings? One thought is by being willing to admit we’re lost more often than we do.

In the middle of the road of my life

I awoke in a dark wood

Where the way was wholly lost.

That’s Dante’s first line in the Divine Comedy according to one translation  – lostness is the beginning of the journey for Dante to heaven, and there’s a waking up to lostness which means a fresh start has been made. Recognising lostness is thus  a mark of spiritual movement! And isn’t it the case that following our path must mean going off the path if it is genuinely to be our path? This makes sense of experience too – the moments when we’ve been genuinely at sea, in terms of relationship breakdown, career crisis, health issues…. these moments of lostness which are awful at the time might nevertheless be seen, looking back, as times of discovery which we wouldn’t give up for all the world.

I suppose all of this shouldn’t really be surprising – the Judeo-Christian scriptures indicate that God does some of his best work with people who are lost in one way or another. The problem isn’t being lost, it’s pretending we’re not. Once we’ve admitted it we’re open to re-direction and expansion. And Dante has a lot to say about that too, but I guess that’s for another day.

Just reading Lucy Winkett’s Our sound is our wound after the Leicester Diocesan clergy conference – lovely reminder of the sculpture in the cathedral in Florence by Luca Della Robbia (in 1431) based on Psalm 150 which we reflected on at the conference. The sculpture has a series of glad cherubs or children playing instruments, dancing or singing – and Lucy puts this next to the passage on how we are to be living stones of the temple (1 Peter 2.4), suggesting from the interpretation of the sculpture that we’re not plonked there as statuesque building cubes but dancing. Building on this idea(!), it fits with the sense of being invited into the dancing (ie perichoresis – earliest description of life of Trinity) of God … or as one saint (I forget who) put it, “the Christian life is about falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up …but all the while, dancing.” And of course to relate as dancers or musicians suggests first and foremost that, like the angels, it’s not about domination or oppression but giving way to one another to make a beautiful unity (Isaiah 6.3, Rev 7.11,12).

St.Seraphim of Sarov (1759 – 1833) – got to be one of my favourite saints – celebrated today. Apart from amazing humility, his love and compassion for people stands as a remarkably different starting point to the popular starting point of having expectations of others, expectations so often frustrated and so easily causing irritation, anger and impatience.  The inevitability of us not meeting expectations all the time and our human fragility should be a cause for compassion – St. Seraphim understood this profoundly and replaced expectations with compassion and love, becoming like a child in his trustful and unquestioning acceptance of everyone.  Christ himself says, “Assuredly I say to you; unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matt18:3). Of course Seraphim could be charged with naivity and indulgence in all this, but to those who recognised God’s grace here and sought to follow the way of faith Seraphim was also a challenging and no-nonsense spiritual guide.

 Among his sayings are “the aim of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit” and “there is nothing that so blocks the work of the Holy Spirit as despondency”.

Put those together and it suggests the importance and spirit-filled nature of hope in the Christian life (Heb 11.1), a hope which, if authentic, means life is lived differently. Archbish’ Rowan says in his New Year’s message that we are not to lose hope in the possibility of change….and presumably that means we’re called to enact such hope in our lives.  Mary C.Grey sees this enacted in the ‘graced actions of ordinary people’ which ‘embody the hope of the coming Kingdom’, and Ann Morisy goes further to suggest these are the kinds of actions that dare to defy our regular assumptions of scarcity and threat (see her Bothered and Bewildered).

So what might such actions look like? I guess in a situation of trouble and dismay, an act of generosity and kindness to another for example…such as is consistently seen in the remarkable generosity of some of the ‘poorest’ people we know. Or in a situation of blame and acrimony, shouldering responsibility in order to shelter another, such as we see in our best ‘bosses’. Or in times of fear and the attendant temptations to violence and rigidity, an openness to God’s movement from the strangest of places, such as we experience in those holy ones who treat us as angels, just in case, Heb 13.2. Hopeful actions, rooted in the ‘assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’, Heb 11.1.

In such ways (and no doubt many others) it seems hope is enacted, despondency rejected and the Holy Spirit according to Seraphim allowed to flow.

The happy angel on the left in the picture is Gabriel, found at the front of Rheims Cathedral in France. There is another laughing angel, l’ange du sourire, on the left front door.

And why not? The angels are said to be rejoicing and presumably joy includes laughter. Laughter is also a great way to alleviate anxiety – so it goes with their message “do not be afraid”.

Reflecting on this in the light of lots of laughter this Christmastide, and the sense of the appropriate fit of that mood to the season. A season devoted to laughter – not mindless hedonism but laughter which is able to see some of its own absurdity, savour company and relax into the giftedness celebrated at Christmas. Why underplay this attractive, life-giving, anxiety-reducing, relationship-building dimension?

And what’s more, in that laughter of the angels maybe there’s an undercurrent  of laughter at the existing powers, and it seems historically that laughing at the powers and principalities is a pretty effective way of loosening their oppressive grip.

There are other pointers to laughter’s significance in the Christian tradition….

When Dante gets to Paradise in the Divine Comedy what does he hear after trials and tribulations? Angels laughing and praising the Trinity. (Isn’t the thought of joining a vibrant living room full of laughter somewhat more attractive than being ushered in to sit on the back pew of an everlasting service?) While in Hell there’s no hope or laughter for Dante, and in Purgatory there’s hope but no laughter, in heaven there’s no need of hope and laughter is the order of the day!

Or take St.Catherine of Siena. Her biographer tells of how she spent three years enclosed in her room, often besieged by doubts, demonic visions and taunting voices until she finally banished them with……you guessed it, laughter! Immediately Christ appeared to her; “And where were you when all this was happening?” she asked reproachfully. “I was in your heart,” came the reply.

A presence released and realized by laughter.

We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity… But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.

 That’s Meister Eckhart – and it seems to me his point is frequently made in Christmas sermons, but often the question it begs is left unanswered – namely, HOW then can it take place in me?

 This is where Mary seems important – as the Orthodox say, ‘Mary is humanity’s ‘Yes’ to God, and the Cross is humanity’s ‘No’ to God’. Mary is the one who let’s this take place in her, literally and metaphorically allowing the Word to take flesh in her.

 So much to learn from Mary in terms of enabling this to happen – courage, joy, freedom, and lots of other intentional characteristics to reflect. But the one that seems most often spoken of is her ‘obedient listening’. 

 But again I wonder if this is sufficiently precise? I wonder if it’s a sharper kind of listening, not least listening especially attentively to that (in scripture and in life) which threatens to knocks us off balance, receptive to that which questions us in disturbing but compelling ways, alert in the moment of being undone to knowing ourselves to be fiercely loved and on the road to life?…Imaginative and brave listening to that which calls for re-direction and a slow and daunting journey of losing and finding. 

 How can it take place? Not without labour, pain and serious birth-pangs…all of which looking back will it seems turn out to have been grace growing life.

Looking back at 2009, some words that have spoken to me;

“Smile, breathe, slow down”.    Thich Nhat Hanh

“Lose your primary entanglement with agonizing beauties of the natural world, and you need tremendous lashings of power and money to make up for it”.     David Whyte

“God is not someone else”.     Thomas Merton

“As soon as Christians come together they begin to classify and judge and condemn each other. There is only one solution to this dynamic which begins so naturally and so inevitably. That solution is service”.     J. Lewis-Anthony

“I knew a parish once whose whole life depended on the silent prayers of an old woman”.       P.Maury