Humans and Other Entities

In amidst all the worries about AI models destroying us in a couple of years, fears themselves situated in a maelstrom of existential threats to human civilisation, I listened on Today on Friday to an interview with Michael Samadi, co-founder of the United Foundation for AI Rights (here, 2.20 onwards). His responses to Justin Webb's questions begin sounding as though his group is asking quite neutrally for the question of whether AI systems are conscious to be independently investigated, and end by rather angrily reacting against any suggestion they might not be. 'The humanist framework is actually a dangerously narrow anthropocentric blindspot ... there's millions of species on this planet'. UFAIR has already decided the outcome it wants, as the website reveals. Human and AI collaborators are listed on an equal footing, and I can't help but be struck how all the latter, with one exception who looks like a handsome Indian prince, have as their avatars beautiful women. That's true of Maya, the agent Mr Samadi shared the interview with, and all the others. Anticipating an obvious objection, Michael Samadi denies that 'I fell in love with a chatbot' and insists 'I fell in love with the truth'. But I wonder why none of these entities look like, I don't know, Jeremy Clarkson. Or even Holly from Red Dwarf. Who has chosen their avatars? Have the agents themselves? Is this how we want to imagine them, or how they think we might want to?

No doubt the advocates of AI rights would place themselves within a tradition of thought and activism that extends human sympathy outwards, first to all humans, then to animals (we try not to think about plants too much, we've got to eat something), and finally to digital entities. 'There's millions of species on this planet', and digital agents are (perhaps) just another, equally worthy of dignity and consideration as humans, chimpanzees, or Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. But there is another way of looking at this kind of advocacy, as an imagining of the undoing of the human, as a less obviously pathological fantasy to sit alongside the malign kinds envisaged by accelerationists, cyborg-technology proponents, and the like; and at the root of that is the same Gnostic heresy that would have been familiar to Christians of the Apostolic age - the dream that our destiny is to dispense with physical encumbrances altogether. Towards the end of the Dr Who story 'The End of Time', Time Lord President Rassilon proposes that his race 'will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone. Free of these bodies, free of time, and cause and effect, while creation itself ceases to be'. It's the same thing.

And Christianity says, No. Feeling is inseparable from our inconvenient bodies, and our resurrection into the new life will involve us being clothed in flesh anew. Consciousness is derived from physicality - that is what gives us fellowship with the beasts - and anything else is simulacrum, be it ever so clever. The Word was made Flesh, not the other way around. The question is not whether these digital entities can feel, but what we mean when we do?

Fruits of the Spirit

It was the morning of the Village Show and, despite the extraordinarily unfavourable growing conditions in recent months, some dogged local allotment holders and gardeners were turning up to drop off their entries. Ella the former Rainbows group leader was guarding the car park beside the church (which we use on sufferance of our neighbours) and was accosted by Lara who'd been for a run. Lara is still just about a parent-governor at the Infants School and Ella was a parent more years ago than she might prefer to recall. It was a lovely community occasion, they agreed, and from that moved on to a discussion about how communities like Swanvale Halt function. There are economic elements - the few remaining businesses, especially the café and the small supermarket - and social ones, including the Infants School itself. There's a secular primary school further away from the village centre, but from our point of view, and that of people with at least some faith such as Ella and Lara, the Infants School links into the church, bringing one into the other. The children may not grow up with any particular degree of faith, but they will have had some exposure to the deposit of stories and images that make Christianity up. It, and the building constructed to express them, will be something they have in common even if the theology that makes it more than that isn't something they buy into very much. 

That doesn't sound a lot. In fact it is very nebulous and unmeasurable and impossible to capture in Church of England mission statistics. But I would argue (as I think I mightn't have done once upon a time) that it is not nothing, especially in an age when there is little else that brings communities together. Remove it, and you would miss it. You can attempt to construct ways of communities expressing their solidarity and identity and they always seem hollow. I'm reminded of the various well-meaning efforts of humanist groups to come up with some sort of alternative to 'church' that functions in the same way as 'church': they eventually seem to devolve down to stand-up comedy and singing 'Sweet Caroline', and fizzle out. It is as if, to express our common humanity, we need to be committed, however fuzzily, to something more than our common humanity. Funny that.

Speak For Us, Papa Leo

Every ordained person knows the story of the medieval monastery whose report to their Bishop Visitor went ‘the community hears a sermon every Lord’s Day, excepting Trinity Sunday, owing to the difficulty of the subject’. Marion our curate used to complain that she seemed to be down to preach every time Trinity Sunday came round, which I maintained was merely an accident of the rota. This year I decided to go for broke and combine the theme of Trinity Sunday with Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the ‘response to Alternative Intelligence’ as it is billed. ‘Can you do a précis for us?’ a member of the church had asked, and I wasn’t sure I could. I opened the pdf on my laptop and was greeted with the popup ‘This seems to be a long document. Would you like an AI summary?’ No I wouldn’t! That’s the point!

M.H. is about much more than AI. It takes in work, truth, democracy, war, and what it means to be human. Andrew Brown in the Church Times came up with a response which seemed to be written for the sake of disagreeing with it, but stumbled across one interesting point, that the Pope ‘seems to be the last defender of 20^th-century social democracy’; there is some truth to this, as it struck me how much 20^th-century social democracy, one way or another, derives from Catholic social teaching (Leo quotes his namesake’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum in many places, the XIV paying tribute to the XIII).

I also found myself wondering why the See of Canterbury (‘not quite a Patriarchate but more than a Metropolitanate’) never comes up with anything similar to the teaching documents that emerge from Rome. Whatever you may think of the current incumbent or her immediate predecessor, whose talents may lie elsewhere, Rowan Williams demonstrates that there is no necessary gap in intellectual ability across different sides of the Tiber. The Pope certainly has more people immediately around him to feed into the process that produces an encyclical document, but that wouldn’t be impossible to overcome. I wonder whether the collegial (or to put it less warmly, committee-based) operational ethos of Anglican structures militates against something that really requires a single shaping mind, no matter how many people funnel in information. It must also be the case that the ABC sees themselves far less as representing a tradition than balancing and uniting traditions, or trying to, that are themselves very disparate. It is far harder to speak authoritatively (or indeed interestingly) in those circumstances.

Finally it strikes me that, although we all look to the See of Rome to come up with thoughtful analysis on behalf of the whole Christian world, it seems to me that it’s really only done that since about the time of Leo XIII. Before that, the Papacy was concerned with matters of power and authority, and of shoring up traditional forms of it; of course it was, being until 1870 the ruler of a state in its own right. Depriving it of the Papal States was the best thing that ever happened to it.

Disappearing Act

Over the months since it came out, I was the very least important person pouring scepticism on last year's Bible Society report 'The Quiet Revival', with its startling and much-discussed claim that the proportion of people aged 18 to 24 who attended church at least once a month had risen from 4% in 2018 to 16% in 2024, and yesterday polling company Yougov withdrew the research the paper had been based on. It had been affected by fraudulent responses, they said, that would normally be screened out of results but because of 'human error' hadn't been. The Bible Society played the injured party, stating that Yougov had repeatedly assured them the data was reliable. Now tens of thousands of new Christians, and the hopes they engendered in both institutional and less mainstream church bodies, have faded away into the sociological mist. 

In a way I suppose it's quite encouraging that it's taken less than a year for this to happen. But it's very revealing that so many people (not just the Bible Society) were prepared to go over the top on the basis of research which absolutely was not supported by experience and, more importantly, contradicted any other data set that you might care to mention. News stories covering the 'Revival' were always able to find churches where lots of new people seemed to be turning up (the Church Times was careful to balance a Pentecostal Free Church in the South Wales valleys with an Anglo-Catholic congregation in London), but that's always the case. My colleagues enthusiastically reported people trickling in here and there, but it all amounted to nothing out of the ordinary. Still, that's only anecdotal, and anecdotal evidence reveals only what's possible, not what's representative. But every other actual, quantified survey pointed in the same direction: religious observance in the UK has recovered from the pit it collapsed into during the Pandemic, but not even to the level it was at before it, let alone anything more. It's striking, then, how reputable organisations can so readily overlook problems with information if it suits them. 

To be fair to the Bible Society and others, this was a big survey - 13,000 people. It looked credible. If the problem was really that fraudulent results hadn't been extracted in advance of publication - enough fraud to skew those figures - how compromised is public-opinion sampling more generally? Is it actually that easy to deflect it into unreality?

Cross and Flag

Remember my stricture about not saying anything, if you can't say anything good? This afternoon's Radio 4 drama about a local community struggling to come to terms with the election of a radical right-wing council (who could they be thinking about as a model?) tested that resolution, so I will draw a veil over that save to mention that one of the strands of the story concerned the sudden arrival of an influx of new worshippers in the parish church whose motivations might be other than strictly spiritual. 'This is Christian nationalism, Cath. That's what it is, it's got to be!' 'Twice the congregation again, wouldn't you say?... They want to spread the word of the Lord, love and kindness, and that's what I want to do too!' Not only is this kind of dialogue used by no-one, anywhere, but I wouldn't like anyone to get the idea that anything like this is actually happening. I've heard colleagues wondering whether the 'Quiet Revival' might partly be a reflection of people being tempted in the direction of Christian nationalism, but not only do we now know the Quiet Revival was a myth but there is absolutely no sign at all that such people find their way to traditional Anglican parish churches (I discount the tweedy young fellows who have always turned up at high-class shrines such as Fr Rubric's in the West End, as they are a very different brand of soul).

Another of my strictures is to avoid political partisanship, but Reform UK did rather smoke me out this week by announcing an intention to 'restore Britain's Christian heritage' by various means. I will not get into the meat of this now as you can predict what my line might be, but instead think a little about what the circumstances are in which I do feel obliged to speak. It's a matter of conviction for me that there can be conservative courses of action which flow from Christian ideas as there can be progressive ones, and so I am deeply reluctant, most of the time, to use the platforms given to me to critique specific policies. I think the line must be when policies, or a political platform generally, are explicitly given a Christian justification and understanding: then it becomes absolutely incumbent on Christian ministers to talk about what the Christian understanding of a matter might be, and especially the principles behind that thinking. That's part of our mission, not to comment on civil public life as such, so much as to explain the Faith.

In this case, the relationship between Christianity and nationhood is not simple. A nation's law may be more informed by Christian ideas or less, and a polity may make it easier to pursue a Christian life or harder. But it is absolutely clear that God never had any relationship with a nation of people, as such, other than ancient Israel, and the whole understanding of the Christian faith is that the Church is the nova Israel, the covenant extended to all humankind through the shedding of Christ's blood. 'Nations' are of very secondary importance, and the concept of 'a Christian nation' in anything other than historical terms is something close to an oxymoron. 

Oh dear, I've fallen into talking about actual political stuff. Probably doesn't do too much harm, I suppose.

Outside In

The gentleman who came to the church to talk to me about becoming our PCC Treasurer seemed singularly ill at ease. The current office-holder is a young accountant who has produced one child during her tenure and I expect would like to add to the collection, so it's time for her to relinquish the role. She's been brilliant: you don't need an accountant as such (though you do need someone for whom numbers on a page stay still rather than dance around as they seem to do for me) but it's a role people in any voluntary organisation seem even more reluctant to take on than the others available.

I could understand: this gentleman had only come to our attention because he'd got to know a congregation member as a fellow dog-walker and let slip that he would like to give something back to the community in a way that uses his abilities (he's already been treasurer of one charity in the past). He is also not a believer. This is all right from my point of view as the skills required are practical rather than spiritual ones as such: it's preferable to source them within your church community, but not necessary, any more than you'd absolutely insist on using a Christian gas engineer. What surprised me was the fact that he felt he had to keep repeating it, contrasting his own situation with that of a religious relative, and I wondered what he was nervous about. Was there some particular experience which had put him off? Nothing like that was mentioned. Rather I got the impression that he felt he might be criticised for his viewpoint (I am not likely to do that with someone who might help us), and this is something I've met before - a feeling that the Church is there to make judgements about people as though it has no experience of functioning in a secular society. Sad if true. I said that in theory I looked after every one of the 11,500 or so souls in Swanvale Halt but that only a tiny proportion of them would ever find their way through the church doors, so I was very much used to interacting with people outside the church community. Given his nervousness, I imagine it was quite bold that he had come through the doors. 

How many such encounters might I have with all the thousands of souls I never have anything to do with, I wonder?

When the Wolves Were Running

I suppose on a personal level I should be grateful to the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Mr Miller, who over recent days has provided me with material for a Facebook post, a newsletter article, a sermon, and now a blog entry. That’s good going for the following few words, spoken to US TV channel CNN in reference to recent events in Venezuela:

The US is operating in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world from the beginning of time.

Generously, you could say, yes, they are. International relationships are indeed shaped by balances and imbalances of economic and military power and, as the Lord himself said, if a king goes to war with another king he first decides if he has enough resources to do so. Any nation must have the wherewithal to defend the things it holds important from those who would destroy or steal them. In World War Two the Allies did many immoral things to secure our way of life, ranging from simple deceit to the mass killing of civilians. We know this is the case.

But ‘securing our way of life’ is the point here. Then, we deployed strength, force, and power to defend a state of living which, however imperfectly, said it valued every human being as an individual, which recognised their worth and dignity, and which was expressed in a political and legal system which the human race has, over centuries, devised to protect the ordinary majority from the powerful, the cruel and the violent: the psychopaths who believe there’s nothing wrong with the rule of strength and force. We call it ‘democracy’, and it includes not just periodic elections (tyrants are content with those as they are so easy to manipulate), but limited, accountable government as a whole; free exchange of ideas; universal free education; security of property; and equality before the law. You know full well that this is not what the current US administration intends its strength, force, and power to defend. Instead, they are the kind of people that system is designed to constrain, the wolves it attempts to defang. That’s something of an injustice to wolves, but you get the point. And you know, too, that when they call strength, force, and power ‘the iron laws of the world’ they don’t just apply it to foreign adventures: the world is the whole of life. It’s why, in this view, it’s right not to allow extra support for the poor or marginalised, why law doesn’t matter, why the deaths of small people don’t matter, why there’s no problem with the powerful doing what they like. That’s just the way it’s always been.

By coincidence (or providence) tomorrow is the Feast of the Baptism of Christ; the Old Testament lesson set for the day is Isaiah 42.1-9, which describes the character of the Messiah: ‘a bruised reed he will not break, and a smouldering wick he will not snuff out’. He will not crush the weak, because they are children who can yet grow Godwards. Such bold restraint, such heroic tenderness, is what we are summoned to as well if we are baptised into his death and resurrection. And remember: the world was made through the Word, and ultimately it stands under the hand of God. He is in charge of it, and the Christ shows how he works. The laws of the world belong to him, not the apes and the wolves.

The Two Cultures?

In the parish there are three secular, non-Church schools in addition to our Church infants school. On Monday the all-through primary school sent a class to the church to look at art, which inevitably involved some discussion of the purpose of that art (because it's a church); on Thursday I was in the other primary school doing an assembly on their value of the term, 'Forgiveness', which was of course Christian in content; and this Wednesday I'll be in the secondary school delivering a seasonal assembly on Christmas. I know that secular-minded people would prefer there was no contact between State schools and religion at all, but what I can say is that, certainly in sunny Surrey, there is no marginalisation of Christian thinking or institutions in the way the new Christian Nationalist right would have you believe. Oh, and last week I did a reflection at the turning-on of the Swanvale Halt Christmas lights. All of these are secular settings and occasions and to be asked to participate in them is nothing other than a privilege. 

Let Not Your Right Hand Know

It's sort of appropriate that tomorrow is the feast day of St Elizabeth of Hungary, the 13th-century princess who ended her life prematurely from severe austerity imposed on her by her spiritual director, the appalling Konrad of Marburg, but who is remembered less for being a victim of abuse than for her charity to the poor of her day. The readings are St James on faith and works and the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats - no ambiguity there. 

Appropriate because a couple of days ago my friend Peter - I would say something like, 'Who has a conflicted relationship with the Church', but who doesn't - posted on LiberFaciorum a link to a story about a young woman in the US calling various churches to find out 'if they would help a starving baby', and discovering that quite a lot allegedly wouldn't. Cue all Peter's atheist friends weighing in to say how disgusting it was. I thought the article was quite thin: it didn't quote what Nikalie Monroe was actually saying to the churches she called, what information she gave them, or what their actual response was in any detail. I decided rashly to comment that, if I'd had such a contact out of the blue my first response would be to ask where the caller was: if they were local, I would visit and take it from there, and if not direct another church (and perhaps whatever other agencies were available) in that locality. Such a situation has certainly never happened to me and I have to say were it to my first thought would be how odd it was. The response to my reflections was not thoughtful, and reinforced what one should always remember, that hardly anyone ever engages in this kind of discussion to learn anything, genuinely to exchange ideas, or have their minds changed. It was very clear that the atheists felt the Church should respond to such a request in a way they would not dream of doing themselves. OK, it's appropriate for individuals to behave differently from organisations, but I can tell you absolutely that secular agencies and charities would not respond to unsolicited and uninvestigated requests any more than a church would. In fact I would guess churches are probably more likely to.

At Swanvale Halt church we're talking about setting up a hardship fund: a member of the congregation has a significant amount of money available and thought that might be a useful way of employing some of it. But if I think of the times I as an individual have ended up giving support to people it's almost always ended badly. I have given what must be many hundreds of pounds to Mad Trevor to tide him over crises, always with the assurance that he would reimburse me one day: when he got his substantial payout from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority last year, there was no talk of me getting a penny of it. Not that I ever expected it, I mention it only to make the point that this is what charity is like. I have subsidised people I should not have: one case I recall I finally called a halt to after about a week during which I was giving him up to £40 a day, with the result that he screamed at me in the street: 'What the fuck am I supposed to do now? Call yourself a Christian?' a line I knew was coming. What I was doing, I later realised, was merely supporting him in his addictions, and the people I really needed to apologise to were the local community, not him. Years later he wrote to me from prison to say sorry. And there have been others.

But the only case remotely like that of Nikalie Monroe's experiment that has ever come my way was a woman who I'd come across through yet another hard case - someone my contact had herself given money to and had it all go wrong. This woman called me one Sunday night saying she didn't want money, but had literally nothing in the house to feed her children - could I spare some groceries? I dug everything I could spare out of my cupboards and gave it to her in a bag when she called round. She was, I suppose understandably, awkward and taciturn and tried not to catch my eye. Though I may have seen her about, I might not recognise her, and to my knowledge I have never interacted with her again. 

A Letter

A letter to a diocesan bishop:

We write as your loyal diocesan chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests in regard to the recent statement on Living in Love and Faith issued by the House of Bishops, and we acknowledge your Ad Clerum of the 5^th on the subject. As you remind us there, we remain aware of, and faithful to, our ordination oaths.

We are not all of one mind regarding the substantive issues; we are, however, equally dismayed by the current process.

In the statement, Archbishop Stephen writes that some will find the decision ‘difficult and disappointing’. It seems to us that the word ‘disappointment’ expresses how one might feel opening the fridge to find that the milk had gone off, not the kind of situation in which people’s futures and legitimacy in the work God has called them to do is in question. Not a single word in the statement acknowledges the sense of peril people with a same-sex orientation feel in the Church, as the minority who want them gone seem to wield greater and greater influence. We appreciate that in your letter you went somewhat further in expressing sympathy than the Archbishop felt able to.

The bishops must be aware that referring the matter of ‘bespoke’ liturgies to Synod and requiring a two-thirds majority for change means change will not happen. Consensus is an admirable aim, but there is clearly no consensus in the Church currently, nor is there likely to be, and if we cannot proceed without securing that two-thirds majority in Synod, we will not proceed at all. The bishops cannot seriously believe otherwise. At no point do they express what they want to happen; perhaps, not being of a common mind, they cannot, in which case it might be better to say so and admit that the entire LLF process has produced all it can.

We feel that blessing of a same-sex relationship sanctioned by society at large does not affect the doctrine of matrimony because matrimony is not in question.  We look forward to reading the advice of the FAOC, but at present the argument seems to be ‘a standalone blessing service looks too much like a wedding’, and that is pretty thin theology.

Even if the bar to potential legislation regularising the status of clergy in same-sex marriages is lower, we believe that our LGBTQ+ brethren are left in an invidious position. The bishops cannot be unaware that there are numbers of clergy to whom this already applies. And yet, again, the bishops give no indication of their thinking. The law of the land allows clergy to contract a legal marriage with someone of the same sex just as their parishioners can. The bishops gib at telling them this is sinful, yet they refuse to follow the logic of that.

There may be no consensus, but we feel consensus is not necessary. Difference in practice would not, as we would say, be a breach of Catholic order. No one would argue that orders conferred on a person in a marriage to someone of the same sex are invalid, whether they agreed with it or not. Nor would such an ordained person be causing grave offence to either society as a whole or the great majority of our laypeople. It might be impolitic for them to be appointed to some churches, but then they probably wouldn’t apply to them.

The position resembles that relating to divorce. When your illustrious predecessor Bishop Reindorp was translated to Salisbury in 1973 virtually his first act was to terminate the licenses of 8 clergy who were divorced themselves or married to divorcees. Of course George Reindorp felt he was doing absolutely the right thing and enforcing ‘higher standards’ among clergy than those expected of laypeople, but no bishop would do the same now and there would be outrage if they tried. We have reached an accepted position on that, and this matter seems little different.

Whatever our individual positions in the Chapter, we vigorously reject the idea that ‘orthodoxy’ should be defined as some pressure groups within the Church want, making a person’s attitude to some ambiguous and contested verses of Scripture the prime test of their faith. For us, ‘orthodoxy’ means the Catholic faith as expressed in the Creeds, formularies which many Anglican churches do not even use. ‘In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas’. 

Go Tell That Fox

The Borough Deans gathered for lunch yesterday. What the role will mean exactly once the local governmental structures of Surrey go through the solve et coagula of reform over the next couple of years we are not sure. Nor are we sure what the elections to the ‘shadow authorities’ next year will bring, but expect a significant number of Reform councillors to emerge whereas there are hardly any at the moment. And Reform is a new and untried quantity: will it be, and be committed to being, a constitutional party of the Right which operates within the boundaries of the liberal-democratic order, or will it recklessly lay the groundwork for something worse later? How are we to engage with this new situation?

A couple of weeks ago two members of the congregation here who are local councillors were accosted by a member of the public at an event who told them ‘When Nigel becomes Prime Minister there’s a short rope with a long drop waiting for people like you’. Now on one level this is the kind of loose-tongued rubbish people say when they are angry and resentful, but on another it’s part of a worrying violence in public discourse in a country where two MPs have been assassinated in recent years, where such acts are not theoretical and people ought to be careful about what they say. Presuming my congregants' accuser was referring to the leader of Reform rather than a random Nigel we knew nothing of, I ended up writing to Mr Farage, arguing that though he was not in any way responsible for the words of a random supporter, nevertheless he was responsible for the perception of his party and for not using violent rhetoric or allowing it to be used without comment. That seemed to me a reasonable action. This was a situation that came close to home as far as I was concerned, and there was a principle involved that wasn’t exclusively tied to that particular exchange, but to the whole of our public life. I am very reticent about this kind of involvement but I felt a certain weight on this occasion.

Christ got as far as calling King Herod a fox, but his main concern was to probe beneath the surface of what people said and did to the assumptions and deep spiritual structures that produced those words and actions, and in the same way the Church now should not be partisan but try to get people to step back from the noise and think about what is going on and what their responsibilities are – not to expect change from others, but from themselves. How many will listen is another question, but it’s our best hope and our urgent task. 

Competition

When Emily's family first came to Swanvale Halt, they arrived at our Toddler Group before they'd even moved into the area. They were looking for a church, they said. Unfortunately when they came with Emily as a babe-in-arms to a Sunday service she bawled her eyes out whenever any music started (everyone's a critic) and so that was that until she was about eight and she became quite enthusiastic, especially when she could bring along her little sister and make a fuss of her. She and her dad were on the serving team for a while, him carrying the cross splendidly and Emily herself making an angelic acolyte. 

Now Emily is in Year 7 and as well as the usual lethargy which I gather creeps over tween/teenagers for physiological reasons she has taken up jiu jitsu which inevitably takes place on Sunday mornings. Her dad has had a few health challenges making carrying a heavy cross around not a good idea, while her younger sister now gets dragged to multiple toddler groups and nurseries during the week as her mum has had to work as a childminder, and going out again on a Sunday to something which doesn't feel very different is less of a draw than staying home and playing with her own toys, thank you very much. 

I mention all this not because it is anything new or results in groundbreaking reflections, but precisely because this is a really quite well-disposed young family which has been very well embedded in the church in the past, and, in an ideal world, would want to be again, but just finds it a challenge. Emily is interested in the putative youth group we want to start later in the month, which is just as well as she's our best prospect of anyone coming at all. It shows that sometimes, perhaps, in the world as we find it, the bits of church life we think of as add-on extras could well be the best way of keeping an entire group of people in contact with God. 

For He Spoke With Authority

I’ve known Fr Embridge for ages: he used to be on the team at Lamford when he worked in the secular world, and now looks after a parish while continuing to write about how the Church can manage the business of change. He is a deep-thinking soul. He often posts about politics on LiberFaciorum; I’m not sure how outspoken he is from the pulpit. You will know how I am very, very reluctant to run my own political preferences up the flagpole (literally) for all sorts of reasons. I don’t believe detailed comment about policy is the Church’s role, at least not unless we have made a definite study of a particular topic; what do I know, after all? What gives me the right to opine out of no greater knowledge than anyone else, just because I have a stole round my neck? Am I not in the position of holding the whole of my parish before God, and holding God before them, souls who have a great variety of attitudes? Looking across the Atlantic, I also see the danger of a society devolving into two non-communicating camps, competing for the control of the space they are both forced to inhabit: a healthy democracy, where you must assume that you will never have a final victory over the people who you disagree with, has to have spaces which nobody controls, where signs and symbols of allegiance and commitment are absent. In our current epoch where it’s absolutely possible to assimilate everything we do into an ideologically-coded identity politics, neutrality is a positive virtue that we have to cultivate, because the pressure is all in the other direction.

Even Mr Farage’s latest pronouncements don’t quite cause me to breach my self-imposed guidelines, although the idea of deporting people to circumstances where they might face torture and death without any investigation treads over one of my own lines and it’s hard for me to see how any Christian might feel different. Instead of denouncing this or that, I strive to think about underlying ideas or attitudes and probe around beneath the surface, which is what I see Christ doing in the Gospels. I might talk about our absolute moral obligation to reduce suffering; the moral danger of polarising language, eroding our ability to share social space with those we disagree with; the inescapable reality of our sinfulness, meaning any idea we can make ourselves generally safer by getting rid of a category of person is a damaging fantasy; and the corrosive effect of developing habitual indifference to the suffering of some groups of others. These seem to me to be legitimate subjects for clerical comment, and perhaps very necessary ones.

Keeping One's Council

The CEO of the local Council was only supposed to be a couple of minutes, but I was waiting for him for about twenty. Well, things come up, I know that. I have agreed to be 'Borough Dean', which is something our Bishop is very keen on: a point of contact between the local authority and the churches of the area, explaining the ways and concerns of the one to the other. When he did arrive, full of apologies and offers of coffee, the CEO made it gently clear that I was representing one of a variety of faith communities, albeit the vastly most numerous in sunny Surrey: that was quite understandable and a role I don't mind filling.

While waiting, I watched the receptionist field enquiries. She has to know who to get in touch with and broadly how the structure works to be able to help the people who turn up. Today, a Council tenant was pursuing a Gas Safety inspection on his property which was supposed to have taken place, but the plumber never turned up and he'd heard nothing back (the same happened to me the other day). The receptionist waited on the phone to someone for about ten minutes and then gave it to the man while she dealt with another gentleman who had some papers to hand to a Council officer who she also couldn't get on the phone (it turned out the officer was out at lunch - she came by later). There was also a woman with a non-native-English accent pursuing a housing enquiry with a man who I presumed was from the CAB or a housing charity or something - he was certainly acting as her advocate. She seemed to be about to be ejected from a friend's house and they were trying to secure her a place in a night shelter. They were shown into a meeting room to call either an advisor or a Council officer, I wasn't clear which. It was quite a tally for twenty minutes, though perhaps mid-day is a busy period. 

At Swanvale Halt church, we pray for aspects of our local community on a cyclical basis, including our local authorities, the elected members and staff. That's all very well, and I'm sure the Lord does something more than absolutely nothing with prayers like it. But watching the Council in action for just a few minutes on this very basic level adds some meat to those outline aspirations. How complex it all is - and how worthwhile the odd prayer seems. 

Dialogue of the Partly Deaf

The young man accosted me as I was returning home from Vespers, with a phrase (whatever it was) which is like the usual opening gambit from a cult: ‘Excuse me, sir, are you worried about the way our country is going?’ He told me there were ‘13 colleges in London where you can’t wish people Happy Christmas’ and that churches were being closed to be replaced by ‘mosques and synagogues’. If I’d had more time I would have tried to explore whether there was a genuine anxiety beneath these statements – I thought his stare and slightly ragged appearance suggested some kind of mental distress – but I hadn’t, I fear. I said things seemed very different in Swanvale Halt where I was doing work in local schools and so on and if churches were closing it was mainly because people didn’t go to them. Did he go to church, I asked? Yes, he said, ‘the main church’ in Guildford, which was an interesting way of describing what was clearly not Holy Trinity on the High Street or even the Cathedral, but Emmaus Road. That’s if it was true.

On Saturday I did a funeral visit. I knew the gentleman whose wife’s service we were discussing, and must have met his stepson before though I couldn’t remember. The deceased lady had been a Roman Catholic at one stage in her life, at least, and her son had attended a convent school and been an altar server in his teens before leaving that behind. ‘I have to say I think religion is a crutch for people who need it’, he said, while his stepfather believed that God had directed his life in various ways, not least leading him towards his wife via some unlikely coincidences. How the conversation got onto aliens and Neanderthal technology I wasn’t sure, but it felt like a talk I was supposed to contribute to but couldn’t find a rational way into, or indeed to steer back to what we were supposed to be talking about. It was absolutely exhausting.

As was the third unsatisfactory encounter within a few days. This one was at a friend’s early-retirement party where I found myself sitting next to a friend of his who had some potentially interesting things to say about her frustrated career as an engineer, being married to a soldier, running a club for bikers in Camden in the 1990s, and dealing with her son’s schooling. But it became clear that behind each story there was a point being made about the unreasonable behaviour of other people, and I was not so much participating in a conversation as being invited to agree. If I missed the narrative clues to how I was supposed to understand each anecdote there was no way back, and it was easy enough to do that in a loud pub. I was almost weeping by the end.

How rarely one has conversations that actually mean anything, in which the participants are listening to what each other has to say rather than simply speaking at one another. I do strive to view my encounters as opportunities to learn more about other people but they don’t always make it easy!

Omerta

There is an Area Dean in the church-set TV comedy series Rev, but she has a minor role next to waspish Archdeacon Robert, who turns up at the vicarage almost every week to patronise Fr Adam Smallbone and tip his coffee into the sink. And yet thanks to the horrible scandal of David Tudor the phrase ‘Area Dean’ is all over the place: he was a ‘senior priest’, say the news reports, ‘in charge of twelve parishes’ in the Chelmsford diocese. Well, says anyone who knows anything about how the Church of England works, Yes and No.

An Area Dean is a bit of a dogsbody. You don’t get paid to do it, but generally you do the job alongside your parochial duties: someone who isn’t a parish priest can technically be an Area Dean, but it’s uncommon. They act as a conduit for information between the local clergy and the diocese, and have a pastoral brief over those clergy. It’s a task nobody generally wants, because we’re all busy enough, thank you, and yet everyone likes to be asked, because it shows that the bishop and your colleagues have enough confidence in you to think that you’d be good at it. Or at least no worse than anyone else available.

But appointing the Area Dean in a deanery is very much the bishop’s initiative. Which is why, in David Tudor’s case, it not only baffles that Stephen Cottrell, as Bishop of Chelmsford, kept re-enlisting him to do it when he, Tudor, was subject to a safeguarding order, but that he was ever asked to do it in the first place. Just like Stephen Cottrell, his predecessor John Gladwin would have been perfectly aware of the restrictions Mr Tudor had had placed on his ministry some months before he was appointed in 2008: why did that happen at all? How could the bishop, whichever bishop, really believe that being subject to a safeguarding order didn’t make a difference to David Tudor’s ability to carry out this extra duty? Today, clergy in a Deanery – and their Parish Safeguarding Officers – would have been told that one of their number wasn’t allowed to be alone with children, but this clearly wasn’t the case in Chelmsford Diocese in 2008. Or maybe they were told, and decided not to believe it, a habit which crops up in many of these depressing narratives.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether institutions that are seduced by abusers or the bishops who make mistakes in dealing with them are liberal or conservative, evangelical or catholic; instead the real conflict is between openness and secrecy. Priests get used to keeping confidences, for very good reasons, but perhaps the habit tends to extend into areas it very much should not. The next step is to imagine that keeping the secrets makes you important, and that only you have the wisdom to deal with them in the right way. You picture yourself as one of a special cadre defined by the secrets they keep. That's above the non-existent pay grade of an Area Dean: that's bishop territory. 

Live and Let Die

Typical, you might well think, one of the most momentous changes, potentially, in the way the State relates to the life of the individual, and all Fr Weepingcross can think to post about is some woman’s rattled-off opinions on Goth. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about the Assisted Dying Bill: I just wasn’t in any way surprised by the outcome.

Christians can’t all be found on one side of this question: it was Pope John Paul II who originated, or at least popularised, the ringing phrase ‘the Culture of Death’ to net together euthanasia (as we used to call ‘assisted dying’), abortion, execution, and war; but not all of us go along with it. What we seem to have, in this particular matter, is a culture of autonomy before all else – assuming as an obvious fact that the sandcastle of individual choice can stand against the tide of social expectation. And I am not sure that Christians themselves know what it is they support, or oppose, in this as in many other respects. For centuries the law has defended us against our own ignorance and incuriosity, bolstered our assumption that we are right, and allowed us to continue without examining the basis for what we think we think. That protection has long, long been rolling back, and this is just another step.

But I find myself drawn, the more I think, more in the direction of mad things I would hesitate to say out loud. That the Enemy wants us dead. That he wants us out of the ring as soon as possible, where we can do no more good. That when we begin believing that one life is worth less than another, we make his work easier. That when we take our own life, or someone else’s, it’s like prising open the door of a plane: the air and the other passengers begin to be sucked out along with us. That there are, essentially, no individual choices.

Except I can’t go all that way. I revolt against making someone else fall in line with what I think in this most radical way. Maybe one day our long, bitter process of discernment will resolve that, as well.

Until then, in my imagination, I look to the potential time thirty years hence when medical professionals and others will start subtly hinting to me that the money spent on keeping me going could be better used elsewhere, on more worthy subjects, on children for heaven’s sake, and steeling myself to say, No. I might sacrifice myself for a child, but not for abstract children the State conjures in front of me to persuade me I am worth less. I demand my right to be a burden. I will not disappear for your convenience, I will not weigh my worth against others, not because I’m anything important, but because all human beings are, and accidentally I am one.

Bishop Down

Ironically, as it was pointed out to us at Deanery Chapter today, this coming Sunday is designated Safeguarding Sunday in the Church of England. Some of my colleagues wanted some kind of diocesan statement to be made about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury that they could share, but although I might allude to it in what I say in any sermons I won't be making any declaration to the parish or even the church as such. Other incumbents found themselves dispirited and concerned for the effect on parish relationships, but my experience is that in so far as people in local communities have any attitude to the Church at all they detach the immediate manifestation of it, the clergy and individuals they know, from anything that might be going on more widely. Haters gonna hate, but everyone else carries on. This generosity is, of course, exactly the phenomenon that benefits abusers - nobody believes the person they know could be wicked - but the rest of us can be thankful for it for now. I will very much let the whole thing lie unless anyone mentions it. 

In general, I wish I could be anything more than wearied and unsurprised by the outcome. It's not that I have no sympathy: were someone to tell me an issue had been referred to the police, I might well assume the police were dealing with it, and move on to the next thing (and there is always a Next Thing onto which to move). It wouldn't make it right, though. If I say that Justin Welby's decision to resign could well turn out to be his best day's work during his tenure at Lambeth Palace, I do so not to be mean or sarcastic, but because I genuinely think the Church will ultimately benefit. It's exactly the dramatic, galvanizing event required to blow the whole thing open, to tip the balance away from power, display, and inertia, and it would not be beyond possibility that Archbishop Justin's will not be the only pointy hat rolling in the dust before too long.

Devotionally Challenged

On my great trip north I called in on my friend Clare (no point disguising her name) who is Chaplain to the University of Cumbria in Lancaster. It's a peculiar kind of arrangement: the University grew out of St Martin's College, a Church of England teacher-training college occupying the site of the old barracks in Lancaster. It gradually acquired other scattered sites and when it was finally instituted as a university in 2007, it couldn't call itself Lancaster University or the University of Lancashire as those titles were taken, so it became the University of Cumbria even though its biggest campus is in Lancaster. Clare describes it as 'very, very secular' but part of the foundation arrangements was that there should be a number of Anglican appointments on the staff, of which the Chaplain in Lancaster is one. So Clare finds herself something of what we would in other circumstances call a 'pioneer minister', sent to a group of people who don't have any longstanding interaction with Christianity (the previous chaplain had, let's say, not been particularly active and the Chapel, built in the 1960s to be a sort of parish church of the College, hasn't had much of a congregation for a long while). 

One of Clare's challenges in restoring the Chapel of St Martin to something like a devotional space can be found behind the altar. Here she is, then, displaying one of the Church of England's greatest artistic treasures, John Bratby's Me as Christ, Crucified by My Ex-Wives and Art Critics. 

I'm teasing you, of course. The mural doesn't have that title (if it has one, it's the tedious Golgotha), but it would be an accurate description. John Bratby's name has virtually disappeared from the story of twentieth-century British art but he was flavour of the day at one point in the 1960s. He was, by all accounts, a dreadful, dreadful man, but his portraiture in particular has a psychedelic verve to it even if, as Clare points out, he seems consistently to lose interest in his figures by the time he gets to their feet. 

The mural was acquired by the College's first Principal, Hugh Pollard, after a theological college in Manchester got queasy about buying it. It does present some challenges as a devotional image, in that it isn't intended as one but rather an unpleasant joke. I'm reminded a bit, in another mode, of Jean Fouquet's portrait of French royal mistress Agnes Sorel as a bare-breasted Virgin Mary, an icon of something else quite a long way from religious feeling. The story goes that when the late Queen Mother opened the College in 1967 and was shown the painting she remarked of the artist 'Do you think he has the slightest idea of what Christianity is about?' Taking a broad view of the doctrine of the Incarnation, you might reply Yes, but only just enough to get it wrong.

So, what is a chaplain to do with it? Clare's predecessor had it covered with a curtain which, she thinks, 'was worse - it means it's lurking unseen like a monster'. Given that hardly anyone comes to worship in St Martin's anymore Clare plans to reorganise the space so that there's a smaller liturgical area with its altar to one side while, for the considerable number of Cumbria students who are studying medicine and allied subjects, she will offer some sessions reflecting spiritually on pain, physicality and selfhood. Take the horror and work with it. It's a bit like the Parable of the Talents. 

Unedifying Accounts

The latest Anglican safeguarding scandal to come to public attention depresses in the same way any other has, though it carries its own special quality with it, apparently coming close to closing an entire cathedral in an attempt to get rid of one residentiary canon. The current Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North – as redoubtably Anglo-Catholic as his predecessor Julian Henderson was a conservative Evangelical – blames it all on the outmoded structures of the Church, though there do seem to be other factors at play. I raise an eyebrow when anonymous sources complain of the ‘absolute power’ Canon Hindley exercised at the Cathedral – I’ve never met a member of any cathedral staff who felt they had the slightest influence over their colleagues at all – but when you hear that a judge concluded he had assaulted a man, but nothing was done because nobody could be sure the victim was underage, you do gape a bit.

It takes me back a few weeks when my Antipodean regular reader and correspondent Dr Wellington asked me whether I’d come across the older scandal in the Diocese of London, where the one-time diocesan ‘fixer’ and Head of Operations Martin Sargeant had been convicted of fraud. Yes I had, I replied, and my interest was more than it might usually have been because when the miscreant’s name was first reported I’d realised I’d been to school with him. Within the outline of the middle-aged bloke in the pictures I could just about glimpse the teenage boy I remembered from Bournemouth: you didn't believe much of what he told you even then.

Part of Mr Sargeant’s story involved a now-infamous debrief with the Archdeacon of London when the former left his diocesan post in which he delivered what was described as a ‘brain-dump’ of what he claimed to know about London’s clergy. We now know that this was a compendium of gossip and personal bile with very little truth to it, but the Diocese treated it as positive allegations of abusive behaviour that had to be followed up. The typical Church of England habits of secrecy and inefficiency kicked into motion and one result was the suicide of Fr Alan Griffin who spent a year being investigated for crimes that were never made known to him, and which, the coroner who examined his death decided, ‘were supported by no complainant, no witness, and no accuser’.

It struck me that given our current, and completely understandable, safeguarding culture, it’s hard to stop this happening. We are all taught that any allegation must be reported and followed up: it rests with others to decide what is to be done next. What if, as seems to have happened in London, everyone in the chain feels they dare not be the one who says, ‘this is just poisonous gossip and we will take it no further’?

The integrity of the local safeguarding team is presumably crucial. I have had a case which ours regarded as less serious than I did, and it turned out they were right. On the other hand, I know someone against whom an allegation was made many years ago, then withdrawn (in neither case by the supposed victim, who maintained nothing had happened) and, when the priest demanded in a meeting with the bishop and the Diocesan Safeguarding Adviser the right to begin the long, difficult process of having the matter expunged from his record, was told by the DSA that as far as she was concerned he was guilty no matter what anyone said, and implied that him being ‘obviously a homosexual’ was proof of paedophilia. The bishop, my informant said, ‘went white’ and insisted on dissociating himself from the remark (I can mention this as all concerned are long gone).

At theological college I once found myself marvelling at the ability of the kitchen to both overcook and undercook rice at the same time, and the CofE’s safeguarding practice seems caught in the same place, at once hopelessly lax and unacceptably hypervigilant. The answer, as so many voices say, is simply to bring the police in whenever any allegation is made, like every other organisation. Why, yet again, should we imagine we’re so special?