Where are all the Characters?

What has happened to the characters in politics - and for that matter in other spheres of life?  When I were a lad (strains of the New World Symphony please) there were characters in politics - people who disagreed with the party leader, but were still elected election after election.  Similarly in business, when I started there there were eccentrics and if you wanted cast iron eccentrics what better place to look than the church!

Nowadays eccentricity seems to have gone out of fashion.  Politicians have no hinterland, as Denis Healey called it, and appear to be scared to offend the hierarchy for fear of rejection.  In business putting the hours in and avoiding making a mistake appears to count for more than having good ideas and in the church there are still some eccentrics around - but we seem to be trying to catch up.  Common Tenure appears to be making the church more like business and will I suspect lead to less eccentricity.

Before I get carried away, all was not well in the old day.  The selection criteria in all of my examples appeared to be who you knew rather than anything objective and prejudice and "unfair" behaviour abounded. But we do seem to have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our search for the "safe" option.  I wonder whether today Churchill, John Harvey Jones or David Jenkins would have been put into post.

Does E-campaigning work?

I have been campaigning by email for a good few years now - but does it work?

It was the Principal of my course who encouraged us to join various campaigns and I got the taste for it and joined some more!  I am not even sure these days how many groups I am joined up with, but at least these:

• Christian Aid
• Avaaz
• Jubilee Debt Campaign

And I have recently started freelancing and have just got a response from the Home Office on these matters.

But does it work?  I think that on the margins it does.  For example although my MP wrote to me explaining why she did not support the change in the law on Vulture Funds yesterday I got an email from George Osbourne (not just me you understand) explaining how the Tories had insisted that this bill be passed before the election - that must have upset my Tory MP!

It is very easy - particularly after the first time - I receive an email with a summary of the issue, click through to the appropriate web page where I enter my email address (some also require postal address) and if I don't want to alter the standard message that is it.

There are times when I don't agree with the campaign - or am not sure enough to want to campaign for it, for example - and that is fine - I just ignore the email.

Why don't you give it a go?

Without a Vision the people perish?

The Naked Pastor has written about vision, and how he sees no need for one.  And I have argued with him!  A couple of days ago he resigned from his post and among the posts he made he included this:

One of the most deadly influences on a community is agenda. In my opinion, it should be enough to gather together to study the bible, pray, worship and fellowship.

and suddenly I got it.  Now, I might argue that what he describes is a vision, but I can see his point about agenda - as soon as someone decides what it is that the church is going to "do" there is risk of division.  Perhaps I am misreading his intention, but if someone is deciding these things, rather than releasing individuals to follow their passions, then at that point we are in trouble.

My Bishop has recently written about dismounting a dead horse - and so often in Churches we see activities continuing because no one is prepared to stop them.  I remember some essay writing advice:

you have to be prepared to murder your babies

and I think that the same applies to everything that a church is doing.

That said I still think that there is a place for vision in church - just not that autocratic kind.

The Invention of Lying

I watched this the other day and it set me thinking about the value of lying.  The small white lies which grease the wheels of social intercourse.  Where do they fit in the overall scheme of things?  I found myself uncomfortable watching the film - was this level of honesty really good?  It worked in the film as everyone had grown up that way, but would it work in today's world where we expect a degree of "diplomacy"?

Of course the approach that we take in this world leaves us open to doubt - what does this person mean?  Do they really like me?  - but could we really live in a world where there was certainty - they hate me, they don't like my dress sense.  There is a small hint of this in the film when his secretary says to him "I loathed almost every minute that I worked for you" - suggesting that perhaps she hadn't been wholly truthful all that time.

However, what we can learn from the film is the ability not to worry about what others think and to deal with them politely, but as we want.  Brian Thorne spoke at our church recently and started by thanking people for their warm welcome, and saying that he hoped it would be as warm at the end, but if it wasn't it wasn't his responsibility - a little counselling joke - but one which is worth remembering.

Am I adequate?

One of the problems with being a priest is that I (and I suspect many others) keep thinking that others are being a priest so much better than I am.  There are said to be many workaholic priests (why can I never find the references when I want them?) - and in any gathering the chances are that they are there - after all, if they weren't workaholic they would be taking time off wouldn't they?

The Vernacular Curate wrote about this in another way and soon after I read his blog the following quote appeared in my in box:

We tend to manage life more than just live it. We are all over-stimulated and drowning in options. We are trained to be managers, to organize life, to make things happen. This is what is built into our culture, and probably into human nature. It is not all bad, but if you transfer that to the spiritual life, it is always heresy. It doesn’t work. It is not gospel. We might be productive and popular, but we will not be spiritually fertile or free.  Richard Rohr

My spiritual director quoted Monica Furlong to me:

I am clear about what I want from the clergy. I want them to be people who dare because they are secure enough in the value of what they are doing, to have time to read, to sit and think, and who face the emptiness and possible depression which often attack people when they do not keep the surface of their mind occupied ... I want them to be people who can sit still without feeling guilty, and from whom I can learn some kind of tranquility in a society which has almost lost the art.  Quoted by Gloucester Diocese

 This resonates with me - but it is so hard to achieve - even more so when colleagues are rushing around "achieving" so much.

And yet one of the things that I have valued about my curacy has been precisely the time to read and to sit and think and to face up to who and what I really am.

Empathy and Bullying

What is it that allows Social Media to be used for bullying?  I have argued that Social Media is not a bad thing, and I stick to that.  However, I have been thinking more about the stories that I posted on Good Friday.  One factor which I believe has to be there is a lack of empathy.  If the persecutors and those who supported them had empathy they surely would not be able to do this unless there were some other factor.  That other factor might be peer pressure - but why does this only ever seem to be present in unpleasant cases?  Where is the peer pressure to do something good?

Is there something about our current society which is decreasing the amount of empathy about?  Whilst I have not been one for censorship I do wonder whether violent video games numb the senses - but we also spend an increasing amount of time alone - how are we going to learn empathy if we do not spend time with other people finding out how they actually feel?

Similarly I hadn't realised that I was anti advertising, but this is the second post (first one here) in which I question the impact that the advertising driven consumerism has on us.  It is all about ME!  And who cares about anyone else.

I am starting to sound like Mary Whitehouse, someone I thought was a terrible advert for Christianity when I was younger.  What might perhaps will stop me falling too far in that direction is that I don't think censorship is the answer.  If Jesus came to bring life in all its fullness then perhaps the best way to deal with this is to model something better - after all, I am not convinced that the people doing these things are happy.

Diary of a City Priest

I bought this book off the back of reading about it in John D Caputo's  What Would Jesus Deconstruct? (story here) and it has been a delight.  It is the diary of a Catholic Priest who works in the dodgy end of Philadelphia and is a record of his reflections as he ministers in a parish with very few Catholics, but significant social need.  He questions how he spends his time, what the hierarchy of the church are about, why he has such a bad temper, why some of his fellow priests have left the priesthood and he hasn't.  I felt that it was a warts and all view of what being a Catholic priest in that place was like, but it also gave an insight about the internal ponderings and worries of priest any time any place anywhere.

Whilst not every priest will have the issues to deal with that he does, I believe that the internal dialogues that he has are worth reading for those training for the priesthood, and for those who don't want to maintain the fiction that priests are perfect christians!  And at the time I posted it can be got very cheaply!