It would seem appropriate to offer an attention deficit reflection on the biggest attention deficit Christian festival in the country. So, what did I make of GB10?

Remember to set aside the momentary panic that comes with arriving at GB. The search for a pitch for the tent; receiving the programme, and panicking about “what to see, what to do, when to do, what will I miss, is it all going to overwhelm me?” This too will pass. Brother Lawrence should be the patron saint of GB, or at least, the patron saint of arriving- the sacrament of the present moment is the only thing that will get you through Friday afternoon.

Friends: old, new and unexpected. This is the most important part of the GB experience. Eventually I fall into a rhythm: event, one hour off with friends, event, and so on. That’s how it should be.

Specific events and impressions:

Stanley Hauerwas is a lot ruder (and funnier!) in person than you can possibly imagine from even his most polemical writing. However, the format of reading from his memoirs didn’t really work; there was too much I wanted to digress from (what are the implications of that throwaway remark?), or needed more context (who is Fred?).

However, the evening session on “America’s God” was a remarkable presentation, critiquing the fascination (unquestioned) by most Americans that “civil religion” is the apotheosis of Christianity and civilization (especially on a weekend in which Glenn Beck was committing all kinds of heresy). Some apercus: “the American middle class is the best bought off peasantry in history”; there is a difference between saying curse words and using curse words; the English are the most uncivil people in the world (but in a good) way; the bishops of the Church of England are more interested in protecting their privileges than condemning the evils of nuclear weapons (one suffragan bishop squirmed in his seat at that one).

Cole Moreton (“award winning journalist” for The Guardian) was especially disappointing. His jaunty, inaccurate, broad-brush and incoherent history of the spiritual and religious life of Britain over the last twenty years was, and this is a technical word, rubbish. He wanted to hand major spiritual shifts on the passing of “minor” pieces of legislation (never making it clear whether the legislation was cause or symptom of said shift). So, for example, when the government changed Sunday trading laws, the Church of England surrendered its moral authority by investing in retail parks, including the Metro Centre. Why should we take any notice of what they say in future? At the same time, in the next paragraph, when the government loosed the country from the Church’s dead-hand monopoly on weddings (silly me! I thought that had happened in 1753 and 1948!), the Church of England refused to capitulate to the consumerist mood which was unleashed, by insisting that people attended church to hear their banns being called, and refusing to allow confetti in the churchyard, whereas the hotel down the road allows you everything you want, and gives you a glass of champagne to boot.

Which is it Cole? The Church follows the mood of the age (shopping centres) or the Church refuses to follow the mood of the age (weddings)? Or would you prefer to criticise for both approaches? I am always grateful when journalists write about religion: it makes me aware of how many half-truths are being peddled in the economics, sport, politics and international sections of the paper as well. (There was also a number of snidey “Unlike the Church of England, I belong to a church which actually believes something…” questions.)

Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: if you attended his talk on “does God want you to be rich?” expecting the answer “yes”, you would be disappointed. But not with the content and delivery of his talk, which, beginning with teaching an Anglo audience how to sing spirituals unaccompanied (“clap on 2 & 4 not 1 & 3), and going through the most touching and provoking stories, won the prize for “talk most likely to challenge my complacency” at GB10.

Giles Fraser on the Church of England and the English Civil War. There are some films which are made with such brio and panache that you are willing to overlook the plot holes. There are some films which, although tightly plotted, are made in such a lumbering, repetitive and unbelievable manner. Fraser’s talk combined the worst of both worlds: it was repetitious in its delivery, with digressions and cul-de-sacs where he obviously had just thought of something and wanted to shoehorn in it (John Locke sat next to Christopher Wren at school? Who knew?); it was fatally flawed in its analysis of the Restoration Church of England as the “peace treaty” for the long wars of religion from Henry VIII onwards— if the Restoration Church and the Book of Common Prayer was a peace treaty, it acted as the Versailles Treaty of peace treaties. It was victor’s justice, imposed with an iron hand, and crushing social and legal conformity. If it was a peace treaty, then why was it accompanied by Test Acts, Five Mile Acts, and Conformity Acts, and why do the non-conformist churches in England all date their founding from the reign of Charles II? (and it is no excuse to complain about the closed shop of the Guild of Historians, as Fraser did, either. History is interpretation, but it is based upon a number of agreed facts. Interpretation doesn’t trump reality). I have to say that the the audience loved what he had to say. I, on the other hand, think the talk might be worth listening to when Fraser finishes it.

All in all, GB10 was another excellent festival. The combination of intellectual stimulation and musical happenstance (which I haven’t even mentioned, but Megson and the Fancy Toys both deserve to be much more widely known), and the continual running into friends makes Greenbelt the oasis of the year, and water for a thirsty soul.

It was once a powerful expression. It once said something new, and exciting, and dangerous, and true. Now it is hackneyed.

How many times have you heard the exhortation to “speak truth to power”? In how many inappropriate situations have you heard applied the exhortation “speaking truth to power”.

It once meant standing up to those people and institutions who could directly and physically harm you. Think of Martin Luther King in Selma in 1965; Nelson Mandela in Rivonia in 1963; Mohandas Gandhi on the Salt March in 1930.

Now it merely means saying something irritating and self-righteous to those with whom you disagree. It is an expression of the ‘victim-culture’ of our day: Monty Python pinned it neatly with the “don’t you oppress me” sequence in The Life of Brian.

Every time you claim to speak truth to power you make a claim about your own powerlessness.

At the same time, you assert that your powerlessness actually adds to the truthfulness of what it is you say: I am truthful because I am powerless.

And very often, the people who are making these claims are Western, middle-class, university-educated, and wealthy beyond the dreams of 90% of the rest of humanity.

Let’s leave “speaking truth to power” to one side for a time, and think about our own complicity in the structural injustices of the world. It’s harder work than student posturing, but it is more grown up.

“No!” the usual answer goes. “Why should we vote for the man or woman who remains faithful to their spouse? How does that help the deficit down and the aeroplanes back into the sky?” Alasdair MacIntyre would beg to differ:

Managers themselves and most writers about management conceive of themselves as morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed. Whether a given manager is effective or not is on the dominant view a quite different question from that of the morality of the ends which his effectiveness serves or fails to serve. None the less there are strong grounds for rejecting the claim that effectiveness is a morally neutral value. For the whole concept of effectiveness is… inseparable from a mode of human existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns of behaviour; and it is by appeal to his own effectiveness that the manager claims authority within the manipulative mode.¹

Of course, to believe MacIntyre, you’d have to accept that our politicians belong to the genus “manager”, and who would believe that?

1. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: a study in moral theory, 2nd ed. (London: Duckworth, 1985), p. 71 [↩]

Apologising is a good thing, isn’t it? Not when it is a substitute for the harder, more searching work of reflection, contrition and restitution.

 3MT : When sorry is the easiest word [5:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1669)

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If you assume a position based upon a legal claim, you better make sure your legal claim actually supports your position. A lesson the Church Missionary Society should learn.

 3MT : The Fig Leaf of Law and the Pharisees [4:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1907)

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3 Minute Theologian’s alter ego, Justin Lewis-Anthony, has another comment piece on the Guardian’s Comment is Free: Belief blogs.

Read it here: Priests are not immigration officers

We look too easily for heroes, and we overlook the ways in which the world is truly transformed for the better. Continue Reading »

 3MT : Drains and Heroism [4:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2046)

Apparently, it was a holiday. Although, to be honest, most days seemed to be a holiday here. And not the sort of decent, joyful, singing-in-the-street sort of holidays he was used to back home. Here the holidays seemed to go on for days at a time, and everyone stayed in doors, only emerging to look miserable and bad-tempered and ready for a fight. Too much religion and not enough wine. Something to do with their miserable mountain god, he supposed.

Anyway, he hated holidays in Judea. Holiday for the Jews, double overtime for the soldiers. You never knew when the empty streets would suddenly fill, for no apparent reason, with crowds looking to pick a fight with a legionary. There were forty crosses on a roadside in Galilee which he had filled after the last holiday: he told his superiors it had been an insurrection, which it probably was, but in his book, as soon as a sword or a club or a rock was lifted towards a Roman, he didn’t care what the motivation was. He had been a centurion for long enough to know that Pax Romana was not concerned with such fine distinctions.

But now he was here, in the capital, for the longest and worst holiday of the year. Appropriate he supposed, for this was the smallest and worst capital in the Empire. Stuck high up on a desert mountain, where water was short and the air was thin, and nights were freezing cold. The olives were wizened and the wine was worse. All in all, he could almost prefer to be in Britannia. And the crowds!

The whole of Judea was here, and crowds of people from all over the Empire, all pouring into the tiny city as if their lives depended on it. And for such a strange religion as well: a cruel and capricious and changeable god (only one!), who made demand after demand on his people, and never allowed them anything in exchange. And such an exclusive god as well. He was a well-brought up Roman citizen, perfectly prepared to offer libations at the altar of Mithras and Zoroaster and Toutatis and Lud. But when he arrived in Jerusalem he was told, in no uncertain terms, that he was NOT to go to the Temple, and he was NOT to attempt to pay respects to the Jewish god: “a jealous god” indeed.

And now he was on mopping up duties. Mopping up after another religious-political mess up. A man who claimed (or didn’t claim) to be a holy man; claimed (or didn’t claim) to be a prophet; claimed (or didn’t claim) to be a political leader; claimed (or didn’t claim) to be a rival King to Caesar. Honestly the story wasn’t straight, and he didn’t think it ever would get straight. The little respect he had for the Jewish religious leaders, and the little respect he had for the Roman political leaders had long gone. He could accept the naked pursuit of private agendas: how else did Pax Romana get to be Pax Romana without it being imposed so decisively? What he couldn’t accept was the incompetence shown by the priests and the Governor. This trouble-maker could’ve been arrested long before the holiday, or he could’ve been “disappeared” until after the crowds dispersed. But a public trial and a public execution on the day before the holiday when the city was at its most volatile? … well! If you want a problem solved, best call the Legion VI Ferrata!

The execution spot, just outside the city walls, was prepared. Golgotha the Jews called it (barbarous tongue): Calvary to the Romans. There had been executions three days ago, and the bodies had been taken down this morning. There were four crosses ready, although they’d only need three: one for the Galilean political, and two for ordinary criminals— robbers, he thought. The next problem to sort out was getting to the execution ground. The streets between the Governor’s palace, the Antonia, and the nearest gate to Calvary were narrow, and bound to be crowded. Short swords might be needed, but clubs would be better. He’d make sure that his men were issued with them. He’d pick up the execution party (party! Great name for it!) at the Antonia, and lead them through. He thought about, and dismissed, riding. He’d have more control on foot. Easier to get to miscreants at their level.

The robbers had not been pleased to see him: one swore, one cried. The “political” said nothing, and just stood there. At first he thought the prisoner was too dazed to know what was going on: his face and back were streaked with blood and bruising. But then, when the order came to shoulder the cross-bars, he could see the prisoner look around him, gazing intently, but without hostility, at the guards who would accompany him to Calvary. He knows what’s going on, the centurion thought. More than that: he thinks he’s in control. He’ll learn soon enough.

The streets were tumultuous, but the resistance he had feared didn’t show. In fact, the crowds were out to jeer at the prisoners. This was unusual. The Jews didn’t normally take against the subjects of Roman justice like this. A man could be a rapist and a murderer, but if he was being killed by Roman law, then he would be acclaimed as a hero by the crowds. And yet the streets rang out to mockery, and the air was filled with curses and spit. He kept a close eye on the political. No reaction. He staggered under the weight of the cross bar, banging its outstretched ends into walls and corners and people. But he didn’t answer back. His eyes were focussed on the man ahead of him. Occasionally he would look to the crowd, but he was looking for someone in particular. He never found them, and looked away disappointed. Still not a word passed his lips.

There was space to breathe outside the city walls, and the air was fresher. Fresh enough for a rain storm? He wished he’d brought his long winter cloak. He would get soaked through on this exposed hill waiting for the prisoners to die. He resolved to get a brazier and break their legs after four hours if they weren’t dead by then. No point in prolonging his inconvenience.

The prisoners were stripped naked, and thrown to the ground, lying upon their cross bars before the uprights fixed already into the ground. Their arms were stretched out, and three legionaries hammered the nails through their wrists into the stained and splintered wood. Two of the three cried out. He was relieved to see the political grimace in pain: he was still alive then, and not drugged out his suffering by some friendly supporter. Ropes were threaded through the hooks on the back of the cross bars and over more hooks on the tops of the stake. The prisoners were dragged upright, pulled up to the tops of the stakes, their bodies dangling in the air. He had made sure their arms were tied to the cross bar as well. If prisoners were just secured by nails they could die of suffocation in the few short minutes before their feet were nailed to the upright. All three prisoners made it to the cross alive. That was practice and professionalism, the centurion admiringly thought. The final nails went into the feet of the prisoners, pushing their legs up into a crouch. That would give them just enough purchase to lift their bodies up when they felt their lungs being crushed. Longer to die, and longer to bring the message home about Roman justice.

One last job for the political. The centurion ordered a ladder to be placed against the political’s cross, and climbed up himself with a wooden board under his arm: the titulus. A last nail to fix it above the political’s head. “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”. So that was his name. Some Jewish VIPs shouted at him as he climbed down the ladder: “You can’t put that up there!” “Speak to Pilate.” “But, he’s not our king!” “Speak to Pilate.” “Put ‘He said he was king of the Jews’”. “Speak to Pilate. And don’t speak to me again.” This last with his hand on his sword. They shut up.

Not for long though. They turned their attention to the political. Abuse and curses and religious language, most of which passed him by. They must really hate him, the centurion thought. The political said nothing for a long while. The screaming continued, until one of the robbers joined in as well. Even on a cross you can find someone worse off than yourself, the centurion thought grimly. Eventually the political opened his mouth. Finally! “Father, forgive” was all that he whispered. That stopped the abuse for the moment. Everyone looked slightly bemused, as if surprised to find themselves where they were, in a boneyard, screaming at dying men.

The sky had clouded over. The storm was coming. He was glad he had ordered the brazier, and he could see three of the soldiers playing dice in its warmth. The crowds had thinned now, sensibly enough. The political wasn’t going anywhere. Two people remained, standing as close to the cordon of soldiers as they dared. The political was speaking to them, a man and an older woman. Something about looking after each other. You should’ve thought about your will before you got into trouble, sonny.

One of the robbers was already dead. The other was close to it. A hour inside his timetable. Good job too, because it was now as dark as pitch, and the rain was lashing down. Only the political was still going, pushing himself up on his nailed feet, stretching towards the heavens. “I have finished…” (true enough, the centurion thought). “Father, into your hands, I commit my spirit.” At this the political shuddered, and died.

The centurion paused, curiously moved, and, despite himself, wondering if he had missed something in all the events of the day. “Perhaps, all in all, this man really was righteous,” he whispered to himself. Even so, righteous or not, he was dead.

Thank the gods that was over. Mopping up successfully accomplished. Time to get the body down before sunset. Let the relatives have him, and then we can forget all about him. I wonder if the water is hot in the barrack bath house?

Today is “Good” Friday, and the sheer name of the day alone shows that we can’t trust God to have the same values as normal, decent, human beings, can we?

Maundy Thursday is the night in which we are allowed to admit our failures.

(longer than 3 minutes, but regard it as a Triduum Minute Theology!)

 3MT : A disastrous dinner party [6:34m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (220)