The Spamhead Blog

UK HIV Response "Woefully Inadequate"

2011-09-02T15:38:00.002Z

A report published yesterday by the HIV and AIDS in the UK Select Committee of the House of Lords has described the priority given to preventing HIV and AIDS in Britain as “woefully inadequate”. While nearly three quarters of a billion pounds is spent each year on HIV treatment, only a third of that is spent on prevention. In the last decade, the UK has trebled the number of people on anti-retroviral therapy for HIV (ART), while we face the number of people living with HIV topping the 100,000 mark in the next year if current trends continue – 25% of whom do not even know their diagnosis. And people unaware of their HIV status risk infecting others and worsening their own health.

While the scale of this problem has made headlines today, the underlying issue should come as no real surprise. As far back as 2006, while attending a function for UK civil society delegates to the UN High Level Meeting on AIDS in New York I was told by a Department of Health Civil Servant that the UK did not need a separate HIV prevention strategy any more, as it was all adequately dealt with by the UK’s sexual health strategy. Ignoring the fact that the most successful work has been done amongst drug users using needle exchanges, the astounding level of complacency this statement reveals is born out by not only today’s figures, but that the UK continues to have some of the highest STD and teenage pregnancy rates in Western Europe. If we cannot even tackle sexual health adequately, no wonder we are not tackling HIV!

In fact, the most worrying finding is that, a generation on from the start of the AIDS pandemic, the British population is more ignorant than ever about HIV, its effects routes of transmission and prevention.

While the British government has been applauded for its funding of HIV treatment and prevention work in the developing world, we remain shockingly inadequate (and even complacent) on the domestic front. Likewise, the global church has responded constructively to HIV in many parts of the world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, but the British church remains largely ignorant and unengaged with HIV as in issue in the UK. It is time for a change in our attitudes.

Well done to Lord Fowler (the originator of the ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ campaign in the eighties that many now credit with playing a significant part in saving the UK from a major HIV epidemic in the nineties) and his committee for reminding us the AIDS has not gone away, and getting it back in the headlines.

this post originally appeared on the blog of the Christian Medical Fellowship at http://www.cmfblog.org.uk

Missing Midwives Costs Mothers’ Lives

2011-04-02T20:12:00.000Z

On 1 April UNICEF and the Royal College of Midwives launched a campaign to find the missing midwives. UNICEF’s recent research suggests that globally we need 350,000 midwives, and that this shortage of skilled birth attendants means as few as 6% of women in some developing countries have access to skilled birth attendants. This means that there are as many 1,000 women and 2,000 children dying daily, many of whose lives could be saved if a trained midwife was in attendance.

350,000 seems a remarkably small number and an achievable target. However, when you consider that the UK is also short of midwives, perhaps it is not a surprise that this gap has not been as easy to bridge as it at first seems. As birth rates rise in the UK, we seem to be training fewer midwives. Most midwives I know work in understaffed, over stressed units, and yet still manage to deliver a generally high standard of care that ensures that not only are the vast majority of British babies delivered safely, they are also delivered in a way that makes for a meaningful and happy experience for the mother. One wonders for how much longer however, as we fail to train new midwives and support effectively those already working in the profession. As DFID gets behind the UNICEF campaign, it is worrying that other parts of the national and devolved governments are at best playing catch up and at worst reducing the numbers of midwives in this country!

However, in many parts of the world, there is no such provision. Partly this is an issue of poverty, and partly a mixture of cultural and political values that do not prioritise motherhood or the life and health of women and children. As we highlighted in the CMF submission to DFID’s maternal health strategy consultation, it is only by addressing these issues, as well as the provision of trained midwives, obstetricians, appropriate medical supply chains etc, that we can turn around the gross inequality in maternal health and survival around the globe.

It is ironic, on Mother’s Day, to consider a world that really does not value mothers and motherhood. We live in a culture that here in the UK has such a disordered sense of human value that it does not train enough midwives, but prioritises free prescription of abortefactive post coital conception. In the process we are failing to address the deeper issues of fractured relationship and disordered sexuality that leads us to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the Western world. And as MPs seek to increase the amount of information, counselling and professional support being provided to women seeking an abortion, they are attacked for trying to harm women. In other parts of the world a man will let his wife die rather than incur the cost of getting her to a hospital – other wives are always available, while his government will not put any money into training midwive who could have helpe her deliver her child more safely at home. It is a sobering thought, as we celebrate our mothers this Sunday. We need to do more than give a few gifts to say thanks to our mothers; we need to take action seek to see motherhood properly supported around the world, and here at home.

To sign the UNICEF petition to UK Development Secretary to support the global drive for more midwives click here

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...Advent Synchro Blog

2010-12-07T20:28:00.001Z

Well, fourteen inches of snow in our back garden by last Friday, three days snowed in and working from home, chaos on the road and trains. Welcome to the British winter! Again.

It is interesting how just a few inches of frozen rain reveal how vulnerable our society is – shops running out of perishable supplies, major transport infrastructure going wrong, leaving people trapped in trains and cars overnight. What would happen is something really serious happened, and all of it just fell apart?

It puts me a bit in mind of Jesus’ warning to the disciples not get anxious about future or current troubles – it’s the way it will be. Sounds a bit fatalistic, but actually, it is reminder that we so easily get distracted by the immediate perils that we miss the bigger picture. If Jesus really is retuning, then things will be kicking off out there in way we cannot mistake – but history is replete with natural and manmade disasters that must have seemed like the end of the world. The long, hard winters at the start of the twelfth century, followed in less than a generation by the Black Death must have felt pretty apocalyptic to the people of Northern Europe And you can point to countless other events of similar ilk. A reminder that our lives on this planet hang by a thread.

Which is why knowing that Jesus is coming back remains so important in Christian thinking – because we know our fragility and ephemerality, we also realise that we have no help or hope other than God, and if the whole world comes crashing down around our ears, God remains firm. There is always a hope, even in the midst of hopelessness.

One of the most striking novels and films of recent times is ‘The Road’ which takes us to a world where is has all collapsed – there is no future, no hope, only a lingering (or if fortunate, a swift and painless) death. But although God never appears, there is that spark of hope, of light, of humanity in the midst of this devastation that looks onwards to a future. It is a human instinct to believe and hope that there is a better world coming – I believe that it has been planted there by God, because it makes us willing to get up every day, persist through the hard things, toil in the face of adversity, believe in the face of doubt, hostility and even persecution.

Where is it all going wrong?

2010-07-28T11:31:00.000Z

Is Obama getting it wrong? There has been a lot of buzz lately about his responses to global health issues - particularly HIV & AIDS. I have blogged elsewhere on the detrimental impact of his changed funding priorities is having on HIV treatment, and the concern that much of the good done by PEPFAR could be lost.

This post from the Huffington Post suggests, quite rightly, that while Obama is right to focus on a wider range of health issues, including maternal and child health (arguing that you cannot deal with one disease at a time, but with the whole constellation of health crises), this should not be at the expense of the work already done on HIV treatment. It's both/and, not either/or.

But, at a time when the economic downturn is putting pressure on aid budgets everywhere, it is harder to make a case for the big spend. While our own government claims to be ring fencing aid spending, the reality is that many in the Tory Party, the right wing press, and quite a few members of the public, are arguing that we need to concentrate on our domestic ills rather than the needs of the world's poorest. Actually, the decision to up the aid to Afghanistan (a significant proportion of which seems to be disappearing into the pockets of a corrupt elite) only serves to strengthen the naysayers.

Aid, where it works, needs to be maintained and expanded - at least until such time as it is no longer needed (which should always be its ultimate aim). We cannot back peddle now!

Earth is Crammed with Heaven

2010-05-20T09:05:00.006Z

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes, the rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I stumbled upon this quote just this morning in one of my wife's books. Every morning on the train I pass by a small glimpse of heaven (or at least what I would hope heaven might be like). Just past Cuxton on the way towards Meopham is a small valley full of farms and fields that change almost daily with the seasons. Going from alternate rich green and yellow fields in the spring, to a uniform green mottled with red poppies in early summer, then white with wheat in August. Meanwhile the trees in the hedgerows and a small woodland in the midst of the valley go from winter's bare skeletons to a riot of spring blossom to lush summer greens and then autumn golds and reds.

But most of the train is too buried in their papers, iPods books and (indeed) Blackberries, or else are too fast asleep to notice. I miss it too, most mornings, but every now and again I see this valley on my way in to London and my heart leaps and gives praise. On my way back from London, especially in the lighter evenings of spring and summer I give thanks whenever this valley comes into view, as it reminds me that I am near home - both physically and spiritually.

This little valley, glimpsed twice a day for barely a minute is, for me at least, a reminder of God's incredible creativity and artistry, and of his tangible presence in a Creation that holds together through his very Word.

Earth is crammed with heaven indeed, even in an obscure part of Northwest Kent.

Dying patients denied pain relief because of legal fears

2010-05-19T09:31:00.004Z

A survey in Nursing Times has been published this morning claiming that "dying patients denied pain relief because of legal fears" - specifically that one in ten 'nurses' surveyed said that they were scared to give full doses of pain relieving opiates (even where prescribed) because of fears of being prosecuted for assisting in the death of a patient.

There are some real question marks to raise about this. First and foremost the methodology of the survey itself. This was an open survey that anyone could post to. Pro euthanasia groups were generically emailing their supporters asking for nurses to fill in the survey, but any of their supporters could have. The same may have happened on the other side. But the key point is that you did not need to be a Nursing Times subscriber or show any proof of being a registered, practising nurse to fill this in, so the results cannot be said to have a high degree of validity. The 2,311 respondents may have all been practising nurses, but there is no way to verify that. Furthermore it was a self selecting sample, so there is no way you can say this is a representative cross section of the profession.

Secondly, the survey asked distinctly slanted questions, which seem to look for answers that pointed to neglecting patients' symptoms for fear of prosecution. It was hard to give an answer that did not point in that direction without ticking an 'other' or 'not applicable' box. In other words, there was no real triangulation of data by asking different questions with different possible answers to make sure that the respondents were actually saying what they appear to have said.

In short, the methodology of the survey is so poor as to leave one wondering how many useful conclusions one could make from the data.

However, leaving aside the questions about the methodology and validity of the study, if one is to draw conclusions from it, then it does suggest a scary level of apparent ignorance of good clinical care and the law. 33% said they did not know what the law was (it hasn't changed, despite what you would have thought seeing the coverage of the DPP's guidelines on prosecution in cases of assisted suicide), and if 12% of nurses think it is better to titrate down the dose of opiate analgesics so that a patient is in pain rather than risk prosecution, that show a) a starling level of callousness and lack of care, b) a devastating level of ignorance about good palliative care and how hard it is to actually overdose someone on appropriately prescribe opiate analgesia, and c) a scary level of ignorance of the law on assisted suicide.

Has any nurse ever been prosecuted for simply giving an extra (prescribed) dose of diamorphine to a patient in terminal pain? I have never heard of such a case. You would have to give a huge dose to kill someone (people in severe pain can take considerably higher doses of opiate analgesia than people in no pain), and be either deliberately malicious or unbelievably incompetent to do so. In short, either this survey is picking up something that is not there by nature of its methodological flaws, or we really need to look again at nurse education on medical law and end of life care!

What is even more concerning is that the Royal College of Nursing has still to produce any professional guidance on this issue. The Nursing and Midwifery Council have spoken strongly, pointing out that the law has not changed, but despite the RCN changing their stance on assisted suicide to one of neutrality (supposedly to enable greater discussion of the issue), the main professional body for nurses in this country seems to be dithering and uncertain what to do. This lack of leadership may explain, at least in part, why so many nurses apparently feel ignorant and unable to act appropriately in the face of a person facing the end of their life in pain.

Leadership and education are what are needed here, not a change in the law!

A Christian Manifesto

2010-05-06T16:00:00.002Z

I was heartened to read the Evangelical Alliances' Open Letter to Party Leaders today, as it reflected the views of British Evangelical Christians on Facebook and Twitter, and refreshingly not a single reactionary idea amongst them!

Encourage the importance of marriage as the best environment to bring up children
A change to the voting system so that it is more representative of the votes cast
For politicians to act with honesty and integrity

Other suggestions that make up the top ten ideas include:

Foster social entrepreneurship in inner city areas that have suffered from long term deprivation
Fully worked out plans for supplying water and sanitation to those currently without in developing countries
An immigration policy that ensures we provide proper sanctuary for those fleeing persecution in their own country
Cap the interest rate that can be charged on loans and credit cards
Reform the House of Lords
Work to set up an international tax on financial transactions
Take hard choices to tackle the national debt

This is just a sample of the many ideas that were submitted to the Facebook group and via Twitter, and show that Christians are passionately committed to all areas of society. Which ever party or parties form the next Government we call on them to listen to these suggestions and engage with the Church. Across the country churches are an integral part of local communities and work for the good of all society. We ask that you work with the church as a key partner as you begin to govern.

The thinking is refreshingly global, focussed on justice, fairness and community - values at the heart of a Christ Centred, Biblical world view. I doubt that the party leaders will have listened that much (judging from most of their manifestos), but whatever government we find tomorrow morning, we have here some of the issues that Christians at least would like it to address - issues that will have a wider benefit rather than simply fulfilling sectarian interests.

Where Was the Foregin Policy?

2010-04-22T23:10:00.004Z

Tonight's Leaders Debate on Sky is being picked over by pundits ad nauseum, so thought I would add my own twopenny worth.

It was meant to be in foreign policy (although less than half was - especially if you take a pointed question about the Papal visit as being less about foreign policy and more about relationships with faith communities, which the leaders seemed to do). So we got Europe (sort of), Afghanistan (a lot) and the Special Relationship with the US (again, sort of). But nothing on overseas aid.

Four or five years back, that would have been in the top three questions asked by the audience or the pundits. Not now - the world's poor have dropped off the agenda again. Depressing. Inevitable, but depressing, because this election will once again be fought about who is going to put more pounds in my pocket - and the swing voters in middle England will be the ones who's pockets that party will want to promise to line. Our own poor, and the poor of the developing world, once again, not getting a seat at the table.

Update 4 May 2010:
Well, it seems the lack of Development related policy or questions was no surprise to some, and that that other have been dissecting the limited differences between all the parties (who all adhere notionally to the target of 0.7% of GDP going in aid by 2013). All well and good. And the One Campaign has got all the party leaders to go on record with their fairly trite statements on aid policy. All seem to be saying the same things, and none of them are bad. But I fear that the world's poor have genuinely slipped off our radar as a nation.

In Sarah Bosley's Global Health Blog in the Guardian this morning there was a pointed piece about Avastin, a bowel cancer drug that can (in very small doses) cure wet age related macular degeneration. But the drug companies are peddling the low doses of Avastin at a hugely inflated price and under another brand name. And this goes on all the time with diseases in the developing world, where treatments are denied the poorest of the poor because of profiteering. But this gets hardly any media or political attention.

This morning I led a morning devotion on Ezekiel 16 (one of the stronger passages in a pretty hard hitting prophetic book). Verses 49-50 say something quite scary - the sin of dear old Sodom, destroyed by sulphurous fire in Genesis, was not as is widely assumed, homosexuality, but rather that they sat back comfortably engrossed in their own pleasures and problems while the poor and vulnerable around them starved.

I fear for our nation - that we have let our own concerns (however relevant and valid they may be) deflect us from the real needs of the poor and our obligations to them as the rich world. And what judgement awaits us for this? Hmmm, read the rest of chapter 16 in Ezekiel and beyond...

BBC News - Will Christians swing the 2010 UK election?

2010-04-21T09:07:00.001Z

Interesting article on the BBC News - Will Christians swing the 2010 UK election? - there is definitely a far more high-profile mobilisation of the Christian electorate this year than I can ever previously recall, and all the major parties (and not a few of the minor ones) seem to be playing up the Christian vote.

Wonder why the sudden sea-change? Is it because we are becoming more political as British Christians, or is because we tend to vote more than the general population, so in a close contest the parties need to court us? No easy conclusions, but perhaps both are true.

I see two dangers - firstly that we end up like the US Evangelicals and become too wedded or identified to one set of political issues and one party, or secondly that we end up being useful idiots to parties that dump us once it is more more politically expedient to do so, as the Republicans did evangelicals in the last US election. Either way, the temptations of power and empire are the ones we must abjure as followers of the King whose Kingdom was not of this world, whilst engaging with the political world in a constructive and Godly manner. Not an easy tightrope to walk, but one we should not avoid.

Marriage does little for child development

2010-04-20T13:13:00.002Z

Interesting study in the Grauniad - Marriage does little for child development, study finds |Politics |guardian.co.uk -

Not really a surprise - it isn't marriage per se, but the people who tend to get married that has an impact on the development of their children.

Which does suggests that in finding policies to help lift children out of the poverty trap and improve social stability it is not so much finding tax incentives for people to get married, as addressing the wider social, educational, economic and health issues that affect families of all shapes and sizes.

As a Christian I believe in marriage, but recognise that it is only one of a whole tapestry of social strands that build stable individuals, families and communities. And it is the wider social, economic, political and spiritual changes in the life of our nation that has eroded many of these strands in many of our communities.

Once again, it is easy to address the surface issue without going deeper in a hunt for attention grabbing policies.

Another Christian Declaration ahead of the General Election

2010-04-12T13:33:00.003Z

This time Steve Chalke's network, Faithworks has launched The Faithworks 2010 Declaration calling on the major parties to recognise the role of faith based organisations and churches to local communities and service provisions across the UK, and the centrality of the Christian faith to those responses. It also calls or stronger national and local government partnerships with the Christian FBO sector which recognise rather than marginalise the core Christian faith at the heart of the work done by churches and Christian organisations.

It is encouraging to see the number of Christian organisations really engaging in this general election (the Evangelical Alliance are asking people to tweet or Facebook their manifesto priorities, CARE are asking Christian to Make The Cross Count, etc, etc.) - and showing the breadth of concerns and involvement that Christians in the UK have with the life of our nation. We may not all agree on what the core issues are, but we hold the same Lord to be at the centre of our ethics, values and practices.

Westminster2010 - Protecting human life, marriage, and freedom of conscience

2010-04-04T14:42:00.000Z

Following the US 'Manhattan Declaration', British Church leaders have today launched Westminster2010 - Protecting human life, marriage, and freedom of conscience, a declaration of Christian conscience, valuing human life and justice for the poor and marginalised ahead of the UK General Election, (expected to be called next week).

The leaders (including former Bishops Michael Nazir-Ali and George Carey, Steve Clifford of the Evangelical Alliance, Cardinal O'Brien, leader of the Catholic Church in Scotland, and the heads of several other Christian denominations and national organisations) call upon all the major parties and candidates to listen to the voice of Christians (amongst others) at the election, recognising that the voices of Christians have been somewhat in danger of being marginalised in recent years.

In particular the Westminster Declaration sets out a broad range of policies that unite churches in the UK, including support for marriage, freedom for those of faith to live their lives according to their beliefs and opposition to assisted suicide and euthanasia.

It also calls for Christians to support, protect, and be advocates for children born and unborn, and all those who are sick, disabled, addicted, elderly, poor, exploited, trafficked or exploited by unjust trade, aid or debt policies.

The timing of the launch of Westminster 2010 ahead of the call of the General election is designed to send a clear message to all parliamentary candidates that Christians will be supporting those who will both promote policies that protect vulnerable people and also respect the right of Christians to hold, express and live according to Christian beliefs.

You can sign the declaration here.

(At time of posting, the site seemed to have crashed, but should be up again soon).

Pullman's Latest Offering Gets a Thoughtful Christian Response

2010-04-03T14:56:00.003Z

Bishop Alan’s Blog: The Goodman Philip and the Scoundrel Pullman?

A typically thoughtful review of Philip Pullman's 'The Goodman Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ' - suggesting it may be a more helpful and thoughtful read than the provocative title suggests. I may now even be tempted to borrow it from my local library! Sadly, I fear this may not be representative of the mad eyed responses I anticipate flooding in from many of my fellow believers (sigh)

Posted using ShareThis

Think local to change face of Britain, urges David Cameron - Times Online

2010-04-01T09:35:00.000Z

Think local to change face of Britain, urges David Cameron - Times Online

It is encouraging to see words like 'Community' and 'Civil Society' being used in the language of the general election. However, while none of the parties has it really nailed, they are coming out with some good ideas. Ideas, however, have a habit of biting the dust once an electoral mandate is received.

Meanwhile the local community groups and churches will get on with the job we do best, with our without the Government's support, whether it be blue, red or yellow come June.

#RHT - Robin Hood Tax

2010-02-10T10:19:00.003Z

Check out this video that explains a simple but potentially significant idea to release a global benefit from the world's financial markets - something that could save lives and make a real, lasting difference.

see http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/ and follow on Twitter & Facebook for more information and ways to get involved.

This is an idea whose time has come!

The Shack & The Road

2009-11-19T21:16:00.002Z

I am still reeling from my recent reading. After putting it off for a year or so, I finally succumbed and borrowed a copy of the most read Christian book of recent years (or decades even), 'The Shack', to at least find out what all the controversy was about. At the same time I decided I needed to read Cormac McCarthy's prize winning 'The Road' before the movie came out. Neither book could be described as a light hearted bundle of laughs, so I was steeling myself for a less than easy literary experience

Let's start with 'The Shack' – the story of a man whose daughter was abducted and murdered some years earlier being drawn to the site of her death by God at the eponymous Shack. Turning up as an African-American and an east Asian woman and a middle-eastern man, the Trinity then proceeds to show him the nature of the divine and his human misconceptions about God, life, death, suffering, etc, etc, and in so doing help him come to terms with his awful loss. If that summary sounds banal and superficial, it is because at one level, the book is banal. Badly written, cliché ridden, verbose to the point of tedium, the God of 'The Shack' communicates in trite sermons and homely proverbs, but seems unable to use metaphor and parable to explore deep and complex issues. It presents a rather wishy-washy God, the sort of nice cuddly figure of the American Megachurches, rather than a more robust Biblical vision of the Divine.

Others have written at length about the book's literary and theological deficits, but it obviously scratches some spiritual itches in our post-Christendom culture. Certainly, it does speak into the darkness of human loss and sorrow, and for all its faults, I found myself moved at times. But like a McDonald's, it tasted good but left me feeling strangely under nourished.

'The Road' on the other hand left me reeling, as if I had been at a good friend's funeral – deeply sorrowful, but also left with a profound sense of hope. The premise is as bleak as you can imagine – a nameless father and son walk across a United States that has been utterly devastated by a nameless global disaster, leaving the air leaden with ash, blotting out the sun and extinguishing all wild life. The only things left in this bleak landscape are the sporadic forest fires sweeping the land, and straggling bands of human survivors scavenging for food, many of whom have turned to cannibalism to survive. With just a trolley of scavenged food supplies, a pistol with two bullets, and each other, the two protagonists struggle towards the ocean for no clear reason. Along the way they face mundane struggles against the elements, the other human survivors, and their own failing health. Not a barrel of laughs you'd think, and for certain it is as grim as that summary would suggest. But to write it off as too bleak to be endured would be to miss out on a truly moving and uplifting masterpiece.

Much has been made of the beautiful, stark and simple prose with which McCarthy paints his pictures and tells his tale, and rightly so. But it is the simple, profound way that he paints the relationship between father and son that got to me. As a father myself I identified with the relationship so powerfully. The father seeks to protect his son from the stark hopelessness of their situation, seeking to convince him that they are keeping the flame of humanity alive, and seeking others who do the same (while not really believing this himself). However, it is the son who keeps challenging his father's single minded resolve to survive at any cost by constantly enjoining him to share their food with others, to take in the lost and help those who are in danger. His simple, naive compassion and hopefulness sits in stark contrast to the vicious cannibalism or despairing, bewildered hopelessness of the other survivors that they encounter. The son teaches the father to be truly human in the face of bleak inhumanity.

In 'The Road' God would seem to be absent – he was either never there, or has turned his face away from humanity and abandoned us to our fate. Yet the novel's finale gives us a glimmer of hope – that God has not turned his face, and that he is to be found in the finer human qualities that have not been extinguished, even in the worst of circumstances.

So, while 'The Shack' seems to be about God, it is really only about a certain, American cuddly image of God that is vapid and all too human. Meanwhile, in 'The Road' God remains off screen, but his presence is there in the simple humanity of the boy and his relationship with his father. It is that altogether more painfully realised image of God that is the more authentic.

Climate Change, Population and Health

2009-10-07T14:31:00.006Z

At the time of writing, the Copenhagen Climate Change Talks are about to happen, and much comment in the media suggests that the chances of a meaningful agreement on curbing emissions rests on whether the West can persuade India, China, Brazil and much of the developing world to sign up.

At the same time, reports have been published recently expressing concern about the role of a growing population will have on climate change, poverty and development Many climate change activists like Jonathon Porritt are calling for drastic reductions in birth rates to save the planet. Others raise the concern that growing third world populations will not only add to climate change but set back development by spreading meagre resources too thinly.

This growing trend needs to be challenged. Recent research has shown that far from contributing to climate change, the poor barely have any impact but are disproportionately affected. China, which has a low population increase rate has one of the highest rates of increases in emissions – the same is true of much of the developed world, while most Africans have less than a thousandth of the carbon footprint of your average European (let alone your average American).

The problem is not population growth but the emergence of developing world middle classes who aspire to Western consumer lifestyles, complete with its conspicuous over-consumption of resources (hence the hike in oil steel and wheat prices over the last five years). This raises two awkward questions. Firstly, what sort of development do we really want? Do we want Africa and Asia to enjoy Western standards of living (and thus consumption)? It has been said that to sustain that level of consumption would take the total resources of 2-3 additional planets like Earth. Secondly, if we do not want that kind of development for Africa, Asia and Latin American, then what right have we to deny them what we permit ourselves? It strikes me that calls to curb the population in the developing world smack too much of the rich trying to control and demonise the poor, while side stepping the consequences of our own love of cheap credit and conspicuous over consumption

Climate change is happening - whether we can change it is open to debate, but like the global economic crisis (which will swell the ranks of the poor by 100 million this year), the poor are not responsible but are the first to suffer. Poverty and lack of resources, infrastructure, and often governance, greatly increase the vulnerability of the poor to the effects of climate change. Those living in costal or tidal river flood plains (e.g. a large part of the population of Bangladesh and Southeast Asia and the Pacific) will be at risk of flooding if sea levels rise - increasing risks of water born diseases, loss of food production, homelessness and descent into further poverty. Competition for water and other resources as climates warm will increase wars and conflicts amongst poor communities and nations, leading to the further collapse of health and social infrastructure and increase rates of malnutrition. Increasing climate refugee communities forced off flooded or drought ridden lands will also put huge strains on health infrastructures of their own and surrounding nations. The subsequent sequelae particularly in the areas of maternal and child health will reverse the meagre gains of the last decade. Climate change, not caused by the poor, will have disproportionate impact upon their health.

We sit back and debate about climate change and whether it is real, while some extremists call all human beings the problem just for being alive. It would seem that the anti-life psychosis that seems to be afflicting late post-industrial Western consumer cultures is being exported to those who do not need to have to put up with such utter evil nonsense. All the while we are fiddling while the poor suffer for our actions – it is us, our cars, our gadgets, our waste, our demand for more, cheaper newer, for the exotic and out of season food shipped half way round the world, the need for bigger cities and more roads to fulfil our demand to get where we want when we want how we want. Porritt, Attenborough and their like are just obfuscating.

Jesus and the prophets warned strongly that sitting back complacently makes us culpable in the exploitation of the poor (e.g. Matthew 25:31-45). The tough question for me is, what the hell am I going to do to help change this? Watch this space.

The Spirituality of the Long Distance Runner

2009-09-05T22:05:00.001Z

I have recently been enjoying the "What is Spiritual Practice" blog series by Christine Sine and associates over in Seattle these last few months. Exploring how every day experiences can be part of our devotion to God has always interested me, and this series of thoughts has been quite refreshing and eye opening about unexpected ways of encountering God.

Thanks to my recent health problems I have had to make some major changes to my diet and start a proper exercise regime. For me, proper exercise means running – it was a passion for much of my twenties and early thirties, but somehow marriage and fatherhood squeezed the time for such practices – until I realised it was one of the only ways I could lose weight and help bring my diabetes under control.

So, I dusted off my old running shoes, bought some running shorts, and fished my worn out running socks from the back of my drawers, and started to pound the pavements whenever I could. I started taking my running gear to work and running the streets of Borough in my lunch hour (I briefly tried to run the route between the Millennium Footbridge and Tower Bridge on both sides of the Thames, but the volume of tourists made this hazardous, and a gashed arm caused by a distracted individual idly forcing me into some railings made me give up on that idea!!).

I started working out longer routes around my neighbourhood – streets that I knew by car, and then back routes and down through woodland and waste ground that I had never even been aware of before. At work I discovered side streets with hidden parks and those wonderful London squares with shared gardens in the centre tucked away behind the utilitarian facades of Borough High Street and London Bridge. I have found that you learn much more about a place pacing it out on foot than you do in a car or on a bus.

But it is the discovery of things inside myself that caught me by surprise. That my body actually craves exercise, and that years of being sedentary had not only harmed my health but had affected my spirit – my body wants to run, and denying it that had left me feeling something was missing. Suddenly it was more than the endorphin high of a good run, it was a sense that my body was doing something it was designed for and designed to do well. I am a runner by nature, and on the road I have found that "sweet spot" – the place where my body works at its best. The challenge of a new hill, a harder circuit, a longer route, a better time, all making me stretch my body to do more of this, and my body responds with joy. I have lost over two and a half stone (around thirty pounds if you are American, around fifteen kilos if you are European), and around eight inches off my waist. But it is more the sense of having energy and stamina and feeling young again that has struck me. It's like the years have fallen off, and I have my old self back again.

And as I find this new/old sense of self, I am also finding God with me on my runs. Granted I usually run listening to a podcast of films reviews, news or other matters of interest to me, but even with that I find myself aware that I am not running alone. I am not sure why God made me good at this – I am never going to be good enough to compete (nor do I want to), and it is an intensely solitary pursuit for me, (although I enjoy running with a partner from time to time). Yet I sense that in finding this one area where I am fitted, I am opening myself up to God to use me in other ways that He has suited me to.

We all have a place where we fit, a role or a skill that is uniquely ours. Finding that "sweet spot" is the road to joy, peace and fulfilment. Not necessarily the road to comfort, prosperity and material security, as some of the American prosperity heresies would have it, mind. In fact quite the opposite. Running takes hard work, discipline and commitment, self-sacrifice. Serving God in whatever way takes no less focus and commitment. So I have found that while running is a good in itself for me, I have found it more as a reminder that God has good works prepared for me in whatever role or walk of life that I am in. That is the challenge we all face – and sometimes we find it by the most unexpected route.

Era of the Reboot

2009-09-04T13:10:00.006Z

I think it can hardly have passed notice that the world of cinematic and TV science fiction is going through a strange phase at the moment. I say strange, because it at once both highly creative and innovative while at the same time being tied somewhat pathetically to its antecedents.

Look at some the major science fiction films of the last eighteen months - Star Trek, Terminator Salvation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and The Day the Earth Stood Still etc. All either remakes or reboots or sequels. Or on recent TV - Stargate Atlantis (a spin off to a TV show that was spin off to a film), Enterprise (the fifth spin off series from the original Star Trek), Battlestar Galactica (a reboot of a short lived seventies/eighties series), Doctor Who (a continuation and re-boot of a the longest running TV science fiction series on Earth) and Torchwood (not only a spin off of Doctor Who, but an anagram of that show's title!), and finally Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles (another spin off from the expanding Terminator franchise). And while Joss Whedon's Dollhouse stands alone as the most original show to have arrived on the scene in a few years, that is only thematically (and even then it has borrowed heavily on ideas from Joe 90 and Dark City to name but two obvious sources). However, structurally (at least to begin with) it was all too tied to the formula of a weekly sci-fi/spy show.

But this trend is not all bad - the new Star Trek film not only brought life and energy to a tired old franchise, but re-booted it in a way that gives infinite room for story progression. Battlestar Galactica remains one of the stand out shows of the noughties, standing up there with The Wire, West Wing and The Sopranos as one of the most innovative, engrossing and compelling television series of any genre. Some old ideas are worth re-visiting and improving upon.

Meanwhile Doctor Who continues to go from strength to strength on both sides of the Atlantic (and indeed, globally). Even it's initially weedy daughter show has at last found its stride with the five part Children of Earth mini series, but at the cost of killing off most of the characters and destroying its base of operations (a fourth season is still rumoured, but no yet confirmed).

Dollhouse may be finding its own original voice after an uneven first season, but at least has the virtue of coming from a (mostly) original idea that is not an attempt at a remake. But it is no Firefly (at least, not yet - the expectation on Season 2 is huge). And while Fox did grant it a second season, it did so at the cost of a third season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which had suffered from a very slow and uneven second season after a lean and engrossing first.

The less said about Terminator Salvation the better - maybe that franchise is finally ready to be laid to rest. Please! Ditto The Day the Earth Stood Still.

What does this all tell me? Maybe that there is a need to play it safe in US and British TV producers minds. Go with what we know will sell, rather than risk something different or new? That may be true, but there are genuinely innovative shows out there that give a lie to such an easy conclusion.

It may be that there are few writers willing or able to come up with something original? Or of a generation so raised on TV and cinema science fiction that they will not raid the treasure trove of ideas in literary science fiction.

However, there are some breaths of fresh air - Cameron's forthcoming Avatar looks set to revitalise the genre, not just through state of the art effects, but also through a premise that draws heavily on classic literary science fiction ideas. And there is District 9, with it unique setting in South Africa (at last, the aliens are not landing in New York or London, but Jo'Berg), and the recent Moon with its original and intelligent premise couched in references back to classic '70s science fiction films. But overall, I fear that TV and cinematic science fiction is in a state of decline in new ideas and innovation. Maybe we need a new generation of writers willing to branch off in new and unexpected directions. The creativity is out there, I am sure, I just hope it gets to see the light of day.

Faith and Theology: On assisted suicide: the problem with choice

2009-08-05T14:03:00.002Z

Faith and Theology: On assisted suicide: the problem with choice

Posted using ShareThis

This blog post and the related letter raise an interesting question about the nature of autonomy and personal choice in the debate about assisted suicide. Is our Western notion of autonomy and choice largely illusory and socially determined (as in the Bantu word ubuntu - I am who am because of you, and vice versa, the choices we make and the lives we lead we do in relation to one another, not in isolation)?

It gives pause for thought in the mounting debate about the decriminalisation of assisted suicide in the UK, in particular when autonomy and choice are the principle arguments in favour of legalisation.

Bishop Says Church of England Won't Surivive Without Radical Change

2009-06-30T10:53:00.005Z

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/9758 - nothing new here, but a public recognition from within the C of E leadership that t cannot count on being part of the Establishment much longer, that it has to rethink how it can remain a part of the life of modern Britain and how it must rethink its mission to England and to the wider world.

One wonders if the formal structures can handle the change fast enough, or like a super-tanker trying to avoid an iceberg, it takes too long to slow and change the behemoth's direction before disaster strikes.

Of course, loss of an established denominational structure no more means the death knell of the church than the sinking of a ship stops people travelling - they just change vessel or mode of transport. The church in new and unexpected forms is popping up everywhere, and long may it do so - I just hope that the formal structures of my church can change direction before one expression of faith in Jesus in this nation collapses beyond repair.

But that is in God's hands, ultimately.

Foreign aid does more harm than good

2009-06-05T07:53:00.003Z

Dambisa Moyo argues that aid has actually stopped development in Africa by enforcing dependency rather than creating space for bottom up wealth creation and development.

This is a an argument that is growing in force, and seems increasingly to be coming from Africans - not politicians but economists, entrepreneurs and business leaders. It would be good to know what the African churches are thinking about this? Many are tied by aid apron strings to their Western parent denominations, but an increasing number of indigenous African churches are kicking free of Western ties (although many seem to be creating new ties, especially to the more odious ends of the American health, wealth and prosperity heresies).

I think this is a new debate that needs to be had - the old models are simply not working any more (if they ever truly did). We need new thinking if we are going to eliminate global poverty.

Spiritual Care Conference – Days 2 & 3

2009-04-24T16:56:00.001Z

The second two days of the conference were primarily for student nurses and teachers. In a wide range of seminars, themes exploring spiritual care in mental health nursing, midwifery, palliative care and general nursing. There were about 22-23 nursing academics and teachers, and about forty to fifty students – mostly from Norway, but also several from Netherlands and Romania.

The first day's themes around how to train nurses in spiritual care were reiterated, but also looking at the issue of the ethics of spiritual care when nurse and patients have different belief systems. The case of Caroline Petrie, the nurse suspended (and later re-instated) after offering to pray for a patient was widely discussed (I was surprised to find how much coverage her story had garnered across Europe). Linda Ross and Wilf McSherry explored this theme together in a closing plenary session, and the debate that was generated could have gone on for the rest of the day!

It was clear from much of the discussion that one problem has been the teaching of spiritual care as a distinct module, rather than interweaving it with all other aspects of care – which reflects more how spiritual care is delivered in practice. From my own experience, it is usually while conducting a routine (though often intimate) task, such as a bed bath or dressing a wound, that a patient will ask a leading question, or make a statement that expresses a spiritual or existential concern. It is a much underrated skill in the art of nursing to read such comments and use sensitive questioning to explore further with the patient the underlying questions and needs the patient is expressing. While looking for the question behind the question is not a teachable skill - it is learnt and acquired through years of experience - the basic skills if observation and reflective questioning are readily taught. One concern I have is that the practice of nursing is moving away from the bedside and in to the office, such that it is the nursing assistant that does the "real" nursing rather than the Registered Nurse. That may explain why RNs in particular express so many anxieties about spiritual care.

Another theme that emerged was the need for evidence based practice in the field. We have long moved on from trying to define spiritual care – there are as many definitions as there are papers and text books, but we do now need to justify all areas of nursing practice in terms of outcomes – not an easy task for such a rarefied and unquantifiable area. I think nursing has less of a professional problem with fuzzy edges and ambiguity, but it is in health system that has focussed on the paradigm of the machine –with inputs, outputs, throughputs and processes at the fore, rather than the ragged complexity of human suffering and healing, which is the rality that nurses deal with routinely. But there is research being done on how best to care for people spiritually, and that is something we need to use as the basis for all training and practice, and to justify the role of spiritual care in nursing care (and indeed all healthcare).

Spiritual care in mental health is a new frontier – with research emerging only slowly. It is a contentious area, as some religious and existential issues will be exacerbated or expressed in mental illness.

Finally, the need for research and training to be multidisciplinary is also key – all aspects of the health service need to recognise human beings as complex social, psychological, relational, spiritual beings, rather than biological machines to be fed through a system. That is going to take more than a few seminars or conferences – it demands a fundamental, radical culture change in healthcare management, government health policy and applied medical science. So – the revolution starts here!

Spiritual Care Conference, Bergen, Norway

2009-04-22T14:36:00.002Z

Most of this week I have been meeting with nurse leaders, academic, lecturers and students from across Europe as we once again explore what spiritual care is, and how we in practice care for the spiritual needs of our patients. In the UK this has recently become a hot topic with nurses suspended for praying with patients, and the National Secular Society has called for the NHS to stop funding all chaplaincy services.

And there is no doubt, as a recent Nursing Times survey has illustrated, that most nurses in Britain at least, find themselves poorly equipped to assess the spiritual needs of their patients and address the care needs that are subsequently identified. My father-in-law, a full time hospital chaplain, has commented on more than one occasion that most of the nurses in his hospital are actually embarrassed to even ask if a patient has a faith or belief system – even when they are also asking about bowel habits, diet and even questions about the patient's sexual health! Is religion and/or spirituality the last taboo? Have we found ourselves able to talk about sex, politics and now even death, but still "don't do God"?

One of the biggest question raised on our first day was simply how we translate research in to practice, how we train nurses to deliver effective spiritual care, and how we weave the spiritual in to all aspects of care rather than separating it out as something 'set apart'. Talking to one leading expert in the field who had just flown in from a Royal College of Nursing conference on spiritual care, it seems that there are voices emerging who are suggesting that nurses should play no role in any kind of spiritual care – and while the reasoning of the voices so far raised is clumsy and poorly thought through, there is no doubt that there will be opposition to restoring the spiritual as an aspect of nursing.

So, in bringing nurses the skills to address the spiritual needs of their patients, we have to start with nurses reflecting on their own spiritual nature and journey, whilst at the same time not forcing their beliefs on others. But that is only a start, because any practice of care must be based on good research and be held properly accountable within a professional framework, so it is more than just touchy feely stuff – it is qualitative and quantitative research, health policy and professional framework development, and training strategies. Yet, we have talked this over for two decades, and nurses still do not feel equipped in this area of practice.

Tomorrow we begin the conference proper, but out of today we are pulling together a network of researchers, practitioners and teachers who will work collaboratively on addressing some of these questions, and sharing more widely the experiences of those seeking to put good research in to good practice.

I just want a white coffee

2009-04-21T13:56:00.000Z

Ordering a coffee – simple you might think, especially in the English speaking world. But even in France, Germany, Netherlands or Romania, I can just say une cafe or eine kaffe, and if I want milk in it, une cafe au lait, eine kaffe mit milch, danke. Easy.

So, when in New York last year I went in to a Starbucks and ordered a white coffee and just got a blank stare from the barista, I was somewhat taken aback. It turned out that what I should have asked for was an Americano with milk. OK, I thought, fair enough, different country, different terminology. Plus I reckon my Southeast England accent was also hard for a native Manhattanite to understand. No worries there then.

But today, when at London City Airport I asked for a white coffee and got a blank stare I knew the goal posts really had shifted. Granted, the guy serving me had a mild Dutch accent, but this was on my native turf! Surely he could understand what a 'white coffee' was?

Then it hit me. I was coming up against Globeish – a hybrid, commercial/business/tech dialect of English spoken around the globe. Shaped by global brands, global business schools, and global information technology, this is the dialect of choice for non-native English speakers and the emerging generation as they circumnavigate the globe (physically or virtually). But it is a different English to the arcane, southeast England dialect I know, where a white coffee is just coffee with milk. It is light years from the broad 'Estuary English' spoken by the kids in my neighbourhood (who neither know nor care about coffee), or to the mannered, professional English of the southeast's middle classes. This is an English where black coffee is an 'Americano' and white coffee a 'flat white', where we 'unpack' rather than explain, and 'google' rather than look up. It is the language of the inhabitants of Cyberia, a country I and my generation can only visit, but of which my children are fast becoming natives. Suddenly, I am old and on the outside.

As I travel the world, my once proud mastery of my mother tongue is called in to question – the English of students and business people, geeks and cybernauts of all cultures is increasingly not my English. I am the outsider, the semi literate who speaks the language as a foreigner, not as a native. This is a new world, linked through social networking sites, connected physically by identikit airports on the edges of urban sprawls, where the same coffee and fast food chains are to be found, identikit cloned, whether you are in Moscow, Seoul, London or Los Angeles. Maybe this is what the adjective ballardian describes; a bleak, uniform, post industrial landscape, full of dislocated and commercially dehumanised and desensitised clones who are no longer people but merely consumers? Is it in this world that Globeish has become the main means of communication?

Or is that just my take as a fearful cultural outsider looking at an undiscovered new country that the teenagers and children of today will call home, but to which I must always be at best, just a tourist? A country that has found its own language in Globeish? I think it was ever thus between the generations, divided by taste in music, fashion and use of language; only now the pace and depth of that change is accelerating and globalising. It is not a good thing, nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Ultimately it is a very human thing, and coming to terms with it is a way of coming to terms with one's own mortality. Time to hand on the baton to the new kids in town – my Generation X gives way to Generation Y, as they in turn will give way to the Millennium Kids – my children's generation. And with each new generation the language will grow and mutate, bending old words to new uses, creating new words for novel ideas and objects. Real horrorshow.

Meanwhile, I think it is time I went off and read some Shakespeare or Milton, or maybe some J G Ballard, just to reacquaint myself with my mother tongue in all its subtle, ancient glory. With a nice cup of white coffee, of course.

Farewell J G Ballard

2009-04-20T13:25:00.003Z

Science Fiction is traditionally seen as the fiction of glittering futures and humanity conquering the "final frontier". Ballard, who died on Sunday, stood in the defiantly British tradition of SF that had no truck with such naive American over-optimism, and instead explored the darker side of where technological progress might take us. His most controversial novel, "Crash" explored a near future where human emotional connections were so weak, and where the obsessions of technology so strong, that the protagonists could only achieve sexual arousal through car crashes – techno fetishism and violence taken to a logical (and nightmarish) extreme.

He also explored ecological collapse in "The Drowned World" – echoing our modern fears about global warming long before they became part of popular consciousness. In fact, many of his short stories (with which I am personally more familiar) and novels explore unexpected catastrophes that threaten complacency or illustrate our over reliance on technology or social/political control.

In our surveillance dominated, risk averse, socially atomised and culturally stagnant post-industrial societies, he will stand for a long time as a secular literary prophet who confronted us with the uncomfortable realities of our chosen way of life, and the world is poorer for his passing. One can only hope that Ballard's death will renew popular interest in his great body of work, and inspire a new generation of science fiction prophets.

A Motto for the Noughties?

2009-03-23T14:14:00.002Z

Well, this could sum up, with no further comments, the message we are all being fed by our governments and the banks they now own on our behalf.

Lent Week 4

2009-03-21T08:44:00.002Z

The "Though for the Day" slot on BBC Radio 4's flagship news programme "Today" has been hotly contested for some time – the presenters (especially national treasure John Humphries) make no bones about the fact that they see it as a waste of space, the British Humanist Association and the National Secular Society have tried to have it either removed or get humanist/rationalist thoughts for the day included as well as religious ones, and to be honest most of us with a faith also find it impossibly bland and irrelevant a lot of the time.

But every now and again it hits the nail on the head – and the two speakers who hit that nail the most often are Britain's two best loved Rabbis – Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and Rabbi Lionel Blue.

It was the latter yesterday morning who hit a nail on the head for me. Reflecting on a comic mess up at Obama's speech on St. Patrick's Day, he reflected that life does not always go as planned:

Then it dawned on me that life is like that autocue. We think our life is scripted. We've made our plans, written our words, know what we're going to say. Then something happens: an illness, an accident, an unexpected crisis, and suddenly the words no longer fit. We're thrown off balance. We improvise. A sense of humour helps. And we stumble through.

At least that's what I used to do until I made a decision that changed my life. Instead of getting angry or sad when things didn't work out the way I'd planned, I started asking, what is God telling me through this mishap? What is he trying to teach me? What does he want me to learn?

In preparing for our staff devotional earlier in the week I was leading from Ecclesiastes 3: 12-22 . Now I love Ecclesiastes, it is the most atypical book in the Bible – it seems nihilistic, almost Taoist – the Tao te Ching (written more or less contemporaneously I believe) has similar echoes about how life is short, wealth, learning and power are fleeting and illusory, and we all share the same fate – death. Cheerful stuff, but it is refreshing to find space in the scriptures for a frank assessment of the meaningless nature of so much that we lay great store in. Verses 12-14 and 22 of that passage remind us that for all that, work and the fruits of our labour are good things to be enjoyed as gifts from God.

Not that we are to live for these things either. Jesus had another take on it – Matthew 6:34 – live in the present, live now. It is not enough to be always looking to the future or harking on about how good things were in the past – here and now is where God is, and it is in the moment that we must live, because we cannot alter or bring back the past, and we cannot know or fully plan for the future. Of course, we have confidence in the fact that God is at work in our past and future too, and we have hope for that future coming of His Kingdom, but as the rest of that passage in Matthew's Gospel reminds us, don't worry about all that stuff – food, clothes, money, status, etc. Focus on God and His Kingdom, the rest is in His hands alone.

One of the lessons I am learning is to live in the present and to ask what God wants of me in my circumstances here, now and today – whether things are going to plan or otherwise. As I reflected earlier in the week, sometimes the most unwelcome turn of events is God's doorway. But we cannot second guess Him, we need to learn to walk with him each step, however unexpected.

Lent – Week 3-4

2009-03-17T09:07:00.003Z

I heard a most useful sermon today, based on Acts 27:1-26, on how the path God has for us is less a straight line than a winding mountain path, full of digressions, resting places, and places where the path divides in different directions, yet still leading to the summit. God does not put us on rail tracks, he lets us find our own way, even when we wander off the path, get lost, double back or stop too long somewhere that was meant only to be a resting place.

God also sometimes sends us on other, unexpected routes, maybe placing obstacles in our paths, maybe using our own mistakes to take is in new directions.

My own Lenten journey has gone through an unexpected digression this last week. I had set out with my own idea of the journey, with a plan of prayer, fasting and study. Maybe I was a bit arrogant, too confident in myself, thinking I could self-discipline my way into God's presence, maybe feeling a couple of fasts and some prayer time each week would bring me in to a right relationship with God. Such attitudes can afflict us all when seeking to draw closer to God in times of self-examination and self-denial, and they leave little room for God's grace.

But barely two weeks in I was thrown an unexpected curve ball – a diagnosis of diabetes! Having been well and showing none of the usual symptom of diabetes this was a surprise (to put it mildly). My fasting plan went out of the window as I sought to make sure I was eating properly (interesting how fasting and following a strict diet can affect ones relationship to food in similar ways – it is no longer a simple pleasure and rapidly can become a focus of obsession). My cycle of prayers was disrupted by appointments with my GP and at the hospital, and my inner confidence that I could seek out God on my own terms went way out of the window. My sense of self control, of my body being under my will, was completely shattered.

I also felt a sense of shame and embarrassment – I knew the risks (family history of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, carrying 2-3 stone more weight than I should, fat stomach, sedentary job, etc, etc.) yet had not taken them seriously enough to make lifestyle changes before the damage was done. I had had no warning shots across the bow – from feeling fine and well, I suddenly found that my body had gone wrong, and that youthful sense of immortality finally got shattered.

God is loving and works the best for His people, but Scripture and everyday experience gives us scant reason to expect that this will always be worked out in happy, cuddly and safe ways.

On Sunday evening, still mulling over the sermon I had heard that morning, I read the story of Jacob wrestling the Angel of God at the ford of Jabbok in Genesis 32:22-32. Jacob, the swindler and scoundrel, charismatic, living of his wits, self reliant. Here he was about to confront the brother he had swindled of his birthright, about to confront all the demons of his past, and once again was using his wit and charm to try and get out of a potentially lethal confrontation. Then a stranger turns up, wrestles with him all night, and finally, as dawn breaks, dislocates Jacob's hip to end the fight and get away. Only Jacob realising this is no ordinary mortal he has been fighting so long and hard, demands a blessing before he will release him from his wrestler's embrace, and so gets the name by which he and his descendants will be known – Israel – "wrestles with God". Jacob would forever be marked by that encounter, limping the rest of his life from a damaged hip. But more deeply he learnt that all his struggles had ultimately been with God, not men, and through them God was turning this supremely self reliant and flawed man into a leader who relied on God first and foremost, and on his native wit only secondarily.

The lesson for me has been similar. As Paul was given a thorn in the flesh, and Jacob a dislocated hip, God has given me more than a reminder of my own mortality – this diagnosis has been an opportunity to stop being so self reliant, and rely on God, and other people (my family, my doctor, and friends, have all been a huge source of support and encouragement already).

Even more, it was a reminder that God meets us on His terms, not ours. We cannot twist His arm; rather we can but receive His Grace as it is poured out in unexpected, and sometimes unasked for ways. And this diagnosis is but the start of a new and unexpected journey for me – not one I fear (although it would be a lie to say I have no anxieties), nor one that I would have sought out, but one I am learning to embrace.

I reflected earlier in Lent how we find God at the most unexpected junctures. Little did I realise how this was to work out. But then, none of us ever do.

Taking Action on the G20 Summit

2009-03-13T08:42:00.007Z

As we near the G20, the Micah Challenge campaign is urging people to pray and lobby for real decisions that will genuinely benefit the poor.

The UK Government evidently sees this as an opportunity to make an impact - civil society and the churches in particular both here in Britain and around the world need to keep up the pressure to make sure that some genuine decisions are not only made, but put in to practice.

And so the Grass Gets Trampled. Again.

2009-03-05T13:32:00.004Z

From today's Guardian

The credit crunch is hitting the income of the world's poorest people the most and will make the UN's Millennium Development Goals more difficult to achieve than ever, according to research released today. The Global Monitoring Report from Unesco estimates the 390 million poorest Africans will see their income drop by around 20% - far more than in the developed world.

There is an old African saying that I have heard - "when elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled". The wealthy nations caused this economic collapse, but the poor, who had least to do with creating the boom or its subsequent bust, suffer the worst.

History repeats itself.
Has to.
No-one listens
Steve Turner

I have said more on this elsewhere, and for now no more needs to be said.

One Week in to Lent

2009-03-04T17:57:00.004Z

I always find lent an austere and difficult time. In part that is a conscious choice on my part – to deny self by some kind of regular fast to focus the time on praying rather than eating. In part it is because it usually falls in the still, dying throes of winter, before spring's new life has had a chance to break out. But mostly it is because I inevitably find that trying to focus on God, and set aside time to pray invariably means other things try to crowd in on my time. And when I do finally get to pray, my mind cannot focus, I pray in meaningless clichés, or my mind wanders butterfly like on to a host of random irrelevancies.

Prayer is work, work is prayer, so goes the old saying. While the latter deserves a whole season of blog posts (OK, I can hear the groans – not seriously), the former is very true. If we are going to do business with God we will face opposition – whether that is from external, demonic forces or the simple stubbornness of the human heart that refuses both true repentance and grace, it is a sign that we are drawing closer to God when it gets harder to find Him. The paradox of God's grace is that the more we need it, the less we believe we can receive it, the more we seek God's face, the further He can seem to be. But then He breaks in, like those rays of light on a dark cloudy day where the sun shines through, illuminating the shadowed ground. Always when we least expect it, always when we least feel we've done anything to earn it. That, in the end, is the maddening, paradoxically delightful nature of grace.

So, it has been a dry, hard Lent so far, and past experience teaches me to roll with it – not to expect sudden revelations, sudden clarity, even while I hope for them. But I also suspect, in the words of Bruce Cockburn, that

"nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight/got to kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds day light."

this is part of a group Lenten blog orgnaised by Christine Sine of Mustard Seed Associates. Their Lenten Guide is available online

Persectued Church? II

2009-03-03T13:28:00.005Z

Following on from yesterday's post on the confusion about the interface of Christianity & secular society in modern Britain, I came across this quote from Jenny Taylor that sums up in a sentence what took me a small essay to write:

"Rather than litigating against the nation's confusion, and adopting the victim pose that demeans our faith in a Lord who rejoiced in martyrdom, we should use our strength trying to model real Christianity – chastity, hope, poverty, stability and love."

With thanks to the guys and gals at Ekklesia

Persecuted Church?

2009-03-02T20:00:00.005Z

It seems you can barely pick up a newspaper at the moment without reading that such and such a Christian has been suspended or sacked for speaking about their faith or praying, or that a Christian organisation has been denied funding or told to take down a cross or other religious symbol, etc, etc. These stories are being seized upon to suggest that Christians in the UK are becoming a persecuted minority.

I have three issues with this. The first is that Christians in the UK seem all too readily to be buying in to the cult of the victim that has overtaken Western culture in the last two or three decades. It seems unless you are from a persecuted minority, you have nothing of value to say about life, so everyone seeks to be a victimised minority – including now white heterosexual males and Christians. In fact, the result of this is to trivialise the genuine suffering of minority groups that are excluded by wider society, and leads to a negative mentality that looks for signs of offence or exclusion when there may not be any.

Secondly, this trivialises the genuine persecution that fellow Christians do experience in many parts of the world. It is a widely quoted statistic that there have been more Christian martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the history of Christianity in the previous 19 centuries. If that is true then the reality of persecution is not trivial. It involves people being imprisoned, tortured and murdered or executed for their faith – and there is plenty of documentary evidence that this is happening in many countries of the world even as I write (see the Persecuted Church Blo g as one example). To suggest what Christians are experiencing in this country goes anywhere near that is, frankly, arrant nonsense.

Finally, labelling this as persecution misses the point. What is happening is a complex readjustment from a culture where the Christian church was seen as mainstream and privileged, to one where it is but one of a plurality of religious and secular voices. It is a confused time, and a confused process – neither Christians nor secular culture really know how it works any more – the rule books are not only ripped up, but are being re-written by different people in different places in different ways. As a result some silly cases do occur, and people genuinely fall foul of the system.

There are genuine cases of discrimination, based on Christians stepping outside the boundaries, or by secular authorities not being sure what the boundaries are and tightening them unnecessarily. There is no doubt that some of the cases cited show examples of genuine discrimination and prejudice against Christians. What they do not add up to is a systematic persecution of the church in modern Britain.

The example that I am closest to is that of the nurse suspended for offering to pray for a patient. The story is reported in detail here, and what emerges is less persecution of a nurse offering care to her patient than a misunderstanding over the role of spirituality in nursing care. Nursing has deep roots in the Christian faith, and unlike medicine has always tended to see people as whole human beings rather than isolated systems. Nurses are required to assess and care for the spiritual needs of their patients in the same way as their physical, social and psychological care. But they are not well taught in how to do this. When a nurse asks a patient if they want prayer, it should be in the context of an assessment of the wider spiritual needs of that individual – but only once it is clear that the patient has a faith and/or would appreciate some support in that area. To suspend a nurse for making such an enquiry was based on a misunderstanding what was going on. Her reinstatement was with explicit guidelines about the context within which that enquiry into a patient's needs was made, and the misunderstanding has been cleared up in this instance. That I know of other cases where this is still happening shows that there is a long way to go!

A lack of training in spiritual care means that hospital chaplains do not get asked to see patients who want to see them, because the nursing staff do not want to explore that issue, either through a lack of personal understanding or a lack of training and awareness. A recent Nursing Times survey highlights this problem – with a majority of nurses seeing prayer as a appropriate care in the right context, but expressing a concern that they are not well enough trained nor do they have adequate guidelines in which to conduct spiritual care.

As we have become a more secular and pluralist society, we have not become any less human and spiritual, but it has become more complex to address those needs. We need a new engagement by our healthcare system, and by all levels of society, with the spiritual reality of our human nature.

We need not be fearful or apologetic about this. A recent poll suggests that the majority of the population would like to see faith at the centre of our ethical and legal frameworks as a nation - indeed even amongst members of Britain's non-Christian faith communities there seems to be a support for a Christian framework to remain central. It is interesting that secular India keeps a religious framework at the centre of its national identity, and does so as a one of the most culturally and religiously plural nations on Earth. Maybe we have lessons to learn about holding the tension between secular and spiritual from the developing world?

As Christians we should not be sitting on the sidelines in all of this, pointing to all the injustices we are apparently suffering, but rather we should be using these cases as opportunities to show grace and engage with the secular systems, helping them to see that there are gaps in their understanding and provision that we, among others, can help them bridge.

Ash Wednesday - Pray, Fast & Give to Zimbabwe

2009-02-25T11:58:00.004Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7909133.stm - This is a link to BBC video of John Sentamu & Rowan Williams calling on the world to fast, pray and give to save lives and stand in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe.

It is a simple message - pray, fast, give - for the start of Lent it is a reminder that true worship, true prayer, true fasting, lead to true justice [Isaiah 58:5-10] -

with acknowldegements to Christine Sine and the God Space Blog.

God Bus Wars III

2009-02-20T08:08:00.005Z

Now it looks as if we are going to get "Atheist Unions" on UK University Campuses and atheist bus campaigns across Europe.

Ah well, all power to them - I doubt either initiative will sway people one way or the other. Faith or its loss are usually grown in the context of family, friends and community, not bus ads or little University cliques. Having been part of a couple of Christian Unions in my student days, I have seen several of my contemporaries lose faith once outside of the comfy clique of CU life, and several others find faith once they were out in the "real world".

And like my most people, I only read adverts to laugh or scoff at their absurdity.

The New Localism?

2009-02-19T11:04:00.002Z

I'm not given to party politics, but I am detecting some interesting new noises coming from the Tory party, noises that chime with my thinking and concerns about how we live today from a Biblical worldview.

I should qualify that of course – I am a Thatcher Child – I came of age under a Tory Government, I was out there as a young man protesting against the Poll Tax. I grew up mistrusting the Tories as the party of the rich and the powerful, of self-interest. Thatcher's famous "there is no such thing as Society" quote was the death knell for my sense that the Tories were a party that had anything for me or ordinary people of my generation. For most people of my generation, the idea of even engaging with Tory policy, let alone voting for them sticks in the craw and makes the flesh creep with horror!

And the legacy of Thatcher era Toryism is with us still, in the collapse of families, the atomisation of society, fear and mistrust of strangers, etc. It is also with us in the legacy of Reaganomics and the New Right, with the increasing monopolisation of financial systems and markets by a hard right, neo-liberal consensus that encouraged the sort of cavalier risk taking that helped stoke our current financial meltdown.

In short, Thatcher era Toryism, and it's bastard spawn, New Labour, have promoted a system that is, frankly, Godless, self focussed, and ultimately as ethically and financially bankrupt as communism and fascism were before it, albeit with a thin veneer of liberal democracy instead of brutal totalitarianism (although Labour's control & command approach to social policy is creeping in the direction of the totalitarian).

Globalisation was the proudest achievement of this way of doing things, but with it came an increasing impoverishment of marginal and developing world communities, reactionary religious and then secular fundamentalism, and ultimately exposed the economies of nations little involved in US or European financial systems to the catastrophic collapse of US, Japanese and EU markets and economies.

But there are signs of something changing. Two articles in this month's Prospect Magazine illustrate an interesting take on the way local communities are beginning to rest political, financial, and cultural control from the old centres of power. Phillip Blond argues in "The Rise of the Red Tories" that the Conservatives need to rest the discourse away from the consensus that they and Labour have built up, and move towards recognising local communities as the political, cultural and economic power bases of society. In the same edition, Peter Bazzlegate argues something similar with respect to Public Service Broadcasting – getting local, web based PSB publicly funded and moving away from the monolithic structures of the BBC, ITV and Channel 4.

The Tories have just launched a series of policy initiatives that is moving in that direction as well (see below)

Now, I am not jumping on board and saying this is it, wow, let's all vote Tory. I am still waiting to see the fine print and how this might work in practice. But I am excited, because we need to build community again in this country, and every political, economic and social trend over the last four or five decades has systematically eroded this. Anything that seeks to reverse that trend, and move us towards a more healthy and human way of functioning as a society is worthy of serious consideration.

The Biblical model is useful to consider – because it emphasises relationships. Justice is relational, compassion is relational, faith is relational – we work these things out through communities, congregations, shared stories of what God has done, what He has asked of us, what He has promised us. We grow in all ways together, not in isolation, and our salvation, while not a result of birth or group membership but born of a one-to-one relationship with God, is mediated and outworked in practice in the context of a congregation, a family, and a community.

The impersonal, the money driven, the self centred are all condemned throughout Old and New Testaments, time and again. But what is lauded in scripture is not community for its own sake, but a community that is in right relationship first and foremost with God, and then with one another, with neighbouring communities, and with the environment. All relationships are contingent upon one another, all start and end in our relationship with God The Hebrew word for this is Shalom, which we often translate as "peace".

Will the churches engage with this new localism? Is it just another fad that will pass, or is it the start of a new, dramatic paradigm shift in British society and politics? Time will tell, but I for one do not want to see this opportunity to see a profound change slip past.

God Bus Wars II

2009-02-08T21:22:00.003Z

Just for fun, discovered this random generator for new atheist (or other) bus ads - http://is.gd/iQp3

God Bus Wars

2009-02-06T11:35:00.005Z

While the atheist adverts doing the rounds on London buses stirred up a bit of a buzz a few weeks back (quote: "There Probably is no God: so stop worrying and enjoy your life"), they would probably be largely forgotten about now. But rather than letting the ads lie and treating them with the humour and disdain they richly deserved, some rather sad (and humourless) Christian groups have launched their own versions, and they are as ever embarrassingly bad.

I preferred this one myself, more topical and more inclined to raise a smile on a snow & fog bound London on a Friday morning

(with acknowledgements to St. Aidan to Abbey Manor blog and Kouya Chronicle)

Keep Calm and Carry On

2009-02-04T13:32:00.006Z

Somehow or other, this old war time poster has become a bit of a cult image it seems, according to BBC Online Magazine

This is a bit of a "British Thing" - that sense of pragmatism in the face of adversity, the famous stiff upper lip and the belief that what one really needs in a crisis is a good cup of tea.

Given the fact that the UK economy is (to quote an oft overused phrase) "going to hell in a hand cart", our children are the most physically and emotionally unhealthy in Europe (thanks to us selfish adults) and that we are stuck in the midst of the worst winter weather in eighteen years, it is perhaps more timely than ever. In the face of everything, let's just keep calm, not make a fuss and get on with it.

From a Christian viewpoint it makes particular sense (to me at least) - if God is in charge, why panic? We are reminded time and again in scripture to fear no evil if we trust in God. It is sound advice, because panic seldom achieves anything.

And on the subject of not panicking - "don't panic Mr Manwaring!" being the famous cry of Corporal Jones in 'Dad's Army' and of course "Don't Panic" the wonderfully British soothing words on the cover of the 'Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' - panic remains an essentially foreign idea to British culture.

We prefer to moan instead. As Stephen Fry recently pointed out, when Americans say "Only in America" it is an expression of national pride, when we say "only in Britain" it is invariably the start (or end) of a long moan or rant.

So maybe keeping calm and carrying on are good messages, but maybe we need some more positive messages as a nation too. Because like so much in British culture, this poster is about facing hardship with stoicism, and not about seeking change and transformation - about bearing the problems rather than finding solutions.

We need first to believe in the possibility of change if we are to change things or be changed ourselves. That, maybe is something missing in British culture, and needs restoring.

Mother-tongue Scriptures Change Hearts and Lives

2009-01-29T20:41:00.002Z

Borrowed from the Kouya Chronicle and Wycliffe Bible Translators - shows simply how spiritually important it is to get the Bible in to people's own heart languages.

So much of how Christianity has been presented in the last two or three centuries has been about the white man and the Westerner as the epitome of the Christian faith - forgetting that Jesus and the Apostles were neither white nor Western. It is the quote "God speaks my language" that got me -you don't have to speak any other language let alone a Western European language (especially English!) to read the scriptures and to grow in faith.

God's language is the language of our hearts and souls, not a borrowed second or third tounge.

DEC Gaza Appeal

2009-01-27T13:46:00.000Z

Fast for Zimbabwe

2009-01-23T11:31:00.001Z

There is now a growing movement in Southern Africa and around the world saying "enough is enough" in Zimbabwe – and one expression is the weekly fast started by Desmond Tutu, that AIMS to get over 100,000 people to fast for Zimbabwe until the following six demands are met::

South African Development Community (SADC), the African Union (AU) and major political parties in the region to end their policy of "quiet diplomacy" on the issue of Zimbabwe.
An urgent response by the United Nations and the international community to Zimbabwe's humanitarian crisis.
An immediate end to the "abductions, torture and other sinister forms of intimidation against civil society and political activists."
For the SADC to grant refugee status to Zimbabweans fleeing their own country,
For Zimbabwe to lift restrictions on freedoms of expression, association and assembly.
For the transitional authority to be installed if a power-sharing deal can't be reached in Zimbabwe by the end of February.

Whether one has a religious faith or just a belief in humanity, I would urge anyone reading this to join with a growing number to fast every Friday, and make this known as widely as possible. There is no website, although if you are on Twitter do follow http://twitter.com/ZimbabweFast & there are several Facebook Groups – but above all else, the people of Zimbabwe need real change.

As a Christian, I see this fast as an outworking of Isaiah 58 – true fasting and worship bring justice.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T13:55:00.002Z

Well, here we are at last, Obama is about to become a historic 44^th US President. Whatever he does he has made history. His choice to use the words of the protest song "A Change is Gonna Come" at his acceptance speech back in November was inspired –harking back to the Civil Rights Movement and the changes the very fact of his election represented in American Society. It also suggests someone looking towards the future, knowing that change is ongoing and never complete. It was certainly a more inspired choice of song than New Labour's use of the twee "Things Can Only Get Better" after the 1997 UK General Election that overthrew 13 years of Tory rule, and promised a bright new future. And we are seeing what has happened to that future right now!

Bright new futures of course are the stuff of fairy tales. The good times don't last (especially if they are spun out of the fairy dust that was the debt fuelled boom of the last decade). And as Enoch Powell once said, "all political careers end in failure". Nevertheless, while not swept along by the general euphoria that comes with the beginning Obama's presidency (and which may be as much to do with the end of Bush's eight disastrous years of power), I am still praying for the man whose choices will affect so much of the world that had no say in his election. He has the chance to make a difference – maybe not as much as so many hope, maybe not as little as the cynics are saying. He is but a man, but a man with power, and whose choices can lead to good or ill. My prayer is that, at least for the next four or eight years we see a President over the Pond who chooses good.

Time will judge how God answers that prayer

The Questions No-One is Asking

2009-01-20T07:55:00.003Z

So, once again we have to bail out our banks as tax payers. And we probably have no choice, because if the banks go under, so do our savings and pensions, let alone all the businesses that will no longer be able to transact their day-to-day business properly.

But it struck me yesterday as I read from the book of Proverbs that we are laying up a mass of trouble for ourselves and our children.

Proverb 6:1-5 is a warning about standing surety for another's debts:

Dear friend, if you've gone into hock with your neighbour or locked yourself into a deal with a stranger,
If you've impulsively promised the shirt off your back
and now find yourself shivering out in the cold,
Friend, don't waste a minute, get yourself out of that mess.
You're in that man's clutches!
Go, put on a long face; act desperate.
Don't procrastinate—
there's no time to lose.
Run like a deer from the hunter,
fly like a bird from the trapper!

The Message

Interesting that the next five verses go on to encourage us to learn from how the ant thrives through long hard work and saving in times of plenty ready for times of austerity. The exact inverse of what we have done as a nation in the UK and indeed a lot of the Western world! So much so that the question is now being raised of the UK becoming insolvent!

The first questions that is not being asked is how we have let this mess happen in the first place? How could unsustainable borrowing be allowed to have got so out of hand? In other words, why did we think increasingly levels of unsecured debt would lead to long term prosperity? The second question that is being dodged is how much criminal activity by the banks or their employees has been going on, and how much has that stoked up this crisis? They are beginning to ask these questions in the US, but the British government and regulatory authorities seem unwilling to address this. The elephant in the room is quite simply that an economy based on debt, get rich quick schemes and out and out fraud, rather than genuine wealth creation, saving and mutuality, will always eventually collapse – and the higher the tower of cards is, the greater the collateral damage for ordinary people. But it seems that we are setting out to increase the level of unsustainable debt to try and dig our way out of the recession. It feels dangerously like trying to dig your way our of a hole only to find oneself further buried and unable to escape.

We need a change of heart as a nation, and we need our government to hear that we are not happy with propping up this situation. Unless there is massive institutional reform, history will just recapitulate. But the change has to start with us as citizens – unless we give up our debt fuelled lifestyles, and regain the values of the ant, individually and collectively, then maybe we are doomed to see the cycle repeat itself endlessly.

You lazy fool, look at an ant.
Watch it closely; let it teach you a thing or two.
Nobody has to tell it what to do.
All summer it stores up food;
at harvest it stockpiles provisions.
So how long are you going to laze around doing nothing?
How long before you get out of bed?
A nap here, a nap there, a day off here, a day off there,
sit back, take it easy—do you know what comes next?
Just this: You can look forward to a dirt-poor life,
poverty your permanent houseguest!

Proverbs 6:6-11 The Message

Kindness

2009-01-13T12:24:00.002Z

Following on from my musings on the Hebrew word chesed [חסד] in my last post, here is an excellent posting on the meaning and practice of kindness (and its absence in modern Western culture and much institutional Christianity) from This Fragile Tent

A New Year Epiphany

2009-01-06T22:06:00.001Z

And so starts another year.

One of the few New Year Resolutions that I have ever kept is to make no New Year Resolutions - on the simple basis that I never managed to keep up with anything I started with good intent. Well, I do have one this year, and that is to get my Romanian up to conversational level by the end of the year – it's a long story and I'll bore you with it another day.

But towards the end of 2008 two, familiar passages from the Bible jumped up and hit me – Matthew 25:31ff and Isaiah 58. Both speak powerfully that the true outworking of faith is in justice and compassion. They are familiar to me, as I have many times taught on them, and been challenged by them to live out my own faith with these values at the centre.

Today is the feast of Epiphany – remembering when the Magi visited Jesus. Epiphany means a showing forth – it has also come to mean a sudden realisation or revelation. I have been on a prayer retreat in a remote South Wales village for three days with a group of Christian health professionals from all over Europe. Today was a day of silent, solitary prayer and fasting, and as I find sitting around in a room to pray almost impossible for any length of time (I have a butterfly mind and fly from one distraction to another all to easily), went for a walk early in the morning before the sun came over the Brecon Hills. Well, it was bitterly cold, and after resting in the local parish church to pray, I decided I needed to keep moving, on through the woods and fields and beside the frozen lake. As I walked and prayed another very familiar passage came to me – Micah 6:8 – "what does the Lord require of you, oh Son of Adam, but to act justly, love kindness and walk humbly with you God". That brief passage summed up the two previous passages that had been playing on my mind, and summed up what I needed to hear.

To walk humbly with someone means to let them take the lead, set the pace and choose the path. You walk alongside, but at their bidding – and it was a challenge to me to let my own daily walk with God be set at His pace and His direction, not mine. I am often so busy doing stuff for God that I forget to listen to what He is actually saying.

But the verse also make it clear that true faith is outworked in practice – in doing what is right and just and fair. But justice can be cold, and it needs to be tempered by kindness, or mercy in some translations. The Hebrew is chesed [חסד] meaning "loving kindness" – often used as an expression of how God feels about His people, it suggests not only tenderness but forbearance and even indulgence – giving favour when it is not necessarily deserved. Mercy in short. True faith is born out of a close, obedient walk with God, worked out in showing practical kindness to strangers and working for justice for the poor and oppressed. Sounds straightforward, but as the passages in Isaiah and Matthew also show us, this takes work. But, as James 2:14-26 warns us, faith without works is meaningless – a head knowledge of God, or even a warm fuzzy feeling about God count for precisely nothing (I Corinthians 13:1-4 also reminds us of this), if they are not also practically worked out in love, compassion and justice.

So maybe less a New Year's Resolution and more a New Year Epiphany. For 2009, my greatest challenge is to once again work out how I live this in practice. I expect to fail many times, but as someone once said, success is buried in the garden of failures.

Annunciation Blues

2008-12-21T21:33:00.000Z

Today was the official Sunday to remember Mary being told by an Angel that she was going to become the mother of the Messiah, and that this was going to be a miraculous rather than human conception. Officially within the church this is called the “Annunciation”. Old technical term, but that’s the church for you. You can read the full story in Luke 1:26-38.

But I love the whole story in Luke 1, because it puts Jesus’ conception and birth in to a family context. The first person Mary tells is not (perhaps understandably) Joseph, but her elderly cousin Elizabeth, who has also miraculously fallen pregnant (though by her husband, the even more elderly priest, and recently dumbstruck Zechariah). In fact, Elizabeth’s baby (who will become John the Baptist, the herald of Jesus’ ministry) recognises that Mary is carrying the Messiah and kicks out in Elizabeth’s womb.

Two ordinary women, sharing the joys and fears of imminent motherhood, as women do the world over. Yet in that sharing, they realise that they are at the centre of something amazing that God is doing. And that God breaks in to such mundane and ordinary lives in such unexpected ways is truly amazing. There is another side to this as well; God being born as man to an ordinary, teenage peasant girl in a backwater town in a disregarded edge of empire province seems the most bizarre way to bring about the work of salvation of mankind. Surely it requires a palace, great signs in the heavens, kings and leaders from all over the world coming to acknowledge the birt?. Actually, we see that in Matthew’s account, but much more low key – the travellers who find Jesus were actually Zoroastrian Priests (Magi) and astrologers following celestial signs, not kings. And they have to slip out under cover of darkness to avoid giving the game away to a tyrant and mass murderer. Luke tells us that the first to greet Jesus were shepherds – people on the outskirts of society – one step removed from vagabonds and beggars. Hardly an upbeat, glorious heralding of the King of Kings, born in a barn.

But in such a humble birth, Jesus lifts up the humble, and in being born naturally, with all the blood, pain, indignity and mess of human childbirth, He lifts up the value of women and mothers too. In this arrival, Jesus shows us the value of all our arrivals, the dignity and value of all our births.

Which is why this passage gives me pause. Because at the same time we remember this miraculous pregnancy and birth and the value God places on each life brought in to the world, and each mother who brings that life forth, thousands of women the world over are dying in pregnancy and childbirth. Poverty, lack of proper facilities and care, poor diet, war, disease – all contribute to an appalling daily death toll of women and their babies. In Niger, 1 in 7 women will die in childbirth. In Sweden that’s one in 30,000. That is enough to give pause for thought. It is even more worrying when you consider that the nations of the world in 2000 agreed universally to reduce this terrible toll by two thirds by the year 2015. It is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals. And it is the one goal that is least likely to be met – in fact if anything the toll is worsening in many countries, and barely improving in many others. It seems that, while God values women, children, pregnancy and motherhood, we do not. Almost all of those deaths are avoidable – it is our negligence and lack of will that is letting this hidden holocaust go on.

Mary’s prayer when she visits Elizabeth is known as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) – and talks of rulers being brought down, the humble and poor being lifted up, filling the hungry with good food, yet turning away the rich and unjust. She saw then that the child she carried was going to turn the world upside down.

Will we be the rich and powerful who are turned away from His Kingdom because we neglected justice?

An Advent Poem.

2008-12-15T21:58:00.001Z

Fascinating poem - drawing on Old Testament prophecy, the gospel narratives and many other allusions with beautiful imagery (in both word and video images) - grasps the heart of Christmas, and the future hope of Advent perfectly.

Check out http://www.theworkofthepeople.com for more

Human Dignity

2008-12-13T20:04:00.006Z

It is probably no coincidence that the Vatican has released a long treatise on the dignity of the human person (“Dignitas Personae”) in the same week that we celebrated the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The two in many ways go hand in hand, and it is no surprise that I am involved with the selection panel for an award to Christian doctors and other health workers involved in the response to HIV & AIDS known as the Dignity & Right to Health Awards. Health and human dignity hold together - especially when we understand health as wholeness of being (health and wholeness and holiness all share the same Anglo-Saxon root - and parallel the Hebrew word "shalom" meaning a state of right relationships and well being).

The aim of the Vatican's three-part instruction 'is to provide responses from the Church to new bioethical questions that didn’t exist when the Church released her last biomedical document in 1987. According to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) the document is the result of six years of study and deliberation on the most recent developments in the field of bio-technology. The document seeks “both to contribute ‘to the formation of conscience’ and to encourage biomedical research respectful of the dignity of every human being and of procreation.”' Catholic News Agency

And there is no doubt that the rapid acceleration of modern medical technology is out pacing our ethical thinking. At both ends of life and (increasingly) in the middle, we are seeing the boundaries shifted - from regenerative medicine based around stem cells, to pushing back the boundaries on pre-term survival of infants. This is increasingly complex moral and clinical territory. An intelligent input in to the debates from a Christian perspective is to be welcomed, and Dignitas Personae gives that input eloquently.

I have become increasingly challenged and fascinated by the Catholic approach to a 'consistent ethic of life', as it holds together the traditional, conservative Christian concerns over abortion, euthanasia and experimentation on human embryos, with the traditional liberal concerns for social justice, care for the poor, and opposition to war and militarism. Holding together these two areas, usually associated respectively with the conservative right and liberal left is, I believe, deeply Biblical, and represents a continuum rather than a clash of interests.

Justice for the child in poverty, exploited as a child soldier, trafficked into the sex industry, or left to die of cholera or AIDS holds hand with a concern for the unborn and an opposition to abortion on demand. A concern to prevent legalised killing of the very ill or disabled goes hand in hand with true compassion and care for the sick, disabled and dying. Not that there are always clear cut answers to these questions - but our responses to them must be couched in compassion rather than judgementalism, in seeking understanding and dialogue rather than pushing our own views as the only way.

Nevertheless, this strong sense of human dignity and the right to life and health is why the early church used to scandalise Roman society by going out in the streets to bring in the poor, the homeless, the sick and the dying, including babies left outside the city gates ("exposed") because they were unwanted or deemed 'imperfect'. One wonders if in a 100 years time our societies' increasing acquiescence to abortion on demand and euthanasia, as well as our fondness for war as a tool of diplomacy and our general inertia in ending the scandal of extreme poverty in the developing world, will be seen as barbaric as the Roman practice of exposing unwanted infants or casting out the disabled and elderly?

But at the heart of all of this is not these emotive issues themselves, but something more basic and more wonderful. Human life has something essentially of value and dignity - so much so that we should declare human rights a global priority, and that we should stress, in the face of advances in medical technology, or the spread of tyranny and human trafficking, the importance and value of each and every human life. For me, the central reason for that dignity is simple - not only are we made in God's image, but also that God took on human flesh, that he grew in the womb as we do, that he was born as we are - vulnerable, naked, dependant on human parents. That he grew and lived, and ultimately died as we live and die, and in so doing lifted our ordinary human existence to the divine. This message is deeply resonant, especially as we approach Christmas.

Once you see all humanity in that light, then everyone you meet, tweet or otherwise interact with is worthy of the utmost value and respect, because there is something of the image of God in them. It impels us to care for the vulnerable and fight for justice for the poor, and not for the sake of a quiet life acquiesce to a culture of comfort that turns a blind eye to the suffering of others

That, perhaps, is one of the greatest messages of Christmas.

Zechariah & The Christmas Culture Wars

2008-12-10T12:24:00.002Z

For our regular office devotions this Advent I set the readings from Zechariah. This often overlooked prophetic book is full of intriguing visions, many of which point to the coming of Messiah, the crucifixion, the final judgement and the coming kingdom of heaven, and of all the nations flowing together to worship the same Lord. It is the fourth most quoted book in the New Testament after Isaiah, Psalms and Deuteronomy - especially in the passion narratives of all four gospels and the book of Revelation. Looking forward to both the coming of Jesus and His return it is perhaps an ideal book to focus on during the season of preparation that is Advent.

This morning's reading was from Zechariah 7 – and it jumped out at me. In particular verses 5 & 6:

"When you fasted and mourned in the fifth and seventh months for the past seventy years, was it really for me that you fasted? And when you were eating and drinking, were you not just feasting for yourselves?"

I am in the midst of a busy time helping my wife to prepare for Christmas, which we are hosting this year. The logistical planning is almost military in its detail and complexity – and it is so easy in the midst of all of this to forget that Advent is the season of prayer and penitence as we look forward and prepare for the return of Jesus. And when we get to Christmas, will we be focussing on "the Word becoming flesh", or will it be on the food and presents, and getting everything ready in time for the Queen's Speech at 3, or making sure we are ready to go off to visit the extended family on Boxing Day? Or will be focussing on the miracle of God taking frail, vulnerable humanity and what that means for us here and now? In fact, it brought me up short about all our festivities – because in Keeping with Isaiah 1:17 and Isaiah 58, it is all too easy to be religious without concern for others, for justice and fairness as well.

"This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor. In your hearts do not think evil of each other.'" [v9-10]

But it also struck me that these were admonishments for God's people, not the nations that did not know Yahweh. So I find it hard to hear the constant whine we make as we see a secular world ignoring the spiritual core of Christmas, and focussing so much on the food, fun and excessive expenditure (in times of recession we are told, it is our patriotic duty to go out and spend, spend, spend, even if it means more unsupportable debt, just to keep the economy going - as if that isn't what caused the problem in the first place!!).

Maybe we should be living our Christmas so differently, so focussed on justice, on compassion and mercy (and not on spend, spend, spend) and ultimately so focussed on Jesus, that the World takes note. Are we out there in the homeless shelters this Christmas, or supporting developing countries through living gift schemes, or in a myriad of other ways approaching Christmas in a different sprit to the world? And let's stop having a go at the secular society for ignoring the spiritual root of Christmas – it does not make them more aware of God, it just entrenches us deeper in these pointlessly petty culture wars we indulge in at the expense of God's Kingdom. Let's rather live out the Kingdom first, and be salt and light rather than shrill noise.

World AIDS Day 2008 - Looking to the Future

2008-12-01T08:48:00.002Z

This year is the 20th World AIDS Day - and as such is a time to give us pause for thought. At one level it seem like we are loosing the war - HIV infections are increasing, with no sign globally of a slow down, deaths from AIDS related illnesses remain alarmingly high, and so many of the world's poorest people have no access to treatment, care or education on how to avoid infection.

But we have also seen in the last five years one of the biggest mobilisations of resources in human history to reverse this trend, an have seen some countries where rates of new infection are in decline, numbers on treatment climb rapidly, and mortality rates drop dramatically. So, in the midst of gloom there are an increasing number of pockets of light.

But we are now in the early stages of what will probably prove to be a major and possibly prolonged global recession - so the worry inevitably is, can this response even be sustained, let alone scaled up so that the few good news stories become many? That may be the biggest cause for concern in the next two to five years. And even if we can keep the scale up of AIDS related funding, what will happen to other areas of development funding to aid poverty reduction and improvement of basic medical and educational services? Services that are going to be essential in seeing the up-scaling of AIDS funding actually having an impact on the ground.

How can equity and justice be maintained in the midst of economic turmoil? - that will be the key question in the coming year - and the answers we find and put in to practice could be the difference between life and death for millions.

The Churches have a role to play here - speaking up for justice and equity for the poor communities where they are based and minister, mobilising resources independently of governments and major donors, setting up models of best practice in care, treatment and prevention through church hospitals, local clinics, church schools, community projects and the like. Church leaders are speaking out this year in an increasingly high profile manner - but more needs to be done. Churches are being encouraged to see HIV as a spiritual and practical challenge that we are called to respond to by God. But more can be done to empower and envision churches. Leadership is the key, and the principle theme for this year's World AIDS Day.

So let this 20th Anniversary World AIDS Day be the point where we stop, reflect on what we have learned from the past, then put all our energies in to finding a result for the future.

Surprised by Sorrow

2008-11-20T22:35:00.003Z

Perhaps one of my most significant finds on the Internet recently has been LastFM, mainly because it keeps introducing me to music that I would otherwise never have heard. My most recent find has been Henryk Górecki's 'II Lento E Largo - Tranquillissimo' from his Symphony No 3. Also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs this is a haunting, moving and uplifting piece that brought tears to my eyes. Despite its title it is not sorrowful or gloomy – it is slow, meditative, beautiful and haunting. It is amazing how music can affect you like this – there are so many pieces that can move me to tears or joy within just a few notes. I only have to hear the opening guitar chords of Johnny Cash's version of Trent Resner's 'Hurt' and tears are in my eyes and I am choking up; the opening sustained chord of 'Shine on You Crazy Diamond' and I am literally transported to another world in my mind.

Films too can have this effect – if you can sit through the closing scene of 'Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence' between Tom Conti and Takeshi Kitano and not weep, then you have a heart of stone! And if the dénouement of 'Sophie's Choice' does not makes you turn away in horror (especially if you a parent) then you have no soul!!

My wife has often observe how odd this is when I did not weep at my own parents' deaths, or that of my Grandmother, with whom I was especially close, or indeed the deaths of several good friends in recent years. Nor did I weep tears of joy at my children's births,. Yet I can cry at a song or a film. Some might think that makes my callous, others that this is just another sign of how emotionally stunted men are – but that is, as ever just looking at the surface. Tears can be faked, but genuine emotions run much, much deeper, and like many men I reflect my deepest feelings in other ways – through the written word, through other acts, rituals, spoken words. Raw emotion does not always cause the same external response in every person.

But that still does not answer how a piece like Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' or Vaughan Williams' 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' can evoke deep emotions and even lead me to weep, when life events do not evoke that response. I do not have the answer fully yet, but maybe music has the power to evoke something deep down in the human soul, homesickness for a place we have never known, nostalgia for a time we never lived, looking for a world that isn't yet. That hunger for something more, something beyond all of this.

Górecki's Symphony No 3 is a musical setting for words written by various people at different times in history who were separated - child from mother or mother from child. The second song that so captivated me was written as a prayer by a Polish girl, Helena Błażusiak, on the walls of her cell in a Gestapo prison calling on the Virgin Mary for protection. It is a cry of hope in the midst of sorrow and separation, for reunion with her mother, for safety, for a better future. In expressing that deep, spiritual longing in music, it shows not only Górecki's genius as a composer, but how deep seated this longing for a better world is in us all.

90 Years

2008-11-11T22:32:00.001Z

Today, in many different nations, there was an act of remembrance for those millions who died in the First World War – 90 years to day that the Great War ended. That the War to End all Wars failed to achieve an end to war is one of the great clichés of the last century. That we continue to mourn those who have died in wars being fought to this very day is another truism. As Steve Turner once wrote, 'history repeats itself; has to; no one listens'. But I have always preferred the words of Wilfred Owen:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

We do need to remember, although there is a good deal of debate in this day in age about what we are remembering. Is it the "Glorious Dead" who died in a noble cause, or is the horror and futility of war, and the hope that we might find a better way.

A week to the day that Barak Obama came to power in the States in the hope that he will lead their nation towards peace and change. The world hopes he does – and the weight of expectation on one man to save our troubled world are not only unrealistic, they are genuinely dangerous because ultimately, he is not going to succeed. I pray that he does make some difference, but he cannot solve the world's problems. And he is less likely to be as a good a friend to Africa as George Bush has ironically turned out to be - not for lack of good will, but because war and economic collapse will be his priority. We need to remember that others came before Obama promising a brave new world – I was reminded of the euphoria eleven years ago when Tony Blair was elected British Prime Minister – and remember how his tenure as PM ended? And remember Bush wanted to avoid embroiling the US in overseas ventures until that fateful morning in September of 2001 changed the course of his presidency. Events, dear boy, events – you never know where they will lead you.

So, let us remember the dead, of all sides, soldiers and civilians, and remember that leaders will never succeed in ending conflict forever. But let us pray that, this once, they succeed.

Cusp

2008-10-24T07:33:00.003Z

I don't think it's just me. I feel it the air, I feel it in the water. Many things that were are not any more... oh sorry, that's the Lord of the Rings!

Seriously though - it's that feeling I had in September 2001, May1997 & Christmas 1989, watching national and world events and knowing that everything was about to change in some fundamental manner. The big cities around the world are full of the deafening sound of stock markets crashing through the floor. Banks are being bought up by governments, global financial systems are in near terminal gridlock, inflation is soaring and recessions are being predicted (and felt) left, right and centre.

The US appear to be on the verge of voting in its first black president - a new JFK maybe? Russia has flexed its muscles in Georgia and finally thrown off any pretence to be being a Western friendly democracy - so much so that the talk is of a new Cold War. We even had a resumption of the Cod War between England and Iceland last week - albeit very briefly, and not over North Sea fishing rights. Power cuts and brownouts are being predicted in the UK this year - it all feels very like the seventies. Bring back Life on Mars I say...

All in all, things are going to change in 2009 - it will be a very different world to the one we faced at New Year 2008, let alone 2007! Only the arrogant or the truly prophetic (or darn lucky) would dare predict where all of this is going, as a new financial calamity, a new geopolitical shift, a new unprecedented global disaster seems to be happening on an almost daily basis. But it will change.

Jesus warned his disciples about this sort of thing - it's normal history though, everything as it always has happened - wars, rumours, economic and political sea changes. We just forget history and assume that this is unprecedented. It is not.

His reminder was not to worry, these are just birth pangs - because ultimately something new is coming, just not quite what he pundits are expecting though.

Juxtapositions

2008-10-23T14:57:00.003Z

Just spotted in the foot links of the BBC website this afternoon

Hunger pains

BBC reporter sees Zimbabweans' struggle for food

Dressed to kill

From moose hunts to couture - Palin's $150,000 makeover

Some juxtapositions are beyond comment

Blog Action Day for Poverty

2008-10-15T19:27:00.007Z

With UK headlines showing the highest rate of unemployment, in seventeen years and the highest rate of inflation in sixteen - on top of the market turmoil of the last three weeks, and the credit crunch of the last eighteen months, suddenly you can see that poverty is a reality around the corner for a lot more people than it was this time last year.

But that's just the UK, where to be honest absolute poverty (i.e. living on less than US$1 a day) is unheard of. But at the same time yesterday, the UN was warning that the global financial crisis has pretty much crashed the chances of achieving any of the Millenium Development Goals for those living in absoloute poverty. And the World Health Report has come up with some alarming figures on the widening health gap in health and life expectancy between rich and poor.

Already, the hike in food prices is affecting poorer people in most countries, let alone the poorest of the poor who already could not afford to buy food. And if you cannot eat, you get ill, and if you get ill, you cannot work, and if you cannot work, you cannot earn money to pay for food - and so it goes, and so it goes...

In short, the global credit crunch has done in for the world's poor. But it's not the bankers who created the problem that will suffer. First it is the poor Americans who were conned in to taking out loans that they could never have repaid and who are now bankrupt and homeless. Next it will be the poor of Africa and Asia who find aid budgets squeezed, protectionism closing down the markets they were just hoping might help them earn a decent living and discover that food, fuel and other essentials are increasingly priced beyond their means. And while the rest of us will have four or five lean years, and some may lose homes and jobs, most of us in the West will come out of it OK and alive.

But there are kids alive today in Zimbabwe and Pakistan who will not be this time next year because of the credit crunch. Credit they would never have had access to in their wildest dreams.

You can understand now why there is a clamour for criminal investigations. But what justice will there be for the poor, yet again shafted by crisis not of their making? Precious little I fear from the global banking system and the governments of wealthy nations.

God looks on, but is He weeping or angry?

Anti-Christian Violence in Orissa

2008-10-03T09:32:00.004Z

Still largely unreported in the Western media, a month long spasm of senseless violence against Christians in the Indian state of Orissa seems to slowly be calming down, at least according to a local blog I am following.

Killing, arson, intimidation (including attacks on orphanages and children's homes for heaven's sake!) - exactly what this has to do with Hinduism is beyond me, but it never ceases to amaze me how humans can excuse the most extreme behaviour in the name of higher principles.

As the author of the Remember Orissa Blog says

Just think of the victims. Yes, they are not tribal. Yes, they are Dalits. Yes, they are Christians. Yes, some may have made false certificates to avail of benefits meant for tribals ; or broken conversion laws when they chose to believe in the Christian God ; or become proud of their progress and education. But don’t they have any rights anymore ? Aren’t they also human ? Aren’t they also Indians ? Or has that also been taken away from them. They go through the reverse Exodus experience – from God’s People to No People.

It is also telling that while the Western World is still obsessing about multi billion dollar and euro bailouts of major financial institutions, or about how Sarah Palin did in last night's presidential debate, (and in the UK how the chief of London's police force has been forced out by the mayor of London) the fact that the lives of ordinary people are being so drastically hit by unrelated problems goes by totally unmarked. The life of a poor person, especially of colour, is worth less it seems than any of the above.

Just where and when did we get it so incredibly wrong?

If you are reading this from the UK, there is one, little thing you can do - sign an on-line petition to encourage the British Government to raise this issue with the Indian Government, and make the situation more widely known.

Bickering in the Flames

2008-09-29T20:13:00.002Z

As I write, the lower House of the US Congress has just thrown out the bill to bail out US investment banks to the tune of about £380 billion. Well, I'm not going to talk about that much, other than to say I am just going to let the Americans do what they do best, and bicker over the minutiae. But let's get back to that in a moment.

Next month, the British Parliament reconvenes after the summer recess. One of the first orders of business will be to rubber stamp the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill. Much has been written elsewhere about the controversies surrounding a lot of this bill, and there are yet more crazy amendments to do with abortion being tagged on with little thought for a considered public health policy on reproductive health. One of the Bill's major bones of contention was over the issue of human animal hybrids being used to generate stem cell lines. I have commented before on the questionable science behind this – when other approaches to stem cells seem to actually be yielding effective treatments for around seventy degenerative disorders, why go asking for legal permission to go down a questionable route that will in all probability divert funding from avenues that are having therapeutic benefits?

Of course, stem cell therapies will only ever benefit the rich and privileged. Vested interests (in scientific prestige or profit) will always drive where the research goes – which is why, as I heard only two weeks ago at a conference in Nigeria, less than 5% of most drug company research and development budgets go on treatments that will benefit the world's poor – most of the spending is going on treatments for baldness (don't get me started again!) and erectile dysfunction, obesity, smoking cessation and other lifestyle health problems of the rich, while malaria and drug resistant TB run rampant in Asia and Africa, and many other debilitating tropical illnesses go with no new or effective therapies even in the pipeline. The poor cannot pay, so let them die or suffer, who cares? No one sees, and it does not affect the bottom dollar.

Back to Wall Street's implosion. Last week in New York was supposed to be a global emergency summit to get the world's leaders to focus once again on how they can lead the way in tackling the Millennium Development Goals (which remain so off track that most will now never be achieved). Only the whole collapse of the investment banks and AIG overtook everything, and the focus was on how we save the world economy. I was in Nigeria when it happened, and while the Nigerian press had a certain schadenfreude over the crisis, they could also see that this was going to hit them at some point, in some manner. Most Africans are watching all of this with more interest n most Americans or Westerners realise (a groups of American nurses I travelled with could not wrap their heads around why there was a huge poster of Barak Obama on a main road in Abuja – they could not see that to Africa, the US elections really do make a difference, and the hope that maybe an African American president might just make things better for Africa – maybe...). We are being watched by the world, how are we going to respond?

The fire fighters are out arguing about how we put out the big fires destroying the great institutions of the City Anglo American Capitalism – but as they stand around the inferno and bicker, they are not caring about (or even noticing) the sparks leaping from the conflagration that are setting ablaze the ramshackle huts that cluster together around the city where the world's poor huddle together. They did not light the fire, but they will burn, unnoticed by the rich as we bicker over bailouts for merchant banks and high tech medicine that only benefits us, our bank balances and our scientific egos. But world's poor are watching the fire and our self absorption – and so is God, and one wonders where the judgement will fall next....

New Perspectives

2008-08-29T18:56:00.009Z

In 'Lila', Robert Pirsig's follow up to 'Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', Phaedrus, the narrator, notes how we all create constructions about our lives that blind us to the deeper qualities of the world around us. Our everyday habits, routines, clichés, etc, all act as cushions and blinds that keep us sheltered from reality by creating around us our own, comforting bubble of pseudo reality. But when illness or disaster strikes - we lose a job, or a loved one, or we wind up in hospital after a car crash - these constructions are torn away, and we glimpse the world in all its reality, beauty, ugliness, joy and horror. Being taken out of our quotidian existence gives us a chance to gain insight into our world, our lives and the lives of others - however fragmentarily and briefly.

I actually think in practice lots of other things do this in less dramatic ways - and one of them is holiday (or vacation if you are from over The Pond). Having just had two spells of holiday book ending August - two weeks camping on Chesil Beach and an extended weekend at home - I have come back with new perspectives on lots of things, not least how much I really enjoy being with my family.

Because my work routine usually brings me home only in time to have an hour or so's interaction with my children each night - when all four of us are tired and irritable - and gives my wife and I only a few minutes of interaction that are mostly focussed on domestic matters, followed by an exhausted collapse into TV, a book, the Internet or sleep (sometimes all four simultaneously!), anything that breaks that routine and allows us to spend a whole day together not solely obsessed by domestic routine, is a minor revelation.

I discover my son has a wry, almost ironic sense of humour (not bad for a five year old), my eldest daughter is a budding artist and author, and my youngest is madly extrovert and just a little bit domineering, as well as very, very funny. And I keep re-discovering new depths and surprises in my wife that keep me falling back in love with her.

Some people find these times with family just a source of stress - and I can see that. I get stressed with them all at times too. And they with me in equal (if not greater) measure. But it's been like a voyage of re-discovering my family this summer - and its made me want to take time out to do this more often.

Changing the Rules of Engagement

2008-06-24T05:11:00.004Z

Have just come away from a church service on the eve of the Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast, where I heard a remarkable sermon by Labib Madanat of the Palestinian Bible Society. Preaching from 2 Kings 5: 1- 19, the story of Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram. Aram had persecuted and plundered Israel, and Naaman had a captured Israelite girl as a slave. She encouraged Naaman to go to Israel to seek healing from his leprosy.

Now most takes I have heard on this story focus on Naaman and Elisha the prophet by whom God healed him, but Labib focussed on the slave girl – taken by force, her family probably slaughtered before her eyes (or worse), and now held a captive far from her home land, speaking a foreign tongue, she had no cause to love or care for her Aramite master. Indeed, she could have said his leprosy was God's righteous judgement on him – but instead she had compassion on him. The rules of engagement required that she should be his enemy – she changed the rules of engagement and showed compassion.

Labib recounted his own experience after losing a close friend and colleague to Hamas gunmen, and while initially feeling this hatred he found himself some time later meeting with a Hamas leader, and mourning with him the loss of his son to Israeli forces some two weeks earlier – this after spending time with his colleague's still grieving family, including his young children. He changed the rule of engagement, and showed compassion.

When I look at Jesus, that is what he did all the time. He never met the scribes and Pharisees on their turf, or fought according to their rules. He did not distance himself from prostitutes and tax collectors and occupying Roman soldiers as the religious rules of engagement dictated, rather he went out of his way to engage with them. He changed the rules of engagement between God and humanity.

At the moment I see my own church's global family ripping itself apart over the issue of gay priests. And while I have sympathy with both sides, especially the conservatives, I fear that neither are changing the rules of engagement. At a time when we are finding that gay men in the UK are engaging in risk taking behaviour like never before, and that HIV rates are climbing within the gay community as a result, should we not be changing the rules of engagement and looking at what we as Christians have to offer to help tackle this? Not in judgement and harsh messages, but out of grace, love and compassion to those who are choosing knowingly to put themselves at risk. A radical suggestion, bound to be disliked by gay activists, religious conservatives and liberals alike – so all the more reason to put it forward. I suspect Jesus would have been with the gay communities, and those affected by AIDS as he was with lepers and prostitutes and tax collectors in his day. Those marginalised by society - is the church doing anything to reduce that marginalisation? I fear the answer is a qualified "no".

While some commentators suggest this growing Anglican rift is primarily a conflict based on a clinging to a Christendom model of the Christian faith, and others that it is just plain intolerance of difference, there is no doubt that both sides in the debate have been lobbing missiles at one another, and as things currently stand a growing number of bishops will not be at the Lambeth Conference in July – heralding the real possibility of schism within worldwide Anglicanism.

But in keeping to the traditional rules of engagement between the theologically conservative and liberal, the Anglican Communion may also be missing the mark in other ways – the media and commentators will be obsessing over the gay priests issue, while the other issues under debate, including global poverty will not get an airing. The National Prayer Breakfast (on the eve of which the service last night was held) is focussing around the Micah Challenge – the global church movement to hold our governments to account for the implementation of the Millennium Development Goals to halve global poverty and tackle the other scourges facing the world's poor. This will also be a focus of the Lambeth Conference, with a planned prayer walk to 10 Downing Street of Bishops committing their churches to the campaign. With so many conservative bishops boycotting the Lambeth Conference, the message of commitment to the Micah Challenge vision of a mobilised global church addressing the issue of poverty will be weaker than it should be.

The rules of engagement between liberal and conservative Anglicans need to change – on both sides; there is too much at stake for the world as a whole for there not to be.

Consistent Ethic of Life

2008-06-09T19:43:00.002Z

So, once again we have US "pro-life" senators trying to pull funding on work that saves lives (just not the unborn). At the same time I am a UN meeting representing some of the smaller UK based Christian HIV & AIDS ministries (and spending some time talking to the larger ones), and find there is an air of intolerance towards Christians in general, and evangelicals in particular. Some of that antipathy is inevitable and not to be avoided - speaking unpalatable truths (as we should if we are faithful the gospel of Jesus) that set people free is one of our callings as believers. But seldom is it the expression of the truth that causes the problem - it is rather this inconsistency from some of the evangelical community (not just in the USA, but most frequently).

Argh! Here at the UN, the US is seen simultaneously as the bad guy (for an example of why, see above) and as a cash cow (ditto!). I am frustrated that we are not getting back to core issue in the AIDS pandemic - how do we stop in spreading, and then how do we treat and care for those already infected and affected. As I see it, the plan to wreck the new PEPFAR funding bill in the US Congress is based on a misapprehension that only drug therapies have the answer, or that prevention should be along narrow (and largely unproven) sexual abstinence only initiatives. Prevention and care need to be tackled in lots of different ways, but at its most effective it is less dependant on the top down approaches of PEPFAR and more on the mobilisation of local communities (churches and other faith communities in particular) to respond in a locally appropriate way.

A consistent ethic of life seeks to care for all - the born and the unborn, the dying and the living, and accord all with equal human dignity. It is about justice above all else. And it is about equipping people to respond to their own needs rather than rely on paternalism from the rich - a Biblical principle found throughout the Pentatuch, and especially in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Sadly, a lot of the "pro-lifers" of the US religious right do not know their Bibles half as well as they think they do, or else they might not be barking up the the wrong tree yet again.

No Imminent Cures from Stem Cells

2008-05-20T12:09:00.007Z

Well, here we have it at last, an admission that all this hoo-haa about human animal hybrids is not leading to imminent cures for degenerative diseases. It is both sad and suspicious that only after the vote had been taken by Parliament did the scientific commentators and proponents of this line of research come out and admit the truth.

Vulnerable people have been exploited to make the case for a line of research which, at the very best, offers only a long-term hope for treatments in a few decades. The cynicism and sheer chutzpah of some proponents of hybrid embryonic stem cell research is astounding.

Once again, one has to ask why the government forced this bit of legislation through with such hype about the potential to cure everything under the sun? Are we seeing once again, as with the dodgy dossier and the case for war in Iraq, a peddling of half truths to win over the public and parliament? And with what motivation?

Hmm... I have no more to say on this matter, time will judge.

The Social Care Agenda

2008-05-14T05:38:00.002Z

So, it seems that Gordon Brown et al are suddenly concerned that our old people (i.e. almost all of us in a few years time) are not being well enough looked after, and that the cost of care is disadvantaging all. Well, I can't argue with that, having worked in nursing and care of the elderly back in the nineties, all I can say is that if things have got worse since that time then we are in a truly sorry State.

The thing that worries me is that throwing money, insurance schemes, and other reviews is not really addressing the issue. The way have chosen to live our lives, atomized, families scattered, children too busy to see isolated parents regularly, neighbours too scared, suspicious or ignorant of one another to watch out for the vulnerable ones, and a general abdication of responsibility to the "powers that be" (i.e. social and health services), means that care has been reduced to a mechanistic process rather than one of genuine compassion and engagement by the wider community.

In fact I would go so far as to say that no government can ever resolve this. While a bill goes through Parliament that allows for IVF with no father being named, and as we increasingly rely on self-definition of "family" and "community" – it is no wonder that our care services are in a sorry state. Because at the end of the day it will be down to us, not Labour, the Tories or anyone else coming along making manifesto promises.

We will all (should we live that long) grow old, become frail and need care. Will we leave it till it's too late to wake up and realize that we need to start looking out for one another and not abdicating that responsibility to the State? I am much heartened by new models of church community that are exploring how to care for one another, especially the most vulnerable. But these examples are still the exception, not the norm, and even if every church in the land rose to the challenge that would still run the risk of the wider community abdicating its responsibility to the churches instead of the State, thus creating a new form of institutionalism.

If how we care for the vulnerable is a mark of how civilised we are then I guess we are living in a barbarian society – the old, the young, the dying and the unborn – none are universally well cared for in modern Britain, and more and more legislation to remove protections and allow the killing of those whose lives are deemed "not worth living" are threatening to appear on our statute books.

The only way that changes is going to happen is with each one of us choosing for it be otherwise – and not to rely on someone else to care for our family, our friends and our neighbours. Instead we should look to do it ourselves, together as a community.

Studying Belief

2008-05-07T12:31:00.002Z

This is a fascinating article from the Economist, that saves it’s sucker punch for the last paragraph, but raises some interesting problems. And my initial reaction was to laugh (it still is to be honest), but on reflection one has to admit it does raise some serious questions about the assumptions in some branches of the scientific community. I say some, as my own schooling in medical anthropology has taught me, the first thing you have to question is every assumption, and reconstruct your understanding from the most basic level.

So the epistemological problem here is quite an intriguing one – can religious belief be analysed and deconstructed, and the basis for it be found in evolutionary biology? The first question I have to ask is, “why are you asking this question?” – is it a valid question to ask if an area of human behaviour and knowledge that deals in the metaphysical, the ritual and the moral/ethical dimensions can be analysed in terms of reductionist methodologies coming from a totally different epistemological starting point. Or to put it another way, can the questions asked by evolutionary biology answer the questions and the search for spiritual meaning and truth? There would seem to be an assumption by the evolutionary biologists that religion has an evolutionary purpose.

And it is a valid question to ask – after all some sociological and psychological studies have indicated that those with a religious belief, and especially those belonging to a religious community of some sort (from a church to a monastery, mosque, synagogue, temple, ashram, etc, etc.) seem to live longer, and have healthier lives, and often contribute more to society (although almost of all of these findings are open to question and interpretation). However, it begs the question – if religious belief has an evolutionary purpose, does non-belief serve a purpose? Is there an evolutionary purpose to scientific research, atheism, secularism, etc, etc? In other words, physician health thyself – it is the old error of earlier generations of anthropologists that their science was purely about the observation of the other rather than the observation of self – the researcher researches him or herself and questions the values, assumptions and mindsets that underpins his or her own field of study and activity. Medical Anthropology soon turned from studying only the patient to also studying the doctor and the nurse, and then to studying the researcher him or herself.

Because the next problem then arises – if those undertaking this research come from an essentially secular and at least agnostic world view then is there not an anomalous problem that the world view they represent may in itself also be the result of an evolutionary process, or, worse still, an evolutionary dead end (after all, the secular, educated middle classes have far lower birth rates than their religious counterparts, so by Darwinian logic are slowly being bred out of existence). So it seems illogical to ask the one question without also asking the other.

The problem is one of blind spots in epistemology, and the ready assumptions that consequently arise. The early question used in the article, about how people may be programmed to see God observing their every move, misses an understanding of what it is that believers actually believe. It is based on the assumptions of what it is that we believe by those who do not necessarily share our beliefs (and of course, there are many scientists who do have a religious belief – the two domains are far from mutually exclusive).

So the whole enterprise of finding a scientific reason for belief ultimately flawed from several angles. However, that does not mean it will not throw up interesting results – but possibly the most interesting results will be what it tells us about the assumptions and beliefs of the scientists undertaking the research.

Best Reading & Listening over the Last Twelve Months

2008-02-15T21:47:00.005Z

Normally, I'm not in to lists and after the initial appeal of all those nostalgia shows on TV, I have got bored to death of shows with titles like "Top 100 Greatest Celebrity TV Dog Moments Ever of the Nineties" or whatever.

But, unapologetically, and with no real reference to wider culture, here are a couple my favourite reads and listens recently - if for no other reason that to give myself something to come back and laugh at in ten years.

The Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell - admirable for its structure (six nested novella length stories , each in a different literary style, each set in different eras form the 19th Century through to a bleak, post apocalyptic far future by way of a detective novella, a farce, a disjointed set of letters from a venal composer between the wars and an Orwellian dystopia), its readability (you can't put it down - seriously!), and the elegant and beautiful way it brings all six narratives together in an exploration of the human capacity to transform ourselves and our world for good and ill, and the journey of one soul through time. A sort of bildungsroman for the 21st Century. It is also a brave literary author who ventures in to Science Fiction - and pulls it off (the two SF stories have echoes respectively of Huxley's "Brave New World" and Le Guin's "Always Coming Home", along with several very Atwood-esque unreliable narrators).

Above all, it is about how humans can really foul up the world - and how we have the potential to put it right again.
In Rainbows - Radiohead. Well, just when I though their avant had disappeared up it's garde and the bleeding edge had exsanguinated itself, Radiohead come out with something immensely listenable, but still way out there (at least in terms of commercial pop and rock). It is also dark and ironic.

One of the great iconic moments of "The Royle Family" is the two leads singing to "Baby David" Radiohead's "No Alarms & No Surprises" as a lullaby. This was Caroline Aherne making an ironic statement about how little most people really listen to music - the song has a beautiful, almost childlike melody, whose lyrics are about suicide(hardly fitting stuff for a lullaby).

This juxtaposition of lyric and melody is a bit of Radiohead trademark ("Fake Plastic Flowers", "High & Dry", etc.). In this album we have one such moment at least in "House of Cards", a beautifully transcendent piece of music that should be a tender and passionate love song, but turns out to be about wife swapping and lust. "You are All I Need" compares the singer to "an animal trapped in your hot car" - a dark reflection on co-dependency. There are glimmers of hope, but you do get the feeling that Tom Yorke feels humans are a bit of a mess, and not very nice - there is no redemption here. He has a point, but it could do with some leavening with hope and a bit less post-modern irony - but maybe you need faith to do that, and that does seem to be the biggest absence.

But it's really the music that grabs you - energetic and almost hypnotic - with some almost unbearable melodic tensions stretched out to the limit before being gloriously resolved. It is quite the most beautiful thing they have done since OK Computer, and one of the very best albums of the last year.

The list will be added to as I get through more books and albums (and the odd film or two).

The tyranny of science

2008-01-22T13:07:00.000Z

The tyranny of science spiked
Dear old Frank Furedi. He does get it right sometimes - although not completely.

His attack on the deification of science as a new de facto source of "scriptural authority" hits a nail on the head. His targeting is a bit lazy in places, but it does bring up an issue - are we creating a new "Scientific Orthodoxy". Are we allowed to hold dissenting views to that Orthodoxy? hmmm.....

Recently the Science & Technology Committee of the House of Commons presented a report that they said was based purely on scientific evidence to do with altering the lower limit for abortions. But the science was already clouded in politics, as both pro and anti lobbies presented evidence that backed their cases. Despite some excellent research on foetal pain from the States, and on surivial of infants at or below the current lower limit of abortion, the Committee produced a report that backed the view that the abortion lower limit should be maintained, and abortion regulations liberalised. The science that contradicted these findings was left out of the report to such a degree that two members of the committee submitted a Minority Report highlighting it.

The Government has now come out clearly in support of the Majority Report, so quickly that one wonders if it had all been written in advance of the official publication? The science was politicised even before this of course, and only a token number of expert opinions were taken from those who believed a lowering of the upper limit was necessary because of increased survival of pre-term infants. And those who did offer expert testimony were then "outed" as being "pro-life" (even if at least one committee member and a number of those giving evidence to the contrary were members of known "pro-Choice" groups). It seems in British public life at the moment only certain orthodoxies, of a scientific and political persuasion, are tolerated.

And now we are seeing a gradual erosion of protection for families and reproductive rights of fathers, the legalisation of human/animal hybrid embryos (for somewhat dubious reasons) and other reproductive rights and protections on a nod and a wink as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill goes through without any of its assumptions (scientific, social and moral) being challenged in the public arena (the media have kept the latter stages out of the headlines altogether). Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill Peers vote to sideline role of fathers for IVF children

This is only one issue of course, but it does seem that there is an unthinking orthodoxy emerging in British Society, and that anyone who steps up and says "hang on a mo', is that really right?" is liable to be at best ignored, and at worst vilified and discredited for daring to speak against the prevailing belief system.

Ring any bells - Spanish Inquisition, Taliban, revolutionary Iran anyone? Now it is the "scientific & secular" West that is jumping on dissenters - maybe we don't get imprisoned for questioning the orthodoxy - not yet anyway, but differences of opinion are certainly not being encouraged.

Whither democracy and freedom of thought now?

Spiritual Care Conference - Malta October 2007

2007-11-01T19:49:00.000Z

Addressing the spiritual in day-to-day care of people, whether as a nurse or other health professionally, is becoming nationally and globally something of cause de jour. Conference, books, academic papers abound, but I think one of the things that is rapidly becoming apparent is that there is no uniformity of agreement on what spirituality and spiritual care actually are.

Wilf McSherry of the University of Hull at the conference I recently attended in Malta (‘Spirituality: The Human Dimension In Care’) pointed out that while nurses and other health professionals increasingly understand that spiritual care is about helping a patient on their journey through illness - addressing the needs for meaning in the experience, finding resources to cope with change and suffering and finding some sense of the transcendent in the whole experience - most patients and their relatives think by spiritual we mean "religious" and so say it is not for them - despite then talking about these wider spiritual issues as being relevant (but not using "spiritual" language to do so). Spiritual care does not necessarily mean religious care (although that is a part of it).

It is interesting that most of the research being done in this field in Europe at least (and the USA and Canada) seems to be undertaken by Christians. There is some New Age stuff out there as well, but not much else. Now, as a Christian myself I am heartened by the work my fellow believers have put in to the topic - and in a non-partisan manner - they are addressing the concept of "spiritual care" in its widest sense (more so, I venture than some of the more wacky New Age approaches, which seem hopelessly vague and wishy-washy to me). No, I am more concerned that the humanist scholars are not out there as well, nor are there humanist chaplains. Surely we are a secular culture here in the West, and that culture should have found itself a secular spiritual expression. However, it seems that in a secular culture, the spiritual is still a taboo area, and still seen as the provenance of the religious. Maybe that should not surprise us.

And maybe that is a reflection of our culture's spiritual poverty. I noticed that the Maltese remain deeply religious (Roman Catholic), and committed to spiritual care - the Cappuchin monks provide over twenty Chaplains to the health services of Malta and Gozo. My father-in-law manages with three part time chaplains and a small number of volunteers for a major urban hospital serving a population of a quarter of million plus. In Malta, with around 400,000 people the one major hospital has sixteen full time chaplains. They have also built in their brand new hospital a chapel physically (and very symbolically) at the centre of the hospital. (see below)

In a culture so steeped in the spiritual this makes sense - the Christian faith creates the framework for addressing the core spiritual needs of the individual. I wonder what that framework now is here in the UK? The answer seems to be so atomised and individualised that it must be a nightmare to approach spiritual care outside of shared framework of one faith or another.

But I digress. The conference, while somewhat didactic to my tastes (my bum got very numb from sitting for so long), still was very engaging. Perhaps the main thing I took away from it was that you cannot teach nurses to be good at caring for the spiritual needs of their patients. They need to "get it" - they need to "catch it", but they cannot really be taught it. Yes, you can teach basic skills and awareness, but to understands the spiritual needs of a patient takes a certain imagination and empathy, and certain willingness to step outside of modern imposed professional boundaries to recognise the patient as a person (as I learnt earlier today, in Uganda they now use the term "friend" instead). At its core, it takes an awareness of the spritual side of one's own nature to be able to grasp the spiritual needs of one's own client - and in a secular culture, there is little language and shared framework for most people to be really be able to do this.

Of course, this is nothing new - caring for the spiritual is what nurses have always done. The roots of nursing, in Europe at least, are in the Christian monastic orders where spiritual care came as second nature - it was part of the warp and weft of their very existence. Other faiths have similar traditions of care, even humanism is rooted in such notions.

Sadly, here in the UK at least, this ethos seems to have been lost in our professional and wider culture in the 21st century.

Count me out of atheism’s creed | spiked

2007-10-30T09:06:00.000Z

Count me out of atheism’s creed spiked

Good article - highlights the inherent problems in the promotion of the "New Atheism" as a kind of religion substitute. Why define yourself by what you do not believe and resist or oppose, rather than what you do believe and want to encourage and promote? Is it just arising from a need for identity and community - and in which case, why chose non-belief as the criteria around which to base that community?

Encouraging to come across atheists and humanists with a wider view on the world!

In that respect, this article asks (not unreasonably), why should there not be humanist chaplains in hospitals if we are providing Christian, Sikh, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Wicca chaplains? Although, to be fair, few hospitals really do provide this full range of religious support.

However, I do have two questions. Firstly, many non-religious people do quite readily turn to religious chaplains as they are looking for the spiritual (though not necessarily "religious") resources to deal with their journey through illness (and indeed, for someone who can "accompany" them through their illness in a spiritual sense) - so what would a humanist chaplain offer them that would be different? Likewise, what form would a humanist chaplaincy take that was different from say a counsellor or a psychotherapist? That is not to say that the idea is without merit, but how would most patients (who still associate "spiritual" with "religious") relate to a non-religious chaplain?

It is an issue worthy of wider discussion - and relates closely to the conference in Malta - which will be the theme of my next proper entry.

Three Days in Malta

2007-10-27T07:10:00.000Z

So, have been in Malta for an international conference on spirituality, spiritual care and nursing hosted and organized by the University of Malta school of care sciences. More on the conference later - firstly my time here so far in quick summary: arrived at Valletta airport on schedule (around 12.30 local time), and was met by a taxi driver who ferried me across the island to the hotel in Salima bay. Have a nice photo of the view. I basically spent the afternoon getting myself unpacked, showered, organised and catching up on lost sleep (I never sleep well on airplanes).

The evening was spent catching up with a colleague from Norway and her students from and another colleague from the Netherlands and his students. My Norwegian colleague and I worked on the Nurses Christian Fellowship International European regional conference in August last year, and my Dutch colleague is based at the university in Ede that hosted the conference. We are already hatching plans for a conference on the spiritual care theme in 2009

Yesterday I was on a guided tour of the old St. Luke's hospital and the newly built Matre Dies hospital (left) - so new that they do not start moving the patients and staff over until next week - so we had the rare privilege of seeing a pristine, unused hospital. Impressively in a 850 bed hospital they have a team of six full time chaplains (all Capuchin Friars), plus another fifteen working at the various clinics, community centres and specialist hospitals. This is the only main hospital in the country - but when the population is only about one and a half times that of Medway, and the Island itself is about half an hours drive from one end to the other, that is not as odd as it seems.

Malta is very built up, very North African sort of flat roofed adobe houses, and the local language is a mixture of Arabic and Italian and English. They also speak English fluently, and all the road signs are in English. Very friendly people.

Anyway, yesterday evening the conference started, and I realised I would need my tie as even the students were dressed in Sunday best! My talk seemed to go OK, not as high powered as the others, but it was not meant to be. However, those of us who had been on the tour earlier in the day all ducked out of the reception in the evening because we had not eaten since breakfast and nothing more substantial than canapés was on offer.

Today has been a series of papers, and then a rather huge lunch in a frankly overcrowded restaurant. We were supposed to be back strictly at 2.30, but they were still serving some people their main courses when I left to catch 40 winks. The conference has about 450 attendees, and all but twenty of us a re Maltese, mostly students.

In the evening some of us went on a "historical tour" of Berega, and the original hospital of the Knight of St John (now a Carmelite convent, and we were very privileged to be allowed in to see around the building by the sisters). After a visit to the church of St. Lawrence (the first Maltese Christian martyr –roasted alive on a barbecue by the Romans – nice people eh?) we rounded of the evening with a light meal – a sort of Maltese metze / tappas – very strong cheeses, dried vegetables, sausages, etc, etc. We were all shattered by the time we got back to the hotel gone midnight.

Today, after filing this blog I am off to do a quick souvenir hunt and then to the airport. Looking forward to being home again.

More on the actual conference at a later date.

Free Burma

2007-10-04T06:33:00.000Z

The more global pressure we put on the Burmese Junta, and the longer we keep that pressure up, the more hope there is that someday things will change - let us pray that "someday" comes soon, and pray for all those imprisoned, tortured or bereaved in the recent clamp down.

Also, an interesting article in the EA on public morality, theology, Coronation Street and Burma. Despite how this sounds, it is not trivial!

Faith in Potter

2007-08-12T16:08:00.000Z

Having read the latest (and final) installment of the Harry Potter series, I was struck , not just by the books (which is overall a good read, by the way, despite a rather slow and drawn out middle section), but by some of the furore in the Christian press over the whole series, and this book in particular. Some are still denouncing the whole thing as demonic - others see in it a powerful Christian allegory. It seems that the only reactions for some Christians are either outright denunciation (a common, and usually self-defeating reflex), or appropriation as a Christian tract.

And (without giving too much away), the last book in this sequence does have elements that a superficial reading could easily give one over to either conclusion. There is a lot about Dark magic and special magical devices that supposedly allow one to cheat death, and a lot about self sacrifice, and the power of atoning sacrifice to defeat evil and even death. But to take a fantasy that does not deal with the real world and blame it for increasing an interest in the occult among children (for which I have seen no evidence), or that because of the themes of death and rebirth and good defeating evil, this must mean that Rowling is a "secret" believer, and is using her books to push a "secret" Christian message is taking things far too far.

Rowling is merely drawing on the wealth of the Western literary tradition, and the deep Jungian archetypes that in our culture have been shaped by nearly 2,000 years of Christianity - ideas like self-sacrifice, and moral courage overcoming evil are deeply embedded. And indeed, these are values that pre-date Christianity - they are there in the Graeco-Roman traditions as well.

Another example is the reaction among some Christians to the last episode in the current series of Doctor Who. Here the Master is defeated not by a secret anti-Time Lord weapon, but by the collective belief of the survivors of Earth that the Doctor could save them - a collective belief that regenerates the Doctor who then proceeds to forgive the Master for his crimes. The Biblical imagery is very strong for all who want to find it, but to then assume that Russell T Davies is a believer would be a serious error. Davies is the writer of "The Second Coming", a drama (also starring Christopher Ecclestone) in which a young man in Sheffield discovers that he is the final incarnation, and that God’s final testament to humanity is that He must die, but with no resurrection – leaving humanity to make it’s own way without God.

That Davies is an atheist (or at least, an agnostic) does not preclude him from understanding the power of forgiveness and belief to transform situations – these are deeply embedded values in our culture. Likewise, when Rowling quotes form the Bible in the “Deathly Hallows”, she does so without citing the origin, but uses the quotes in a highly appropriate context. But most readers would not recognise the quotes as from the New Testament.

Whether she has a faith or not is not salient to the books – they are full of values that Christian and atheist and agnostic alike would recognise – friends matter, truth is vital, and evil is always weaker than good because it is blind to the things that make the world worth living in. In that sense I can celebrate the writing in Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Phillip Pullmans’ explicitly atheistic “His Dark Materials”, CS Lewis’s explicitly Christian Narnia books, the Le Guin’s explicitly Taoist “Earthsea” books. They all take values that I celebrate as part of my faith, and I can take from them what I bring to them.

Blowing the Whistle

2007-06-02T19:41:00.000Z

Today a group of eight of joined with abound 900 others at worship service at Westminster Central Hall to and then joined with about 4,000 others at Lambeth Bridge by the House of Commons to make a huge din to draw attention to the failure of global community to honour its commitments to the poor.

Do such demos make any difference? Is there any point, when our government seems to be one of the few that is doing anything constructive - surely it is the US or Italy or Russia that needs kicking in to action?

And the simple answer is, the more we do, the more we change things. Peacefully, rather than through the violent riots that kicked off in Germany around the same time as our rally and largely drowned it out. Furthermore, I think that getting churches to engage with campaigning makes a difference - it has more than a hint of the Old Testament prophets who challenged kings and rulers to do right by the poor. It also gets a group naturally inclined towards activism of one kind or another actively seeking to change the world. Wake the sleeping giant and see what happens.

And finally, it is church groups, more than any other single network, that are out there caring for the poor throughout the world, so if any group has a right to speak out, it is the church.

Lets see what difference, if any, all the whistle blowing has made.

Cure for Baldness

2007-05-26T07:34:00.000Z

Apparently, there is yet another putative cure for baldness out there. Yes, I know these things have been coming out every few years for as long as I can remember, and none have caused significant change to men with baldness. But bear with me.

The thing that strikes me is the term "cure". You cure an illness or a disorder. I, on the other hand, have never felt that in being as bald a coot that I was either ill, or had a disorder or abnormality. I certainly have never felt disabled by it. Baldness is just how I am, in the same way that some people are blond or auburn, curly haired or straight. I know some people with red hair would claim that this marks them out for special abuse, and everyone assumes blonds (especially female blonds) are stupid, but as far as I recall, hair colour or type has never been seen as a disorder.

So why am I in need of a cure for being bald? Or is this another symptom of a society that medicalises everything? Therapy culture tells us that we all need a bit of therapy (or so the people who make a living out of selling us therapies tell us). We even turn opinions and emotional reactions to concepts and groups in to diseases (see Frank Furedi's latest article on phobias)! Yes, I know that some men feel very self conscious about hair loss, but that is as much to do with stereotypes and expectations forced upon us by the wider culture - and these days being bald is not automatically a sign of being old or sad. It is a matter of self-worth and self-perception rather than there being anything intrinsically wrong with being bald.

I am bald and overweight and 41 years old, male and white, a father, a Christian, middle class (University educated and a professional) and English. Any one of these could be seen by one group or another as a disorder that needs a cure (or euthanasia!). To me, it's just who I am, and if you think I need therapy, then keep your opinion to yourself thank you very much . When I am genuinely ill, I will seek help from the appropriate source (one that has no vested interest in selling me some quackery or other).

Otherwise, warts and all, I am who and what I am, and need make no apologies for that. And nor should you.

Three Passings

2007-05-18T11:14:00.000Z

This last week has seen the end of three eras - all of significance.

Last Thursday Tony Blair finally announced his timetable to leave office as the British Prime Minister, after one of the longest and most poorly concealed resignation processes in British political history. Earlier this week, the Revd. Jerry Falwell, doyen of the US Evangelical Right passed on to be with his Lord unexpectedly. And today, Paul Wolfowitz quit as head of the World Bank, after another long-drawn out process in which the outcome was inevitable, only the timetable was uncertain, thus fueling much media speculation.

And each does represent the end of an era, and the legacies of each will continue to be contested. Only Wolfowitz, in his World Bank role, had barely had time to establish reputation and a true legacy, and who knows what good or ill (or probably both) he would have wrought over the next decade if he had not been caught with his hand in the till. But from his White House days, we can see one part of his legacy every time we turn on the news - Iraq.

Sadly, for Blair this is the one part of his legacy that will overshadow his achievements (and failures) in other areas. I wonder how many outside of Ireland will recall the pivotal role he played in bringing about the Good Friday agreement and the final power sharing agreement at Stormont (also agreed in the last week), thus bringing to a final conclusion one long and bloody period of Irish history and offering hope of a more peaceful, less divided future?

Falwell (of whom I know comparatively little from this side of The Pond) has been a divisive figure in the Christian Community in the States for decades, and a hate figure for secular liberals. But he did drag the evangelical community out to address wider issues, making sure that faith could no longer be seen as private. How he did this, and the issues he got stuck on will always be contentious, but that he did it at all has meant that others (Rick Warren and Bill Hybles for two) have taken the mantle on and begun to focus on far wider issues - the environment, global poverty and AIDS for three.

Enoch Powell once famously said that all political careers end in failure. But Blair quit while his party still held on to power in Westminster (if nowhere else in the UK), and at a time and a manner of his choosing. Falwell was taken unexpectedly - collapsing in his office. No slow decline for him. Only Wolfowitz was driven from office for his misdemeanors. Of the three, his departure could be the only one described as failure, and of the most fundamental kind - if not actually being corrupt, then showing a degree of nepotism that robbed him and the institution for which he worked of any credibility in tackling corruption in other nations, and thus letting down the billions living in poverty that the Bank could still help.

Blair has done more than any other British leader to bring the cause of fighting global poverty to the top of the national and global political agenda. And even Falwell, for all the hurt and division he brought, did get the church in the USA thinking and acting in a way that made for the new initiatives that are likely to save many millions more lives in years to come. Wolfowitz's passing meanwhile, has almost certainly damaged attempts to fight global poverty.

Whatever legacies these men may have left in other areas, the way they affected the global poor (for good and ill) may be the most lasting.

Argh!

2007-04-25T12:40:00.000Z

Well, we are at it again. After a public declaration that the theology of substitutionary atonement (and particularly penal substitution) portrayed God wrongly as a sadist, Jeffrey John (a bishop with whom I have never been largely sympathetic) was on the end of an apparent torrent of abusive hate mail from so-called Bible believing Christians.

One contention that has often been made is that the belief that the death of Jesus was to placate a wrathful God (one way of framing the theology of penal substitution) tends to lead to aggressive and violent Christianity - and it seems that in this case the point was well made!

I actually tend towards the theology of penal substitution (though not in the words in which I framed it above), and actually believe that a lot of those who hold to it (without naming it as such) are peaceful, grace filled believers. But there are also a lot of nutters who seem happier to have a Jesus nailed to a cross and being raised only so He can come back and whack unbelievers over the head, rather than grappling with what He actually taught. That's not to let Jeffrey John off the hook either - I disagree with his interpretation of the Bible - but that does not mean I want to hurt him! Far from it; having heart felt disagreement, a full on argument, then a trip to the pub afterwards is always welcome. But not in public with the media looking on, stoking up the fight!

The basics of Christianity is simply this - I know I am a git, but God loves me anyway - and the cross is His way of dealing with me being a git. I am forgiven because Jesus faced the consequences of me being a git. That extends to those who have a different theological bent to me, such as Jeffrey John, and those who send hate mail in the name of Jesus. But I suspect, when He comes back, Jesus is going to have equally harsh words to say to all of us for being such stupid gits!

However, just to add to my level of grumpiness today, the media are in apoplexy over a change of judge at the head of the public enquiry over the death of princess Diana. Why? Who cares? We are falling behind in the promises we made to increase our aid and debt relief t the poor, and global warming is not slowing down because the Chinese are not worried about it (yet), but all the British papers care about is flaming Diana!! Poor woman has been dead ten years, and we are still dragging her out in to the media spotlight. Let her rest and watch out for the real stories you dimwits!

Jesus harshest words were for those who distracted people from the truth with petty rules and religious rituals. The media and the church in this day and age are pretty guilty of doing that job through irrelvant tittle tattle and headline grabbing theological nonsense.

Sunshine

2007-04-20T16:04:00.000Z

Saw a remarkable film last night - Danny Boyle's latest quality Brittywood offering, Sunshine. It is remarkable for two reasons - it is a British movie, filmed for around $40M, about a a quarter to a fifth of a comparable Hollywood movie, but of the same quality in terms of the production design and the (mesmerizingly beautiful) special effects.

However, it is more remarkable that in an era when most science fiction movies seem to rely on space battles and gimmicks to appeal to thirteen year old males, this was rare, old fashioned piece of intelligent, hard(ish) sci-fi. OK, so it plays fast a loose with some of the laws of physics (sound in space, artificial gravity, etc, etc.), and the last half hour falls apart in to a confusing and unnecessary sub-plot leading to a still relatively satisfying, if hard to follow climax. But the first hour or so it is a slow, meditative, thoughtful and above, visually stunning piece in the tradition of Solaris, 2001 and Silent Running.

Obviously, Boyle has cited these as influences, and they are all there (will not show off all the references I picked up, but they were delightfully subtle in places, from the lone seedling clutched in dying fingers, to the escape into an airlock using the pressure of atmosphere vented in to space as propulsion, and the computer voice slowing and slurring as its circuits were disconnected). Above all though, it is the image of the spaceship, alone, out of contact with Earth, years from home and facing great peril that is one of those iconic SF images that is refreshingly recycled here. I had the image of the ship behind its gigantic shield, protecting it from the heat, radiation and glare of our dying sun buzzing round my head for hours as I went to sleep.

Above all it did what all good science fiction must do, and hold a mirror up to the concerns of our own world and times (particularly environmental issues). It also looks at how a single decision, made with the best will and best logic in the world can lead to an expanding tree of unintended consequences and probabilities that cannot be seen from outset - as Cillian Murphy's character points out early on - there comes a point where the probabilities are so infinite that you just have to make a good guess. But that guess has moral, ethical and practical consequences that other people have to live with. There are no shortage of current events that this problem echoes!

Oh, and the soundtrack by Underworld is hauntingly beautiful and atmospheric - good to see those guys back doing what they do best.

If only the last third of the film had been as good as the first two thirds, it would be justifiably called a classic. Maybe, even with this flaw, it will be seen that way in the future.

Grumpiness

2007-04-10T00:00:00.000Z

spiked Grumpiness - great article by Frank Furedi. Maybe being a "grumpy old man" is not so bad after all, even if the term is used to dismiss and diminish those who feel a sense of dissatisfaction with the world we find ourselves in. As the article says,

"There was a time when criticising the status quo was considered radical. Throughout history, refusing to accept the world as it existed has been looked upon as a form of rebellion. Those who did not ‘much care for contemporary life’ were very often inspired by the conviction that human life and culture could be – and must be – improved upon. Today, such an aspiring outlook is seen as a social faux pas"

I have always thought this capacity to question the everyday assumptions and values of the world around you was of the highest order and to be greatly valued. If those of us who feel this way are to be dismissed as "Grumpy Old Men/Women" by wider society, then let us wear our badge (however ill fitting) with pride! As "Queer", "Nigger" (and countless other terms of abuse) have been co-opted by those so labelled as a badge that inverted the stigma of the name and made it a symbol of resistance and pride, then let us challenge this sick society by letting their labels be turned against them. I am Grumpy and I am proud!!

Rant over, back to doing the bins and making the wife a cuppa.

Phew!!

2007-04-09T15:34:00.000Z

New babies really do take over your life. Even when you have been through the experience a couple of times before, you quickly forget how rapidly they dictate how and when you get out (more slowly, less frequently). You forget because as they get older, so it gets easier to go out and do things and need somewhat less logistical planning or equipment (nappies, prams, car seats, changes of clothes, emergency food supplies for adults - emergency supplies of almost everything in fact!)

The other thing they do is put pressure on all your other relationships. We have had the odd few days since No. 3 turned up where we have all fallen apart or fallen out with one another. This Easter weekend has not been without its traumas and busts ups - and reconciliations and fun bits too.

I can begin to understand why some men just walk out on their families - well, almost. You think - "this is it, this is the rest of my life - dealing with pooh, never getting out or or doing things I want to do any more, always being tired, never sleeping enough, always having my life dictated too by our child". I think plenty of women feel the same, and I think it is a myth that they adapt better than men - they just have less in the way of socially acceptable opt out clauses - negligent fathers are frowned upon - mothers who walk out are liable to be burnt as witches. Double standards are alive and well in C21!

It is bloody hard at times being a parent - or being a spouse for that matter - parenthood changes marriages beyond recognition. Believe me if you have never experienced it, nothing is the same again. But that is not automatically bad, and because something is tough does not automatically make it impossible. We learn and grow through tough times - or we fall apart. Its our choice, and I made that choice a long time back. However hard it gets, I'm in it for the long haul. Because the good bits - when your baby recognises your voice or gives you a big smile for the first time, or when you hear them say their first words, or tell you that they love you, or write their first sentences or read their first book, or bring home their first boy/girl friend - it all makes it so worthwhile.

But it is flaming hard work! Which is why no family should ever be on their own - friends, aunties, uncles, cousins, grandparents - you need them all. That may be one of the reasons why the rates of family break up are so high - we are just not looking after each other and keeping families together. If was not for having family five minutes walk around the corner, and a network of church friends and others scattered across the country, I am not sure how we would have made it through the last few years.

I know that there is more to it than that, but even just having the role model of parents who are still together can make you believe you can do the same for your wife and kids. And that belief is vital.

Why Easter?

2007-04-05T09:28:00.000Z

So, here we are, the most significant season of the year for Christians, and one of those relatively rare occasions when the Eastern and Western Easters and the Jewish Passover coincide.

It has always seemed odd to me that this most important season of Christian year, when we remember the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus, should be named in English (and German) after a pre-Christian Germanic female fertility deity, Ēostre. The same route from which we get the word for the female sex hormone Oestrogen. Nothing to do with Jesus, or the Jewish Passover. Yet another of the pagan accommodations that the early Christians made (we were never commanded to observe any festivals by Jesus - the only observation was the shared meal of bred and wine to remember Jesus sacrifice of Himself). Yet this is a significant time of year - the Jewish festival celebrates God delivering His people from slavery, the Christian festival God delivering His people from spiritual bondage. Emancipation, freedom, life - this is what Easter is about. You can see how it has got diluted down to a celebration of spring for most people.

So, here's to freedom, hope and new life - literal, spiritual, political, psychological, to a remembrance of the awful price to be paid for such freedom, and thanks to One who was prepared to pay that price for me.

Shalom

Martin Luther King Jnr.

2007-04-04T11:42:00.000Z

Sharing a birthday with the Rev.d Luther King has always made me feel a vague connection with the man. Today is the anniversary of his murder - a murder than highlights the high cost paid by those who stand up against the status quo, who challenge entrenched powers on behalf of the downtrodden, and above all who have the temerity to stand up to satanic theories of race based on the ugly history of the transatlantic slave industry.

If my earlier posting gave the impression that I thought it was all down to us whites to sort out the problems faced by black people, then I apologise - Martin Luther King is one of many examples of how much of the emancipation from slavery and the subsequent social segregation was down to black people themselves taking hold of their lives, history and destiny and changing it for themselves - with or without the help of whites.

Of course, it then becomes easy to swing the other way, and lionise the likes of King and lo and behold we have the Hollywood "Wise Negro" archetype - you know the sort played usually by Morgan Freeman - who is noble and kind and spiritual and sorts out the white protagonist's inner demons and sets him/her on the path to enlightenment (think of Driving Miss Daisy and you get the picture - although you could also include the Morpheus in the Matrix under that rubric). It's just as much of a myth as the other stereotypes of black people that we white Europeans and Americans have.

Martin Luther King had his flaws (he was an adulterer for one), but he also had a grasp of something central - God's bias to the poor and downtrodden and the need for justice, not based on retribution and revenge, but on setting things right between people. He only partially succeeded, but that was still some success. There is a lot more to be done.

No profound insights there then, just an attempt at a corrective to what I posted earlier, and to remember not just the man on this anniversary, but the struggle for racial and social justice which is still ongoing, and those fighting in the front line.

Shopping Trolleys!

2007-03-31T20:27:00.000Z

I have a deep seated belief, based on a marginal reading of the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy, that there is a whole circle of Hell devoted especially to those who leave supermarket shopping trolleys to clog up parking spaces, walkways and roadways at supermarkets.

I have, on more than occasion seen people push a trolley they have just unloaded in to an empty parking bay, rather than walk an extra thirty yards to put it in to a shopping trolley bay for collection.

This annoys me for two reasons. The first is that it is innately annoying when tying to walk or drive or park to find a shopping trolley left where it is destined to cause maximum inconvenience.

The second, more significant reason is the attitude that it exposes. "I cannot be bothered to do something as taxing as walk thirty yards and put away a trolley. Someone else will deal with it, so why worry. It's not my problem. I pay good money to shop here, so I expect to have my mess cleared up for me."

This attitude has at its heart a childishness that is shared bt that a lot of adults in modern Britain - a generation of infant-adults. Someone is always going to do it for them, they have no responsibility to other people. Mummy will take care of it (she probably always did, and never got them to to do anything for themselves as children). Never mind that they are the first to complain when another infant-adult inconveniences them through such selfishness!

It drives me mad when I hear someone say "someone should do something about it". My answer is to say "why don't you?". And there are always the excuses about time, or "I don't know how", or, most commonly "it's not my responsibility. The government should do this, it's what we pay our taxes for".

Now, I can see a hypocrisy in myself as I type this - one my wife would keenly point out! I do leave messes around our house, assuming that it will get dealt with later (usually by my wife). I am not perfect, and this is one area where I need to grow up - it's a trait that a lot of men share. But I cannot leave litter on the street or a shopping trolley not in its bay. And I cannot assume that the government will do something about war, famine, poverty or any other ill, unless I and others badger them to do something, and are prepared to get up and do something about it ourselves.

Shopping trolley crimes are in themselves petty and trivial, but this abdication of responsibility is a sign of a moral weakness and spiritual malaise that angers me deeply, but which is so prevalent in British culture today. And thus it is worthy of damnation in all of us who abdicate our responsibility for the weak, poor and marginalised. Sins of omission are sometimes even worse than those of commission.

Anniversaries

2007-03-28T19:40:00.000Z

So, we are now past the various celebrations of the 200 years since the abolition of the slave trade, and what a jolly time we have had! Everyone slagging everyone else off for not celebrating the right things (it wasn't the end of slavery, don't y' know?), or not celebrating the right people (it wasn't all Wilberforce, don't y' know?).

The thing is, I sympathise with the guy who got up in Westminster Abbey yesterday to berate everyone present. I don't totally agree with him, but I do sympathise - after all, didn't the Church of England, the Monarchy the British Government and indeed most of British industry benefit from the slave trade and ongoing slavery for more than thirty years after the abolition of the transatlantic trade? Not much repentance for that in the service, as far as I could see. And didn't these profiteers on the back human misery all get compensation for the loss of their slaves (the slaves, of course, got nothing)?

The history of how this and other Western nations treated the people of Africa so appallingly lives with us to this day. Where is the greatest poverty and social deprivation to be found in the UK and the USA? - largely among the descendants of salves. Which groups are still excluded, treated as less than human and subject regular individual and institutional abuse? - yeah, you got it again. And yes, where is the slave industry still flourishing? - well actually not just in Africa this time - how about Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, etc, etc. It's spreading! But where is poverty getting worse? - umm, there you are again, Africa. And who is still getting rich off the poverty of Africans and slaves? - ah yes, that'd be us again.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la mem cholse.

So maybe I did not totally agree with the protester yesterday - but he had a point. Poverty and slavery and racism and injustice are still with us - Wilberforce did not abolish them. He may have won one small battle two centuries back, but the war is far from over. No wonder so many of those of African descent feel uncomfortable and alienated from the celebrations this year. Maybe we need to ask the question that Wilberforce and the abolitionists asked - are we happy to grow in wealth and power at the expense of others living in poverty and misery? And if not, what are we going to do to change that?

If the controversy over these celebrations should teach us anything, it is that we cannot afford to stop asking these two questions of ourselves - and seeing them spur us into action.

(Am I getting a bit pious here? Quick! - get me back to baby pooh!)

We Didn't Start the Fire.....

2007-03-05T14:07:00.000Z

One of Billy Joel's better songs, but a sentiment I cannot wholly agree with! Over the last year or so there has been a distinct fire raging at the heart of British cultural life - a fire that at times seems all consuming, and at others barely relevant or noticeable. It is a fire that our cousins across The Pond have called the "Culture Wars", but here have manifested in a different form. However, they all seem to come from the same starting point - the clash between a secular modernity that feels it should have long ago won the argument about the validity of all forms of religious expression in the public (and increasingly the private) sphere, against religious convictions of various kinds that not only do not agree that the argument is over, but question the validity of the argument in the first place.

This has lead to a war of words in the public square between the hostile atheistic fundamentalism of Dawkins and Hitchens, up against the various forms of religion, fundamentalist, literalist, traditional and liberal. Increasingly hostile and being fought out in spheres of equal opportunities, and human rights legislation, this conflict at times sheds more heat than light.

At the heart of it seems to be a fundamental mismatch of world views. Not only are they incompatible with one another, they actually do not intersect most of the time.

Rationalistic atheism and secularism assume that all truth is capable of reductionist analysis. Religious world views tend to believe that truth is apprehended experientially, whether through scripture, ritual or mystical experience. The one assumes that anything that cannot be measured and observed is not true, or cannot be subjected to enough scrutiny to verify its truth one way or the other. The other assumes that experiential truth leads one to a greater understanding of oneself, one's place in the Universe and how one should live.

Evangelical Christianity has accommodated the modernist, rationalist mindset the most, and has framed the Christian faith in terms of analogical and propositional truths and doctrines, and so most often clashes with secularism. Catholic and pentecostal Christianity are less in love with modernity, and feel less need to engage with these debates except where they force a clash of values in the public sphere.

Which is where the other difference arises - secularism holds that faith, if it must exist, has to be kept to the private sphere, and not affect any other part of life. Meanwhile faith has always seen itself involved with all of life. Secularism is largely confined to a Cartesian dualism, faith (possibly apart from Evangelicalism in its most academic forms) is concerned with the whole of life as lived in embodied, phenomenolgical experience. Needless to say that the latter is older, more widely practised human thought pattern.

Sadly, I fear the likes of Dawkins, who are nice, middle class white European male children of the Enlightenment have little real engagement with the rest of the human race, and thus no real understanding of religion, or indeed post-modernity which is largely suspicious of the overarching truth claims of any religion - including scientific atheism.

But it is the ferocity of these clashes that bemuses me. The fear, on both sides, that the other is a real danger to the future of the human race. I find this sad - I have many good friends who hold themselves as committed atheists and agnostics (the latter in the sense of subjecting all truth claims, including those of scientific atheism to serious and sceptical scrutiny). I respect their positions, and they respect mine.

Dawkins (or Hitchens) I fear is a man who I might like in person and find I could talk to about most subjects, but once we come on to religion, his bigotry and fanatical hatred of all things religious would make any attempt at dialogue pointless.

There is no point in trying to debate with the wild eyed, fanatical convert who is convinced his truth is the only one. Faith, in the very real sense, is about a journey of discovery - doctrine may not be irrelevant, but is only a starting point - if one cannot learn, and have one's beliefs subject to regular scrutiny, then what you have is not faith, but a blind clinging to certainty out of a fear that one might be wrong. Dawkins is, I fear, as much guilty of that kind of red-eyed fanaticism as any religious fundamentalist that he rails against. Less nice, middle class people than he who hold similar views could use them to some very unpleasant ends, and indeed the likes of Enver Hoxha and Joseph Dzhugashvili have shown us that this is not a false fear.

Together for the Gospel?

2007-02-20T17:10:00.000Z

I sometimes despair about my church. Not my local congregation - which, for all its faults is a great group of people who are trying to live faithfully to the teaching and example of Jesus and make a positive difference in their communities and workplaces.

No, I mean the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion. At a time when churches the world over are beginning to work together more constructively than ever to bring the reality of God's kingdom of peace, justice and grace to a world torn asunder by war, injustice and ungraciousness, the Anglican Communion is tearing itself apart over the issue of whether or not ordain gay priests.

Not that the issue does not matter, but how did we get so easily diverted by such a side issue? What about poverty, war, AIDS, the injustices in world trade and the negative aspects of globalisation, the erosion of family life, and the increasing spiritual poverty in the West that we are so rapidly exporting around the world? What about the Good News that Jesus brought? Why is that not our number one priority?

The answer seems to be not in the Anglican Communion, but rather among the Catholics, Pentecostals and other protestant groups, who all seem to be less readily diverted. I give God thanks that there are plenty of people (including Anglicans at the grass roots) who are not getting bogged down in political disputes that divert us from the Great Commission. Those are the people I want to be working with.

I'm a Dad .... again

2007-02-14T14:03:00.000Z

Here she is, pickle number three. Safely delivered, and at home by some good friends (who also happen to be professional midwives). There is something really special having the baby at home, and having friends and family involved. The baby was born in the living room, with the children in their bedroom right next door (they claim not to have heard a thing!), surrounded by people who we knew, loved and trusted.

It contrasts to our first two who were born in hospital with significant medical intervention. Not that the care was bad; far from it, and not that the interventions were not necessary (neither of my other two kids nor my wife would be probably be with us now if there had not been those interventions). However, the experience of a normal, everyday but hugely significant life event in your own home is something special.

One of my favourite books of all time (Marrying & Burying: Rites of Passage in a Man's Life) explores how the rituals with which we surround ourselves help give meaning to life events like birth, marriage, coming of age, death, and dinner. Around all of these life events (major and mundane), however much we may not realise it in our post-industrial world, we are steeped in a huge variety of big and little rituals. The one we went through yesterday evening was the ritual of modern birth - attended by professionals with their notes and equipment, the ritual checks of the baby and mother, etc. Today I participated in the modern ritual of announcing the birth to friends and family - in the past done my letter or word of mouth, now done by email and blog spots. The instant nature of the modern ritual means this post-industrial father got one of the new baby's names wrong, and had to apologise on line!!

We have lost some of the deeper meanings of all of these events. My father-in-law brought us back in to focus today by simply praying over the child and making the sign of the cross on her forehead as she slept. One of her names is Grace, a reminder that she is a gift to us out of God's grace - the abundant, selfless, unearned blessings He pours out on all Creation.

Little rituals connect us back with deep truths.

SNOW!

2007-02-08T09:37:00.000Z

No sign of the baby yet, but boy did it snow (and still is snowing - see left taken five minutes back). About three inches.

Now in Scotland, Siberia and Saskatchewan that may sound like a light dusting, but down here it brings the whole country to a halt. But I don't care today, because it's SNOWING!! and I got to take two very excited children to school and pre-school in it. Darling wife wanted to get out in it too, but grumpily conceded that she did not want to fall over on her bum in the snow, as her centre of gravity currently sits about three inches in front of her actual body, and so balancing on ice is hard, hard work. Bless. But it also might bring on labour!

Now, less of the silly displacement activity and childish excitedness at snow, and back to some real work.

Namare

Tum Te Tum Te Tum

2007-02-07T11:51:00.000Z

Tiddley pom, nobody knows how cold my toes are growing, tiddley pom. It is real brass monkey weather, bright, sunny, frosty, and with 2 - 7 inches of snow forecast for tonight, looks like it is only going to get colder. Even with thermal socks, my feet are like ice blocks on the cold kitchen floor and this study is like a freezer, even with the heating on!

Meanwhile, my darling wife is in the protracted early stages of labour, I am off work to help, and we are cooling our heals waiting for junior No 3 to show his/her face as soon as possible (in the midst of one of the most fraught times at work, as well!) - our kids are always late. The first two were induced and born at 12 and 13 days overdue respectively, so we are really hoping this one bucks the trend. But you never can tell.

At lest I won't have to fight my way into the office tomorrow when the train system inevitably grinds to a halt tonight!

Meanwhile, more media madness - Celebrity Big Brother and the racist bullying row, Tony Blair and No 10 staff still being questioned over an alleged cover up of cash for peerages corruption, the video of US pilots shooting up a British convoy and killing one serviceman, and all the other bits and pieces of the last month. All of this is serious stuff, despite initial appearances, but as ever distracts from the bigger picture.

But lets not go there again!

I anticipate I will be blogging more for the next few days, before once again a madly busy work schedule and increasingly busy family life take over. Meanwhile lets get some food down me to keep my blood warm!

Birthday!

2007-01-15T14:19:00.000Z

At forty one, a birthday should (according to conventional wisdom) be a day for feeling down and grumpy. You're another year older (and therefore, closer to death, or at least being old and infirm), you inevitably feel disappointed with the presents you get and life seems to be one huge let down, etc, etc.

Well, that's how I am told I should feel. I have never been very good at bending to convention, unless I like the convention. The "forty something and grumpy" convention does not suite my temperament, so I ignore it. Yes, I do get grumpy at times, and yes I do shout at the TV regularly (most car ads are greeted with "it's just a car!" - and indeed most adverts get short-shrift because they are trying to tell me how inadequate I am without their product, and how much more fulfilled I would be with it - neither of which statements long experience has taught me are in the slightest bit true - ever!). But at the end of the day, life is too short and full of woe to be sad and grumpy all the time - you have to live and celebrate living every day, otherwise why live at all?!

So birthdays are for me a great excuse to catch up with friends, have a knees up eat party food, have a drink or two more than usual, and have some pressies (with which I very, very seldom am disappointed - this year a water proof wind up radio/torch and beautiful plain gold cross).

In short, I am still a big kid, and feel no shame in that whatsoever!

Now, back to work (but first a cup of tea and some of my wife's brownies - yum!)

Myopia

2007-01-09T15:22:00.000Z

Looking at the news yesterday evening and this morning, you might be forgiven for thinking that the only thing happening in the world at the moment is a raging controversy over whether a (moderately unpopular) government minister is right or wrong to send her dyslexic child to a private special needs to school rather than a state school.

Meanwhile our oil supplies are being cut off by Russia, the genocide in Darfur continues with very little signs of the West intervening to stop the killing, a major new front on the War against Terror (or Terrorism) is opening in Somalia, and Afghanistan and Iraq descend in to further chaos. And that is leaving to one side global warming and the mounting crisis of the AIDS pandemic.

The British press can be be brain bogglingly myopic and petty at times.

Meanwhile many of my fellow believers (some of whom I count as personal friends) are protesting against the new sexual orientation regulations soon to go through Parliament. While I suspect that many of their anxieties about this legislation are exaggerated (but not totally), I find myself uncomfortable to see fellow believers marching against legislation that is widely perceived (however inaccurately) to be promoting justice and equality of opportunity to people. Whether or not I agree with someone's lifestyle or choices has nothing to do with what rights and dignity I extend to them as a human being. Jesus certainly seemed to reserve most of his harshest words for the religious establishment and its promotion of its own agenda to the exclusion of the needs of ordinary people (e.g. the seven woes in Matthew 23).

Meanwhile, in addition to all of the above global problems, the church in Africa lives in poverty, its congregations depleted by AIDS, malnutrition and people leaving to find work in the cities or other nations, while in other parts of the world (including Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Central and South East Asia and northern Africa) Christians are regularly imprisoned, tortured or put to death for their faith.

Are we so introverted in the British church that all we care about is threats to our own rights and status? Surely that should be the last thing on our mind - especially considering how privileged we are in this wealthy, peaceful nation of ours.

Paul got it right; we lay our rights down before God and the needs of the poor and the vulnerable (e.g. 2 Corinthians 6: 3-10). I like the bit a bout not putting stumbling blocks in people's way. I fear sometimes we come over as harsh and shrill and bigoted rather than full of grace and peace. But then again, some of that is also the way the media spins what we say.

And that, at the end of the day, is the problem - what we see of the world and how we respond to it is so shaped by the myopic lens of the media that we miss what is really going on.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

2007-01-07T20:40:00.000Z

Sunday is notionally meant to be the “day of rest” in Christian countries of the Northern Hemisphere and other parts of the anglophone world (and it seems in South Korea too, from my all to brief experience of the country, although with more than 33% of the population claiming membership of one or other Christian church, maybe that is not so surprising as it initially seems). But for our family at the moment it means once again a day of sorting out things for the incoming baby – such as cots (reassembling thereof) travel systems (laundering the covers thereof after a long sojourn in the garage since our son was outgrew the travel system a couple of years ago). Now I have twenty minutes before another series of "Waking the Dead" starts (I hope it is a better season than the last dismal outing of what used to be a very enjoyable, if occasionally daft crime series).

However, it is not the return of Trevor Eve and Co. that has got me excited, for on Tuesday we see the return of Battlestar Galactica. Now, at this point the nerd in me easily takes over, but let's pause a moment before dismissing this "re-imagining" of a classic (if distinctly kitsch, nay even naff) seventies space opera. Let us put this in to a bit of a context first.

A lot of genre TV (crime and science fiction in particular) suffers from being formulaic, repetitive and derivative. When a show breaks free of those constraints, it is pure joy. Recently the US has output some of the best genre and non-genre TV drams in decades - all of which have bee mould breakers of one kind or another. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, CSI, Murder One, 24, etc, etc. On the science fiction side we are now in the tenth and terminal series of Stargate, about to see the return in the spring of the new (improved) Dr Who for a third series (well done Russell), the recent end of Torchwood (jury's still out on that, but maybe not all Russell touches turns to gold after all), the wrapping up of Farscape and finally, the return of Battlestar Galactica. Recent years have also seen such truly inventive gems as Frefly come (and mysteriously go) to reinvigorate TV sceince fiction, which has always been the poor relation to the wirtten end of the gnere.

BSG followed hard on the heels of Firefly, but set a new tone - it has all a good sci-fi show should have to satisfy the inner-thirteen year old of most science fiction fans - good special effects,, dramatic storylines, strong characterisations, good writing. There are also the obligatory sexy women (and men) to appeal to their respective demographics. No surprises there.

What sets it above the average though is that along with all of this there is an air of stark realism. This show's main storyline is about survival - characters die, the human race is clinging by a thread to existence, and asking itself the question " do we deserve to survive in the first place". The "baddies" have just the same questions and existential doubts (further complicated by the religious differences between the notionally polytheistic (by practically secular) humans and the apparently monotheistic Cylons).

The "Good Guys" are always teetering on (and not infrequently falling over) the edge into immoral actions, while the "Bad Guys" are capable of making moral choices for the good, are able to recognise the moral consequences of their actions and are capable of feeling remorse.

All this is dressed without acres of technobabble, aliens who are just actors in rubber suits (or with Cornish pasties on their heads) and spouting silly invented languages. If anything there are times when it resembles an episode of The West Wing or 24 more than a traditional science fiction series.

Above all though, it is a powerful echo of the angst in American culture over the War Against Terrorism. As such, it not only resonates with British culture (which is equally immersed in this latest ideological war), but it also gives me hope that there are real moral questions being grappled with in America and (I hope) in the UK.

In that sense it may be not just one of the best TV dramas (genre and non-genre) around at the moment, but in terms of history, one of the defining TV series of this decade.

Meanwhile, I shall rot my brain with Waking the Dead, which has little to say, but is a pleasant enough way of passing a Sunday evening (if watching autopsies on bodies in various states of decay can be described as "fun" that is!).

Kirk Douglas, Eat Your Heart Out!

2007-01-02T20:47:00.000Z

One of the features of the last week off work has been my son's imagination. For days on end now we have had to play "Lazy Town". I will not bore you with what Lazy Town is - just follow the link if you are interested, but my son always has to be the hero - Sportacus. If I deign to call him anything else, he shouts "no, I'm Sportacus", which inevitably leads my wife or myself to retort "No, I'm Sportacus, and so's my wife/husband". This rather confused cinematic family in-joke has become one of those amusing but tiresome anecdotes that one will save up to embarrass one's children in future years (especially in front of prospective girlfriends).

So, here we are in 2007, back at work (with the epic daily commute), and spending every second or third evening up in the very confined space that we laughingly call our loft trying to arrange plastic sheeting and ice cream tubs to catch the leaks in (what several roofers have now informed is called) our central gully gutter. And my lunchtimes at work chasing up said roofers to come and give us a quote to fix the leaks. Ah, the joys of home ownership.

In between whiles I am running around after my son who still insists on being addressed as the hero of the earlier mentioned Icelandic pre-school TV phenomenon, and who insists that I am "Robby Rotten" - the arch nemesis of Sportacus (funny how in our version, Robby Rotten is the one who cuddles Sportacus downstairs after a bath, reads the bed time story and gets the night time cup of milk - rather than trying to turn Sportacus into a gibbering slob as happens in the TV version!).

Ah, the joys of family life - leaky roofs and Sportacus! Welcome 2007.

Surving Christmas [Part III]

2006-12-27T13:18:00.000Z

Still alive, still sane and finally as a family we all get to plob out and have what we call at "duvet day" (stay in bed late, don't get dressed, do noting of great importance, watch a lot of [new Christmas] DVDs and trash TV, talk about everything and anything but work and household business, play with the kids, chill out - you know the sort of day, however infrequently you get a chance to take it). A good "duvet day" is needed in the middle of the Christmas madness, if only to get your energy levels up to cope with New Year.

Christmas day was actually a good rest for us in reality - after the military level planning delivered a more than decent Christmas lunch, and the present opening went chaotically but enjoyably. I just caught the Christmas Doctor Who special, and that was about all the TV I saw all day! Otherwise my evening was spent stripping the turkey carcass and getting the bones in the stock pot to the strains of Kate Bush's "The Ninth Wave" - arguably the best thing she ever did, and one of my favourite Chrissie pressies this year (that and the Beatles "Love").

On Boxing Day we decamped up to North East London to the annual family get together at my wife's Uncle's extensive Manse (the only one of two houses in the family big enough for most of us to get together). That involves the small kids going mad with each other upstairs, the twenty somethings sitting around boozing and nattering in the front room, and us oldies sleeping off the large lunch of cold cuts in the snug. It is actually a good time to catch up and see people that we only get together a few times a year, and it is such a huge family that we do not all get a chance to meet up very often - we'll miss the next major family gathering as that is at the same time as our next baby is due to be born.

It was also a poignant get together, as last year's Boxing Day meet up was the last time that my wife's grandmother was with us all - she died very suddenly and unexpectedly in her bed on New Year's Day. As the clan matriarch, her absence is very keenly felt by all of us. This year there were only three generations of the family together - for the last five, we had seen four generations all together.

Not only have we survived Christmas this year, we have enjoyed it, reconnected with far scattered family, and remembered at the heart of it the story of God becoming a vulnerable child. Whatever the cultural battles over Christmas are (and I think they are largely based on a romanticised notion of a past that never was - Christmas has always been at least half a pagan festival), it remains an important time in our culture, whatever one's religious convictions. And it should never distract from the core message of Jesus' teaching and life.

There is nothing in the Bible telling us to celebrate a festival called Christmas (which is why some Christan sects dispense with it altogether), and indeed, we only get two, somewhat contradictory accounts of Jesus birth in two of the four gospels (Mark glosses over Jesus' origins altogether - while John goes for a mystical interpretation, which is very powerful, and I think deeply profound). The precise details of Jesus' birth are less significant than the impact of His life and teaching, yet it is the minutiae that get focussed upon. Jesus had a phrase for this - straining at gnats and swallowing camels. And who said Jesus never had a sense of humour?

So now it's the run up to New Year, and all the quasi spiritual themes about "new starts" and "resolutions" that usually entails. One, strangely profound moment in the Christmas Doctor Who (not a programme in which I normally find profundity) was the Doctor showing Donna the origins of the earth as all the debris of solar system coalesced to form the planets, and pointing out that the thing that humans do is create order out of chaos with our calendars and our festivals. We make meaning where there appears to be none - that is why we are so close to God in our nature.

New Year, like Christmas may be a bit arbitrary, but it gives us a focal point to collectively reflect on the year that was, and look forward to the year that is to come. We can do that individually and as families at point in the year of course - birthdays, remembrances of family deaths, wedding anniversaries, the third Tuesday in May, whatever is personally relevant or takes our fancy. But a shared, collective time of reflection is good for us as a nation and individually. We very often forget these collective acts and their importance to society.

Surviving the Run-up to Christmas [Part II]

2006-12-24T08:12:00.000Z

So, made it to and from the fair town of Southampton (infamous across the Pond for being the city that that rejected the Pilgrim Fathers) to catch up with family and exchange presents. It was good to catch up, especially with my sister, of whom I see far too little. Odd how we take such relationships for granted.

My darling wife managed to use the opportunity of my absence, and the absence of earlier mentioned madcap midgets (who were abducted by grandparents in an act of uncharacteristic spontaneous mercy) to get all the pressies wrapped, and actually have a sit down with Nigella Lawson (not in person, you understand - although having both domestic goddesses under one roof would fulfill a particular fantasy of mine - but let's not go there right now!)

My daughter has been getting very upset about the lack of presents under the tree for her, and was therefore very excited to come home from said grandparents to find a several carrier bags and a large crate of wrapped presents. She has just spent the morning putting them under her tree, while her brother plays on the computer next to me on his favourite Underground Ernie game [this did prompt a couple of minutes back a five minute whinge from daughter, as she wanted her brother to help her with a three hundred piece jigsaw - I seem to spend my mornings being shouted at by children!]. My wife is enjoying the lie in she always promises me at weekends, but that my body and my children conspire never to give me. But that does give me the chance to wrap up her presents with the kids!

So, yes surviving Christmas. Not doing too bad so far, but today is the day that we do the major logistical planning that is Christmas lunch, so anything could happen! Timetables, oven temperatures, preparation tables, you name it, there's a list and set of instructions that will be pinned to the kitchen cupboards so that I can get dinner on the table, on schedule, and properly cooked tomorrow. I am king of the Sunday roasts, and can instinctively judge timings and temperatures for everything pretty well, but with Christmas lunch, it is distinctly more timing and temperature critical, and nothing is left to judgment or instinct [or chance]. This is military level planning!

The enjoyable bit of today is taking the kids to the Sunday afternoon crib service and the much later, taking myself to midnight mass. These are the reminders of what all this logistical planning, and running to and fro, shopping, agonizing and general hard work is about. These trappings are part of the social customs that help us stay connected to one another - they go back to pre-Christian Rome and Celtic Britain - lights, feasting, special foods, presents. All mid-winter celebrations to in essence break to gloom of the coldest, dingiest part of the year in the northern hemisphere.

But the other side of coin - the remembrance that the Lord of Creation came into the poverty and muck of a stable birth to a teenage girl, pregnant outside of marriage (and nearly "put aside" by her husband to be in quiet disgrace), in an occupied land where ethnic and religious persecution were the norm, after a journey at the behest of a corrupt leader seeking to boost his tax revenue from already hard pressed peasants. It was into these inauspicious circumstances that Jesus was born - not a romantic nativity scene of Victorian Christmases or modern piety. It was this child who grew up as an artisan in a small village (still in a region that is the scene of ethnic and religious tensions to this day), then in adulthood spent three years preaching and teaching around the remote, largely ignored region of Galilee before finally being arrested by the religious authorities for threatening their status and power. He was eventually put to death by the secular, occupying forces of the Roman empire. Oddly enough, it is the instrument of torture and execution on which he died, a symbol of Rome's brutal control of it's subject peoples, which has become a globally recognised symbol of the Christian faith, and not any of the symbols related to Christmas (stars, mangers, etc, etc.).

Not much of a foundation for a faith you might think- Richard Dawkins and others would tell us so, but the idea that God got involved in all this rubbish we have to live with, from work and taxes to political oppression and persecution lifts our everyday muck and poverty and hardship to the level of something sacred- because He went through it with us. Even something as mundane as pregnancy, childbirth and childhood are lifted to being something holy. It also reminds us that injustice and suffering are something that matter to God, and not issues to be swept under the carpet.

That is something worth celebrating. That and what Jesus' death actually means - Christmas only becomes complete at Easter.

Joyeux Noel touts les Mondes

Surviving the Run-up to Christmas [Part I]

2006-12-23T07:38:00.000Z

Well, my kids were actually well behaved, and we survived the neighbour's party with no blood on the carpet (although there was spillage of red lemonade - although the carpet was already so old and worn that you would hardly notice the difference, but I still feel guilty about it ).

So, here I am with two days to go until Christmas. My inestimable wife has done miracles on the Christmas shopping front (in addition to making presents!), while I have actually got all my shopping done (God bless the Internet). With a manic last couple of months at work keeping me busy and away from home for upwards of twelve hours a day and leaving my like a zombie when I get home, my dear wife laid low by late stage pregnancy, two small hyperactive and mischievous midgets and bronchitis, it is a small miracle that we have got this far alive.

My next struggle is to to do the present run to my sister and cousin in Southampton. With the fog and likely traffic chaos, that does not look to be great fun. To be honest, I could do without going, but we have reached a compromise, and the kids will stay at home with my wife, and I'll go on my own - traffic and weather permitting.

I case you missed it, most of the British Isles has been under a very, very heavy blanket of fog for pretty much all of the last four days, throwing airports, road and public transport into even greater chaos than usual. Oh, and the drivers one of the main train companies are threatening strike action. Christmas would not be Christmas in Britain without travel chaos - it is what we do best.

Needless to say, this is one of the major reasons we never, ever go away for Christmas - that and two travel sick midgets, and the stress of organising going away. And that we have family and friends on our doorstep, so "going away" just means a ten minute walk round the corner, or a five minute drive. Only the Southampton present run has entered the Christmas calendar as a long distance event.

Now don't get me wrong. I love my sister and get on with my cousin and her family pretty well, but the thought of hauling arse all the way across the south of England and back in one day to exchange Christmas presents a few days before the festivities is not my idea of a fun excursion, with most of the rest of the Southeasts' 23 million souls trying to do the same on an already overstretched and overcrowded transport infrastructure.

But unless we keep up these little, ritual points of contact, the bonds that hold families (and friends) together begin to weaken. People take offense, or just forget about us, and next year, we are likely to get left off the list of cards and invitations (not necessarily maliciously). And so it goes.

Everyone moans about Christmas, the commercialization, the hassle ,etc. But we all still do it, every single year. Why? Because it is a basic human instinct - we need these little present giving rituals to keep us knitted to one another. Christmas has many meanings, but one of them, however stressful and annoying at one level, is keeping far flung families and groups of friends who have drifted apart geographically from drifting apart socially. We go through all this hassle because, at the end of the day, just letting someone know you have thought about them and care about them, and giving them the opportunity to do the same, actually means more than all the aggro that goes with organising all of this.

We are odd creatures. But at least that is one reason why Christmas persists, even as Western Culture at least has largely forgotten the spiritual narrative that underlies it. But that is for another day, and for other, more vehement blogs of those on the frontline of the Culture Wars, a conflict I see little point in fighting (at lest not the way it is usually fought).

If I survive today's excursion, I will be back again to explore surviving other sides of the run up to Christmas in my family.

Grey Day Friday

2006-12-15T13:35:00.000Z

Or indeed, Gray Day - depending on which side of the pond you sit.

Today's more interesting challenges include: assessing new offices for my organisation to move to; getting home in time this evening to have a meal with the family, release my wife to go to a concert rehearsal, and taking the children to a neighbours' Christmas party.

Bear in mind, these are the same to children who gave my poor wife the run around yesterday while I was working late until about 9.00 p.m. (better than a colleague who got locked in the building overnight and had to sleep here!!). The routine goes like this - mid afternoon, both back from school/pre-school. Son decides that he wants a snack, mother gets it for him - it's a banana. Now some bananas he can peel, others he needs a hand with (don't we all at times). This one was of the latter variety - but despite agreeing to his mother peeling it, he proceeded to have a tantrum, asking her to unpeel it and give it back to him whole to do himself. Thus far, thus good. My daughter then decides she is in a right mood, and decides to fly off on one about some lost toy or broken bit of dressing up paraphernalia. There are now two children yelling at their mother, who locks herself in the study to MSN me about all this, while I am trying to prepare for a busy meeting. We all end up stressed and tense.

These two darling children (whom I love very much) are now so tired and on edge (as are we all) that tonight may turn in to WWIII at the neighbours, who already think we are the loudest, most reprehensible family on the street (which is probably no exaggeration, but not by much).

If I never post another blog entry, it will be because my children or the neighbours, or my wife have murdered me.

The Day Thou Gavest Lord Has Ended, and I am sorry, but I seem to have misplaced it!

2006-12-13T21:07:00.000Z

Well, here I am having survived being Santa, the gaggle of parents videoing everything their kids did at the nativity, a day of re-writing job descriptions, creating a calendar with family photos for my wife's parents' Christmas present, and in between feeding and watering the kids. A fairly average day, but I am cream crackered and need to go to bed very, very soon.

So, glass of wine in one hand, and bar of chocolate in the other (plus my wife's phone, as she has just called down to me that she'd forgotten it and being seven months pregnant had no wish to traverse our stairwell more than is vital), plus the laundry basket (same reason), I am heading away up the stairs to cloud cookoo land.

Then up at five tomorrow for a 1.5 hour commute, a day writing more job descriptions, and then a meeting planning our organisational publications strategy for the coming year that will grind on inexorably and depressingly until around 9 p.m. at which point I shall make the 1.5 hour return journey, collapse in to bed again and go through the whole rigmarole again the next day.

Why? Oddly enough because I actually love my work and the people I work for and with. Insane, maybe, but I'd rather be doing something I love and that serves a greater end than fattening the wallets of a some already too rich share holders. Hey ho, but then I am just as sad old forty something idealist.

Bon soir, et hon y soit qui mal y pense.

Apologia pro Absentia

2006-12-13T09:56:00.000Z

One big problem with blogs is that you need to have something to write. The other is that you need to have the time to write them. I am never short of things to write (I do it almost daily for a living, and get me started and I can waffle for hours on the things that move me). Time is another matter.

It is said that we live in a resource rich, time poor culture here in the West. The other twist I have heard from some African colleagues is that "God gave the Africans the time, and the Europeans the watch". Either way, it seem bizzare that having so much in the way of technology to save us time, we contrive to do so much more that we actually have less time than ever.

Anyway, that is not the point of this blog. Others have written more eloquently on this matter, and my simple minded ponderings add nothing to the blogsphere on the subject. But it does challenge me that keeping a realistic diary of all that I do is harder than it seems. Two aborted tries so far, let's see how the third goes.

Today is big fun day for my family - my son's first pre-school nativity play (he's a shepherd, but seems less than excited about the enterprise, but then he is only three), my annual guest turn as Father Christmas at the parent and Toddler group run by my wife (and her last Parent & Toddler group before the birth of our third child), and at the same time I am working from home redrawing all the job descriptions and person specifications and job descriptions for my organisation. And I have just had to write two articles/editorials for our quarterly magazine and newsletter. As my wife is so exhausted from Christmas preparations, I am also probably doing tea tonight - and will Google up a good corned beef has recipe for tea later this morning.

So why am I blogging rather than working? Displacement behavior pure and simple - helps me relax the brain for a few minutes before diving back in. But it is fun being able to mix work, domestic life and this "third place" all together at once.

And while I am at it - work life balance - what a stupid idea? Is not work a part of life? Is my work life not real life? And do I not work even when I am not at work (housework, gardening, shopping, household maintenance, etc.)? Surely it is more about getting all the different facets of life in balance. That is probably the one thing all our technologies can do most to disrupt if used unwisely, and the most to improve if used well. Can someone please tell me how to do the latter?

Enough, allez, salut maintennant!

G'Day

2006-07-22T17:21:00.000Z

Well, earlier this month I had ten days in New South Wales, Australia at the International Christian Medical & Dental Association Conference - mostly in Sydney.

Having never been south of the equator before, this was a big adventure in some ways. However, it was meant to be work, and I did work pretty hard, but I also got two whole days to just explore Sydney before my work started.

The first thing that struck me was how English it felt - driving on the left, familiar road names and place names (there's a Hyde Park, Oxford Street, Croydon, Paddington, Lewisham - the list goes on). Then it began to feel less like London and more like Vancouver with its huge Chinese, Japanese and Korean communities (I was staying and working near China town though, which did slightly skew things). Overall, the familiar aspects soon blended with something indefinably Australian. Sydney is very much it's own city, not a copy of a European or North American city - but there are echoes of both influences. Except for the Opera House, which is beautiful and unique. I wished I could have afforded to go to a performance!

The main aim of being there was simply to network with other groups of Christian medical organisations involved in international health work. In particular I spent four days in the Blue Mountains (which, while being neither blue nor mountainous, are beautiful) at a conference centre called Meroo with a group of medics and clerics from all over the world as we looked a church led responses to HIV and AIDS around the world, and out which we have set up a new network (www.icmdahivintiative.org)

The hardest thing with these long haul trips is being away from family. Thankfully there were cybercafes aplenty across downtown Sydney, and when back in town for the main bulk of the conference we could MSN one another. However exciting and absorbing it is to work in such an environment, it is always good to get back home afterwards!

Welcome

2006-06-24T11:33:00.000Z

Welcome to the Spamhead Blog.

Having never blogged, not even successfully kept a handwritten diary before, this is quite a new experience. It will be interesting to see if I can keep this up. I never have any shortage of waffle to drivel on about, its more whether I can find the tie or mental energy to keep blogging!

So, we'll see how this evolves.

The top of the page tells you who I am and a bit of what I am about, so I will say no more for now. If no-pone else reads this, will not be unhappy,a s this is primarily for me to come back and review over the coming years.

Adieu