Part of the Establishment?

As part of the process of candidating for ministry, I have had to read and reflect upon a non-theological book, ready for one of the small group interviews. The book I've decided to look at is called 'The Establishment And How They Get Away With It' by Owen Jones, who writes for the Guardian. It's about how we've ended up with the Britain we have, and the consequences for those not pulling the strings!

The notion of an ‘establishment’ goes back to the 1950s and was coined by the journalist Henry Fairlie. For him, this was about a group of people at the top of British society bound together by social ties – it’s all about who you know – which included the Church of England, the BBC, the monarchy and so on. Owen Jones’ take on the idea is rather different; what defines and keeps the establishment together is a shared ideological commitment, which benefits those who maintain that the neoliberal consensus (small state, minimal employment rights, low taxes for the wealthy, minimal regulation of markets, etc.) represents the only viable political approach, and who profit as a result through shared financial ties and interests. His understanding means a far more diverse collection of people fall into its net, including supposedly anti-establishment political bloggers like Guido Fawkes (Paul Staines) and Russian oligarchs, alongside traditional members such as cabinet ministers, aristocrats, the Church of England and newspaper bosses.

In the opening chapter, Jones describes the shift away from the post-war consensus, which saw public ownership of utilities, transport networks and so on, unions as equal players alongside business leaders, and a top rate of income tax as high as 75%. Think-tanks such as the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) and the Adam Smith Institute laid the intellectual groundwork for the concrete policies of the Thatcher government, and this worldview has come to define the subsequent political landscape. For example, the Keynesian economics of the 1970s would’ve suggested using capital investment paid for by government borrowing as the solution to a sluggish economy like ours in recent years, whereas use of interest rates, lowering taxes for the better off and austerity measures in public spending characterise the monetarism and free market approach currently employed. Successors of those who influenced Thatcher still police the agenda, with organisations like the Taxpayers’ Alliance, actually made up of those who stand to benefit directly from this setup, effectively positioning themselves as the common sense voice of ordinary people, and shouting down those who challenge this neoliberal consensus. 

Having laid this groundwork, Jones goes on to talk about the “Westminster cartel” of MPs with salaries far above anything like the vast majority of their constituents could hope to earn (£67K in 2015) implementing policies that benefit both themselves and the interests of those they work or lobby for (the “revolving door” between private business and parliament), such as private healthcare companies and venture capitalists. He talks about extreme language being used in the face of alternative ideas (think of reactions to Ed Miliband’s proposals on freezing energy prices and greater rights for tenants, or the continued demonisation of unions), to create the impression that any deviation from neoliberalism is simply madness. It clearly works; I’ve had conversations with people at work who make the same arguments and talk of plain fear at the prospect of a Labour government they see as extreme lefties - oh, the irony! Anyway, Jones goes on to talk about New Labour selling out to big business, and the acceleration of the intrusion of private interests into public services, often at great cost to the taxpayer, under the Coalition in areas like prisons, immigration centres, the NHS and education.

The remaining chapters of the book deal with specific areas of life where the establishment dictates the agenda. This includes a list of the usual suspects from the ‘traditional’ establishment such as the Humphrey Appleby-types in the Civil Service, newspaper proprietors and those at the top of the financial sector, but also includes many more targets that fit with Jones' wider definition of the establishment: tabloid reporters and phone hacking, the big four accountancy firms helping government to create tax laws and then helping firms circumvent them, the police considering themselves above the Law (think Hillsborough) and helping to create the conditions that facilitate the few being enabled to exploit the many (think mass surveillance and kettling of demonstrators), and a multitude of others like arms firms, lobbyists and energy companies.

The book includes interviews with various people seeking to position themselves as outside the establishment. Reading some of these, one cannot help but feel there’s both a goodly amount of self-delusion going on (think John Prescott or Paul Dacre, for example), as well as deliberate political posturing (he’s not interviewed here, but Nigel Farage is a prime example of this in practice), and blatant hypocrisy. Jones is very good at calling out the latter, citing Andrew Mitchell’s reaction when the power he wielded was turned on him in the ‘Plebgate’ affair, or the former tabloid editor Neil Wallis’ distress when subjected to tactics he once employed against others. I got the impression that many people were covering their own backs, and that despite having become something of an establishment figure himself (he acknowledges this) and thus able to gain access to the corridors of power, Jones was unable to draw too much out of them.  

This brings me to the question about who exactly is anti-establishment these days. Jones’ quest to find such people brings him together with a very odd bedfellow in UKIP MP Douglas Carswell, with whom he has nothing much else in common (“UKIP is not the answer to any question Jones might be interested in” – Runciman). UKIP presents a very good example, as it happens, of why this isn't a purely academic question. Farage has recently said, in conversation with Trevor Phillips, that he would like to get rid of many anti-discrimination laws, saying they're no longer necessary, and that employers should have much more freedom to discriminate/employ who they want to, depending on how it's read. When confronted with a backlash as a result, he branded the establishment "shameful" and "racist". This is fascinating, and actually illustrates why his desire to get rid of equality legislation doesn't add up. If we take him at his word and assume he's anti-establishment, ignoring all the evidence to the contrary, then surely if he's on the side of ordinary people he should be upholding laws that protect us against them? Conversely, if he is part of the establishment, then he's at least in part responsible for a racist culture. I would argue it's the latter that rings true.

Overall, I think this is a very important book in that it diagnoses the problems faced in modern Britain as a result of the power wielded by the establishment and points out the resulting symptoms, such as overlaps between Westminster and private business interests, authoritarianism, removal of the welfare safety net, records numbers of working people needing to use food banks and so forth. What it doesn’t do is offer many solutions or avenues for change; I have to confess I came away feeling utterly dispirited and fed up! Having been on Occupy myself and of the view that as much as they were seeking a new way to be, this was doomed to fail because of a lack of imagination, I wonder increasingly if what we need is something like what I’ve tried to get at in the sermon extract I’ve posted below.

Your thoughts, ideas and challenges would be appreciated! Let’s get a discussion going…
 

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In his book ‘The Prophetic Imagination’, the American theologian Walter Brueggemann describes the task of a prophet as being to “nurture, nourish and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to [that] of the dominant culture around us”, which he argues is both “grossly uncritical” and “wearied”. In other words, prophets are all about cultivating a radically different way to be, centred on justice and compassion and the freedom of God’s liberating love. Whereas the dominant powers insist there can be “no new beginnings”, the prophetic imagination brings about renewal that leads to societal transformation.

So this calls for honesty, honesty to identity and penetrate the numbness and apathy that allows oppressive structures to flourish, especially when income-based segregation in things like housing and schooling can easily end up sheltering middle-class people (whom statistics suggest make up the majority of church members) from the everyday struggles of the poor and vulnerable. It needs courage, courage to grieve for the death of the current way of being and to articulate hope, when those running the show are fearful of the death of that which advantages them, and protest that there is no alternative. Finally, and crucially, it requires imagination to tap into the symbols in our culture that speak of hope. We need imagination to energise people, to help us discover language of poetry and praise to express wonder and amazement at the freedom of God’s love. Imagination takes the deep wells of grief and transforms them into wellsprings, torrents, monsoons of living and life-giving water.

Brueggemann goes on to talk about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus as the ultimate example of this. His death on a cruel cross acts as the ultimate criticism of all that the oppressive powers of his day and ours, religious and secular, stood and stand for. We don’t like to think too much about the reality of crucifixion, which was designed to strip its victim of their dignity and humanity, but we need to gets our heads around why the Romans did it and why it was effective. For starters, crucified people didn’t wear loincloths, but were naked and utterly vulnerable; no pandering to polite sensibilities here. It was a punishment considered too severe for Roman citizens and thus was reserved for criminals and rebels, and to avoid offending its inhabitants in this particular case, took place outside Jerusalem’s boundaries. It was a shameful death, followed normally by being dumped in a common grave.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that the cross was a stumbling block to Jews, many of whom were hoping for a military Messiah who would banish the hated Romans from their land once-and-for-all, and to Greeks, who couldn’t see the logic behind the claim that such a death brings about a new way to be. Yet, that’s exactly what Jesus Christ has brought about. This apparently foolish and crazy act, the letting go of all earthly ideas of power and wisdom, the refusing to love and live with anything other than the freedom of God, changes everything.

The cross shows us, whether we like it or not, where our selfishness, our clinging onto what we have and excluding the stranger, the poor, the vulnerable and the difficult leads us. And yet that wasn’t and isn’t the end of the story. Easter and Christ’s resurrection energise and free us to embrace and to cultivate hope. It makes a radically different way of being and doing possible. Rowan Williams once referred to the resurrection as a “second Big Bang”, a release of creative energy into the universe that opens up new possibilities we could never previously have imagined. The reality is that injustice, oppression and death do not have the last word. Through the continued energising of the Holy Spirit, we can overcome weariness and apathy to see things with honesty. We can find the courage to name our society’s demons aloud and seek out symbols of hope. We can imagine a transformed world, and express wonder as we see the freedom of God’s love at work.

Rape, Forgiveness and Football

I came across an article in today’s Guardian saying that Ched Evans, the Sheffield United footballer convicted in April 2012 of raping a nineteen year-old woman in a hotel room, has been allowed to resume training following a request from the Professional Footballers’ Association to let him rebuild his fitness. In response, the club’s patron, Charlie Webster, has resigned from her role, arguing that someone convicted of such an offence should not be allowed to resume a career that involves being a role-model in the community, and in particular for young boys and men. This case raises complex and sensitive issues about how we respond as a society to sexual violence, how we treat people with criminal convictions upon release from prison, and how issues of fame and status influence these dynamics, upon which I want to offer a few tentative thoughts.

First though, some statistics: according to figures from the Ministry of Justice, Office for National Statistics and the Home Office released in January 2013, approximately 85,000 women are raped in England and Wales each year. This figure doesn’t include violence against men, or the many incidents that go unreported for a variety of reasons, such as fear of not being believed or the victim being blamed for what happened to them – Rape Crisis England and Wales say that from their experience, only 15% of victims report being attacked to the police. Various myths circulate around the nature of rape and it’s victims; the reality is that in around 90% of cases, the attacker is known to the victim beforehand, rather than being a stranger springing out of a dark alleyway, and the ‘false reporting’ rate is no higher than other crimes, with the Crown Prosecution Service estimating such instances to make up less than 1% of all cases. Moreover, there’s no such thing as a ‘typical’ rapist, and rape isn’t about sexual frustration; indeed, studies of victims’ accounts suggest many attackers find it difficult to maintain an erection. Rape is about violence, power and humiliation.

The impact of rape on the victim is huge. As the statistic on reporting rates suggests, coming forward isn’t easy, and many people internalise a sense of shame or blame themselves for what happened. The trauma that results doesn’t magically go away over time, and struggling to trust a potential partner again is a very common consequence of having suffered any kind of sexual assault. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can give rise to flashbacks, panic attacks, blackouts, freezing with fear and many other symptoms., which can be triggered by apparently unlikely things, or comments or situations that most people wouldn’t react to – it’s one of the reasons why the kind of ‘humour’ or ‘banter’ occasionally thrown about these days around rape is so unacceptable to many. I’ve sometimes found myself, having experienced life being read by others as both female and male at different times, pointing out to male friends that language they might think is ‘ironic’ or ‘tongue-in-cheek’ can have a profound and distressing impact on others.

It’s vitally important, therefore, that the gravity of what Evans has done is acknowledged and reflected in how he’s subsequently treated. However much he protests his innocence, and while the criminal justice system isn’t perfect, he was convicted of rape in a fair trial by a jury of his peers, and must be seen in that light. Many jobs involve a representative aspect and require the person to be a role-model in the community, but few also come with the fame, adulation and status associated with professional football. If Evans was to eventually be re-signed and allowed to carry on as if nothing of consequence happened, it risks trivialising his actions and their impact upon his victim, and facilitates a situation where young boys could get the impression that sexual violence against women isn’t a big deal. I think the way footballers get hero-worshipped in our society is profoundly unhealthy anyway; in Evans’ case, it would be deeply irresponsible to elevate him to that position once more.

I do think, however and more generally speaking, that our response to people who’ve been in prison and served their sentence often lacks compassion and precludes the possibility that someone can change their ways. Forgiveness isn’t a very fashionable word these days, and it seems that, despite much evidence that the best way to prevent reoffending is for someone to find stable and fulfilling employment, having a real fresh start after serving a sentence is very rare. Employers are reluctant to give someone a chance, and having been a prison visitor in the past and spoken with a variety of folks, several expressed the sentiment that the first time they were sent down was like getting a life-sentence, as they’ve been unable to build a ‘normal’ life for themselves afterwards. If we’re serious about our justice system having something to do with rehabilitation and not simply a dynamic of punishment and revenge, then we need to recognise, I would argue, that human beings are rarely black and white; there’s good and bad within all of us, and redemption has to be a real possibility.

Obviously, the practicalities of working the above out are complex, as Evans’ case demonstrates all too well, and it’s worth pausing at this point to think about exactly what we do and don’t mean when we talk about forgiveness. As an example, consider the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 and 12. Just as God had warned Israel when they clamoured for a king, human beings all too easily abuse power for their own gain. In David’s case, he saw Bathsheba, a married woman, bathing and took rather a shine to her. Learning she had a husband didn’t deter him, and the text tells us that he sent for and seduced her (2 Samuel 11:4), though what chance she’d have had if she’d said no isn’t a point we usually worry ourselves about too much – make of that what you will. When David found out she was pregnant, he tried to engineer a situation where Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, could return from battle and sleep with her, so everyone including him would think the child was his. After this plan failed, David conspired to get Uriah killed in battle (2 Samuel 11:14), so he could step in and marry Bathsheba. Seemingly, all was well, though God knew what he’d done.

Nathan was a court prophet, and God used him to call David out on his abuse of power with a clever bit of preaching that brought home the reality of his actions. Upon being pulled up, David acknowledges the wrongness of what he’s done (2 Samuel 12:13) and he receives forgiveness from God. However, the consequences of his actions for himself, for Bathsheba and for his kingdom were profound; David could never be the one to build the Temple, political instability and rebellion ensued in the years up to his death and beyond, and the child that resulted from his forbidden liaison died. Forgiveness didn’t mean being able to sweep his actions and their impact on others under the carpet, nor did it mean being able to carry on the same as before. However, it also didn’t mean being cast out from God’s presence, that everything David had achieved beforehand needed to be erased from history, or that he was dismissed as evil or a monster; David was still a human being made in the image of God, as is Ched Evans, whatever his past.

What I suppose this all shows is that balancing justice and mercy is a highly complex business that throws up profoundly difficult questions. Moreover, while we may want to draw out general principles from sources like the Bible, each individual situation has its own nuances which need careful consideration. In Evans’ case, the status accorded to professional footballers and the consequent responsibilities make it, to my mind, highly inappropriate for him to be allowed to continue in that role. However, branding someone a monster or condemning them to never be allowed to rebuild a life for themselves is cruel and perpetuates misery and suffering, and that I feel cannot be right, either.

My own experience of escaping and surviving an emotionally, physically and sexually abusive relationship is that forgiveness isn’t about pretending nothing happened (even if that were possible, which it isn’t when the silliest of things can cause flashbacks), acting like it doesn’t matter or excusing the person’s behaviour; it’s vital that what happened and the pain and suffering caused is acknowledged. It does mean, though, a willingness to not hold what happened against the person, to lay their actions aside and see their humanity, which is bloody hard work and an on-going process rather than a one-off event. I made a conscious decision not to let my anger consume me, after realising all I was doing by hanging onto it was destroying myself from the inside. It doesn’t mean the scars aren’t still there and that they don’t itch sometimes, or that being able to trust another partner, as wonderful as I think she is, has been easy at all, but it does mean there’s room for God’s love to be at work in me where previously there was just hatred, and that has to make a difference for the better, right?

Thinking about Sacred Spaces

The idea for this piece is to think a bit about what we might mean by ‘sacred spaces’ and how this connects with mission. In particular, I want to look at how we might make connections with people who don’t see themselves as having any affiliation with Christianity or the church by making ‘spaces’, in a broad sense, available to bridge the gap. To help me do this, I’m going to attempt to reflect theologically on an experience I had a few months back. I can’t promise this will be entirely clear or fully-formed, but it captures where my thinking is at currently.

For the past two years, I’ve organised the Transgender Day of Remembrance events in Milton Keynes. This happened quite by accident! I agreed to help another transgender person to organise something, as Pink Punters had stopped providing a coach to take people down to the London event. We had an initial meeting and I said I’d do a few of the jobs around the edge of things, and no more than that. However, due to illness, this friend, who’d agreed to do the majority of the work, bailed out with a week and a half to go. We’d already invited the then mayor to come, and she’d accepted. As all the others in the small team we’d put together dropped out too, I realised if I didn’t do something, it would be me, Sally and the mayor! So, I set about doing the publicity, putting together the plan for the evening, found people to do readings and so on. I also, rather by default, ended up leading the event on the day, too. As no-one answered my plea for help last year I planned and ran the event then, too.

For a bit of background, TDOR is held on 20th November each year and remembers those killed throughout the world for being (or being perceived to be) gender-variant. This encompasses transsexuals (those going through or who have gone through gender reassignment), cross-dressers/transvestites, people who don’t feel they fit into either of the binary categories we usually employ, or fit into both, or who experience gender as something fluid and varying, and so on!

It was started to mark the killing of Rita Hester in the United States, who was a transgender activist and campaigner, and is now held across the world in several countries. In most places, the commemorations consist of reading the list of the names of those killed in the past year, along with poetry, music, prayers and so on. Most events are held in, and organised by, religious communities of one sort or another. Ours was therefore somewhat unusual in being a secular event, though I did incorporate a version of a prayer written by a Rabbi specifically for TDOR in both years, as it is rather beautiful.

Our event has been held in a small room in the city centre church in both years. We chose this venue because it’s central and easy to get to, has a room which is the right size and cheap to hire, and I felt it was a safe space. The free church minister knew what was happening, was supportive and gave permission for us to use the room, but it was not an ‘official’ church event – this would’ve been difficult as though I’ve been accepted without any problems (or at least if people have had problems with me being transgender then they’ve not expressed them to me!), the mix of the congregation is such that many don’t approve of homosexuality, and no doubt would struggle with transgender issues if they knew about them!

In 2013, we had over forty people attend and were supported financially and with publicity by the local LGBT Pride organisation. Some of the participants and certainly our sponsor knew that I am a Christian and more specifically a Methodist local preacher, however they understood that. I’m also going through gender reassignment at the moment, and identify as a transsexual man. Our TDOR brought many into the church who wouldn’t darken its doorstep in normal circumstances; for some, it was their first time inside a church, and others hadn’t been in a church building for many a year. People commented on how they’d always thought churches were cold and unwelcoming and this had blown their stereotype apart, and one of the local LGBT youth group leaders joked about getting the young people to the church on time!

Thus, without really trying, we ended up creating a sacred space, both in the sense of taking an ordinary room and turning into somewhere we could hold a ‘service’ (it did feel very much like a service despite the lack of overt Christian content), and in terms of what we were actually doing. In order to compile the list of names, I had to take a document put together by an organisation that sets out to track these things and extract the information I needed: the name, age and country of origin of each person listed. As this paper details the causes of death of each person, and some of the descriptions are very graphic, it wouldn’t be appropriate just to take the raw document as is. Thus, I’ve gone through and copied the information into a list of my own. It’s by far the hardest bit of running a TDOR, and both times I’ve got through multiple tissues.

It occurred to me before I began that, especially with those people who are never identified, who remain nameless, there may be no-one to pray for them. I find it hard to imagine having nobody to miss you, or to hold you before God; makes me feel emotional just thinking about it. As I was compiling the list, it struck me that God was asking me to pray for the folks I was reading about, and the people who were gathering to remember to hold them too, in a prayerful way, in love and respect. Importantly, we also remember the people who’ve been driven to suicide because of the way they’ve been discriminated against; they aren’t included in the list I mentioned, yet matter just as much.

I think that’s actually quite a priestly thing to do; as we hold the world before God in prayer when we intercede, so we were holding those people before God in TDOR, consciously or otherwise depending on the participant’s views. Additionally, it’s an active, rather than passive, kind of remembering, akin to that in the Eucharist in that makes a conscious connection and gives a degree of dignity to those cruelly deprived of it by violence and hatred. Consequently, I would argue that whether they knew it or not, our TDOR participants were behaving as the people of God in that space, in that thirty minute act of remembering and hoping.

Moreover, it was a chance to invite un-churched, to use the jargon of fresh expressions, people into the building, including as I said the local LGBT youth group, and make them feel welcome and safe in the space we created. I hope it broke down some of the hostility there sadly can be between LGBT people and religious groups. As I’ve noted already, that was probably made easier by going under the ‘official’ church radar, yet it was by its nature missional, both because it got them across the threshold of a church building, but I think also because many knew I’m a lay preacher, and more importantly because of the nature of our actions on those days. What we were doing wasn’t part of a traditional church pattern, nor was it a fresh expression, but something in the gap between the two: mission for the moment, or mission in the gaps.

In her book ‘Journeying Out’, Ann Morisy talks about apt liturgy. By this, she means words and actions that are appropriate for a particular community at a crucial moment, probably involving minimal overt Christian content but not totally devoid of it, which expresses the thoughts and feelings of those people, giving them the space to deal with the situation at hand. It points to something beyond their ordinary experience of life, without bombarding them with religious language or dogma, and invites them to perhaps begin to see something of a bigger picture beyond the material world. I think that, without consciously thinking about it, that’s what happened in those TDOR gatherings. Apt liturgy is one way of bridging gaps.

Romans 15:13 and Paul’s words in abounding in hope come to mind here. Each time we had two poems written and read by transgender people, the reading of the names, silence, prayer and music. First time we used ‘Something Inside so Strong’ and second time ‘True Colours’; these seemed to capture the mood well, and offer encouragement and hope, as well as an opportunity for remembrance, which I think is very important. I think I can say the ‘space’, both physical and otherwise, was sacred because it opened up room for the God of resurrection and new beginnings to be at work, pointing to something more than the grim reality of prejudice against transgender folks, as well as making a connection with and honouring those who had died.

Moreover, without trying I think we created something akin to the temporary autonomous zone, or TAZ, written about by Hakim Bey in a 1991 essay. Essentially, a TAZ zone is a temporary space that subverts the normal rules and eludes formal structures of control. An example outside the church might be the camps set up during the Occupy movement, with no explicit hierarchy and enabling the establishing of different kinds of relationship. In our context, though we had permission of a sort from the church hierarchy, it wasn’t an ‘official’ event and we left to get on with it. Had the wider community known about it, it may not have been possible to do; it subverted the normal rules of what can and cannot be done in church! Everybody joined in reading the names together; this was very important, as it meant though I was in one sense leading, or perhaps facilitating is a better word, the event, each person’s own remembering was equally important and valid and real.

I realise I’ve talked about sacred spaces in various senses here, both in terms of physical spaces transformed into ‘TAZ zones’ and spiritual (for want of a better word) spaces created by priestly actions, by using apt liturgy. I acknowledge my thinking on this is not fully coherent, and that this is a (rather long) stream of consciousness piece. Yet I think at the heart of all of this is that when Jesus is welcomed in somewhere and/or by someone, whether that’s through overtly Christian prayer, words and actions (so we might speak of cathedrals or places like Iona as being ‘thin places’ as they’ve been soaked in prayer) or via welcoming, remembering, honouring the most vulnerable in God’s world, then transformation happens and sacred spaces are formed. I come back to Matthew 25 and the parable of the sheep and the goats: what you do for the least of God’s children, you do for Christ. That’s got to be a door onto the sacred, right? 

Thinking about Light and UFOs

On Tuesday evening, Sally and I attended a Durham University panel discussion event that was held at the Institute of Chartered Accountants headquarters in London. It was part of a programme run by the Institute of Advanced Studies, which essentially is an interdisciplinary project trying to bring experts from a wide variety of fields together to take part in shared conversations around a given theme. This year’s topic is light, and the evening took the format of a panel discussion with a theologian (David Wilkinson), an astronomer (Jocelyn Bell-Brunell), a classicist (Serafina Cuomo) and an anthropologist (Bob Latyon), and chaired by Martin Ward, who is a physicist. It proved to be a very lively evening with lots to think about.

After enjoying much needed refreshment beforehand (it was a very humid evening), the discussion began with the four panel members being asked what they felt when they looked up at the sky, and all four mentioned a sense of wonder and mystery. The discussion then proceeded to think about the place the various objects in the night sky – comets, stars, supernovae and so on – have played in human understanding and interpretation of events. We learned of the political ramifications that could sometimes be associated with unusual cosmic events in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, the relative lack of interest in such things in the Bible, which then makes the story of the star at Bethlehem even more unusual and intriguing, the different ways in which cultures other than our own have interpreted the constellations, and how we need to get our act together and think much more seriously about how we would deal with supposed contact from an alien civilisation. Quite a mixture, I’m sure you’ll agree!

I thought the most interesting part of the evening (and this probably says a lot about me!) was the discussion of UFOs and why it might be that so many people (including apparently four million Americans) believe they’ve either encountered or been abducted by aliens. Each of the panel was asked how they’d respond if a signal wishing to make contact was received, and if we should send a message back, what would it be? Serafina Cuomo admitted she’d known the question was coming and so asked her eight year-old son what he thought. Apparently, he wanted to go to see them, and take all the penguins, because he’s worried about the polar ice gaps melting! While this was very sweet, it has a serious point: perhaps we’re so keen on the idea of alien visitations because we’re seeking salvation, a second chance after we’ve made such a mess of our own planet. It’s not an unusual theme in science fiction, after all. David Wilkinson’s answer was that our message back should be ‘tell us your story’, to try to build relationships.

Both got me thinking, and I know David’s done some work on this, about the theological implications of there being intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, something that cannot be ruled out categorically, and indeed as the Drake Equation suggests, is perfectly possible. We talk about Christ’s resurrection as having implications for the whole of creation, not just our own planet, because that’s what the Scriptures tell us we must do. It’s the first fruit of a new creation, according to St Paul, which will eventually be brought to completion when God restores the heavens and the earth (you might read ‘Surprised by Hope’ by Tom Wright for a fuller discussion of this theme and its implications), and some such as Rowan Williams have referred to it as a ‘second Big Bang’, an explosion of new creative energy into the universe. If this is the case, and our understanding of the resulting atonement for sins and restored relationship with God is bound up with God having shared our human nature (the Word became flesh as John’s Gospel puts it), then what meaning does this story have for an alien civilisation with intelligent beings capable of moral agency, and therefore presumably of sin?

 

It got me thinking that perhaps there are at least three possibilities for how God in Christ might interact with other worlds:

• What we understand as a unique event isn’t actually thus, and the salvation story is brought about by particular events in each world where redemption is required. In other words, God enters into those worlds in different ways and brings about salvation one at a time. This raises all sorts of questions about revelation and our understanding of God as Trinity, to name but two issues.
•  Perhaps the Christ story really does represent God’s one foray into the creation, and so when such a story might get communicated elsewhere in the universe, it could well have to begin with ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…’! This may well make it incredibility hard to relate to God, but perhaps not; I find the incarnation and God having been there and done that, if you see what I mean, very comforting when life’s tough, but many of other faiths manage quite well without such an understanding of a personal God (or even a God at all). Either way, it’s hard to imagine what Christianity would look like without the incarnation at its heart.
• Perhaps God doesn’t care what the vehicle is by which people (in the broadest sense) gain insight into the divine, as long as they do, which would impact our own earthly interfaith dialogues, never mind a wider cosmic view! In some ways this is the easiest answer to work with, but again it asks us what we believe about revelation and the true character of God – can we say anything ‘true’ about the divine?

A not unconnected question relates to what it means to be made in the image of God, and indeed what it is to be human. I saw a fantastic BBC series a little while ago about animal intelligence and behaviours, called ‘Super Smart Animals’. It showed how various animals can do things we used to think were unique to humans such as multi-step problem-solving, imagination, abstract reasoning and so on. While not as smart as the breed of crows featured who solved several stage problems to retrieve food using tools, the crows around our neck of the woods certainly display teamwork and problem-solving skills when they want to raid our rubbish bags! It’s also been long known that apes, for example, sometimes display what we might call sinful behaviours if they occurred in humans, such as bullying, freezing out, domestic violence and even infanticide. Taking what we can see in the animal kingdom and what we might see ‘out there’ at some point in the future, I think we seriously need to go on wrestling with the question of what it means to be made in God’s image, and perhaps to acknowledge that we’re not as special as we like to think…

 

 I don’t have any answers for these questions, but nonetheless enjoyed being prompted to think about them by this very engaging evening. After grabbing another drink, we headed off to our hotel, which because of an admin cock-up by the website I used for booking, was not near Regent’s Park as intended, but at another part of the same chain at Canary Wharf. I’ve now had, as a result, my first experience of a jacuzzi, and all I can say is I want one of those!