maggi dawn

Management speak and the church

I was completely heartened to read the BBC's article on the ridiculous management jargon that infects the language all over the place. Fifty people tell of the meaningless phrases they hate the most. How very cheering to discover that I am not alone in hating this meaningless drivel. Happily, I work in an environment where very few people talk this way; most of them speak fairly normal English and a lot of theme are even rather eloquent. But it seems you can't escape management-speak even if you don't work in an office.

Paul Roberts writes about how it has dribbled its way into the language of the Church. Perceptive as ever, he observes that "The middle-manager, in order not to go insane, has to invent a kind of linguistic universe where the excitement of other worlds inhabits his or her own. This results in the large-scale importing of metaphors from other contexts which then are over-used, largely because they make the banality seem somehow more imaginative and glamorous."

Worrying, then that business-speke has infected Church language. Why do we need it? Is Church so unimaginative and unglamorous that we need to compare it to a football game to make it sexy?

Paul notes that business-speke can convert mission into a management exercise where "the Lord is the spreadsheet". I've heard worship leaders call their congregations to "push the envelope" in their worship, and one memorable description of worship as "uniquely a bottom-up actvity". It inspired tears of mirth, it didn't really inspire worship. 

Language, as any good Wittgensteinian knows, doesn't just describe what's there, in the end it defines it. If we use idiotic management speke to describe our theology, in the end our theology will become idiotic middle management mumbo-jumbo.

Me? I hate being told to "step up to the plate". Someone I know* uses business-speke all the time, not just at work but at home, among friends, in the pub, at the PCC. Last time he said I should "step up to the plate", I asked, What plate is that then? Silver plate? Dinner plate? Do we know what plate we are talking about here? The plate, in fact, is where you stand to face the ball in a baseball game. But we don't play baseball in England. In this cricket-playing nation, it might at least make more sense to say "going in to bat". But in any case, when misapplied sporting metaphors designed to give meaning to the meaningless creep from the office into everyday language, you have to wonder whether people simply have nothing to say any more. It reminds me of Thoreau saying that people pushed for communication technology, without ever asking whether the people involved - Maine and Texas, for instance - had anything to say to each other.

* said friend, BTW, allowed me to write this, although did point out that I was "pushing the envelope" when it came to friendship...

If everything was made by Microsoft...

Go here for 17 more very funny runners up

 
by tayser

Is my faith real?

Regular readers here will know that I post from time to time about doubt - how healthy it is to express and explore doubt, how it is an essential part of a growing faith.

One of the things that is particularly difficult for leaders in Christian communities is to get enough space to let doubt work its way through. In fact, it's sometimes the simbple fact of being a leader that can create some of the doubts. If you are expected to show up every week to worship, often in a leading role, and regularly to have something encouraging to say to others, the point can come when you wonder whether it's "real" for you, or whether you do this because you always have. It's not unique to those who are in paid ministry. Simply having a responsibility and a commitment to a Church can create this situation. It takes some creativity and determination to keep your faith flexible and alive, so that you don't realise too late that it has hardened and ossified into something that doesn't feed your soul any longer. 

Real Live Preacher writes:

"...there is a certain emotional burden that comes with being the pastor. I’m the one you know will always be there. I’m the one who arrives early to open the doors and stays late to lock them. And I’m the one who will always always always have something to say on Sundays. I can’t speak for other ministers, but I’ve lost touch with how I feel because how I feel doesn’t really matter. I’m paid to be there on Sundays, so I will be there.

I’m a professional Christian. That sounds crass, but I am. I try to keep my own personal devotion and spiritual practice alive, but there is always that obligation resting heavily on my shoulders. Am I a part of the community, or am I an employee of the community? That’s a real question that all ministers should ask themselves, in my opinion."

Visual Arts at Greenbelt Festival

There are a hundred reasons to go to Greenbelt Festival. Music and talks/seminars are perhaps the most well known features of the Festival, but there's more, much more... theatre, community, development, poetry, literature... Visual Arts is an area that has developed in exciting ways at the Festival over the last few years. You could spend the entire weekend just doing this:

The Sunday Tree - part 2

Yesterday's post - a change proposal about cancelling the Sunday service - had interesting comments. I think, though, that to understand the piece, you have to note the opening line of the piece - "Say your church is dying..."

If your Sunday service is vibrant and life-giving, you don't need that particular change proposal. But if Sunday services are simply draining energy, and the only visible shoots of life are elsewhere in the life of the community, then Steve Taylor's change proposal is well worth thinking about. There's no point trying to revive branches that have already died; you chop off the dead bits of plants so that the life can recover elsewhere, just like Steve says. Hey, wait - didn't another Big Man draw an analogy between spiritual life and pruning trees? 

Chopping down the Sunday Tree

I read this on Digging a Lot:

Say your church is dying. You have good buildings and some community ministry, but Sunday service is dwindling. It consumes a lot of your energy, both from your pastoral leader and your volunteers - to run sound and play music.

Change proposal: chopping down the Sunday tree.

Keep meeting at 10:30 am Sunday. Keep the doors open. Keep the coffee fresh. Keep the muffins warm. But stop the sermons and stop the singing. Take all that energy and reclaim the time for mission. Read a creed. Dwell in Luke 10:1-12. Initiate some listening experiments. Share stories. Foray into the community for simple acts of service. Return to share stories. Re-read a creed. Re-dwell in Luke 10:1-12. Initiate some more listening experiments. Share stories. Foray into the community for further acts of service.

You get the idea.

If it fails, you were dying anyway.

If visitors do come, they are not meeting a shut door, nor are they finding a stressed group of people. Instead they are finding a warm community who like coffee and muffins. Who knows, they might just be attracted by a group of people taking mission and church and leadership seriously. In the meantime, you are reclaiming an existing resource - your time and your pastoral time - and you’re investing that in mission. And you are redefining your stretched life around mission and community.

Do this for 3 months and see what shoots begin to emerge. Who knows. Some shoots will need another prune. But some might be worth persevering with. Some might even need a new name’.

Edit: commenters have noted that this was written by Steve Taylor. Here's the link to his original post. If you like it buy his book (it's good!) 

Chaplaincy in the Church Times

Cambridge is 800 years old this year, and the Church Times is celebrating us today with a feature on Chapels and Chaplaincy in the University. Among interviews with the Deans and Chaplains of Trinity, Johns and Emmanuel, she writes about me and Robinson Chapel. here's a snip:

"The red-brick chapel at Robinson is famous for the streaming glory of its John Piper window. Dr Dawn has put a lot of thought and experiment into getting people to engage with the building, even if they are not practising Christians.

“One of the anomalies of chapel in a college like this, even more than the traditional college, is that we take in a student body which is largely not interested or au fait with Christian devotions at all,” she reflects.

“A lot of people come here specifically because they like the idea that it is modern and progressive. The chapel just gives permission to people to have a belief. It says that to be an intellectual and rational person in the 21st century, in one of the best universities in the world, doesn’t mean you can’t have faith...”

For the rest see the Church Times (you can subscribe online for individual issues of the paper)

Moveable feast

Around this time of year I get asked a lot of times why Easter on a different day each year, when is Pentecost and what does it have to do with Easter, if Lent is supposedly 40 days long, why were there 46 days from Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday, and other such assorted questions. I would go into detail here but I note that Bosco Peters has made a chart which makes it very clear. If I get a moment later I'll post the rule from the BCP about why Easter can be as early as March 21st, or well into April.

How much love is too much?

this post has moved

Resentment

“Resentment is like taking poison and hoping the other person dies.”

Einstein on Jesus

"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene....No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.
Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrase-mongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot."

from "What Life Means to Einstein," The Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1929

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Princeton University

Sophia Network

My friend Jen Baker launched the Sophia Network a while back - a forum and website aimed principally at women in Youth work, but with all kinds of stuff that's interesting and useful for personal and community faith building. 

Sophia's new website has now gone live, and looks rather fab. Go check it out.   

Faith seeking understanding

I blogged a while back that it's the 900th anniversary of Ely Diocese this year. but it's also 900 years ago today that Anselm died. His dictum "faith seeking understanding" has been quoted by many a theologian (including my own favourite Schleiermacher),  His words are also relevant to the faith-doubt-uncertainty thread I've been mulling on here and here since Low Sunday.

Faith and certainty

Several people wrote in response to my post on Honest Thomas that they believe certainty to be the opposite of faith. It's an interesting point, particularly as there is a tendency within some streams of Christianity to treat faith precisely as if it is the same as certainty. Certainty, in fact, is almost like an addiction for some people when it comes to faith. I've often wondered why it is that reasonably clever people will go along with theology that is quite unbelievably illogical and unreasonable. If thought systems of similar quality were used in their professional lives they wouldn't put up with it, yet they seem willing to tolerate it when it comes to their faith. I wonder whether, in an uncertain world, a religion that ties up the ends neatly and firmly is just so attractive to people that they don't mind leaving their intellect out of the equation.

By the same token, there are others who believe that unless you can be absolutely, forensically certain of the facts, then belief or faith is ruled out. This is like a return to the Enlightenment, where rational thought wiped out any other ways of knowing. It was this empirical approach to knowledge that the Romantics tried to break out from, not denying that rational thought has its place, but insisting that there are other ways of knowing things too. Coleridge, in particular, showed both in his essays and his poetry that he believed partial and intuitive knowledge was not invalidated by its incompleteness. 

Faith, if it is real, must be honest and must include the whole person - as Jesus himself said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength - emotion, spirit, intellect and body. Not reason alone, nor emotion without intellect. Nothing left out.

Hadge quotes Peter Gabriel (from the song That Voice Again):

"It's only in uncertainty that we are naked and alive!"

DIY church

You have to love this. Never mind emerging church in the living room, or theology in the pub, or any of that sutff. Just build your own church in the back garden. That's what Jon Richards did for his wife, who found her local church to busy and crowded for her liking.  

Access Heaps

One of the things I'm involved in at my College is Access issues. We try to reach people who could come to Cambridge but it might not occur to them to try, and we aim to break down the myths about Cambridge that make some people reluctant to apply here. So I was really pleased to read about this initiative.

Honest Thomas

It's Low Sunday. One week on from Easter. Traditionally the day when we remember Thomas, the disciple who doubted.

It isn't true, but many in the Church seem to believe that doubt is the antithesis of faith. In fact, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but unbelief. 

"Dubious questioning", wrote Coleridge, "is a much better evidence than that senseless deadness which most take for believing. People that know nothing...have no doubts. Never be afraid to doubt, if only you have the disposition to believe, and doubt in order that you may end in believing the truth."

"Doubting Thomas" is the uncomplimentary title that Thomas has often been tagged with. But it would be more accurate, I think, to call him Honest Thomas. He was a man of integrity; he didn't pretend to believe things that he didn't really; he didn't say the words just to feel part of the crowd. It's much harder to own up to being the odd one out among a group of friends, and it was brave, when he found that he was the odd one out, not to go off and be by himself.  For a whole week he went on meeting up with the other disciples. Their faith and stories of visions must have made him feel uncomfortable and left out. But he still hung around. Eventually, Jesus came and met him in person. His integrity paid off; when faith came to him as a gift, it was his own and not someone else's.

Doubt is not the same as unbelief. Unbelief is a determined refusal to believe, whereas doubt is an honest owning up to not being convinced. In Judaism, according to Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth, "To be without questions is not a sign of faith, but of lack of depth." And he encourages people not only to ask questions about the meaning of the faith, but to question God. We ask questions, says Sacks, "not because we doubt, but because we believe."

the question is not whether it's right or wrong.

“The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.” Joseph Campbell

I've been looking at this quote on my screen every day for more than a week. It speaks volumes about the human heart, the inadequacy of rules and principles, the necessity of being guided by spirit (human spirit, holy spirit...). There is some wide open truth in this idea, which is caught in the Bible over and over again. Proverbs tells us that the loss of hope leads to death. John tells us that spirit and truth are interconnected. James tells us that faith is only faith if it's lived, not just believed.

Right and wrong. Sometimes there isn't a right answer. A lot of the time we find ourselves choosing between two or three things, none of which are quite right, all of which are compromises. Sometimes principle and truth will only guide you so far. And then perhaps the question does simply have to be, which of these paths can I walk with conviction?

hat tip to myriam joseph and jen lemen

Forgetting Jesus...

I've been listening to Hadge Hughes' Lent reflections. In the first one he explores the idea of wilderness as a kind of spiritual life-laundry. Kind of a similar theme to my Lent book for 2010 - you have to give up your entrenched ideas about God in order to see him more clearly. And that, of course, feels highly risky.

Even though Lent is over, Hadge's reflections are well worth a listen.

Sir Clement Freud

a national institution

in his own words

Tom Wright, Heliocentricism and the Big Picture

"...we are not the center of the universe. God is not circling around us....We are in orbit around God and His purposes."

a little quote from a big book

teenage song

for teenagers, parents of teenagers, people who work with teenagers. Watch and learn:

non-violent atonement

I see that Giles Fraser is getting a bit of stick both in blogland and tweetsville over his latest comments on Good Friday and Easter. He has claimed that the idea that sin is like a debt to God that must be paid for with equal amounts of pain is a "disgusting idea"; he suggests that it leads to the justification of various kinds of ongoing violence. He quotes the prophet Hosea who puts into God's mouth the words, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."

People who are fixed on the idea of Jesus' death as a payment for sin seem to have got very hot under the collar about Fraser's columns. But I think Fraser is right to demand that the death of Jesus is thought of more widely than a kind of tit-for-tat payment to God. After all, it was Jesus himself who demanded that people move on from that kind of approach to justice. "An eye for an eye?" No, says Jesus, that won't do any more. Turn the other cheek. Step away from violent retribution, not just by limiting it to vioence in equal measures, but by putting a stop to it and finding a new way of dealing with grievances. 

So it would be cheap and sad to base our own understanding of the atonement on the idea that God would then demand a tit-for-tat payment for sin. There has to be a more convincing reason than that to regard Jesus' death as an atonement.

To dispense with a feudal landlord view of God doesn't diminish the fact that Jesus' death was both significant and sacrificial. Rather than viewing his death as a sacrifice to pay back a demanding landlord or loan-shark God, you could equally see it as that of a scapegoat, perhaps, or more like someone who in order to make his plea for justice heard found that death was unavoidable, or more like the earlier idea of wresting back power from evil by walking straight into it's clutches. C S Lewis understood how a death could be sacrifical without being a payment. He called it Deep Magic.  Even Dr Who understood how walking into the clutches of evil destroys its power, but not without cost: watch any of the episodes that include a regeneration and you'll see what I mean.

I wrote more on different kinds of atonement theory a couple of years back, and there as here, I think one of the important things to remember is there is not ONE account of atonement that is right, and all the rest are wrong. Thank God it's more interesting and multi-faceted than that.  

* * *

Back to Giles Fraser. There are two reasons why I like his writing. The first is that he has chosen a particular form of writing - a short, pithy, thought-provoking column - and just goes for it. He doesn't worry about tying up all the loose ends, he just aims for what a short column does best. It's a scruff of the neck approach to writing - taking a fresh look at just one familiar or current idea. It has to make people think twice, and it works well for shaking people up about something they thought they already knew.  The second reason I like his writing is that he writes about religion but not for religious people. He doesn't write about Easter for the Bible study group (not in the paper, at least!), but for people who have a vague and fixed notion about Christian belief, and says: "look again! that's not what it's all about!" In a world constantly being told by the New Atheists that Christian belief is a sorry mess of out of date, illogical nonsense, I find Fraser's public brush strokes of bold faith a breath of fresh air.

imagine there IS a heaven...

you'd think, from the press and bookshop windows, that no-one in England believes in God, heaven, or even the human soul any more. This report suggests otherwise, saying that according to a number of recent surveys the majority of people still do believe in a soul and an afterlife. Apparently there is only a slight increase in scepticism. 

resurrection? you must be crazy

"Alleluia, Christ is risen!"  All over the world, Churches will have been roused to worship with this greeting today. Traditionally, the correct reply is, "He is risen indeed, Alleluia!", and of course it's supposed to be a shout of joy and praise. Easter is the ultimate declaration of Christian faith, much bigger than Christmas. 

I recall years ago when our local priest (who is now Archbishop Sentamu of York) would give the Easter acclamation, if the reply wasn't convincing enough he would bellow back at us - "I want to hear it as if you BELIEVE it!!" Then we would go through the call and response one more time, this time with everyone awake. 

On the first Easter, though, the response was nothing like so affirmatory.  Mary was the first person to see the risen Christ, and, still washed away with grief, she herself had to look twice before she registered the barely believable sight of Jesus standing before her.  "Go and tell the others," said Jesus. So Mary became the first person to pronounce the Easter acclamation. She found the disciples shut away, doubtless still worn out with grief and shock. "Alleluia, Christ is risen!" said Mary, or words to that effect. 

She didn't even get a half-enthusiastic Alleluia back from most of them. Their responses, reading between the lines, were something like "Poor love, she's really lost it," or maybe "Don't be crazy, get a grip." Or possibly "Women - so illogical." Or maybe "Don't listen to her - science has shown that to be impossible." 

It's easy enough to get into the spirit of Easter, especially if the sun is shining, the church bells are ringing and there are plenty of flowers about adding to the sense of spring and new life.  But stop and think about it for a moment, and - especially if life is not unbounded joy for you at the moment - resurrection is an extraordinary idea, truly beyond belief.  

Perhaps this year in particular, when most people find that the credit crunch, among other things, has dulled the general spirit of optimism, it might be difficult to leap unreservedly in response to the traditional Easter words. Maybe there's a degree of anxiety stirred into our Alleluias, some reservation about the resurrection.  

If so, we have more in common than we realise with the early disciples. When Mary told them he was risen only a few legged it to the tomb to find out for themselves while the rest, it seems, stayed put - reserved, stunned, sceptical. But over the coming weeks, they all saw Jesus for themselves. He found them all, one by one, the enthusiasts and evangelists, the intellectuals and the activists, the sceptics and the doubters. 

If you didn't shout the response very convincingly this morning, or if your private feeling was more along the lines of  "If only...", don't worry. If he is risen (and I do believe he is), he'll come and find you sooner or later. 

The Easter Path

I walked the Easter Path in Brighton on Friday, read about it here at Beyond.

It's a tradition in churches to spend the three hours between noon and 3pm in meditation on the passion of Christ. We set off at noon with about thirty others who had gathered for Martin Poole's guided walk around the contemporary, shop-window version of the  twelve stations of the Cross that he and others in Beyond had set up at the beginning of Lent.

A comic shop had an installation of superheroes, all of whom, of course, die and then come back to life. The next point on the route was a picture of Christ falling, and Martin drew the contrast between the invincibility of the superheroes and the choice of God to take on the frailty of humanity. We an never be like a superhero; we can only wish life's problems were so easily resolved. But Jesus doesn't give us a fantasy story of victory over the world. Instead, by being like us, he empowers us to live our real lives to the full, despite the vagaries of everyday existence. 

Another shop window contained an installation reflecting on Simon of Cyrene, who emerged out of the crowd to help Jesus. After the walk, I asked my eleven year old son what he remembered about the walk. "I think the most important thing was," he replied thoughtfully, "that even if you are just a bystander and have no permission to do anything, you can still help other people."  

The whole experience was thought provoking, and also included some lighthearted moments, such as when Martin asked everyone to draw in close to the shop window "let's allow other pedestrians space to walk by on the other side'" he said, to which a small chorus replied, "that will be very biblical...". The walk finished conveniently close to a sea front fish and chip shop. When three o'clock came we had walked in the rain, prayed, thought, talked, met new friends and eaten fish. It seemed an appropriate way to mark Good Friday. 

Emily Jeffrey of BBC South was there, and she interviewed Martin, and me, and a few other people who were walking the path. You can get her commentary on the Easter Path here:  

the fig tree and the mountain

While I was in Spain last week I ate three things I've never tried before. Two of them were fabulous - skate wings (yum!), and fig conserve. I have now found a jar of fig conserve back in the UK, so am very happy about that. I love figs, fresh, dried, any way they come. I also love fig trees, and it was very lovely to see a lot of them in leaf and with early fruit in Spain.

Hugh has been a regular blog commenter here for several years. He has just started his own blog, and his first "proper" post is about figs. and other things. Check it out and welcome his new blog to the blogosphere.

Would you want to be cured?

 After my son wrote his lovely guest blog last week, some people have asked me in person whether I would wish for a cure for Aspergers. That's a very hard question to answer. Of course sometimes I would love his life to be easier. In other ways, though, it's precisely the fact that he is an "Aspie" that makes him who he is, and if he were cured then some of the aspects of his personality which are genuinely lovely despite being a little quirky, would disappear.

It is an amazing experience to grow up with a child with Aspergers, despite the mind boggling difficulties it presents. It most definitely has its up-side. His searing honesty is as endearing as it is disarming; he finds it almost impossible to tell lies or to tolerate being lied to. It gives a whole new depth to the idea that "the truth shall set you free" (John 8:32). When he doesn't understand what's happening he will ask for so much further clarification that he forces me to sweep the cobwebs of vagueness out of the corners of my own mind. In explaining the world to him in ways he understands makes me think about what I say and what I mean more intently than ever before.  Sometimes it demands applying to everyday life the precision of thought that I associate with PhD work, and that's saying something. The fact that he takes everything literally, and doesn't instinctively pick up idiomatic figures of speech or jokes, makes me stop and see the world in a completely different way, almost as if he has painted the whole picture with a new style in colours I didn't see before.  So I genuinely feel that for him at least, Aspergers is gradually turning out to be a gift and not a disability.

If his condition were way more pronounced, if it was really impossible for him to integrate into the world at all, maybe I would feel differently. But there's a genuine question here. If we cured the world of its unusual people, would we all be happy, or would we merely all be the same? We wouldn't see the world through the eyes of many of the artists of the world, our top scientists and inventors would be made mediochre, and maybe all we would achieve would be the lack of a need to listen to people who are different from us and upset our own view of the world.

The wish for a cure may be motivated by a longing for people who struggle to have an easier time of it.  But to have an easier time mostly what people like my son need is a little more acceptance and a bit of time and attention taken to understand how he sees the world. Maybe the cure we need is to give that to everyone, whether they have a "condition" or not.

Any discussion of a cure is highly theoretical in this context, as there is no cure. For more on this discussion see Life With Aspergers

Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want.

Read this on Paul's blog. I would love to stop reading and writing and play my guitar instead. Maybe I will take it away with me for the weekend. 

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

RUMI

The Easter Path

Regular readers will remember me raving about the wonderful Advent Beach huts organised by Beyond in Brighton and Hove.

The same creative team has now set up an EASTER PATH, which is on now and until Easter. You can download the map and walk it yourself, or go on a guided tour on 10th April (Good Friday) at midday. I'm going, and looking forward to it no end. 

Sentamu and St George's Day

When the Archbishop of York was my parish priest, he often used to say to us that we should be proud to be British, and to be English. It sounded very un-PC at the time. But Sentamu always had this way of putting this message across - it seemed humorous and slightly playful, almost teasing somehow. Definitely not aggressive. Behind the teasing the point was dead serious - he believed that the national spirit was being eroded, and a kind of post-colonial anxiety was making us fearful about having any pride in our national identity.

It was often said among his parishioners that Sentamu was more British than the British. But I think he's right. And I think, perhaps, that only an incomer to the country can say this kind of thing and get a hearing.

Now he has given his message to a much wider audience. I hope people are listening.

alter ego

A strange story in the Church Times about a man at last weekend's protest, dressed as a Vicar and claiming to be the Revd Keith Smith, Vicar of Pagham, West Sussex. As it turns out, the real Revd Keith Smith was at home in Pagham.

If anyone met me at the protest, that was an impostor too. I wasn't there either.

tweet tweet

Have just returned from a holiday with a crowd of seriously interesting people. Between them they have persuaded me to take another brave step into the twenty-first century so today I signed up with Twitter...

I am not really a total technophobe, although I do need to ask for lots of advice on how it all works. But I am sceptical about how genuinely life-enhancing these massive communications devices are. Blogging has worked for me. Facebook I stay on purely so that people can find me if they want to, but I don't find it useful for work and I like my social life to be real not virtual. Linked-In and Plaxo I just never get round to updating, but I am assured they are worth it...

Tweeting? Well, I shall find out for myself. If you are there already, my twitter name is maggidawn

The Longest Week

Nick Page has put a reading plan up on his blog for Holy Week. Download it and you can read every day the bits of the gospels that tell the story in order of the events of the first Holy Week.

It is, of course, a matter of dispute as to what happened when because as everyone knows, the gospels differ as to the order of events. But I wouldn't let that stop you getting into the flow of the story, at least from one person's point of view. Nick simply follows Mark's chronology and adds the readings from the other gospels to illuminate Mark's version. Recommended!

World Autism Awareness Day

Today's entry is a guest blog by my son, Benedict, who is eleven:

My name is Ben Dawn-Cross, and I’m Maggi’s son. I’m eleven years old, and I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome when I was nine.

 

Before we got the diagnosis, I was in a calamity of problems. At school, I could understand what the teachers were saying, but it was hard to gather up all their instructions. If you have Aspergers, if there are too many instructions at once it’s quite hard to take them all in and turn them into actions. It feels as if loads of tiny versions of “me” are inside my head, writing and typing and filing all the instructions and questions that are coming in. If there are too many, all the little “mes” inside my head get overloaded and they seem to just go to sleep. When this happens, I feel like I'm all on my own, and my head feels as if it’s been overstuffed and then I can’t think at all because my head is too full.

 

A few years ago my school were not very helpful, they seemed to think it was just my Mum's fault. But then we went to see a doctor, and he sent us to see an Educational Psychologist. She was really helpful. She found out that there was nothing wrong with me or my Mum, it was just that I have Aspergers Syndrome.

 

After that we went to see an Occupational Therapist. She found out that my right hand is quite weak and my left hand is very weak, and I can’t use them both at the same time. That’s why I almost can’t write with a pen or pencil, and I find it difficult to use a knife and fork. Now I have some special Aspergers cutlery. It has special handles that are very lightweight and easy to hold. And I have a special pen which works in the same way. And I’m allowed to do all my homework on a computer.

 

Sometimes in school, when people keep on calling out in class, the entire lesson slows down with all the interruptions, and then I have what some people call a “meltdown”. It makes me feel frustrated, and there’s not enough time to let all the feelings go away, and my head fills up. When this happens I am allowed to go out of class. I take a sand-timer with me and when all the sand has run to the bottom I go back in. It takes about five minutes for my head to cool down.

 

There’s not much meltdown stuff at home, because it’s just me and Mum, and nowadays I mostly don’t have meltdowns when there’s not many people about. But if we have friends over, it gets a little harder, because if there is too much talking going on I just don’t know what to do. Mum doesn’t invite people round too often because she understands that it’s hard for me. She knows I need to have my own space after school.

Lots of people don’t understand Aspergers Syndrome, and when they hear about it for the first time some people think that it means that I’m stupid. Aspergers doesn’t make you stupid. In fact most people with it are quite clever. But it makes it difficult to begin social relationships with people, so it’s unlikely that they will understand you. When I was younger I used to get bullied a lot because of this. The headteacher wasn’t very helpful about it but Mum managed to persuade her that it couldn’t go on. Eventually that headteacher left, and the one after that left as well, but now we have a new one and she is better. She doesn’t allow bullying.

 

There are some advantages to having Aspergers Syndrome. One is you have a very good memory. Another one is that it’s really hard to tell lies. I like to say things exactly as they are. Another one is that it makes you quite clever. This can be quite an advantage in class. When I read a page of a book, or watch a scene of a movie, I mostly remember every single word of it.

That’s all I have to say about Aspergers for today. Thank you for reading.