Fallen Again

The tragic and awful post-mortem shaming of Jean Vanier opens up again the question of how apparently deeply spiritual people go wrong. At least the Church is becoming accustomed to acknowledging the failures of those who were formerly trusted and even revered, but there are vitally important questions that I am not sure anyone is yet asking: not just ‘How did we let this happen?’ but ‘How did this individual do this and maintain a ministry?’ My old theology tutor at Staggers once said, ‘If I were to attack Christianity, it wouldn’t be on the basis of history – the case for Christianity is far too strong – but on the behaviour of Christians. If Christianity is true, they should be better than this.’ These scandals are a deep, deep fault line in Christianity and to stop it happening so very often we should ask not just how it's allowed to happen, but why it happens in the first place.

Did Jean Vanier succumb to temptation once L’Arche gave him the power to abuse, or did he set it up in order to have that power? Was it a conspiracy between him and Fr Thomas Philippe, or was the L’Arche idea a brainchild of two abusers who didn’t intend anything malign at all? Once people are dead we can’t ask and nobody seems to want to ask. Having asked the question before, my feeling is that people who found radical Christian communities often do so to escape their own hangups and end up trapped by them.

Christians are not, generally, unaware of their sins. Those who come through a Charismatic Evangelical experience, it seems, believe that those sins are put behind them, only to be quietly ambushed by them as time goes on. But Catholics like Jean Vanier are supposed to make confession, not just once but regularly. I wonder whether something like this is what happens:

1. You make your confession. There is some besetting sin, whatever it might be, of thought or act, that you are glad to talk about. You really intend to change: you’re not so daft you expect the sin to die off at once, but you hope that a new phase has begun.

2. Then you find yourself confessing the same thing over and over. It’s wearying. You know that confession is supposed to generate change, not excuse sin. What can your confessor say to your repeated admissions? What can you say? What’s the point of repeating this? You convince yourself it’s more dealt with than it is, and stop talking about it to spare yourself the humiliation.

3. You tell yourself that the sin is not that bad after all. Perhaps at some stage your confessor has told you that, too, to be kind and encouraging.

4. You then tell yourself, Nobody’s perfect; I have this fault, but I do good things otherwise. You use one part of your nature to buy off the other, and the good purchases you credit so you can more easily ignore the bad. It’s not just religious people who do this; it’s the kind of mindset we all have, frankly. Having stopped talking about the sin, you stop even trying to deal with it. You live with it. You leave it to God, not trustingly, but lazily.

5. You erect a mental structure that justifies the fault, and step by step you stop caring. You wall it off from the rest of your life, a life that should be integrated and whole. 

6. Perhaps you achieve even more with the ‘good’ part of yourself than you would have done otherwise. Good is a compensation measure, a subconscious means of keeping that wall high. You pray more, write about the spiritual life if you’re in a position to do so, do more and more good. But at the heart of you is that fundamental discontinuity, and depending what it is, it can be catastrophic. It’s like a bit of the garden full of rampant weeds, and within the wall the sin advances in the same way that the good side of you advances outside it. At some point the weeds are going to scale the wall, or burrow under it, and come out.

Or is it all as simple as Jesus says of the Pharisees in Mark 12, which I happened to read this morning: 'They devour widows' houses, and for a show make lengthy prayers'? 

A Perfect World Where Everyone's Like Me

Over on another social media platform, Fr Robin Ward, the principal of my old theological college, decided boldly to wade into the matter of the ejection of Mr Andrew Sabitsky as a Downing Street advisor on the grounds that he knows him: Mr Sabitsky was at least at one time an habitué of various Anglo-Catholic churches around Oxford. ‘He would make a very good archbishop’ comments Dr Ward in response to one outburst, ‘there would be compulsory folded chasubles all round’.

As a result, there was much talk of the notion of ‘high-end’ and ‘low-end decoupling’, an idea I’d not encountered before. A high-end decoupler has a mental habit of considering a concept or proposition in isolation from its context, as an intellectual exercise, and surrounding that discussion with verbal disclaimers to make it clear, at least to other high-end decouplers, that any wider considerations are being put to one side. Low-end decouplers find it hard to examine an idea apart from its context and often react very badly to such examinations of controversial ideas. I am not convinced this entirely explains what happened to Mr Sabitsky.

In one of the original comments on Dominic Cummings’s famous blog which gave rise to all this fuss, Mr Sabitsky talks about the heritability of intelligence, and potentially of other characteristics such as compassion, things which genetic fiddling might encourage: the production of better humans. It’s no surprise that he concludes that it’s more realistic to manipulate intelligence because it is easier to measure than those other faculties – no surprise, because people who perform well in IQ tests always end up saying this.

Easy to measure, but less easy to predict. For instance, I know that I am not in the top echelon of intelligence: my mind works slowly and in a fragmented fashion, and I know plenty of people who are cleverer than me. I don’t believe I am stupid, although I can be very dim about some things; I take comfort in my one-time academic successes rather like an old soldier’s campaign medals, and like those they only bear a remote relationship to who I am now. I describe myself as being in the upper ranks of the second-rate. But I am the first person in my family to have any academic qualifications at all; had my ancestors taken the IQ test, would they have scored highly? Is it simply that they never had the chance, or are there other factors at play? Am I a mutant in my lineage?

The real problem is the use of intelligence, however measured, as the most important index of a person’s worth. I wonder when this started? Human society used to privilege other virtues. I’m put in mind of Song no.92 of the Carmina Burana, usually called ‘The Dispute of Phyllis and Flora’, or something of the sort, in which two medieval ladies debate whose boyfriend is the most worthwhile: Phyllis’s is a knight and Flora’s a clergyman (how naughty). Back and forth they reason, until they agree to submit the judgement to the court of Cupid whose assembled nymphs eventually conclude ‘By virtue of their learning and the customs they inherit/ We declare the love of clerics worthier of merit’. This poem is one of a category of medieval lyrics around the same theme and, as David Parrett, the author of the Penguin Classics selection of the Carmina writes, ‘that the clerics always win [is a bit of] a foregone conclusion in view of their obvious authorship’. In this and similar works, medieval clergy were a class based in education and learning, arguing for their precedence over the military virtues. In the modern world, however, eugenic fantasies, rather than those of courtly romance, form the nerd’s revenge.

I suspect we privilege intellect because of the progressivist vision of human history we’ve developed since the Reformation, or the Enlightenment at the very least. We have come to associate human progress with technological advance and scientific understanding, and see these as driven by the application of intellect; and even though we find brainy people often baffling and comic – or worrying – we cannot help but enthrone intelligence as the most important of human characteristics because of the advantages it brings us all; as opposed to, say, courage or kindness, which are admirable but don’t move the world forward, or so it seems.

The truth is that as very few people fortuitously combine in their single persons the necessary virtues to greater-than-average degrees, we need all sorts of human beings in a society. Even sociopaths sometimes have a use. Predicting what sorts of human beings we might need and in what proportions at particular times would require a level of superforecasting hard to envisage.

Misanthropy 2 - Worlds That Pass

My mind, still trying to process the attitudes I encounter online, turns to my friend Dr TransHuman who got into the newspapers a few days ago because of her latest book – ‘Goth professor says, Stop breeding to save the Earth’. While I come from a very different place ideologically, not only do I think nobody deserves the death threats she got, but I also suspect she has a bit of a point. There are a lot of human beings about, and we don’t necessarily need lots more. Then again, yesterday I shared a table at the café opposite the church with a lady who told me her large brood of five daughters reflected a fear of loneliness that had dogged her for many years. Many of the people I know have experiences of life which are more marginal than they realise; but so, to a degree, are mine.

In a way, I live a life which is more similar to the way most people once did. Swanvale Halt is not just the place I sleep; I spend the great majority of my time in it and I know some hundreds of its people to some extent: the congregation and their extended contacts, business owners and workers, teachers, schoolchildren, and their families. They behave pleasantly to me and I strive to do the same, and often I get some insight into their habits, struggles and thoughts. They are very varied, apart from sharing the same geographical location. This used to be quite close to common experience, when people lived surrounded by a network of acquaintance, work and family, but now it’s almost wildly off-centre. This is especially so if you’ve moved halfway across the country, and perhaps changed countries, to come to London and work there; but even if you haven’t, the stability of communities and the opportunities for casual interactions of the kind that generate fellowship are much weakened from the way they used to be. It’s my bizarre position as parson which opens the possibility of something different, an older way of living, and which allows me to move between different sub-groups within my community and interact with them all. It is true that my relationships with most of these people are, necessarily, relatively superficial. But they are not nothing, and when interacting with the people I don’t know that well, I tend to extrapolate from the experiences of those I do know something about, and to extend the love and generosity I try to have for them.

Now, many people I know don’t have experiences which are anything like this. If they are remote from family, geographically or emotionally (and many are), they will perhaps interact with a relatively small group of co-workers, and for the rest of the time move past a mass of anonymous souls about whom they know nothing apart from fleeting impressions. They have no idea who they are, where they have come from or where they are going, what stresses they may be under or what they may be looking forward to. They are unknown.

If your life is like this, your main relationships will be with friends (including partners) and pets. The latter in particular are very likely to bias you against the anonymous human beings who rush past you in your daily life. They will make no demands on you except very obvious physical ones, and will never have any needs that you will struggle to meet. They will never tell you you’re wrong, and never have a disagreement with you. You can project anything you like onto them, and say anything to them; you can insult them or coo over them, and they will react to you the same way; the basic nature of their existence will never challenge you or your ideas. They are utterly uncomplicated and that’s their appeal, though the idea leaves me a bit cold. I am very sceptical about human beings’ ability to read animal thoughts and emotions: most of the time (and I know I do this as I watch and occasionally talk to the cats in my garden) we judge them according to models of human behaviour that we then impute to them, barely recognising that that’s what we’re doing. We underestimate how remote their mental lives are from ours.

Friends and lovers, of course, you select. You gravitate towards people who share experiences and outlooks. They will almost universally reflect back at you exactly the same reactions and understandings you have. They will reinforce your impressions and back up your conclusions about the world, and when they don’t – which is what we’re talking about here – it can be very painful and you are more likely to dispose of them than to incorporate the fact in your life, as you would to some degree have to if you lived in an old-fashioned organic community and couldn’t escape them. You can maintain the sense that your friends are distinct from the rest of humanity, because they are like you and think the things that you think. You can place them in a separate conceptual category. Of course everyone has some relationships which are closer than others, but some don’t have much to give a broader perspective on them.

So if people find themselves expressing anti-humanist ideas, those ideas come from experience and probably pain, anger and disillusionment. That doesn’t mean they can be dismissed as merely personal bias: ideas have a life of their own and should be dealt with on their own rational terms. But understanding where they come from is a counterbalance against the anger that might bubble up in us when confronted with ideas that challenge us very deeply. We have to work very hard to see through the opacity of our own experience to understand those of others; we are not, sadly, the Son of Man, whose unfailing sight had the clarity of the Spirit. And I’m not sure who has the more oddball life, or whose is more representative of modernity – me, or my friends.

The Trouble With Humans

At some point I'll be able to write something upbeat here - but not today! A few months ago I put together a short pamphlet on the relationship of the Church to the climate emergency and the theological issues it raised, mainly because nothing I heard tackled it the way that concerned me. In it, I thought about the danger the politics of climate change seemed to pose of anti-humanism, of falling into a misanthropic rhetoric which viewed human beings as a polluting presence, a disease that nature would be justified in wiping out.  That wasn't very present just a short time back, but it seems to be now. My LiberFaciorum feed is full of it: often brutal and violent, accusatory, angry not with categories of human being (like the Brexit debate), but with humans as such. The Earth would be fine if they weren't around. It's hard to read, and often comes from people I care about and who are even, in at least one case, engaged in work which concerns saving people's lives. 

One of my favourite little stories involves Metropolitan Anthony of Sourezh who, on his first trip back to the Soviet Union from which his family had fled during the Revolution, was welcomed at the airport by a commissar from the Ministry of Religious Affairs. 'Do you believe in God, my child?' asked the archbishop. 'Certainly not,' replied the official firmly, 'As a member of the Communist Party I believe in human beings.' 'Good!', said Anthony, shaking his hand, 'So does God!'

There is a misanthropic strain in Christian spirituality, with disgust at the depth of human sin as its justification, but it's marginal. Rather, we are used to the tension between the fact that human life cannot be radically bad if the eternal Son came to share it and we are to carry on his work, and on the other hand the inescapable truth that humans' response to the arrival of absolute goodness was to turn on it and attempt to destroy it. The liturgy consistently rehearses both. I don't know whether the atheistic sort of misanthropy, released by the climate crisis, has long roots in people's thinking - was it always there - or whether it results from being surprised at how humans have failed? Christians have always known we are Fallen; perhaps non-believers are only now really finding out.

There's a more philosophical question below this, which is how far we should think of humans as part of the natural order, and how far we are separate from it. This is a complex matter for both Christians and non-believers. Traditionally Christians could maintain that humans were set radically apart from the beasts, but accepting evolution muddies those waters: we become both, part of a natural continuum but also endowed with something else, something which makes us capable of great good and also great evil. Our animal nature can be bent in either direction. However, if you're an atheist, everything we have is part of our genetic inheritance, and the way we behave must also derive from it. Whatever selfishness and short-sightedness we display must come from there. If we act badly, it can't be because we are too distinct from nature, but precisely because we are part of it: not because we are insufficiently like your pet cat, but because we're like it too much. If that's true, there's no great sense in castigating humans for being what they can't help. 

The conclusion a Christian must draw is that, if our imagination, the aspects of us that are 'the image of God', can be used positively or negatively; though it be ever so hard, we can choose to exercise the better side of what we are. And we must, for disaster lies otherwise. And without us, Creation returns not to a state of goodness and grace, but to chaos, to inarticulacy, to nothingness; beauty, perhaps, but with nothing capable of discerning, describing or enjoying beauty. Try Romans 8.19-22, which our holy mother the Church made us read last Sunday, if you don't believe me. Blessed Paul, of course, got there ahead of us.

I Never Cared You Knew

I have no idea what algorithm led to an advert for Fewer Funerals popping up on my LiberFaciorum feed. This jolly initiative provides a place where people who vaguely know one another can agree not to go to one another's funerals. The image gives you some idea of the level of the humour: 'That's Fewer Funerals, not Fuhrer Funerals'. 

There are, as the video points out, many reasons for not going to someone's funeral. Perhaps you can't find the time off work, or you didn't know the deceased very well, or the calculation of utility - involving distance, time, familiarity, the desire to support friends or family - simply works out negative. We've all been there. The website, where you and others can register your desire not to have vague acquaintances or work colleagues attend your obsequies, states that its main consideration is to fend off criticism from others for not going, and it's unhelpful for anyone to feel positive pressure to go to a funeral service.

What strikes one, though, is the cheerful callousness dressed up as humour. On the video, neighbours blithely disregard one another's horrible deaths (not funerals, note, but deaths), while the website's logo looks like this:

One of the stated reasons for going to fewer funerals is that you'll contribute less to global warming (well, you could do that either by being strict about using trains or buying an electric car), or, 'last but not least, having more time to do things you want to do, like watching your favourite box sets'. The little character on the screen is watching Six Feet Under, but given the guidance the website gives you on 'Five Things You Can Do Instead of Attending a Funeral', I'm not that sure it's a joke at all. 

The gentleman behind all this states that:

A man who’s been involved in the funeral business for decades and the first person to introduce the concept of natural burials, Ken West, said if only he’d had a pound for everyone who has told him ‘just put me in a bag and throw me in a hole when I pop my clogs.’ I think this shows that there are a lot of like minded people out there who are aware that, if their own funeral isn’t of great importance to them, then it shouldn’t be of great importance to the people who are thinking about attending.

It is true that you do hear that, though usually second-hand because it is reported by relatives. Funnily enough, they never want to stick granddad in a bag in a hole. And 'granddad' is correct, because I've never heard of a woman expressing these opinions. That's because, I suspect, they are fake. They are a weird assertion of self-reliance, an insistence on 'not making a fuss', and a declaration of bravado, all of which are ways of avoiding emotion. It's mainly men who are prey to this sort of nonsense. 

Once upon a time none of this would arise. If someone died in your community, you'd be there: the coffin would be carried past even if you weren't following it. If they died away from your community, even if you knew them well, even if you loved them, you probably wouldn't be able to go. There was, rightly, no individual choice to be exercised; rightly, because death is not an individual matter. It is a matter of our common humanity, and those who shy away from marking that probably steer clear of the depths - and heights - of life as well.

One of the reasons the Fewer Funerals video gives for not going to a funeral (or any, perhaps) is that 'some people just don't like getting dressed up'. I doubt they'd say the same about weddings, though I don't particularly enjoy those most of the time. There are all sorts of justifications you can force yourself to, if you're desperate enough to avoid life, and the death that is part of it.

Strange Paths

You are used to me describing episodes which I usually characterise as passing through a cloud - the way it can suddenly come down and then as suddenly lift. The last couple of days have seen me feeling something linked to that experience, but distinct from it. It's been a peculiar sort of mild derangement - a sense of cognitive fracturing alongside a very negative mindset, which is unusually directed not at my situation but outward. A friend says something on LiberFaciorum and my first mental response is to pick holes in it, no matter what it might be, while I find myself unable to compose any positive, coherent thoughts or concentrate on anything beyond the immediate tasks I absolutely can't avoid doing. Having come across extracts from it for some time, I've just bought an old copy of CS Lewis's The Four Loves and have been finding myself getting to the foot of a page and having very little idea what I've read: it's CS Lewis, for heaven's sake, not Hegel. I faff about in the study, and in the middle of one task think of another but then in the middle of looking something up or finding an envelope or whatever can't hold on to either long enough to move forward on them. Am I ageing, mentally declining, or just tired?

Church life is part of this. Swanvale Halt faces the same challenges as any small community of English Christians and there are innumerable suggestions for what a pastor might do about them, or about themselves, a kaleidoscope of answers to a welter of ways of characterising the problem. A lot of the time all I can do is think of objections. I don't actually know what to do. There are projects I begin, and then conclude that they aren't going to work after all, which I suppose is no bad thing but it's difficult to see them as more than a waste of time.

I haven't seen S.D. for a long while. I called him this morning to fix a meeting before Easter. 'I suppose I can fit you in,' he said wearily. I related one of my favourite stories, of how the future Fr Joe Williamson went as a young man straight back from World War One to visit the notoriously sarcastic Fr Montgomery-Campbell at St Saviour's Poplar, who listened to this stumbling, nervous Cockney lad on his doorstep describing how he felt God was calling him to be a priest, and replied with 'Really? How interesting,' and then shut the door. 'That's how it should be,' put in S.D., 'none of this nonsense about feelings.' He put me in the diary and to cheer me up told me a story about how he and a disabled friend got stuck in a lift at a reception in an Oxford college recently and had to climb/be lifted out with the aid of two chairs. They both thought it was a hoot while the college is mortified and launching an enquiry. Funnily enough, it did cheer me up a bit.

Nothing Worse Than ...

... and you can fill in your own conclusion. High on the list of rankling ecclesiastical impedimenta comes a wonky thurible. We don't actually use ours very often, but when we do it invariably misbehaves, coming open at inconvenient points and spraying ash. In the past I have blamed our head server but in fact I do no better with it, and the application of pliers a little while ago has made no difference. Having found a friendly metalworker not far away the time is ripe for him to have a look at it to see whether it really is as misaligned as it seems to be. Candlemas out of the way, we shouldn't be using it again till Easter morning, and by then it might be more biddable. Of course everyone is too terrified to polish it in case they tangle the chains.