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Category: Royal Wedding

  • Families – Love ‘Em, Hate ‘Em

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

    I’m experiencing an interesting collision of three family stories as I sit down to write this piece. The gospel reading for Sunday morning sees a dying man hand his mother into the care of his close friend. Meanwhile the daffodils are out and we celebrate Mother’s Day  -or, for those of you who enjoy being counter-cultural, Mothering Sunday. This is dwarfed by the drama of the world’s most famous dysfunctional family having their melt-down on the international stage.

    When all goes smoothly being part of a loving family is wonderful. We can feel assured of love even when we mess up. We know where we belong and we can trust that our family has our best interests at heart. This may be a genetic family, or a constructed family. It may be a social and faith-based family, such as a church. If your family is a really safe place it is also where you can have a good row. You can be free to say what is on your heart without the fear that you will be expelled.

    Within a healthy family system being loved and belonging are not up for negotiation. There is, or should be, no ‘deal’ – in other words, nothing transactional about your place within your family.

    Sadly, we know that it doesn’t always work out that way.

    For many people it is a defining aspect of their emotional life that they are always striving to please their judgemental parents. Long into adulthood they crave parental approval more than anything else. It’s fairly common for successful people on Desert Island Disks to say something along the lines of ‘I really wish my Dad had lived long enough to see me win an Oscar, he never thought I’d amount to much.’

    It is very hard to have a settled and confident sense of belonging if you are constantly feeling judged. Whatever you may think about ‘Megxit’ it does look as if she never developed a confident sense of belonging to her new family and always felt judged – maybe by them, maybe by the British press. Whatever the real story it has caused sadness and distress all round.

    When my mother moved to the UK following her marriage one of the first things that struck her was how people controlled their children though their inheritance. In Switzerland you simply cannot cut off a child you’ve fallen out with. The inheritance laws give an equal share to every child.

    So if ordinary human families so often mess this up maybe there is a second chance within God’s family?

    Justin Welby expressed this very clearly when the news broke that the man he had always supposed to be his father was not. In 2016 he said: “My own experience is typical of many people. To find that one’s father is other than imagined is not unusual. To be the child of families with great difficulties in relationships, with substance abuse or other matters, is far too normal.”  And he said that he found who he was in his religious faith, “not in genetics”.

    This is a very big deal. A whole new chance to find who you are in the context of the love of God and to become part of a healthy Christian family. I would even go so far as to suggest that this makes the church specially attractive to those who have challenging parental experiences. The offer is that you are adopted into the family of Christ and receive God’s unconditional love. It’s full of potential for healing and growth, stability and maturity.

    The incident where Jesus, in extremis, thinks more of his mother’s pain than his own and entrusts her in the care of John, is a highly charged example of the quality of love we all long for. In the gospels we hear of Jesus’ acts and his teachings but there are very few moments of personal intimacy. This is one of them.

    As Christians we invest very deeply in the ‘belonging’ part of faith. What could be better than becoming a child of God? How sad, how bitter then is the fact that huge energy goes into defining who ‘belongs’ and who doesn’t? This surely is an evil thing which betrays the love we proclaim.

    This week, Jayne Ozanne quit the government’s LGBT+ Advisory Panel. She was holding them to account for their commitment to ban “conversion therapy” – which they were failing to implement. Thankfully this bold action has drawn a fresh promise that a ban will happen.

    This is a way of putting action into the General Synod motion which also called for a ban.

    It matters so very much because so-called “conversion therapy” is the most cruel expression of the many ways in which LGBT+ people have been treated by their Christian family. Sadly church has never been a place where any minority has felt safe. We unknowingly transfer our dysfunctional family systems into the church. We pre-load God with a love which demands total conformity – a love which will cut you off if you are different or rebellious or challenging.

    We will never get this right until we repent of our idolatrous image of God and rediscover the God who is the very essence of love. Yes, as human beings, even within the church, we will probably go on being cruel and judgemental and capricious, but let’s stop calling that ‘God’ and own it and take responsibility. Goodness – just imagine if people were able to say ‘I don’t want you in my church’ instead of ‘God doesn’t want you in his church’!

    It is a massive challenge. Taking responsibility for our own prejudices and working to understand what’s going on and bring about change. The Christian family could be pretty wonderful if we could just grow up enough to treat one another as equal siblings.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Are We Partly to Blame?

    by Jayne Ozanne, Editor of Via Media News and Director of the Ozanne Foundation

    Meghan and Harry

    Families.  They affect us all – for better or for worse.

    Some are so close knit that they never let anyone through their metaphorical front door, whilst others quite literally wash all their dirty linen in public and leave it hanging there to dry!

    Families are the one thing that most of us have no choice at all of being part of – as Harper Lee famously said: “you can choose your friends but you sho’ can’t choose your family”.

    Interestingly families are one of the things that comedians – old and new – love focusing on.  From Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s award-winning Fleabag, to one of the world’s most famous families, The Simpsons.  Perhaps I should say the world’s most famous fictional families?  For there is of course one family that is known and loved above all others, made up of real people, with real lives, who have real feelings, and bleed when cut – although I very much doubt that their blood is actually blue.  I speak of course of our Royal Family, not that portrayed by the drama series The Crown, but the one made up of individuals who have had no choice but to accept the role into which they were born.

    Very few of us know what it is like to live under the intense scrutiny of the 24-hour media.  It is, I am assured, utterly relentless. The advent of social media has made this undoubtedly worse.  For we now live in a world where diplomacy is conducted in 250-characters and news broken via Instagram.

    Never has there been a greater need for clarity of communication that is impervious to spin in order for it to be believed and trusted.  However, ironically, never has there been such a soundbite culture that demands fast news, at the risk of it morphing into fake news.

    And so we start to witness the casualties – most recently in the form of a certain young couple who have declared that they want their lives and their privacy back.  We blame the insatiable appetite of the media, without recognising that it is us – the public – who are the ones that are hungry for news.

    It reminds me that there was once a young man who also found it hard to escape the multitudes.  Who had people monitoring his every move, and criticising his every decision – including his own family.  His popularity and fame were legendary, and ultimately led to him being crucified by the very crowds who had originally feted him.  Jesus of course was prepared for this.

    It is however a sobering reminder about the role we, the public can play. At the start of this New Year, perhaps it’s time to check our appetite for certain types of news.

  • Sex & the Single Girl

    by Dr Meg Warner, Theologian, Lecturer and Member of General Synod

    Meg Warner

    In all of the excitement about that sermon, some of the striking aspects of the royal wedding were perhaps slightly overlooked. The world watched an American divorcée marry into the Royal Family, with its full approval. Yes, some of them looked decidedly uncomfortable, but that was more about the preaching of the first black Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church than about the bride. She herself entered Windsor Chapel alone, with no man to support her for most of the long walk down the aisle – just some winningly emotional children. It looked more like a coronation than a wedding. And Meghan’s mother, also alone, won more admiration for her composure than she did sympathy for her solitariness.

    Even fifty years ago none of this would have been thinkable.

    Prior to the wedding, Harry and Meghan lived together in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace, and spoke openly about their camping holidays. That wouldn’t have been thinkable fifty years ago either. And that got me thinking about the Scriptures and sex before marriage.

    It is clear in the Scriptures that sex before marriage is considered a Bad Thing. God, however, doesn’t have much to say on the matter, and it seems apparent that the antipathy toward sexual activity between unmarried people is essentially cultural. In other words, while it is taken for granted in most places in the Scriptures that women should not have sex before they are married (eg. Deut 22:20-21), this is less reflective of divine viewpoint than it is adoptive of prevalent community attitudes. I should add that there is nothing in the Old Testament, at least, prohibiting unmarried men from engaging in sexual activity with unmarried women. (The Old Testament just happens to be my field, but it also has far more discussion of sexuality than the New.)

    In order to understand what the Scriptures have to say about sexual activity on the part of unmarried women, and what community views the Scriptures are adopting, you need to know a little about the status of women in biblical times. In order to function in society each woman needed to ‘belong’ to a man. A woman needed to be the daughter or wife or (in extremis) sister of a man in order to have any kind of life or security. And I say ‘belong’ advisedly. Women were in a very real sense the property of the men to whom they belonged. A vital part of any marriage negotiation was the ‘mohar’ or ‘bride price’ that a prospective groom would pay to the bride’s father (eg. 1 Sam 18:25). Each of the provisions in the Torah about sexual activity on the part of an unmarried woman is prompted, at least in part, by concerns about this mohar (or about the deal that a husband is getting in exchange). So, for example, Exodus says that if a man seduces an unmarried woman he must marry her (after giving her father the mohar). In other words, if a man has sex with an unmarried woman, thereby rendering her unmarriageable, he must pay the price that her father could have expected from a prospective suitor, and if her father refuses to give her to him in marriage he must pay the mohar regardless (Exod 21:16-17). Deuteronomy adds that if the seduction is violent the girl’s father has no choice in the matter – he must give his daughter in marriage to her abuser, but the abuser must pay the girl’s father 50 silver shekels and will never be permitted to divorce her (Deut 22:28). We can’t imagine this being great for the girl, but the girl’s father gets the mohar and the whole family – including the girl – is protected from the shame and burden of future divorce.

    On the other side of the bargain, if a man alleges that his wife was not a virgin when he married her, and her family is unable to provide proof of her virginity, the woman is to be taken to the entrance of her father’s house and stoned to death (because she committed a disgraceful act in Israel by prostituting herself in her father’s house, Deut 22:20-21). And if this sounds to you like pretty clear evidence that God isn’t in favour of sex before marriage, remember that the woman in question is now married, and that the problem is that her husband hasn’t got what he paid for.

    Even Leviticus’ incest laws (Leviticus 18 and 20) appear to be predicated upon the issue of bride price. Where a man commits incest the problem is arguably not so much the closeness of the relationship as the fact that he has trespassed on the property rights of another man. Disturbing support for this is found in the fact that Leviticus has no prohibition on sexual activity between a man and his daughters.

    If we, today, look to the Scriptures for guidance about ethics (and I’m convinced we should), then we need to be aware, too, of the cultural milieu that formed them, and also of how ethics changed and developed, even in biblical times, with the surrounding culture. Change is happening in our culture, too, as Meghan and Harry have amply demonstrated.

    Perhaps our interpretation and application of Scriptures should change and develop with it? Of course, they already do. We no longer marry girls off to their rapists or stone them to death for ‘prostituting themselves in the fathers’ houses’. Imagine preaching either of those things post-#metoo!

    We need to get more honest and intentional about the fact that we are all ‘revisionists’. Only then will we be able truly to be faithful to the Scriptures.

     

  • Love, Fire and Brimstone Modelled!

    by the Revd Dr Lorraine Cavanagh, Author of “Waiting on the Word” and Blogger 

    pope and michael

    A survivor of sexual abuse has been told by Pope Francis that God made him gay and loves him as he is. The Pope does not simply say that God accepts him, but that he loves him.  We recently heard a passionate wedding sermon preached in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, in which the preacher, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Michael Curry, spoke of the kind of fiery love that sustains a good marriage. Neither the wedding preacher, nor the Pope minced their words and both would seem to have had scant regard for their immediate surroundings or even perhaps for the size of their wider congregation, some 1.9 billion in the case of Bishop Michael and a figure which probably resembles it in the case of the Pope.

    Sermons still count for something.  The same is true of ground breaking public pronouncements.

    The first surprise to emerge from these two utterances is the fact that the institutional Church, for all its obsession with strategy and management, can still produce visionary leaders, leaders who connect with, and articulate, the deepest longing of the human heart which is to love and be loved. For a moment the 1.9 billion people watching the royal wedding could allow themselves to be caught unawares by the integrity and boldness of the sermon, a sermon which defied convention and appeared to make one or two of its august listeners squirm in their seats. Similarly, the brief column which appeared in the Guardian (May 21st, 2018) and which reports the Pope telling a gay man who was the victim of historic abuse that God loves him as he is, was heart lifting for many of us, irrespective of our sexual orientation.

    In the case of the wedding sermon, it could be argued that the style did not suite the surroundings and that the content was rather more than was desired. But perhaps the mild embarrassment experienced by some was only a manifestation of a much deeper disturbance, the kind of disturbance we experience when we are in the presence of holiness.

    I think it is safe to say that both Bishop Michael and Pope Francis radiate holiness. They do not emanate piety. They radiate the kind of holiness which transcends the boundaries set by institutionalised religion and which defies the conventions of piety. This is the holiness which dispenses with all the irrelevances of rank and power, whatever the context, at the risk of embarrassing some, so that all can momentarily know that they are loved unconditionally by God.

    The art of preaching a good wedding sermon lies in dedicating it to the couple while at the same time embracing the wider congregation, so that every person hears this good news for themselves. Irrespective of text, or of any particular occasion, when gifted preachers speak they give all their listeners permission to love in a way which, until now, may have seemed impossible or even unimaginable. Such preaching is about a much more fiery kind of loving than that which we experience in mere ‘acceptance’, and for many of us both the preaching and the love of which it speaks takes some getting used to.  It can even be painful.

    Perhaps, in also alluding to social media as a sign of our social dysfunctionality, Bishop Michael was suggesting that social media is not social at all. Only rarely on social media do we get a sense of society’s endemic loneliness, no matter how personal and explicit the remarks that are being posted. Rather, it is a convenient means for projecting ourselves in such a way as to hide our incapacity for the giving and receiving of love, even though, from time to time, as with this sermon, we are unexpectedly ‘burned’ by the love of God.

    For those who cannot love such preaching is fire, and possibly brimstone, though not in the way these are commonly understood in the terms employed in medieval descriptions of damnation. Understood in the language of today, hell, or ‘fire and brimstone’, is more likely to be a painful burning away of everything that prevents human beings from loving and allowing themselves to be loved as they are. The fires of hell are the fires of love burning away all that is frightened and false in us, revealing us to ourselves and to one another in our full humanity. Perhaps Bishop Michael had something like this at the back of his mind when he was preaching.

    Lorraine Cavanagh is the author of ‘Waiting on the Word: Preaching Sermons That Connect People to God’ (DLT) 

     

     

  • Royal Weddings – A New Evangelism Strategy?

    by the Rev Canon Rosie Harper, Chaplain to the Bishop of Buckingham & Member of General Synod 

    Rosie Haarper

    It didn’t come naturally. I’m not a Royalist. However in our little Parish in Great Missenden we hired a large screen TV, plugged in the rather fabulous sound system and invited folk to simply pitch up. And they did. Bottles of fizz and industrial quantities of sausage rolls. In some ways it was better than being there. You got a great view and, instead of sitting on your own with rather grotty sound, we all shared the wedding and laughed and applauded and I believe some even shed a tear. As community events go it was ace.

    The initial reaction to Michael Curry was incredible. Even those who wouldn’t naturally enjoy his style felt the warmth and the authenticity. People who never do church loved it. The Guardian told it’s readers that if your enjoyed that why don’t you pop round to your local church on Sunday.

    It is impossible to conceive of any way of getting it out there that could be better than that. The audience round the world was thought to be well north of 1.9 billion. The Church Commissioners could sell all the family silver and they could never come up with an Evangelism project that would have such a reach.

    And the message was spot on wasn’t it? He only said what Jesus said when they asked him. Love God, love one another and even love yourself. Having enough faith to be a loving person and live a loving life is sufficient, indeed it’s what it’s all about. That’s what people heard and they felt they could be part of it.

    That’s what Jesus said.

    That is what Jesus said, and he got it right, because when you do that you become a better human being. You grow to become kind and loving, you stop making yourself the centre of the universe, you stop persecuting people and starting wars. All that stuff that Michael Curry said. All the stuff that is evidence that love can change the world.

    Then it started. Most of the not very religious people loved it, but the God squad started to complain. The first and most obvious complaint was that there wasn’t enough about sin (see my previous blog -it’s a fixation). The people who love their theology said it was theology lite, the liturgists complained about the liturgical detail. Some of the comment of Facebook and the like were unpleasant and judgemental.

    The penny dropped. The theology, the religion, the liturgy, they are all side shows. They are not faith itself. Faith can only be lived.

    Hence the famous verse: If we say we love God, but hate others, we are liars. For we cannot love God, whom we have not seen, if we do not love others, whom we have seen. 1John 4: 20

    Now a huge amount of effort is going into all sorts of evangelism at the moment. They seem to be almost all of the teachy variety. If only we could explain the gospel better, put together such fabulous courses that people would come. Then people would understand and turn to God. It sounds good, but all we are saying is that we want to persuade more people to be like us, and most of them have very little indeed to do with faith.

    We have inherited a rich stream of wisdom through our theology, but in the end all theology is, is whistling in the air. An extraordinary tapestry we have woven to talk about God. Often it is exquisite in it’s beauty, sometimes is it savage in it’s cruelty, but it’s all made up. Theories which people who like that sort of thing find helpful. God is unknowable.

    I’ve never seen people come out of a course on doctrine as more lovely people, they just know a bit more and hence have become a bit more like us.

    The naysayers about Curry’s sermon see themselves as some sort of gatekeeps. Well, God doesn’t need looking after, and seems she decided to rock up at the Royal Wedding off her own bat. It felt right to the millions around the world who got to hear a gospel that for once actually was good news.

    I’m not one who has any personal certainty about life after death, but just say some of the folk who heard Michael Curry last week pitch up at the pearly gates having lived generous and loving lives.  Are you seriously going to tell me the God will turn them away saying: ’Oh so you thought it was all about love. No! No! There’s a lot more to it than that. ‘

    Faith is what you believe and live. All the theology, doctrine and liturgy in the world might delight your mind but if it leads you to judge your neighbour instead of loving then it’s toxic. As evangelists we need to put our energy into the Michael Curry route. He talked about changing the world not the church. He talked about the end of slavery and warfare. He talked about God as love and he meant it.

     

  • Royal Wedding – Finding a Voice

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

    Archbishops

    I must be amongst a minority of people who did not see the Royal Wedding Saturday. Many months ago we had arranged a day to explore some of the spiritual and theological dimensions of money here at Sarum College. Bishop Peter Selby and Dr James Walters led us through a series of challenging reflections about debt, symbol, meaning and how we might put our theology to work. Those of us gathered in our lecture room could hear in the distance the voices of many enjoying a public screening of the events from Windsor at the East End of the Cathedral.

    I confess to feeling surprised and even shocked at the range and strength of opinion expressed, especially by Christians, about the different voices present last Saturday in St George’s Windsor. The criticisms of the voices of both the Dean of Windsor and the Archbishop of Canterbury set against an unnecessary comparison between their voices and voice of Bishop Michael Curry have been persistent, critical and at times ferocious.  We all hear with different perceptions and prejudices.

    Social media turns all of us into public commentators exposing both our ability and inability to perceive, articulate and judge. In this as we find our voice in interpreting what we see and hear we also reveal some of our own flaws and uncertainties. A little more self-knowledge and tentativeness in the expression of our own voice is surely called for if we are to embody the hope and love for which Curry made such a passionate plea?

    There are many agendas at work, not least the glorious and well tested ability of Christians to engage in tribal infighting. We should ask ourselves how and in what way our failure to honour difference and others voices leads to a stronger and more inclusive community. Surely we should be careful in the articulation of sweeping judgements which only give voice to a lack of generosity and inability to see how partial and limited our voices might be. To borrow the oft quoted former Archbishop Runcie’s analogy (paraphrased) comparing the church to a public swimming pool on a bank holiday Monday: ‘there is too much noise from the shallow end’.

    A some measure of reservation, embrace of ambiguity and desire to use our voices to build up and strengthen might enrich community and model love.

    To personalise this – the attacks on the Dean of Windsor and his voice – reveal a lack of understanding and appreciation of his care, faithfulness, goodness and steadiness. It may not be our voice but it was his voice and we should surely respect and honour that? It was a voice that deliberately and intentionally placed self aside in order to allow the words to speak and the focus not to be on him but on the act of worship within which the marriage took place. The culture of spiritual striving where the ego finds its moderated place and voice needs nurturing amidst the seductive and controlling forces of individualism.  Those whose voices are raised in situations of conflict are rarely listening and so neglect to consider and reflect appropriately our human capacity constantly to fail to honour others.

    Brought up in a family of six it is a reminder to me of the lesson needs to be daily learnt – expressed clearly to me by my parents : ‘Remember in living together as a family it isn’t all about you’.

    There were other voices on that day. The voice of the cello blending in with the orchestra. The voice of those individual choristers and lay clerks who are attending to each other’s voices created harmony and music for our souls. Their skill as musicians depended in part on attending to each other’s voices and honouring them. There was the voice of the soloist raising our hearts to the vision of human solidarity in the song, Stand by Me. This was strengthened and enlarged by the choir raising their voices to fill that glorious vaulted space. There were the voices that did not speak. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, uttered not a word but spoke the dignity and honour which warmed all of our hearts. There were the voices of all of those who work together across Windsor to ensure a celebration of life and love which lifted us all.

    We need to continue to find a voice which is ours and to work as best we can to ensure that our voice honours others’. This is especially important as we listen to voices that are different, perplexing, uncertain, struggling towards expressing aspiration and pain.  Nowhere is this more urgent than when voices where there is discord, disagreement and conflict.

    In the film, The King’s Speech, the therapist working with the monarch to find and express his voice sums it up as follows, finding a voice looks like as he suggests is one ‘To give them faith in their voice and let them know a friend is listening.’

    In our public discourse and in our human relating and listening, we must stand back and reflect a little on how our finding our voice and honouring other voices might help to build hope, inclusivity, understanding and trust out of friendship and supportive love.

  • From Windrush to Windsor: Who Do We Think We Are?

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

    Windrush to Windsor

    Pictures:  Junior Green, Windrush victim (left); Rt Revd Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of Episcopal Church of America (right)

    How much difference just a couple of weeks makes!  Two weeks ago we were caught up in the appalling realization of how resident black Britons had been driven out of the country.  Today, as I write, we’ve been celebrating a royal wedding in which it’s clear that, in the service, a definite move was made to recognize and incorporate black or mixed-race identity into the heart of the establishment.

    The Windrush scandal ought to have shocked us to the core.  The readiness of government to see people whose identity documents pre-dated the imposition of new rules about residency by many years thrown out of the country and forced to return to places that many of them could scarcely remember as a child was a brutal reminder of the indifference of policy to people.

    Was it a racist policy?  Many have said so, and I am in no position to disagree.  What’s clear is that, at the very least, targets for lowering illegal immigration were set and approved with such zeal that no scope was left for the intelligent examination of people’s lives and circumstances.  Numbers mattered; people did not.

    That was scandal enough.  But as a historian, the wider implications of what was going on here also concern me.  It was as if the complexity of human identity was simply being erased.  Who we are is not one thing, one dimension of geography or biology or history.   We’re made by multiple points of experience – not just where we were born, not just where we live now, not just what we choose to be now.  We’re creatures of time and the constant interweaving of human relationships: our families’ experiences, our DNA, our home background and aspirations, all these and other factors shape what make us.

    That’s why fascination with genealogy is such a feature of our time.  Programmes like ‘Who do you think you are’ or ‘Long lost family’ demonstrate how all of us, no matter how famous or obscure, in the end are made by a family history that stretches back well beyond what we can remember.  Recovering that history, or something of it at least, is often profoundly moving for people, as they recognize the roots of problems they have experienced, or recover hidden or altogether unknown aspects of the emotional landscape in which they were raised.

    So there is a kind of chilling reduction going on in the assumption that what constitutes an ‘illegal immigrant’, and therefore someone not really ‘one of us’, can be defined simply by the failure to produce certain documents – landing cards, old tax returns perhaps – that people were never told they needed to retain in the first place.  This is bureaucracy like a mindless machine, setting targets, implementing actions, ignoring real situations, and above all turning away from the inhumane implications of what is being done.  It has such sinister overtones of what has gone on elsewhere and at other times in the last century that I surely don’t need to spell the parallels out.

    This is particularly sensitive when we think of the highly complicated legacy of empire.  I’m not one of those calling for a wholesale purging of names, statues, and other cultural signs of British history.  I don’t think we should pull down Nelson’s column, or Churchill’s statute in Parliament Square, for example.  But we do have to expand our idea of British history, to reckon not only with embarrassing or scandalous aspects of our past, but also with the way our past as a former imperial power encompasses not just the British Isles, but innumerable other parts of the world.  And not just that, but also experiences of marginalization and oppression that have simply not featured all that much in the favoured national stories.  Our sense of history and personal identity, if we can raise our horizons that way, takes us well beyond the familiar and comforting.

    And then lands right back on our own patch.  Because if we want to understand who we really are, we have to complicate our own story, and see ourselves as individuals as inheritors of a patchwork history, in which race, class, gender, region, faith commitment, politics and work have all played their part.  The forced ‘sending back’ of people who have lived for half a century and had every encouragement – until recently – to think of themselves as British residents contradicts what we instinctively know and feel – surely – about what we are as human beings.

    But forward fast to today, and a royal wedding.  Of course we can make too much of these things.  But it is nonetheless very ironic that the inclusive spirit of the service was a world away from the reality of the experience of dozens of black Britons forced to undergo hostile scrutiny about their residency, and even exile.  Something good may come of that.

    Picture:  Junior Green, Windrush victim (left)

  • Royal Weddings & Lady Bishops – Time for Change?

    by the Revd Dr Hayley Matthews, Director of Lay Training, Diocese of Leeds

    Meghan & VivPictures: Meghan Markle (left); Very Revd Vivienne Faull, Dean of York (right)

    Dashing in for long shorts for my son, not wanting to miss a moment of spring sunshine, the supermarket’s t-shirts slogans took me by surprise: ‘When Harry met Meghan’ filled the foyer in all sorts of glittering shapes and sizes.

    Marriage mania was clear with tiaras and well wishes to be seen in every shop front along the parade, from the bargain outlet to Harvey Nicks.  Sadly, Meghan’s own father is not getting quite such a good press as the red-tops persist in digging for dirt. When none is to be found, resorting to the unflattering photograph leads to idle if not malicious speculation.

    All to be expected, perhaps, and now that it has been confirmed that Meghan’s father will no longer walk her down the aisle. Headlines have commented that this departure from ‘tradition’ in which a father or other male relative is expected to ‘give away’ their female offspring as if ‘owned’ has not been warmly received by the Royal family, while a Royal Commentator suggested on Radio 4 that ‘the woman who gave birth to her should [walk her down the aisle]’ as a positive solution to Meghan’s father being indisposed.

    It defies belief that in the 21st century an independent woman might need to be ‘given away’ by her father and not accompanied in mutual love by the woman who has nurtured her throughout her childhood and well into adulthood.  Such rank misogyny leaves me breathless in the 21st century on a day when Vivienne Faull was announced as the 15th female bishop, following Mike Hill as Bishop of Bristol.  Dean Faull has pioneered women’s ministry for decades from the moment she was the first woman to train for ordination at St John’s College, Nottingham going on to be one of the first women deacons in 1982, becoming Chaplain of Gloucester Cathedral in 1990. In 1994, she was among the first women to be ordained priest, becoming Canon Pastor of Coventry Cathedral.

    Coming full circle after a series of high-ranking church roles Dean Faull whose own mother was brought up in Bristol, said on Tuesday that the move would be ‘like returning home’ as she becomes Bishop of a diocese that was the first to ordain women as priests 24 years ago.  Dean Faull declared that she wanted ‘the diocese to continue to show that pioneering courage.’ Those are not empty words coming from the first woman to head the chapter of an English cathedral.

    These two women will both experience the Church of England at her best, one in St George’s Chapel, Windsor as she marries into the family whose Matriarch not only heads up the Monarchy she is to join, but who is indeed the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. Harry’s Father would surely never hear Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II referred to as ‘the woman who gave birth to him’? Such rank disrespect of any woman beggars belief, particularly from BBC Radio 4 who spent an entire season exploring the ‘locker-room’ language of men towards women.

    Dean Faull, on the other hand, will be consecrated as the 57th Bishop of Bristol at a service at St Paul’s Cathedral on 3 July, and installed at Bristol Cathedral in the autumn, experiencing the moving magnificence of a service of consecration that continues to mark the historic unfolding of an egalitarian respect of gender, ecclesiology and episcopal order in the Church of England. No doubt she, too, will encounter moments of disrespect, challenge and demeaning language as she continues her pioneering ministry in the ongoing field of firsts.

    Dean Faull has been quoted as saying, “what has been lovely over the past four years is to see [women] emerging as bishops, suffragan or diocesan, and watch how they have begun to establish themselves in very different ways, and be themselves, which is transformative of the Church and perceptions of the Church.” (Church Times, May 15th 2018)

    Meghan Markle will also emerge and establish herself as a Duchess in very different ways to those who have married into the Windsors before, and we know ow well that went for both Princess Diana, Harry’s Mum, and his Aunt, Sarah Ferguson.  However difficult their journey’s, their advent was and continues to be transformative for the Royal family as women bishops are to the Church. Being herself whilst also being a Royal will be a profound challenge in terms of who she is as well as within her new role as a Princess by marriage.

    Both Ms Markle and Dean Faull are women making history this year; breaking new ground, heading into territory as yet uncharted by any other woman before them. They deserve the respect and support of those within the institutions they are joining in order to fully flourish and grow into the enormity of the mantles being thrust upon them. Each will bear burdens large and small, bearable and unbearable as the full weight of their tiara/mitre settles upon them.

    Perhaps it is time for us all to put down our rocks and pointed pens and to begin a sea-change of kindness and forgiveness where we acknowledge the imperfections of these mere human beings thrust into as harsh a spotlight as can be imagined. Is it not the time for cynicism to give way to true Christian charity as to make space for the ‘other’ to flourish and grow, seeing what the new and unexpected has to offer us in terms of enriching and enlivening that which has become so perfectly predictable as to become more pride and prejudice than sense and sensibility?

    To both Dean Faull and Meghan Markle I raise my hat – may they each flourish as only human beings can as they find their place in our dearly beloved Church; and as they find their place may the love of God, surrounding and upholding them, been seen in and through them, and in all their works within the Church and beyond, to the glory of God. Amen.