The audience

Channel Four is a mixture of the good and the bad: their programmes can be at both extremes. 

I saw the programme "The Audience" for the first time last night and unfortunately it was the last in the series. I usually find reality TV crass and shallow but this was worth watching.
The basic format is a central character has a dilemma in his/her life and a group of 50 strangers listen to the person and question him closely in order to understand his dilemma. They then offer insights from their experience and help him resolve the quandary. This is crowd sourcing at its most raw!
Actually this is no different to the listening and reflecting back techniques used by counsellors of all hues, religious or secular, to help people understand their own situation. A counsellor's aim is often to get a person to realise that they know much more about their lives than they think that they do.
It could have been crass, exploitative and superficial but I was surprised by the sensitivity and warmth of the crowd. Though there were fifty people in the crowd, only about a dozen asked questions and spoke to the camera.
Anthony, the guy with the dilemma, was obviously chosen because the producers realised that there were a whole load of unresolved baggage in his life. This came from the traumatic and tragic loss of both his parents and grandparents in childhood. In the presence of this large group of strangers he opened up about the past in ways that he had probably not done before. During the course of these conversations he became emotional and tearful several times. This was clearly cathartic for him. By the end of the programme his increased self understanding gave him the confidence to admit the dilemma was an excuse to run away from facing up to the tragic and traumatic events from many years before. He was now more accepting of the reality of his family history. He could now make decisions himself and plan his own future.
The transformation of a person from someone moulded by their circumstances to someone who is taking responsibility for their life is at the heart of the Christian gospel. It is the sort of transformation that I look for as a sign in the lives of mature Christians. It is good to see that in the strange secular world of reality television this truth is also recognised.
There is also something in this crowd sourcing model that can help better decision making in churches and other organisations. Often when an organisation is facing a dilemma they will bring in a consultant. The consultant will, in the same way as "The Audience", reflect back to them what they already know deep down but perhaps have never articulated. A skilled facilitator can frequently help groups increase their self understanding and from this informed position, dilemmas can be seen in a clearer light. 

 Image courtesy of FloatingLemons / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Living in uncertain times...

Was there ever a time that was not full of uncertainty and change? Life changes; people grow older; politicians come and go and the world develops. Nothing stays the same. “Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes”. (James 4:14.)

To live confidently as Christians in uncertain times we need to pay attention and to engage with the present moment. So much of our discomfort is related to what might happen later today, tomorrow or next year. All the "what if's." If we can step back and be curious rather than always imaging the worst, we give ourselves breathing space. We can also look back at the other challenging and uncertain times we have lived through and we can have confidence in our ability to survive this new crisis or possible crisis when and if it comes to pass. “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine”(Isaiah 43:1)

If we can be present to the joyful liberating limitless potential of every moment then we can live each moment. We can meet every moment with all of our senses and with the freshness and the newness of each second. If we can be present with every person we are with. If we can be aware in every place we stand of the wonder about us in our surroundings and in other people. If we do not blot out life by listening to our own music on earphones, cocooning ourselves in our own little shell. If we do not ignore all the people around us as we communicate with our friend by smart phone. We are living life to the full when we recognise Christ with us in every minute. If we can live life so fully, and experience the presence of God with us in every moment then we will have no fear of an uncertain future. We will be building a strong and resilient future in every minute of our present lives.

If we really trust God we realise that we are in this together. God cares for all people. God wants all to claim their identity and destiny as children of God. This involves trust as God does not force it on anyone. When we take hold of God by faith and begin to seek God’s way we see that we are in this together. So we become free to live in the present, to enjoy it and live one day at a time. We can neither predict nor control the future. But we can work with God who is beyond past, present, and future; therefore, we can focus on today – its problems and its blessings. We are able to be alive to what is now, trusting that the God who is with us in all of life holds us in an eternal embrace of presence and purpose. So we pray Reinhold Niebuhr's prayer written in 1943:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next. Amen.

(I wrote this article for a church magazine when the future pattern of ministry was unclear and this issue was causing some anxiety)

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Moral dilemma of the day....

Image courtesy ofTom Curtis/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

On the eight eleven train into Glasgow this morning a young woman came and sat next to me. The carriage was full. She was wearing headphones connected to her iphone to insulate her from possible interaction with other passengers.
When the ticket collector arrived she bought a return to the next stop. She then stayed on the train all the way into Glasgow. She had committed a crime - fare dodging - and I was probably the only one who was aware of it. Should I have done anything?
She had paid a fare but not the full amount required at that peak hour service. The train was packed with standing room only on the last stops into the city so the train company would have made plenty of money from the trip. 
The guard/ticket collector was nowhere in sight. There was probably nothing that I could have done. I didn't feel that it was my duty as a good citizen to confront her.(Or was that cowardice on my part?) 
Perhaps the young woman was an impoverished student who had spent the last of her student loan on her iphone and had to economise whenever she saw a chance? 
She did contribute something to the railway. This contrasts with my recent experience on buses when I have been one of the few passengers who have actually paid anything at all! Should I just mind my own business? Should I try not to be so aware of what other people are doing around me? There are of course far more serious crimes committed every day and some would argue that this was a victimless crime. But if the ethics of right and wrong were a simple binary question expecting a simple yes/no answer then there would be no work for lawyers!
Ethics always seem simple until you get into the real world!

Eco-Congregations Ireland hold their first conference

Ireland is a very green country but the idea of churches being interested in green issues is very new. When the committee of Eco-congregations Ireland decided to have a conference they though that it would attract 30-40 people. The Dromantine conference centre in beautiful rural County Down was booked in faith for a two day residential conference from 9.30am on Friday 14th to 5pm on Saturday 15th September 2012. The conference attracted almost 150 attendees and a block booking at a local hotel had to be made to accommodate them all! There seems to be an awakening spirit of environmental awareness in the Irish churches.

Dromantine is just a few miles outside Newry, and thus just north of the Border. The participants were attracted from all the major denominations and from all parts of Ireland, North and South, and was particularly successful in attracting religious sisters and brothers. (In fact I have never been with so many nuns at one time in all my life!) Many of these religious communities have run gardens and farms as part of their vocation for many years so Christian environmentalism was for them a natural progression.

As the representative of Eco Congregations Scotland I was made very welcome and I told about some of the green achievements of Scottish churches and parishes in a workshop. ECI is in a different place to ECS. It was set up by the inter-church committee for social affairs five years ago and to date has made five awards to churches and dioceses. It still operates as a sub committee of this body. In contrast ECS is a charity in its own right and has now made 100 awards.

A range of distinguished speakers opened up the whole area of green theology and ethics.

Prof David Howell (Exeter) asked if the bible is green and how environmentalism be drawn from the text. Prof Stephen Williams (UTC Belfast) examined what a theology of creation could look like. Ann Primavasi looked at the threat to the world from Militarism. Alastair McIntosh spoke about money, consumerism and society and Peter Owen-Jones spoke about the quest for well-being in the twenty-first century. There were also workshops on weather, economics, GM crops, earth spirituality, and practical advice on what churches can do.

I enjoyed my long weekend in Northern Ireland and the great craic of the many coffee time and after hours encounters. I even ended up late on Friday night singing Irish songs with a Presbyterian couple from Belfast and four lovely nuns from Kilarney!

How do we react when others disrespect our faith?

This week there have been riots across the Muslim world and in Pakistan people have been killed following the release of an American video disrespectful to the prophet Mohammad and the Islamic faith.

Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 But then I read the following Avaaz article reacting to the response of Newsweek (link). It seems much coverage lacks a sense of perspective and assumes all Muslims think in the same way. The report highlighted that: 

1. Participation in anti-film protests at between 0.001 and 0.007% of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims – a tiny fraction of those who marched for democracy in the Arab spring.

2. The vast majority of protesters have been peaceful. The breaches of foreign embassies were almost all organised or fuelled by elements of the Salafist movement, a radical Islamist group that is most concerned with undermining more popular moderate Islamist groups.

3. Top Libyan and US officials are divided over whether the killing of the US ambassador to Libya was likely pre-planned to coincide with 9/11, and therefore not connected to the film.

4. Apart from attacks by radical militant groups in Libya and Afghanistan, a survey of news reports on 20 September suggested that actual protesters had killed a total of zero people. The deaths cited by media were largely protesters killed by police.

5. Pretty much every major leader, Muslim and western, has condemned the film, and pretty much every leader, Muslim and western, has condemned any violence that might be committed in response.

6. The pope visited Lebanon at the height of the tension, and Hezbollah leaders attended his sermon, refrained from protesting the film until he left, and called for religious tolerance.

7. After the attack in Benghazi, ordinary people turned out on the streets in Benghazi and Tripoli with signs, many of them in English, apologising and saying the violence did not represent them or their religion.

We will all experience strong feelings when things we hold dear are treated by others in ways that are at varience with the reverence in which we traditionally hold them. 

I was at the musical drama "Tam O Shanter" last night on its tour of Scotland after its run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The play, about Burns and his poetry, showed the drunken, bawdy life of the society in which he lived.  Also several scenes parodied the strict authoritarian attitudes of the church at the time. These scenes served to highlight the hypocrisy of the parishioners who said amen to the preacher reading out comminations whilst at the same time acting in a debauched manner. A section of the bible was read out and a psalm sung as part of the performance.

But rather than wanting to burn the theatre down at such a use of the bible and church tradition I was challenged to think about the way that faith is portrayed. How different are the churches today compared to the strict Calvinism of the seventeenth century? I was challenged to think of how the church relates today to people on the fringe of society who are living lives fuelled and dominated by alcohol. And I started to wonder how the church can make its message for the world clear as a positive message about life and all its fullness. 

From the statistics above it would seem that the majority of Muslims in the world are trying to do exactly the same.

A biblical theology of creation for today

Some notes made at a lecture by Prof Stephen Williams of UTC Belfast at the Eco-congregations Ireland conference September 2012)

Before the twentieth century creation and creator were seen as completely separate. However since the beginning of the twentieth century the distinction has become less absolute and belief of all things existing in God has become widely held. (A belief often called panentheism) The theology of creation has been extended with new insights from eco-feminism and other ideas in the second half of the twentieth century.

 (Image courtesy of pixomar / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

A biblical theology will be based on the following principles:
1. creation is good which in this context means fit for purpose
2. the biblical command to have dominion will be taken to mean care
3. the covenant of Noah between God and all creation is foundational
4. all creation is sustained by God's providence
5. eschatalogical peace is holistic rather than destructive

Darwinianism ( and other theories of evolution) have problems with these principles.
The problem posed by Darwinianism is that the evolution of the world by natural selection reveals a world of waste, cruelty and meaninglessness. It will be very difficult for anyone who takes that view of the cosmos to believe in a benevolent creator.

There are five responses to that challenge:

1. evil is inexplicable - a mystery - for example from Genesis 3 the story of the serpent makes you ponder on how one of God's good creatures can be evil
2. there is a connection between moral evil (what people do) and natural evil ( earthquakes floods etc) - evil can be seen to come from that which is good
3. We have a two sided universe and the so called natural evils are not evident. So for example volcanoes are necessary and morally neutral in themselves
4. We live in an interconnected universe - you can't have the good without the evil and some evil is just shadow possibility of what is not good
 5. Possibility of meaninglessness - Leviticus states that everything is fleeting vanity - and it is not possible from the cosmos to work out the meaning of the word

Work for creation is work of love not work of HOPE
HOPE in the bible is attached to God's promises

There are many things that we cannot understand and theology cannot comprehend everything. In the Jewish traditions paradox was important as it shows us the nature of reality cannot be comprehended  because of its great depths.

Is the bible green?

Some notes from a presentation by Prof David G Horrell (Exeter University) at the Eco-congregations Ireland conference September 2012...

The bible is not a simple green book. There is a green bible published (a version of the NRSV) in which all the parts that have positive things to say about the environment are highlighted. But there are also many negative aspects in the bible that cannot be ignored.

Some of the problems with the Bible as a green text are:

• In Genesis 1 the word subdue used in reference to the human relationship to the earth can be interpreted in terms of stewardship but has often been used to justify exploitation. In 1967 Lynn White published a paper claiming that the command to subdue the earth was at the heart of all the environmental problems of the world because the western Judeo Christian ethic originating from this text had dominated the world.
• The end times such as the apocalypse in Mark or 2 Peter indicate that Christians should be doing whatever they can to hasten the end of the world! This will make people bad stewards of the earth. However the ideas of destruction can be interpreted as ideas of transformation and renewal of the new heaven and the new earth

There are however numerous good texts from an environmental point of view

• Genesis 1.31  Goodness of the earth emphasised in every stage of the creation story
• Genesis 9  Noah's covenant is with the whole earth
• Psalms  (104 and 148 :3-10) hymns of praise of all creation
• Job ch 38-41 - humanity is not seen as the centre of all that exists as God asks "Who do you think you are?"
• Prophetic visions of future peace such as in Isaiah 11:6-9 where the lion and the lamb lie in peace. Here peace goes beyond the human world to encompass all creation
• In Matthew 6  v 26-39 Jesus outlines God's care for creation (but also says God loves people more!)
• Romans 8  outlines God's saving purpose for all creation
• Colossians 1 is a vision of all things being reconciled and saved
• The vision in Revelation 21.5 is ambiguous and could be good or bad from an environmental point of view.

The bible is not a simple green Christian text book but it contains within it great potential for the green reconfiguration of Christian theology.

Image courtesy of Arvind Balaraman / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

One sentence that says so much...

I was on a journey recently and to help the time pass on trains, buses and ferries I read Mark Twain's classic "Huckleberry Finn". I have known about the book since I was in primary school but had never before got round to reading it.

To read "Huckleberry Finn" in the era of a black president of the USA was a strangely disconcerting experience as I found this relatively recent history more than a little alarming. In those days it would seem that black people were not only slaves but not even regarded as human beings. They were property and only valued for their utility.

The story is about Huckleberry Finn, a young lad, probably aged about thirteen who lives on his wits on the fringe of society and his view of the world was at best unconventional. The portrait of the southern states of the USA was also very revealing. It is set in the mid-nineteenth century and black people are referred to as niggers throughout. Slavery was still normative then. Huck sometimes accepts that his companion Jim, a runaway slave, has feelings as he has, and at other times he regards him as one might regard a pet dog. 

The one extract that I remember and will stay with me for a long time exemplifies the attitudes of the time. It was a conversation  between Huck and Mrs Phelps when he was explaining his later than expected arrival by steam boat. The passage went like this

...We blowed out a cylinder-head"
"Good gracious! Was anybody hurt?"
"No mam. Killed a nigger."
"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt..."

What more can you say. 
With such attitudes only one hundred and fifty years ago, it becomes easier to understand contemporary American racial tensions.

Away with the Fairies

When you mention the literary genre fantasy fiction, you most usually think of dragons and dungeons in the neo-Gothic settings of other worlds. The novel "Some Kind of Fairy Tale" by  Graham Joyce is fantasy set in contemporary England describing the interface between the real world and the fairy realm. (Actually he never uses the word Fairy as he says they don't like this name!)

The plot centres on a young woman, Tara, who disappears in some enchanted woods at the age of 16 and then returns to her parents house twenty years later, not seeming to have aged and swearing she has been away only for six months. She claims to have been living with the fairies in a parallel universe. Tara's brother, parents, and teenage sweetheart find it difficult to accepting her return and the explanation of events she gives. It is this collision of belief and unbelief that drives the plot forward. It is basically a novel that explores themes of love and loss. The descriptions of the land where Tara went are beautifully evocative and the description of the dysfunctional relationships between Tara and her family, and Richie - the ex-boyfriend - are subtly nuanced and well written.

`Some Kind of Fairy Tale' is a contemporary take on the classic `abducted by fairies' tale and Joyce admits that he was inspired and influenced by many such stories from the past. Joyce creates a recognisable, comfortable middle class semi-rural suburbia then over paints this scene with shades of unreality. His fairies are not the sentimental version: they are not tiny and they don't have wings and wear pretty little dresses. They are not evil but dark and sinister with a very different morality and code of behaviour. It is a dark Faerie-land which is both a menacing and yet also a very beautiful place. 
The book occupies the hinterland between psychology and fantasy. Joyce's fiction is noted for its juxtaposition of the real and unreal, with an element of ambiguity regarding whether the supernatural element is truly supernatural or is in fact a metaphor, or psychological manifestation. Alongside the supernatural element of this story we are offered alternative explanations, possibilities and reactions through the narratives of the different characters. Tara tells her story to a psychiatrist and to her sister in law, a psychologist, and they both make their own diagnosis. There is much scepticism about Tara's story, and we see the attempts to test and disprove her account.

I enjoyed the book and found the use of many narrators to tell the story a masterful device to show that every story is seen differently through the eyes and experiences of each unique individual.

Click here to buy this book

 Image courtesy of dan/ FreeDigitalPhotos.net