maggi dawn

Homosexuality and the Bible

Another event in Cambridge you might like to know about:
Christian and Gay: how inclusive can church be? - What do the Old and New Testament have to say about homosexuality? What do you think of what they have to say?

Following the success of the public debate earlier this year, this second event will provide the chance to return to the issue of inclusion from another perspective. The principal focus will be the opportunity for group study and discussion of the interpretation and relevance of the scriptural passages which have been used in the debate on homosexuality.

The New Testament passages will be introduced by Dr Mike Thompson (Ridley Hall) and the Old Testament passages by Dr Andrew Mein (Westcott House).

There is no charge for this event and it is open to everyone.

7.30pm, Wednesday 10 May
Michaelhouse Centre, Trinity Street, Cambridge, CB2 1SU
Organizers: PCC, Great St Mary’s, Cambridge; Inclusive Church (Ely)

God in the slums, the silence and the debris...

"...whatever thoughts you have about God, who He is or if He exists, most will agree that if there is a God, He has a special place for the poor. In fact, the poor are where God lives. Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill. I hope so. He may well be with us as in all manner of controversial stuff. Maybe, maybe not. But the one thing we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. "If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom with become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places." It's not a coincidence that in the scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It's not an accident. That's a lot of air time, 2,100 mentions. (You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor.) 'As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me' (Matthew 25:40). As I say, good news to the poor."

Bono speaks to The National Prayer Breakfast (see more here)

no such thing as a neutral world view

People are still talking here about Richard Dawkins bizarre views on religion after his recent TV programmes. Thing that baffles me about Richard Dawkins' line of argument is that he seems to consider himself neutral. He argues that children should not be "indoctrinated" with religion, simply left to make up their own minds later. But if you don't teach them religion, you don't teach them nothing, you teach them an alternative. An atheist point of view is just as much a "religion" as Christianity in the sense that it is a worldview with a commitment to belief that extends beyond rational thought.

The real issue in raising and teaching children is not WHETHER to teach them a world view, but thnking about what you are teaching them (both deliberately, and subliminally), about how to give them a sense of security yet also the freedom not to think in every way as you do, so as to extend and not limit their capacity to engage with the world. You have to measure carefully in order to give them both a sense of security and confidence in what they know, and that necessary degree of agnosticism required for any kind of genuine, honest enagement with the world. I teach my son both what I know, and also what I believe - but I also teach him that not everyone believes as we do. I teach him that widely accepted views (such as most of the science we "know") is always contingent, always subject to revision.  I teach him what I think - but I also try to teach him how to think. I give him the space to try out ideas that spill over the edge of what I believe, for the sake of allowing him to think and weigh and own the beliefs he grows up with. Recently he made friends with a child from a Jewish family, and said that we should pray only to God and not to Jesus - his reasoning being that he didn't want to think he was "leaving his friend out" when we prayed. Rather than inisisting on our  "orthodoxy", I went along with it, taking it as an opportunity to teach him a bit about the common ideas and history of the two religions, and how to live constructively with people who agree with us on some things and disagree on others. We didn't convert, we gained confidence both in the stability and the flexibility of our own faith.

Of course, I may decide 20 years from now that I got it wrong. But I think there is all the difference in the world between "indoctrination" and teaching about God and faith from within a religious viewpoint.

Narnia and religious intolerance

interesting essay here

Protest4

Protest4's new website is up and running.  "The truth isn't sexy."

WILDERNESS

We are in the midst of planning a week of "Alternative" chapel -
spirituality for the non-religious as well as the faith community, Chapel for those who don't usually attend. We're going to turn various corners of the Chapel into forest, desert, theatre, hillside...  Watch this space, and put 10-17 March in your diary if you are Cambridge based!

Ecological footprint

Around the middle of last year I checked out my ecological footprint, and discovered that at 3.9, if everyone lived like me we would need two and a half planets to sustain us. I was pretty shocked (thinking of myself as a fairly ecologically cool individual).

My son and I set about improving our record, by using the car less, eating less imported and processed food, turning the heating down, and a few other things. Eight months on, I find that my footprint has gone down - but only to 3.5, and we'd still need 1.9 planets to sustain a world full of people like me. More work required. 
What's your ecological footprint?

FLAME

a colleague put me on to this rather good website about marriage, children, parents, relationships, marriage break-up, etc - everything you can think of to do with family life and relationships. Patron is the Archbish of Canterbury, and there's a good selection of articles on there

Guerilla Gardening

Guerilla Gardening is a site about people who go around in the middle of the night planiting and gardening in public spaces, in order to improve the habitat. It's a way-out idea, and really rather wonderful. Link from Cartoon Church

written on the body

I was interviewed recently by a student doing research on the acceptance of women in the Church. As a closing aside, she commented that the struggles of women ministers are just the same as those of gay Christians who want their gay identity to be accepted in church. On one level I guess there are similarities, in that if someone is convinced deep down that a gay person cannot be a Christian, or deeply prejudiced against a woman in certain areas of ministry, there isn't much you can do or say that will persuade them otherwise.

But in fact, I believe there are profound differences. One of them is the possibility of a secret identity. A gay man can go into a meeting of the clergy and has the choice as to whether he owns up to being gay (it is clear that for centuries there have been gay Christians living with a hidden identity). This of course is a can of worms in itself - hidden identities are fraught with difficulties. But the choice is there, nonetheless: the choice to be known as a GAY man, or just as "a man". Whether or not he wears his identity publicly, and accepts the disadvantage that may bring, is up to the individual. But for me, there is no choice. There is no hiding the fact that I'm a woman; it's more obvious than if it were tatooed on my forehead, written unmistakably into the cells of my body.
They say that when a speaker walks on stage, the listener makes about 60% of their decision as to whether they 'like' the speaker or not before they have even heard the first word. They make a further 30% of their decision in the next 10 seconds. Which, if the listener has a deep prejudice against women in the church, doesn't leave you much of a window to change their mind later. This isn't going to stop me speaking, writing, reading, holding opinions, or spending my life living out my calling in God to minister in love and grace to anyone who will receive me. To the extent that it's possible, I shall continue to subvert disadvantage into advantage. But I can't avoid the fact that being a woman with the gifts and calling that some people attribute only to the male of the species, affects everything I do, from my perception of myself, to other people's perceptions of me.
I can't hide the fact I'm a woman. Some of my listeners have already decided they don't want to 'hear' me before I've even opened my mouth. It's written on the body.

relevance

I'm writing a session for Greenbelt on "Relevance" - there's a lot of talk surrounding the Emerging/FreshExpressions/Alternative etc incarnations of the gospel concerning how "relevant" we are. Relevant to whom? Rerlevant to our own experience of the world? Relevant in terms of mission? if we attempt to make the gospel "relevant", do we run the risk of watering down the essenc e of the gospel? These and other questions are what I'm turning over at the mo. Join in - either save it up for the Greenbelt session, or here, or both...

Inter Faith COmmunities

Looking After One Another offers some good thoughts on protecting faith communities. Download it from here

Make poverty history?

I thoroughly approve of public protest. I come from a long line of political protesters, one of whom even got shot for his efforts. So I was very glad to see St Bob's efforts over the weekend to mobilise people all over the place to make a point. 

I found myself worrying, however, that the tempo was rising towards a view that eight men in a room could change the world. However valuable it is to make the protest loud and clear, so that they know what we want, the reality is that global poverty will only be shifted if you and I (and all the outrageously rich rock stars in the world) take seriously the fact that global poverty will cost us - in our pockets, in our lifestyles, in our wish to consume all we want without counting. Eight men in a room can't change anything unless you and I are willing to simplify, cut down, drive less, fly less, eat drink and be merry in more moderate terms, consider how many electronic gadgets and fancy clothes we buy, and who from... and all the rest.

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Eight men in a room can't change the world, unless the millions of people who campaigned at the weekend will back up the call for change with their individual action within our own luxury (in world terms) lifestyles. As Gordon Brown said earlier today, getting rid of poverty is not the job of a day or a weekend, or even of a summit - it's the job of a lifetime: something we'll have to keep on at doggedly for years to come. The eight men in a room are our elected leaders, but not our saviours, and we would make a huge mistake if we allowed ourselves to begin believing that it is THEIR responsibility, and not yours and mine. Much more comfortable, of course, to pretend that THEY should do something, not ME. But it won't change anything if we think that way. 

I shan't make myself popular by saying so, of course. But it's true all the same.

ACC

I've read plenty of negative, even hopeless, accounts of the ACC meeting. So it's good to read a positive one here. Whether or not a positive reading will turn out to be justified only time will tell. But I still hope it might be.

always a good time to have a baby

There's been a bit of news coverage this week concerning the worry that fairly soon as many as one in three women will have serious trouble conceiving. There are several reasons for this, including rising rates of obesity and environmental factors. But one large contributing factor is that women have been encouraged to leave it later and later to have children, and when they do eventually get round to it (in their late thirties) they are not as fertile as they hoped.

It struck me rather forcibly as I listened to this that while we are trying to deal with late infertility, we also very seriously discourage young women from having babies. Teenage and college age women are drilled constantly into thinking that pregnancy is a disaster, babies tie you down, your own life would be disrupted - ruined, even - if you had a baby. How long does it take for young women to throw that idea off? I thought of it again when I read this heartbreaking story, "When I was Garbage" at Girl Mom, via an intelligent and thought-provoking post at Progressive Protestant.

I am well aware that there are just as many issues and difficulties around teeanage motherhood as there are around late motherhood. But it seems to me that the whole picture of motherhood has got somewhat out of kilter in our society.  We seems to have constructed an artificial idea of social perfection - that everyone will be a couple by 29 and have their babies just on the right side of 30; that all babies everywhere should be born to happy couples in large houses, not too early, not to late... But real life just isn't like that.  Real babies are born at inconvenient moments, disrupt whatever they are born into, are unmanageable and tricky little creatures;  real babies - even the ones that are born into the image of social perfection - are sometimes the very means by which that false image is brought tumbling to the ground.  Babies are sometimes the catalyst of relationship disintegration between supposedly happy couples; they are sometimes the wake-up call that make people realise they are living a glossy life they can't sustain any more. What's wrong? Not the babies, I think. What's wrong is the ridiculous idea of social perfection that is peddled to us in  magazines and movies, paperbacks and pulpits.

We need to live against that fake ideal, I think. We need a more positive view of motherhood - even for those who embark upon parenthood somewhat early, and in difficult circumstances. We need a world in which girls like Allison Crews are made to feel enabled, not feel like garbage.

I remember once talking to a couple who (unknown to me) were longing for a baby they couldn't seem to have. They were trying to make a choice between two vocational paths, one of which would not be ideal circumstances for starting a family.  "Well, maybe this isn't a good time for you to have a baby?" I said, ignorant of their deeper longing.

There was a short pause. I looked at her, she looked away. But he looked me straight in the eyes, and I can still hear his reply - warm and optimistic, but with a slight crack in his voice.  "It's always a good time to have a baby."

Protest4 goes live

Protest4 is the brainchild of a few friends and acquaintances of mine, chief among them the wonderful Si Johnston. Protest4 is mostly about creating the means by which "ordinary" people, who feel powerless to do something about the injustices in society, can find ways of addressing them. Don't protest AGAINST, Protest FOR a better society. It was my privilege to offer a little help with some of the writing and proofreading for the material that will be added to the proceedings.

The big issue Protest4 is focussing on for starters is the shocking and heartbreaking situation of human trafficking - another name for slavery.  People who are powerless in their own cultures, or too naive to know what they are being talked into, are being trapped into slavery, taken far from their homeland and set to work as slave labour for minimal or no money, or forced to work in the sex industry. The stories are appalling - there was a long piece in the Telegraph yesterday highlighting the plight of a schoolgirl from Eastern Europe who was traficked as a sex worker for eight months in England before some young women helped her escape and regain her freedom.

What's the problem here? - not enough people are aware of it; more co-ordination is needed between agencies to tighten the net...
What might the answers be? Protest4 want to underline the fact that if our society provides answers, then sitting back and waiting for the government or the police force or the legal system or someone else to sort it out isn't good enough. It's our world: we need to get involved in whatever way we can.
The Protest4 website has just gone live, and there will be more coming up on there over the next little while.

manifold sins and wickedness

One or two people have said to me (rather accusingly, it must be said) that they think it's "an absolute disgrace" that "the Archbishop of Canterbury made" Charles and Camilla recite an apology for their former actions within the service of thanksgiving for their marriage.

From where I'm looking this seems more like a case of over-reporting by the press. I marry people regularly, and fairly often couples opt to include one form or another of confession within the service. As one man put it to me last year - "it's not as if we have anything very specific to be sorry about, just that on our wedding day, of all days, we want to start this part of our lives in the knowledge of God's blessing on every inch of our lives".

Maybe the press furore over this one has more to do with liturgical illiteracy than anything. After all, Anglicans recite one form or another of confession every time they go to worship - once or twice a week would be standard, but even twice a day wouldn't be unusual. And on a normal day most of us haven't  committed any grave wickedness since breakfast time (oh for the time and the opportunity!), it's more an acknowledgement that our lives are imperfect, unfinished, and prone to delivering chaos just as much as creativity, darkness as much as light. A constant reminder that it's normal to be imperfect, and normal for God to forgive, heal and restore us is an essential part of staying sane. As Alan Mann has rather eloquently stated in his recent book, a diminishing sense of what "sin" really is has led us to a place where people can live with an unspecified and general sense of shame, but no clear means of dealing with it.

I revel in the words of Absolution, both when I pronounce them and when I receive them. To know that you are imperfect, normal, and forgiven, is a means of preserving one's sanity in a chaotic world. If the Prince and Camilla, and the whole of their congregation, recited a confession as part of their wedding service, what's so unusual or disgraceful about that?  It sounds like normal Anglican liturgy to me.

politics

pete writes some good common sense here.

gates

lovely post from SimonSays. Makes me think of how my front doorstep becomes a community place in the summer when the weather is good - and what a closed fortress it becomes in the winter.

excuse me while I offend you...

The subject of religion and offence has been much in the news lately. "Jerry Springer - The Opera", the Windsor Report, and one or two other issues have raised controversies that have been much discussed in Christian circles. This is a dialogue that has been going on for centuries, not just a few weeks - a point illustrated rather well by The Long View that I heard on Radio 4 listen-again last night. The porgramme explored the relationship between religious sensitivity and the role of the arts.  What they got right is that the arts needs a degree of freedom in order to speak the uncomfortable truth, and that includes the uncomfortable truth about religion. Gagging the artist, the theatre, the author or the composer would be a retrograde step in the end. Yet the other side of it is that the arts too, especially in public space, needs to have the truth told - it needs to pull back if it becomes gratuitous not challenging, lewd not truthful, invasive rather than transparently honest.

What the programme got wrong, though (IMHO) was that they posited the idea that religion and "real life" were not the same thing - that a person has to be able to separate their "life" from their religious beliefs. Depending on quite what you mean by that, it could be taken to be true, but in context the implication that religion was a belief system that was added as a separable layer of ones whole life bought into the consumer view of religion. The spokesman from the Evangelical Alliance was right in his response - that all the religions discussed on the programme would claim within themselves to be about all of life, not an additional, luxury extra.

Melanie Phillips turned the conundrum on its head the other day, pointing out that the real issue is not whether religious people get offended, but that religion itself is bound to cause offence: "There is now a very dangerous climate in which giving offence is considered worse than violence or threatening behaviour. But religion almost inevitably causes offence." Reminded me of something  Dorothy Sayers once said. "I believe it to be a great mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it," she wrote, "We cannot blink at the fact that gentle Jesus meek and mild was so stiff in his opinions and so inflammatory in his language that he was thrown out of church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbeted as a firebrand and a public danger.  Whatever his peace was, it was not the peace of an amiable indifference."

maggie and jerry

I found this an illuminating read.

Kyrie Eleison

It seems from today's paper that the outstandingly unhelpful actions of Christian Voice are now to extend to militant activism against abortion clinics.

I know Jesus was annoyingly confusing by prophesying violence and doom in the midst of his commands to act peaceably. But the good Lord himself went like a Lamb to the slaughter, and (apparently without resorting to violence or verbal abuse himself) rebuked Simon Peter no end for chopping someone's ear off. I'm persuaded by the peaceful approach myself, and would prefer to err on the side of "judging not that you be not judged". And I'm definitely not for reducing issues like sex, cancer, free speech, homosexuality and abortion to simplistic black-and-white arguments.

I seriously hope that campaigns by Christian Voice won't lead to shoot-outs on the steps of abortion clinics, as has happened before now in the States. Nobody likes abortion; nobody in their right mind would recommend it without encouraging a woman to think honestly and carefully through the consequences to herself of her various options. Nevertheless, there are cases when there is not a good option available; when abortion is, though sad, the better choice. I'm with Bill Clinton on this one - that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare. 

Issues such as this are far more complex than such militant groups as CV ever wish to admit. We will never solve all our social problems, but the distance we can go towards doing so will only be successful if approached with multi-layered and carefully thought out strategies, and if these are motivated by compassion, not by what passes itself off as "righteous anger". I want nothing to do with the militant approach to Christianity. It is counterproductive, against the teachings of scripture (despite the typical appeals to biblical authentication) and gives the rest of us - and even Jesus himself - a thoroughly bad name.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

I was going to blog about this bizarre story  but a) I'm rushed off my feet and b) Tom Allen  has already said it. So go read him today.

anabaptist

I've heard it said that the Anabaptists were the only Protestants to survive the Reformation with their integrity intact. Not sure I'd want to argue that line, but I must say the Anabaptists are v. interesting, especially when it comes to relating faith to political justice. Check out this site for starters

not for sale

The trafficking and owning of slaves was abolished in this country in the nineteenth century. I remember writing essays about this in my Church History course as an undergrad in the early 90's. Yet it seems that slavery of another kind is alive and flourishing in Europe - indeed, according to William Hague in today's Independent, there may be many more slaves now than there were then. People who are in forced work having been tricked into taking loans; women who have been married into servitude, women and children who have been bought and sold to people the sex industry.

I know a few people who are trying to do something concrete to address this issue of human trafficking. One is the inimitable Carrie Pemberton, for whose charity Chaste I organised a fundraising concert here at college. Another is Si Johnston (that's THREE Baptists on this blog in the space of a month... ha!) whose latest post had me frozen to my seat. Here's a bit of a speech he made about Protest4:
Protest4 is a growing group of people who believe that through action, by our solidarity, we can protest4 a better world. And it is significant that our first endeavour will be to address the issue of slavery. Everyday, as a minister here at this church, I am forced to walk past the monolith outside our front door – The Lincoln Tower. It serves to remind us that at the height of the transatlantic slave trade of the 15th-19th centuries some 11 million Africans were exported to the Americas, and that subsequently, a group of people, under the leadership of William Wilberforce through time, succeeded in abolishing the slave-trade and thus one of the greatest scars on the face of modern history. Or did they? To the surprise of many, there are now more people in slavery across our world than there were in the days of Wilberforce...

The reality is that tonight, one girl, Sofia who has under the guise of being ushered into this ‘better world’ over and against the oppression she experienced in her village in Albania, went through the dehumanising ‘breaking process’ where she was repeatedly and violently raped until her spirit broke making her the commodity she needed to be for her pimps in Soho as we sit here tonight. As a child brought up in the violence of Northern Ireland, I had, at a young age, the dictum ‘Do unto others as you would have done unto yourself’ drummed into me. Can I ask, if you were in one of the breaking camps in Belgrade, Nis or Tirana, and found yourself being tortured to the point when your life lost all meaning, what would you want someone to do for you? If you were in Soho tonight and had to perform sex acts against your will under the threat of death to you or your family, what would you want someone to do for you? Human-trafficking is a global trade in rape for profit. I am culpable because, as a man, I share my masculinity with the perpetrators of these crimes and the victims are crying out for someone, anyone, to do something to help them...

...ask yourself the question…what would I like someone to do for me if I was in their shoes?

This stuff is really horrid, but we need to read it, get real about it, and do something about it. Chaste is here. The rest of Si's post is here (don't stop on the first paragraph - this issue is way, way bigger than party politics). Protest4's provisional webpage is here.

Then join me in thinking what to do next. Cause we have to do something.