Year: 2018

by the Revd Canon Professor James Woodward, Principal of Sarum College, Salisbury

The decision of bishops blocking the introduction of a new prayer celebrating a transgender person’s change of sex has rightly been the cause of frustration and anger to many of us. While no one from the bench of bishops has been able to offer a view of how their decision was made this inevitably plays into deep feelings of hurt. Younger generations re-enchanted by a commitment to social justice and social activism will wonder how long it will take to build a spiritual economy founded on equality and inclusion.

And that is just the present. Those of us who have been working for inclusivity over the past decades may wonder why change has been so slow. We know of individuals and groups who have worked to undermine, devalue and diminish our commitment to equality. Perhaps we sometimes wonder what we might have done that would have made a more significant difference to our faith communities?  We have to live with imperfections, limited horizons, ambiguities and contradictions in our human relating. The things that block and diminish human flourishing make us angry. Articulating why we are angry is an important part of the searching of the soul.

When we have connected with the causes of anger, we might consider how to transform its destructive potential. It is important to understand that it’s not people or events that make us angry, but our reaction to them. Anger turned inwards may also result in a lack of assertiveness, stress, low mood, or even self-harm. We can get locked into a denial of how we feel.

Repressing or ignoring anger may give the sense of dealing with it, but this inward control fails to harness creativity. Unless anger is managed properly, it can have a devastating effect on our family, work, and overall well-being.

Anger is generally interpreted as a dangerous emotion in Western culture.  We are told not to get angry. Most of us have learned to evade or ignore it (see the Bishop of Liverpool’s excellent piece  Calm Down Dear – Love and Anger in the Church.)    We fear harming others if we get angry with them. When we do express anger, we often justify ourselves. “My partner is stubborn and doesn’t care if I am upset; so I teach him a lesson by showing how angry I am.”

The Bible recognises the redemptive aspects of anger. Jesus expressed anger in a number of circumstances, demonstrating concern for particular individuals. In the Temple, Jesus threw out usurers and others who were taking advantage of the poor (Luke 19.45-46). Jesus was also angry with the Pharisees, who wanted to catch him breaking one of their laws (Mark 3.1-6), yet were unwilling to consider the real morality of the law.

In both cases, Jesus was angry with people who were doing wrong and who refused to listen to God. He feels for others, rebukes those with power, and uses anger as an expression of care when confronting individuals with truth, so that they might repent. The Bible asks us to make anger redemptive. We are right to feel anger and express it. When it enables change, anger becomes trans­formative.

Here are the ways in which I have learnt to use this powerful emotion and put to creative use.

First, we can try to understand what it is that triggers our anger. Working out what makes us angry now can be a step towards acknowledging strong feelings, and lead to the possibility of changing our attitude towards these feelings. We can talk about them, and try to accept that nothing can change what has happened in the past. A journal can be useful to give shape to these reflections.

Hanging on to angry feelings from years gone by can cause unnecessary problems, but, if we can identify them, we may be able to change the way we deal with current situations.

Second, if anger is building up, we need to deal with it. We shouldn’t let it simmer away until we have a violent outburst. If possible, we could try taking ourselves away from the situation, thinking about the bigger picture, and considering the consequences of our behaviour before we react.

Third, we might ask ourselves how far some of this is associated with our lifestyle. Do we pack too much in so that we are struggling to cope? We might need to do fewer of the demanding tasks, and spend more time doing things that we find relaxing. Find a pleasurable way to let off steam, which will prevent the build-up of tension and increase self-confidence. Even simple pleasures such as a relaxing bath, a pleasant walk, or a good book can help.

Fourth, make sure to eat a healthy diet and get enough sleep. Lack of sleep and food can make us feel irritable. It may help to talk things over regularly with a friend or member of the family.

Fifth, learning to keep calm may help us cope with our feelings. Learning to breathe slowly, prayer, silence, meditation, and other relaxation techniques can help us to slow down, and to see and feel more. Sometimes we have to learn to let go of our desire for control, and to allow God to take and shape us. A regular life of prayer can place our lives into the broader shape of God’s narrative of love.

Sixth, confrontations are usually hard to deal with. It is important that we try to express ourselves assertively without losing our cool. We can do this by preparing what we want to say. If the discussion gets heated, it can be useful to remember that it is OK for someone else to have a different opinion.

We can try to express ourselves as clearly as possible, and use phrases such as “I feel angry with you because . . .” rather than being abusive. We can also try to be clear about what we expect to come out of the discussion. We can listen to the other person, and avoid taking things too personally.

Anger is complex. This fearful emotion can be embraced and transformed. It is essential that we explore with ourselves and others what we do with our anger. Reflecting on what makes us angry, being aware of the different ways anger shows itself, and finding ways of putting our emotions to creative and spiritual use might be part of our journey of self-discovery this New Year. There will certainly be much in 2018 that continues to make us angry – our challenge for human flourishing is to name it and use it for building transformed communities with emotional and spiritual intelligence at their heart.

by the Rt Revd Dr David Walker, Bishop of Manchester

In the church where I preached on the first Sunday after Epiphany there’s a stained glass window dedicated in memory of a former member of the congregation from the nineteenth century. Nothing unusual there, except that this particular notable individual was the Confederate General, Robert E. Lee. The church has a number of other memorials too, and a further stained glass window, which honours Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President at the height of the American Civil War.

The city of Richmond, Virginia has changed much over 150 years, and the church now has a congregation that seeks to unite people across the diversity, including ethnic diversity, of a busy modern city. Some small modifications, to respond to some of the emblems of the Confederacy that have become particularly controversial in recent times, have already taken place. But the church is now engaging on a major programme of looking into its history and deciding how its story can appropriately be told, in glass and metal as well as words and song, for the present era. The determination to do the work deeply impressed me.

I’m not going to wade into the battles over how organisations in the USA should handle the legacy of both slavery and the war waged to eradicate it. But I am going to try to let the courage and commitment of my American friends inspire me to think about where there may be visible reminders of the life and beliefs of my own church and society in previous generations, which may give the impression, or even support the fact, that we have not properly repented of our sins.

So, in a diocese where many of our churches, especially our older ones, have walls festooned with memorials to the wealthy and successful of former times, lauding both their virtues and their financial generosity, what changes can we effect to make more, or even equally, visible the lives and contributions of the poor?

And when I look at the many depictions in our stained glass windows of Jesus with blond hair, blue eyes and mildly aristocratic features, I want to ask what we can do to depict our Lord as one of us, with our range of ethnic characteristics, our shapes and sizes, abilities and disabilities. If we can accept the sight of a blond Jesus, we can surely accept a dark skinned Jesus or one in a wheelchair.

And while I’m on about it, how can we show women differently in our church artwork, furniture and fittings? Not simply as mother or martyr but in strength. Exercising leadership independent of their relationships to their men, and engaged in ministries many of which do not depend on a particular view about ordination but could unite us from liberal to conservative.

I’m not pretending to there being a moral equivalence between imagery showing Jesus as Anglo-Saxon, and monuments praising those who fought for the right to keep slaves. But issues raised by the one have made me more acutely aware of the other.

My hunch is that the answer does not lie in obliterating our history. I won’t be casting the first stone at any church window in Virginia or Manchester. We need many of our old images, appropriately interpreted, alongside the others that more fully reflect the people God is calling us to be. And the images we use must reflect the reality of our work and witness. Diverse bodies and faces on windows, walls and church notice boards are not an alternative to our having those faces and bodies in the sanctuary or pulpit, and at the altar, but they can be an encouragement for it and complementary to it.

by the Revd Dr Jeremy Morris, Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

In 1965 Bishop John Robinson – already famous for his iconoclastic book Honest to God – challenged the Church of England with a call for a ‘New Reformation’.  Claiming the traditional Church had got in the way of people’s experience of God, he argued for a revolution in theology, starting the other way round, that is, with lay people’s experience and beliefs, and building up from there.  Robinson’s book was radical in its day, and saturated with the language of the secular gospel which was fashionable then, but which has not stood the test of time.  He thought that Christianity needed to be radically reworked into something that made sense to a secular age, and that much of its traditional theology was deaf to the new currents of thought running through modern society.  He wanted to see in its place an immanent, human-centred theology, rather than the transcendent, anti-humanist shape he thought it had taken hitherto.

Robinson’s book is a bit like a running commentary on key points of the Protestant Reformation – that’s why he calls for a ‘New Reformation’.  But in all last year’s reflection on the 500^th anniversary of Luther’s protest against indulgences I didn’t see any reference to it.  That’s probably a sign that the radical theology Robinson represented has long passed its sell-by date.  From here – at least to me – that 1960s theology looks excessively critical of traditional Christian doctrine, and excessively dependent upon a concept of secular modernity that itself was crying out for criticism.

But perhaps something at least ought to be salvaged from what Robinson was attempting to do.  One of the things that motivated him was a fear that the Church of England as human institution had become an obstacle to belief.  In his terms, this was because its worship, its way of reaching decisions, the narrow social circle from which its leadership mostly came, in fact much of the Church’s cultural baggage, looked out-dated and irrelevant to modern needs.  I’m not convinced by the terms in which Robinson put all this, partly because the Church has changed a bit since then, but more seriously because his idea of what is, or was, ‘relevant’ in the modern world gave too much away to contemporary trends, and was insufficiently attuned to the way the Gospel is a standing challenge to them.

But Robinson was on to something in his suspicion that the Church could be encountered by people as itself an engine of oppression, not liberation.  If ‘relevance’ as he conceived it was problematic as a way of trying to think about what the Church should be like, it doesn’t require much imagination to apply parts of his analysis to current issues.  For many who feel damaged or excluded by the Church, Robinson’s language would surely have some resonance.  The Church is, or can be, an obstacle to the very thing it stands for – personal redemption.

I’m not trying to prop up Robinson’s theology here.  I don’t think that can or should be done now.  But there is usually something to be learnt from those with whom we disagree, and it’s striking to see how Robinson was concerned to try to put ordinary people back at the very centre of the way the Church of England thought about its mission and its message.  To borrow a phrase from another book, this time by Vernon White, he was urging Christians to pay attention to people.  People matter, for Robinson, because Christ came as a person; therefore, as Christ is in everyone, or (if you’d rather) is there for everyone, not one single person can be put out of the Church’s concern.

But this cuts two ways.  First, it has the uncomfortable implication that even in the most distressing and painful episodes – and heaven knows there have been an awful lot of those for the Church of England to reckon with recently – there is always something more to be done, not only for those who have suffered, but also for those who, one way or another, have caused or inflicted that suffering.  I do not think we have, as Christians, even begun to work out how to come to terms with that particular challenge.

But, second, it also suggests that we cannot let people off the hook when they actually are responsible for making decisions.  Institutions are made up of people, after all.  Though we talk understandably about the ‘Establishment’, about a particular class or group, just as we talk about the ‘Church’, in the end that can only be a kind of short-hand for people who occupy particular positions and exercise (or fail to exercise) particular responsibilities.  Paying attention to people doesn’t just mean being nice to all people, but holding people to account.

So even if I can’t follow Robinson’s call for a new Reformation into the sort of revised, ‘bottom up’ theology for which he was calling, I do think his instinct that the Church needed to reconceive or relearn its vocation was essentially correct.  To my mind, you don’t need to revise traditional Christian doctrine to do this.  But we have got to learn again how to start thinking, as Christians, outwards and upwards from the experience of those who have found the Church an obstacle in their lives.  We need a theology of reception, as well as proclamation, and to hear the truth spoken to us from those who see themselves outside the Church, or abandoned by it.

by the Revd Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham and Member of General Synod

It’s the beginning of a new year and the script is that we talk about hope. It was a challenging 2017 but things will be ok. New opportunities, fresh blessings, more love and more joy.

So why am I wanting to talk about death? Well, it’s personal and also professional.

It’s personal because I have just booked flights back to Switzerland to go to the funeral of my much loved uncle Albin. He died two days before Christmas, aged 82, gently and peacefully with his family around him. About six years ago his younger brother Otto also died peacefully with his family around him. The difference was that Albin died of old age and dementia, Otto died of a nasty aggressive brain tumour. Albin died ‘naturally’, Otto, being Swiss was able to request and receive the help he needed to die in a dignified and pain-free peaceful way. This merciful intervention in no way changed the fact of his death, and even now the sorrow is hard to bear, but it did cut short the last bitter agonies of the manner of his dying.

It is professional because in the Parish where I work there are a lot of funerals. Mostly the bereaved tell me of the immense kindness of all around; family and friends, Doctors and nurses. They tell of the shock of sudden unexpected death and also the oblique conversations about the use of morphine. They also sometimes tell me of bad deaths. Deaths where there is no way of giving the dying person their final wish: ‘please, dear God, please help me to die.’

Don’t tell me that the time of someone’s death is purely God’s business. That at the moment when all a human soul wants is for it to end, God stands at the end of the bed and says: ‘No my child, it is my will that you suffer just a few more days.’

That is pure fatalism and superstition. Even people who would use language such as ‘God has a plan for your life’ don’t actually mean that everything that happens to them from birth to death is controlled. Of course not. We rejoice in our free will, even in the knowledge that we risk miss-using it. That’s part of the deal. Our conception is a risk. We may be born to loving parents, or our mother might have been kidnapped and raped. The will of God? Throughout our lives we make choices and many of them are life and death choices. To smoke or drink or over eat. To enjoy extreme sports, to ride a motorbike. For all those things we choose and we also take responsibility.

When our lives are nearing the end there are now many societies where that degree of both choice and responsibility remains. That is not the case in the UK.

Just when you might think we need our freedom the most the medical profession (by law) take it away from us. Just when you might think that God would most honor the freedom he has given us the Christian community take it away from us. I’m with Hans Küng. If the time comes, and it is necessary for me, I would find it a fulfilment of my life of faith to be able to say to God: ‘Loving Father I thank you for the most wonderful gift of life. The burden of it is now too much for me to bear and so with every ounce of love and gratitude I can muster I give it back to you.’