Jameswoodward’s Weblog

I travelled down from Windsor to London yesterday to share in a conference run by the Church Army and the Leveson Centre to promote our publication A Mission Shaped Church for Older People at St Michaels Chester Square.

(available from the Leveson Centre – www.levesoncentre.org.uk)

This event was specifically intended for those with a passion for mission to this age group (not only pastoral care) and those interested in the different dynamics of mission and fresh expression of church with the younger old and active retired as well as the elderly frail. the programme was well organised with plenty of time  for pooling ideas, networking with other practitioners and grappling together with the challenging questions that mission in these contexts raises.

The energy and passion of the group were very inspiring as was Mark Russells imput. It was good to bump into an old friend who I hadnt seen since 1982 – and kindly told me that I didnt look that different ( does that mean that I am ageing well??!!) I was also glad to catch up with Jen Jones the ever willing and faithful parish secretary from my old parish of Temple Balsall. Bishop Graham Cray ended the conference with an excellent reflection

Here is a short extract from my lecture:

Perhaps one of the reasons why I continue to be so intrigued by the whole agenda of age and ageing is that it demands that we ask so many fundamental theological questions about human nature, the nature of life itself, what it might mean to survive and what the future holds for us in terms of hope and purpose. What kind of theological questions should we ask?

The profit motive, the mass media’s love affair with the new, and the anxiety provoked by growing old in a youth obsessed culture has led millions to surrender their faces to the war on wrinkles.  We are being asked to unmake what we have spent a life time making.  What do we receive in return for this sacrifice?  Not youth.  Instead we are given, at best, the facsimile of youth.  Expressionless, passion, and history are pillages in the pursuit of youth’s fresh blankness.  People fear wrinkles because of what they seem to say about us.  They are the sum of all our days we have lived and will never live again.  They tell us our story even when we do not want that story told.  Even the attempt to raise them becomes part of what is written on our faces.  We – the doers, the movers, the shakers, the achievers, the rocks of our families and communities – are being written upon.  It shocks us to see ourselves, for the first time as paper and not the pen we imagine ourselves to be.  Wrinkles are painless and harmless.  They are us and we are them.What would it be like to live in a society that adored wrinkles?  The idea may seem laughable at first, but for millennia, living to a ripe old age was an exceptional achievement and was often recognised as such by society.  All this self induced anguish might serve some purpose if it prodded us towards a re-examination of our longevity.  Wrinkles give us a way to begin such a conversation, but it is just a start.  Grey hair and facial lines are only the first signs of something much more menacing.  Finding a new wrinkle on wrinkles is one thing; plumbing the true nature of our longevity present a much more exciting and demanding challenge.

This playing around with words asks us to imagine growing into an old age defined by full development, maturity, awareness readiness and advancement – this really would be an opportune time.  Instead we are mired in a highly negative view of ageing that envisions a one-way trip down the long road towards disease, dementia, disability and death.  Peaches but ripen, but human beings, it seems, cannot.  Though we are all aware that of the real and often unpleasant changes that come with advancing years, we lack a concept that fully recognises the positive elements of ageing.  It is as if our longevity consists solely of deep, forbidding shadows.  This emphasis is perhaps the most damaging consequence of contemporary society’s glorification of youth.  Those who seek a more complete understanding of longevity, an understanding capable of embracing both light and shadow, conduct their search within a culture that rarely misses an opportunity to emphasise the negative aspect of ageing.  The positive dimensions of our longevity remain, for now, present but unseen.

The decline that accompanies ageing is real and important (it helps explain why we die when we get old) but it is much less than the whole story.  The danger is that we allow a thoughtless acceptance of what seems obvious to obscure deeper, more meaningful insights into age and ageing.  Even though more than half of the normal human life span is spent ageing, we understand very little about the potential of the ageing process.  The powers of old age remain too often devalued or outright hidden from us.

How do you feel about your wrinkles?

Precious in thy sight, O Lord, is the death of thy saints, whose faithful witness, by thy providence, hath its great reward: We give thee thanks for thy martyrs James Hannington and his companions, who purchased with their blood a road unto Uganda for the proclamation of the Gospel; and we pray that with them we also may obtain the crown of righteousness which is laid up for all who love the appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. 

Among the new nations of Africa, Uganda is the most predominantly Christian. Mission work began there in the 1870’s with the favor of King Mutesa, who died in 1884. However, his son and successor, King Mwanga, opposed all foreign presence, including the missions.

James Hannington, born 1847, was sent out from England in 1884 by the Anglican Church as missionary Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa. As he was travelling toward Uganda, he was apprehended by emissaries of King Mwanga. He and his companions were brutally treated and, a week later, 29 October 1885, most of them were put to death. Hannington’s last words were: “Go tell your master that I have purchased the road to Uganda with my blood.”

The first native martyr was the Roman Catholic Joseph Mkasa Balikuddembe, who was beheaded after having rebuked the king for his debauchery and for the murder of Bishop Hannington. On 3 June 1886, a group of 32 men and boys, 22 Roman Catholic and 10 Anglican, were burned at the stake. Most of them were young pages in Mwanga’s household, from their head-man, Charles Lwanga, to the thirteen-year-old Kizito, who went to his death “laughing and chattering.” These and many other Ugandan Christians suffered for their faith then and in the next few years.

In 1977, the Anglican Archbishop Janani Luwum and many other Christians suffered death for their faith under the tyrant Idi Amin.

Thanks largely to their common heritage of suffering for their Master, Christians of various communions in Uganda have always been on excellent terms.

British pomp and pageantry was on full display today as the Queen welcomed the Indian president toWinsor Castle today.

Pratibha Patil – India’s first female president – was greeted by the Monarch and Duke of Edinburgh on a royal dais in the centre of the Berkshire town as a thunderous royal salute was fired nearby by the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery.

The Asian leader and her husband Devisingh Ransingh Shekhawat had travelled from London in a fleet of cars with the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall.

After the greeting the party paused on the dais for a few moments for the Indian national anthem to be played before leaving for Windsor Castle where the president and her partner will stay as guests of the Queen.

The royal party travelled through the streets of Windsor in horse drawn carriages with the Household Cavalry in their shining breast plates and plumed helmets providing a Sovereign’s Escort.

The flag of India and Britain’s Union flag were hung from a succession of lamp posts in the town and some of the route was lined by guardsmen, in their scarlet tunics and bearskins, from the Grenadier, Scots, Irish and Coldstream regiments.

A guard of honour made up of the 1st Battalion Irish Guards was waiting in the castle’s quadrangle to be inspected by the India head of state when she arrived.

Philip motioned to the president to step forward and examine the soldiers and the 88-year-old Duke took the elbow of the 75-year-old stateswoman to help her from the dais where they had been standing.

The diminutive Asian leader, who wore a sari and cream coloured overcoat, was dwarfed by the guardsmen as she inspected the troops lined up in two rows.

After the ceremony the Queen escorted her guests inside the castle for a private lunch which will be followed later this evening by a lavish white-tie banquet.

self-blessing

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

From Galway Kinnell, St Francis and the sow.

King of the southern Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex and one of the outstanding figures of English history, as much for his social and educational reforms as for his military successes against the Danes. He is the only English monarch known as ‘the Great’.

Alfred was born at Wantage in Oxfordshire in 849, fourth or fifth son of Aethelwulf, king of the West Saxons. Following the wishes of their father, the sons succeeded to the kingship in turn. At a time when the country was under threat from Danish raids, this was aimed at preventing a child inheriting the throne with the related weaknesses in leadership. In 870 the Danes attacked the only remaining independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Wessex, whose forces were commanded by Alfred’s older brother, King Aethelred and Alfred himself.

In 871, Alfred defeated the Danes at the Battle of Ashdown in Berkshire. The following year, he succeeded his brother as king. Despite his success at Ashdown, the Danes continued to devastate Wessex and Alfred was forced to withdraw to the Somerset marshes, where he continued guerrilla warfare against his enemies. In 878, he again defeated the Danes in the Battle of Edington. They made peace and Guthrum, their king, was baptised with Alfred as his sponsor. In 886, Alfred negotiated a treaty with the Danes. England was divided, with the north and the east (between the Rivers Thames and Tees) declared to be Danish territory – later known as the ‘Danelaw’. Alfred therefore gained control of areas of West Mercia and Kent which had been beyond the boundaries of Wessex.

Alfred built up the defences of his kingdom to ensure that it was not threatened by the Danes again. He reorganised his army and built a series of well-defended settlements across southern England. He also established a navy for use against the Danish raiders who continued to harass the coast.

As an administrator Alfred advocated justice and order and established a code of laws and a reformed coinage. He had a strong belief in the importance of education and learnt Latin in his late thirties. He then arranged, and himself took part in, the translation of books from Latin to Anglo-Saxon.

By the 890s, Alfred’s charters and coinage were referring to him as ‘king of the English’. He died in October 899 and was buried at his capital city of Winchester

The disappearance of the Bible from European culture is self evident: once it was part of the intellectual and imaginative make up of poets, novelists and artists. Even if only a few knew the original languages in which the Bible was written, there was for the English speaking community the King James’ Bible – ‘That old tongue’ with its ‘clang and fervour’. Even that has disappeared: our culture today does not value reading, let alone reading books. I remember being taken to task by a fellow cleric in my last deanery. I arrived early for a meeting and settled into a book. My colleague took one look at my concentration and said – ‘what good do you think that will do you?’ I didn’t have the courage to reply honestly!

Sunday by Sunday you come to this place and listen to the Bible being read aloud. Day by day the clergy read and listen to large portions of this text being read. We preachers are required to expound the text. And different brands of Christians – conservative, liberal, radical – all appeal to the Bible to legitimise their attitudes, opinions and sometimes plain prejudice. But in spite of all this deference to the Bible, my experience adds up to this – outside the circle of experts there is considerable confusion and widespread ignorance. We are confused about what these texts mean and we continue to argue fervently about what constitutes the truth.

I want to share with you this morning on this Bible Sunday some reflections about the Bible as I look back over using it as a priest- and look forward to the necessity to continuing to attend to its texts and meanings for us.

The first thing I have had to learn is to bring my concerns, preoccupations and questions to the text, as clearly and consciously as possible. We cannot abandon our values as we read. This throws out the so called objectivity and neutrality of the scholar,; scholarship is not neutral; it has its own value system, exalting the rational over the emotional, the intellect over the imagination – its own political values of an essentially conservative nature, socialising students into its own methods and preoccupations, and until recently this was the sole preserve of white middle class males. 

Reading the Bible has to happen in such a way that the text is allowed to breathe and speak. Reading the Bible is tough and delicate – bringing together the readers passion and the strangeness of the text; and there always has to be enough room for the text to address the reader. We need to open ourselves up to the texts challenge and wrestle  with the truth not mould it into our comfort zone. 

Reading the Bible needs to be preceded by a sense of anticipation, that it will yield some hope and truth.

And in this sense we need some curiosity, some passion and desire to learn more about these books and their stories and ideas. We will need to develop a sharp, historical imagination so that we can know the ancient world and how this world has shaped the texts, its preoccupations and concerns. Rumours about the strange book will keep its memory and transforming power alive in the study and the life of the Church. The Bible can help safeguard us against making Christ in our own image – there are too many parts of us and the Church that ignore the texts. We should allow the Bible to alert us to our own attitudes to slavery, xenophobia, misogyny.  As a Christian we should seek to find within the Bible a sense of a living word that is from God and of God. In this I have discovered what a dangerous book the Bible is. It threatens organised religion, it holds up a mirror to the endless capacity of us all to be greedy. It reminds us of the dignity of the human being, especially the poorest. The Bible offers us extraordinary pictures of the possibilities and hopes of a new world – the Kingdom of God.

In all this there is a density and opacity – a deep mystery in which the writers share a sense of the transcending God disclosed among the vagaries and unpredictable areas of our living. This is the word of God – not a rule book of instructions but the primary source for feeding our imagination for  a new a transformed world.

 Let us Pray: 

 May your word be a lantern to our feet
and a light upon our path
that we may behold your coming among us.

I am, of course, not alone in feeling dismayed by the recent announcement by our sister church, Rome, about the deal to offer Anglican a way into a move to Rome. It feels like an act of aggression at worst – at best, a rather predatory move. It leaves me with al kinds of questions:

1. Will Anglicans need to be re ordained?
2. Why wasnt Canterbury consulted?
3. Where does this leave the mechanisms of ecuemnical partnership and dialogue?
4. What will it mean for Anglicans to maintain their distinctive indentity within the Roman Catholic Church?
5. Why didnt the Archbishop voice soem of his concerns?

and so the list may go on……

Here is an excellent reflection for this weeks Guardian:

It is not an act of aggression,” the Archbishop of Canterbury insisted as the Vatican’s metaphorical tanks drew up outside Lambeth Palace on Tuesday. Not even his admirers quite believed him, and few saw Pope Benedict’s back-channel deal with Anglo-Catholics opposed to women bishops as “not a vote of no confidence”. It looked much more as if the Pope had launched a small craft to ferry the disaffected back across the Tiber, a move to asset-strip the Anglican communion of those bits the Vatican might find useful. It was an uncompromising recognition of the fissiparous state of Anglicanism and the failure of Rowan Williams’ long, hard struggle to hold it together.

Lambeth rightly insisted yesterday that until the publication in February of the terms of the dispensation by which Anglican priests – and perhaps their congregations too – can be admitted to Rome while retaining much of their own liturgy, it is impossible to predict what its impact will be. They also have a case when they point to the wild predictions of mass migration to Roman Catholicism after women were first ordained in the Church of England 15 years ago.

In the event, perhaps a total of 400 Anglican priests either converted, or left the church altogether, joined by Ann Widdecombe and John Gummer. Perhaps yesterday’s reports of 50 bishops leaving, taking with them congregations in the thousands, are similarly overheated. Lambeth was on dodgier ground trying to explain why the Vatican should appear to ride roughshod over 40 years of ecumenical work, and why it was given only a fortnight’s notice, leaving a visibly uncertain Archbishop of Canterbury to lean on the protection of the Archbishop of Westminster at their joint press conference.

Pope Benedict’s Vatican is not diplomatically sure-footed, as the recent decision to readmit a bishop with a record as a Holocaust denier shows. The Pope is driven by an urgent search for unity against liberalism and the rapid rise of secularism. But preserving space for faith is one of Rowan Williams’ central concerns, too. It lies behind the thoughtful and well-received speeches he has made on the economic crisis and the environment, as he tries to show Anglicanism’s potential to contribute to public debate. Now the Vatican has shaken the ground beneath him, and by diminishing him risks diminishing his power to persuade. But perhaps it will also liberate him a little. His fiercest critics, the most bitter opponents of women bishops and gay priests, are not the Anglo-Catholics but the evangelicals. If the Pope’s wooing were successful, the evangelicals would be on their own in their disaffection. And they have nowhere to go.

Guardian Editorial 22 October 2009

I have always felt a certain amount of ambivalence towards lawyers – based on experience and a little envy at the sheer injustice of a society that pays them so much for their work!

Imagine then the circumstances whereby I choose to buy a lawyers memoirs! Putting money in the direction where none is needed! This lawyer is perhaps an exception that disproves many of my prejudices?

Michael Mansfield QC – a radical, outspoken and risky sort of man who has taken on many cases and causes.

This time he’s written a memoir, a “collage of recollections and reminiscences” where almost every case (chosen, he writes, to highlight a particular legal issue), seems to follow a similar arc: crime, miscarriage of justice/cover-up/whitewash, then Mansfield taking on the establishment, generally in the form of the police, but also forensic scientists, intelligence officers. 

It is a wonderful read. I was especially warmed by his defence of the miners caught up in the long and bitter disputes of the mid 1980’s – a dispute that affected my own family profoundly.

Mansfield is a big man, and, at 67, beginning, like a mountain that has suffered a recent landslide, or a balloon half-filled with sand, to succumb to gravity.  Often called a champagne socialist ( and what is wrong with that I ask?) he was roundly mocked for fighting Mohamed Al Fayed’s corner in the Princess Diana inquest; look at the great left-wing crusader went the line, shilling for cash (not that there wasn’t plenty of that, at £575 an hour). Perhaps, but apart from the implicit racism of some of the coverage, which would have denied Al Fayed a fair hearing  was to misunderstand the nature of Mansfield’s politics, which, he readily admits, never involved bringing a pre-existing belief system to bear on the world. “Some people think that I’ve got this Marxism running through the body, a propagandist, or whatever they think I am – in fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth.”

His politics is, rather, reactive and incidental, shaped piecemeal by each successive case he has taken on. “People have said to me, you know, where are you in all this. And from time to time I’ve made some rather glib comments like, ‘Well, I don’t know where I am, because actually I’m more interested in where you are.’ And then you identify, or not, with that position, and then articulate or express it or represent it or whatever – and then when the next one is added and added, and they’re all locked into that situation.” Which would easily cast him as a kind of political mercenary – the job of a barrister, after all, is to take on each case and fight it, regardless.

I challenge anybody not to enjoy this book and have their horzons either changed or brosdened by the quality of the prose. Put it on your Christmas list…

I am busy at the moment beginning to prepare to do some scoping for a new book on theological reflection – a movement away from some of my usual topics !

Here is a starter thought:

‘Christians are not reticent about expressing their opinions such matters, and one countless others. In doing so they are assessing the adequacy of the correlated interpretations of Christian faith that they encounter. But if assessments are to be made on more than ad hoc, ill-informed, and inconsistent basis, all Christian theologians need to give thought to the standard of judgment that they apply. They need to fashion their theology as carefully as the stonemason crafted a medieval cathedral, or a woodworker crafts a fine cabinet, or a weaver crafts a fine piece of cloth. Their embedded theology and their readings and conversations with others are the raw material they work with; native intelligence and sensitivity are their talent. But it takes skill, practiced and honed over time, to make useful and adequate theology.’

How to Think Theologically  by Howard W. Stone and James O. Duke

Fortress Press 1996 ( page 37)

Now there is food for thought!