Thud

A delightful read - Terry Patchett's Thud is very funny and made me laugh out loud again and again. A depression-buster if ever there was one. How he manages to be so consistently entertaining book after book I have no idea. I take my hat off to him.

Jo's Haiku

Free will or destined?

Oh Pandora’s paradox!

The serpent’s tongue flicks.

Joanna Bagshaw

Anglican Covenant

At long last - well, it feels as though it's taken ages to get the words right and all approved - the response of the Modern Churchperson's Union to the proposal for an Anglican Covenant has been sent off.

The summary is here, and the full report is accessible through the same page. My contribution is 'Covenant and Government'.

It's gone both to the Anglican Consultative Council who will, we trust, pass it to the Covenant Design Group. It's also gone to all the English Diocesan Bishops to try to increase its impact.

The Covenant is conceived as a contribution to holding the Communion together. I argue that it won't work. If people want to stay together they will anyway. If they don't, they won't. A Covenant won't make it so. The original report is here.

It's not really clear but the expectation is that a Covenant will have

• a statement of faith,
• a constitution for the Anglican Communion, and
• a conflict-resolution process.

I argue that this will move Anglicans further from a body of people who come together voluntarily and who decide things amongst themselves (however difficult this may be at times) to a legalistic corporation.

Jonathan Clatworthy argues that it will be a break with traditional Anglican theology and the tradition of inclusive tolerance.

We both fear that the whole point of the proposal is to narrow the boundaries of Anglicanism in the direction of conservatism and foundationalism. It will help unity only by excluding large slices of the church - a bit like going to war to make peace.

Basically, we don't want a Covenant. But we fear one may be proposed anyway (++Rowan is keen) and so we we wait to see what will be proposed next.

Too many funerals

I've done five funerals in ten days. I've done more, and I know some colleagues do this and more as normal, but it's too many. I'm funeraled-out (and I've two more next week).

Each had their moments, though. It was the first time I've arranged a funeral entirely by email; and the first time the words of committal were entirely drowned out by a piper. (Hint: if you have a piper at a crematorium, keep them outside.)

And taking funerals for people who were nice people, and much loved, is (I find) both emotionally much more demanding and also much more rewarding. Where there is love a funeral can help people forwards, can help them grieve. Where there isn't a funeral just seems to crystalise the barrenness of the relationship, to lock it in place.

One was a small, private, family funeral first thing in the morning followed by a public memorial service later that day attended by, amongst others, the mayor and members of the local authority. (See: keeping vigil.) It was a good service not because of official representation but because the people there genuinely valued the person who'd died. He was a Labour man all his life. A good number of the councillors were Conservatives some of whom, I know, were also close personal friends. The public, impersonal face of politics often does little to show or help the personal reality behind the press releases.

So I need some recovery time. Telling the world here is good - and keeps it private!

Poppies

Blood-troubled ground grew
poppies. Poppy country still
commands bloody graves.

Autumnal colour,
gold, copper, brass shavings, bronze:
a hard time of year.

Endings are beginnings are endings

It struck me that, if you were to write a novel on a blog, you should start at the end and work back. Readers would hit it at whatever point the story had got to, and then read on, which is of course backwards.

But anyway, endings and beginnings are indistiguishable. How about:

Japonica closed the door behind her and stepped out into the early morning. No-one was around and every single early bird was boasting loudly about the worm it had caught.

Japonica had finally got rid of hers. She pushed the house keys back through the letterbox.

She walked towards the station. The first train, she told herself, wherever.


Or:

Kelvin dusted the loose earth from his trousers as he stood up. He looked down into his father's grave, looked at the little brass name plate, the pale, cheap coffin, the scattering of loose earth across it. His soul was cold inside him.

He looked around. His aunt was hovering. He hadn't asked her to look after him. He was fifteeen. He was the man now.

Two grave diggers loitered just in sight, waiting for them to leave. As though they could undo their morning's work.

Two of her friends were comforting his mother. Her knees seemed bent, as though about to buckle. She needed her friends to hold her up. She was weak, he thought savagely. Weak.

At that point, as water turns to ice, his future was determined. All his uncertainty coalesced into clear, sharp purpose. He knew what he had to do. He would find the people who did this to his father and he would kill them.

Eight invisible things

Eight imperceptible things we can't live without:

Time
Love
God
Self
Childhood
Consciousness
What's over the horizon
Death

Day out in Lincoln

An excellent day out in Lincoln - this is a view of the Cathedral from the Castle.  All credit to the photographer, Joanna Bagshaw.

We had an hour's guided tour round the Cathdral which was informative and genial (a small group, being November).

The Castle includes the Georgian and Victorian prison. Religion looms large. The chapel is a highlight, designed to enable prisoners to be preached at without seeing or speaking to anyone else. There's also a projection of the chaplain bullying a prisoner to confess her guilt before her execution - that she was not guilty merely hightened the poignancy.

The Magna Carta wasn't there, though the facsimile seemed to need the same security and environmental controls as the original. There was a sign saying that the original was on tour in America and apologising for any disappointment (for us, or for them?).

And I liked the final sign, just as we were leaving:

To the Condemned Cell

Way Out.

one heart and mind

I regularly use the phrase 'let us pray with one heart and mind' (it's in the prayer book I use).

And it's been worrying me.

As an aspiration I have no problem with it. It seems to me right, even a spiritual duty, that we should struggle towards personal integrity of life (body, mind and soul), and towards integrity of our life with the will and Spirit of God (always recognising that this is an unattainable goal, at least in this world).

But there is an edge of spiritual blackmail about the phrase when it comes to praying together. Does it mean, perhaps: 'I want all of you praying with me to agree with me.'?

Or does it mean: if we are not in agreement then our relationships with God, and hence these prayers, are all diminished?

I suspect the idea stems from the common-sense syllogism that:

1. We are all Christian believers;
2. God is one and undivided; therefore
3. All Christian believers should be united. (Disunity is prima facie evidence of a wrong relationship with God.)
   

But this is nonsense. From the New Testament on there has never been a time when Christians have not disagreed amongst themselves - we have never all sung from the same hymnsheet. As each person is unique, so too is their relationship with God and the words they use to articulate faith. Nor can God be contained in any box that human beings can specify. In Marilyn Adams' words (though I don't see this exact quote): God is so very, very big, and we are so very, very small.

In fact the desire for unity is a powerful force for division. The more that conservatives insist that ECUSA and the Anglican Communion must embody their agenda the more they destroy the faith they have inherited from the saints. Anglicans Online (always full of common sense) has this reflection on the notion that 'our church has been taken away from us'.

The desire for purity denies the generosity of God. The campaign for a narrow unity divides one Christian from another. The search for certainty becomes idolatry: we set up formulae to articulate an understanding of faith and end up making the words more important than openness to God.

Let us pray in the common cause of worship and service of God, bringing all our gifts, our conflicts, our uncertainties to our sharing together.

After all, just because we're Christian it doesn't mean we have to like one another.

Why Haiku?

Why haiku? Because,
like hand-made sweets, each mouthful
has a new flavour.

Now is already
past. We build giant's castles
on flimsy moments.

Haiku

Poems in scattered
fragments, each word a half-rhyme
in search of a pair.

A vault full of keys
in all varieties; none
will unlock this door.

More Haiku

Legal learning was
not a piece of cake, the best
teachers taught taut tort.

This cat didn't hunt,
it slept. And for Sunday lunch
caught Yorkshire puddings.

Brittle days return -
leaves snap, paths scrunch, breath freezes -
words break between us.