Starting Out...

There's a film starring Martin Sheen called 'The Way', about a father whose son died walking the first stage of the 'El Camino de Santiago', the famous pilgrimage to the grand church of Santiago de Compostela. He (the father) decides to undertake the eight hundred kilometre walk himself in memory of his son, from whom he'd been largely estranged in the years before the accident. It's a film about journeys, new friendships and vulnerability, with milestones that need to be reached along the way to avoid being left sleeping out in the cold, and various obstacles to be overcome. Through the process, the father is changed from a grumpy git with a deep suspicion of others to someone who is a bit less hostile, having had some of his rough edges knocked off.

I was thinking about this today during the Holy Communion service that marked the conclusion of the induction period of my theological training, at Queen's College in Birmingham. This week has involved an intense period of introduction to college life, and this post is an attempt to make sense of this and where life is at.

 

This time last week, I was on a train to Birmingham, having completed my final day at work in London, validating mathematical models for a bank. The next few days were spent moving our stuff from a temporary flat (the rain and a leaky roof conspired to damage the kitchen in our actual flat) to our new home, and building our new furniture. It turns out that making flat pack stuff isn't as hard as I thought it would be! Anyway, after that was all sorted, there was a gap of a few days, during which time the reality of becoming a student minister (student presbyter, to be precise and to use the correct Methodist wording - apparently I'm very much not an ordinand yet) stubbornly refused to begin to sink in.

On the Sunday, I went to Birmingham Cathedral for the morning Eucharist, looking for something familiar and reassuring, and found the interior covered in scaffolding, which summed up how I felt at that point: being propped up, goodness knows by what, in danger of falling down otherwise. My mum had a stroke on New Year's Day which has left her unable to communicate in any meaningful way, and since then I've really struggled to pray. To be honest, it's actually given my relationship with God quite a big knock, in that while I can happily give intellectual assent to the same doctrinal framework I've had for the past few years, the emotional/relationship side of things feels deadened. Preaching regularly has kept me engaging with the Bible, but otherwise it's been hard to keep up any real kind of spiritual discipline. With all that going on, I was dreading going into an environment full of Christians, and wondering how it would pan out.

The first few days have involved getting to know the other people, made up of fellow Methodist student ministers, Anglican ordinands, international students and independent students, and being bombarded with things to take in, about the academic work we'll be doing, ministerial formation, college life and so on. It's all been rather overwhelming, due to both the sheer volume of information to process and digest, and the things people kept saying about being Christian leaders, the milestones on the way to being ready to go into stationing (in English, the first appointment), and the Church's expectations. I felt increasingly like a fraud as time went on, given the dryness of my own prayer life at the moment.

One of the things that has helped me settle a bit is the regular pattern of worship, and community meals and time in the Common Room have been useful for getting to know people. However, the big question that keeps coming back is 'why on earth am I here?' This all came to a head during the Communion service, which brought up all sorts of unexpected feelings. As some of you may know, I was kicked out of the ordination process in the Church of England when I came out as gay (this was before I went through gender reassignment, so I still identified as a lesbian), meaning I didn't the chance to explore my vocation. While I have reconciled myself to having moved denominations, sometimes this is still painful. I wonder if there's an element of sacrificial service, maybe? Being in an environment where familiar and deeply meaningful language was being used, and knowing that having ended up in Methodism means that isn't now my tradition, is tough. Being able to express this to one of the others, someone I've known for a long time, really helped but I think it will all take time to settle down and make some sort of sense.

The main thing I've found useful, though, is the cross in the grounds of the college, which I've photographed:

For me, it's a really powerful symbol of brokenness and God making us whole through breaking us down and knocking off the rough edges. College will be a journey with milestones that need to be passed in a given time period, obstacles to be overcome, much to learn and community to embrace and negotiate. The thing that's stopping me running away at the moment is the thought that, however confusing and muddled it all feels (which is very!), God is somewhere in the mess and I'm not here at Queen's through coincidence or accident. John 15:16 is the text we had during the corporate silence today, which makes the point clearly.

So, now there's a few days to recover before it all gets going. I intend to keep posting as and when I get the time, as a way of journaling I might actually do, so watch this space...

David Cameron's Easter Misunderstandings

It was reported in the Guardian on Thursday that David Cameron believes the 'Easter message' is about hard work and responsibility. In an interview he gave to Premier Radio, he argued that the heart of Christian faith is "compassion, forgiveness, kindness, hard work and responsibility", and that "‘Love thy neighbour’ is a doctrine we can all apply to our lives – at school, at work, at home and with our families". Mr Cameron admits to being "fuzzy" about the "finer points" of the faith, but having read this, I can't help but feel he's hazy about rather more than that; indeed, I found myself wondering if we're reading the same Bible!

The version of Christianity put forward in this article misses the point of the Gospel completely and wilfully. Throughout the centuries, the church has wrestled with who Jesus is and what he accomplished, meaning for example that the creeds took hundreds of years to thrash out, and that the Reformation of the sixteenth century had such a turbulent effect on European society. However, what it never has successfully done is to claim that Jesus Christ was crucified for preaching the kind of inoffensive, motherhood-and-apple-pie 'faith' that Cameron talks about here. Rather, at the heart of the Gospel is the scandalous idea that, contrary to the conform-or-die mentality of the Roman Empire that brutally supressed descent and used crucifixion as the ultimate way of denying the humanity of its enemies, there is no such thing as a person that doesn't matter to God. That includes the outcasts, the poor, the sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes of Jesus' day, and inconveniently for Cameron's neoliberal ideology, it also includes the unemployed, immigrants, disabled people, single parents, working poor and all the other groups regularly demonised these days.

It strikes me that the neoliberal consensus that has emerged over the past thirty-five years, the emergence of which I've discussed in an earlier post of the nature of the Establishment, values people in terms of their economic output and potential as consumers. This means that those who are less well-off, or in our context less able or unable to contribute to UK plc., are considered less worthwhile human beings than those in work, unless they're pensioners as they're more likely to vote than any other demographic. Moreover, the changes we've seen under Cameron's government that have made employment less secure, led to zero-hours contracts creating instability for a great number of people, and seen record numbers of working people needing to call upon food banks to survive, have added to a sense that human worth has been reduced to economic utility manifested in the betterment of those who are already wealthy, rather than seeing human beings as intrinsically worthwhile, as mattering for their own sakes.

The Gospel stands, therefore, in sharp contrast to a worldview that fails to value all people as God does, as evidenced by Jesus' laying down his life on the cross and rising again for all, not just a privileged few. Jesus bashed up against Roman might not because he was a Jesus Barabbas-style bandit, but because he loved with a freedom that simply proved too hot for religious and secular power alike to handle. If you read of the events of Holy Week, as I strongly encourage you to do, you’ll see that Jesus offended the authorities by challenging how things were done in the Temple, questioning the exclusion of the poor, sick and marginalised from Israel’s religious life, and crossing boundaries to reach out to those most in need of God’s love. This wasn't in the script as far as either the Temple authorities or the Roman governor were concerned, and they sought to remove a potential thorn in their side in decisive fashion.

 

They found a ready ally in one of Jesus' own disciples; scholars have speculated that Judas might’ve been a zealot, looking for a military Messiah who would overthrow the hated Romans by force. If so, he was probably angry with, and disappointed by, the sort of Christ Jesus turned out to be. Moreover, when it came to it, the same crowds who rejoiced at Jesus' arrival were ready to scream 'crucify' when stirred up by religious leaders. There was something about the freedom with which Jesus was able to love and challenge the barriers we slam up, the way we create an 'us' and 'them', which was deeply threatening then and remains so today. After all, as I said earlier, Jesus wasn't stripped naked, beaten, crowned with thorns and nailed to a cross for preaching motherhood and apple pie! Crucifixion was not just a form of capital punishment, but a punishment designed to be as cruel as possible and to strip its victims of all human dignity.

 

The cross of Christ, then, stands in opposition to a Roman empire that sought to enforce conformity, and to value human life in of itself as worth nothing. It still stands against those things in our culture that enable the misuse of power to the determent of human flourishing. I'm increasingly convinced, therefore, that resurrection is about the emphatic rejection of everything crucifixion stands and stood for. It's as clear a demonstration as possible that the power of love made visible in utter weakness is stronger than violence, than the worst of human nature. Put simply, contrary to the whole framework which Roman rule operated under, there really is no such thing as a person who doesn't matter, because there's no-one who's outside of the reach of the love of God.

 

I fear that Mr Cameron's twee theology, that so readily creates a 'them' and 'us' society (think strivers against skivers, and other spurious dichotomies), doesn't hold water when set against the reality of Holy Week, of the cross and resurrection. I'm sorry, but unless I'm missing something, I don't see where hard work or responsibility comes into what I've outlined above. The biblical narratives present a God who's all about overflowing love, reckless love that acts indiscriminately to include both the 'good' and respectable and the outcasts and misfits, and is no respecter of status, wealth or economic utility. Above all, this love is a gift, unearned and unmerited, not a reward for hard work. Mr Cameron should try reading the New Testament occasionally. He might learn something!

The Pioneer Gift

For the final part of my series of posts in preparation for ministry selection, looking at a film, an exhibition, a non-theological book and a theological text, I’ve decided to look at a collection of essays edited by Jonny Baker and Cathy Ross, called ‘The Pioneer Gift: Explorations in Mission’. This contains twelve contributions from a range of practitioners, lay and ordained, some of whom are publishing their first such piece. I found it an interesting and thought-provoking book as someone going through a process of selection to become a minister in what’s often referred to as ‘inherited’ church, though I cannot deny I felt a sense of frustration growing inside me as I journeyed through it, alongside much useful food for thought.

I’ve explored material on fresh expressions of church and pioneer ministry before, and I struggle with the way that, for all the talk of a genuine mixed-economy church, the reality often means people like me keeping the ‘old way’ going, while others get on with the ‘creative stuff’, like we’ve created two parallel strands that don’t connect very often. While this book is much better than much of what I’ve previously read at avoiding this trap, my burning question at the end of it was, essentially, about where people like me fit into the picture. I want to and can reach out to those for whom a transformative relationship with Jesus Christ isn’t yet there, and there’s no way I’m giving up a well-paid and enjoyable job to be a professional manager of institutional decline. Yet, given I think God’s calling me to work predominantly in ‘traditional’ church, I was left wondering how that fits with a desire to move beyond its boundaries.

I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of each chapter, as much as anything else because Sally’s already done this extremely well in her review. Rather, I want to draw out the aspects that most interested and grabbed me, as well as pondering the above question.

So that brings me to Jonny Baker’s opening chapter, looking at the nature of the pioneer gift, which in his words is “the gift of not fitting in”. Pioneers are those who have the vision to see new possibilities and then to work to bring them to life, which he argues is something every church needs “if it is to have a future and not get stuck … if it is to be missional and move out of its comfort zone”. The church has needed such people in every age, yet the term still retains ambiguity and complexity, allowing for diversity in both its expression and the range of people called to walk its path. Consequently, it flourishes through authentic expression of what it means for each pioneer to be thus in their context, as opposed to trying to conform to predefined expectations. At its core is mission; pioneering is about orientating to the true North of the missio dei, in traversing a rapidly changing cultural landscape while learning from the Bible and history, and developing a “mission spirituality” to sustain the journey.

Baker goes on to discuss some of the difficulties encountered by pioneers and those seeking to support, train and authorise them within existing denominational structures. He argues that it needs “imagination, courage, tenacity and resilience (and indeed velocity)” to resist being sucked back into a “business as usual” framework, and that the journey of change the church needs to go on to make this smoother will not be easy. Moreover, one of the dangers in trying to share the Gospel in new contexts is that the culture of those doing so gets unwittingly imposed on the recipients, so deep engagement with those cultural contexts and a willingness on the part of pioneers to let go of some of their own preconceptions is necessary. It’s thus a gift that takes time to grow and to flourish, and requires being what he calls “path-finding dissenters”; that is, people able to “bridge the gap between the Gospel and culture, imagining and implementing new strategies”.

A good deal of the rest of the essays flow from Baker’s, and pick up on the ideas and challenges outlined above. Cathy Ross talks about her experience as part of the Church Mission Society (CMS), and outlines various aspects of what mission means in practice: sight means reading culture and context, properly seeing and therefore respecting and valuing others, and being able to imagine a different way to be that goes against the grain. Emptiness and hiddenness mean self-emptying love (with a note of caution about ignoring our own needs) and an emphasis on the aspects of discipleship that aren’t always seen and recognised, rather than focusing on headline-grabbing quantitative (numerical) growth as the end point of everything. Hospitality means mutually enriching relationship, echoing Ann Morisy’s argument about the transformative power of meeting others on equal terms, and homelessness involves stepping out into alien theological territory, into the wilderness, and letting go of current thinking to receive new insights from God.

I found this a very helpful chapter, in that while her focus is on pioneers, much of what Ross says is more widely applicable. After all, discipleship is by its nature relational, rather than something that happens in isolation. Consequently, there’s a need in every context to learn how to see anew, to catch glimpses of the unexpected and transformative things the Holy Spirit is doing in our communities, and to properly care for the marginalised and easily overlooked people that we encounter. We follow a God who took human form, was often to be found teaching, healing, challenging and receiving at the dining table, and who became the servant of all, so it’s natural that diakonia and hospitality should be central to mission. Additionally, like it or lump it, the church will need to change drastically in the coming years due to declining resources (people and financial), so we’ll all need to risk theological (and ecclesiological) homelessness in order to discover where God’s leading us next.

This idea of theological homelessness is further developed in three chapters that illustrate the need for existing doctrinal ideas to be challenged and reformed. Anna Ruddick talks about her work with the Eden Network in troubled communities, with the language of transformation being far more natural for the young people she encountered than traditional terms like salvation and redemption. Andrea Campanale works in South West London, and talks about her experience of shame being at the root of the difficulty many have trusting that God loves them, rather than a sense of sinfulness. This pushed her to explore the stories and thinking in our tradition that can speak to this and bring about healing, to help people integrate their actual and ideal selves (her ‘Screen Eucharist’ liturgy is a very powerful example of this in practice).

On a related theme, Emma Nash talks about her research on the language of sin, arguing that “we need to present sin as a profoundly relational dysfunction” that causes us to be estranged from others and God, and not simply about “guilty thoughts, words and deeds”. This also means acknowledging systematic injustices far more prominently than is often the case. Moreover, she wonders if we need to find words that don’t “require people to acknowledge wrong in their lives in the first instance” but instead “invite them to spend time with a person and experience a friendship like no other”. All this stems from findings that suggest that sin and atonement formed very little part in becoming a Christian among many of her interviewees. Additionally, the conception of sin as relating to ‘naughty thoughts’, particularly of the sexual variety, didn’t connect with people in a society where there’s more freedom than ever to construct one’s own moral code and understanding.

I found these three chapters fascinating; the question of finding language to express Christian faith that connects with people outside the church is crucial for all Christians. As a local preacher working in secular employment, predominantly with people around my own age (late 20s and early 30s), my experience has been that much of the language we take for granted simply doesn’t resonate beyond the church walls, or indeed the concepts we think are most important aren’t always those occupying others. 1 Peter talks about being able to give an account one’s faith, in that case to a bunch of Christians derided for being different and not fitting in with the world around them. If we’re going to carry on that fine tradition of not fitting in as a gift, pointing to an exciting and life-giving different way to be, as a core part of discipleship, we need to take this challenge seriously.

As an example, shame is something that experience tells me resonates with a lot of people who believe themselves unlovable for a whole variety of reasons, often connecting with deep hurts and or a sense of not living up to social expectations in some way. Lecturing people about sin in these circumstances can be not just unhelpful, but actively harmful, as Nash recognises. I once took part in research looking at the impact on transgender people of shame, in a society that is more open than many but where negative and hostile attitudes to gender nonconformity can lead to people struggling with self-hatred or profound embarrassment. In that situation, being able to speak of God’s loving acceptance and always having known and delighted in us exactly as we really are, has the potential to bring about healing and help people towards wholeness. Placing too much emphasis on sin, on the other hand, risks further alienating a group generally wary of Christianity, for good reason.

Moving from some of the gifts pioneers can offer the wider church to some of the difficulties they experience living with it, Doug Gay and Gerald Arbuckle talk about some of the frustrations of dealing with existing institutions, and obstacles to bringing about change, respectively. Gay (who I met on Iona once upon a time…) is a lecturer in practical theology at the University of Glasgow. He discusses not being able to get permission to start up a new project from the local incumbent, and the issues caused by not having ‘permission-givers’ enabled to make things happen in his denomination, the Church of Scotland. Arbuckle, an anthropologist now working in Australia, explores the nature of myth. He reflects on the hope for reform present at the time of Vatican II, and what went wrong as cultures and structures did not change enough to prevent conservatism regaining the upper hand.

These two chapters point to one of the challenges I guess pioneers face: how to carve out the space to enable them to take risks and start something new. Feeling threatened by new people rocking up, or worrying about Christianity being dumbed down in some sense, are probably common reasons for hostility towards pioneers arising. It also takes time and concerted effort to bring about cultural change. However, I do wonder if this is a two-way problem, and that actually pioneers may not notice some of the gifts and resources that inherited church has to offer. Perhaps they sometimes fail to recognise that although starting from a different base, there are those of us looking to straddle the two worlds, to connect with the surrounding culture and context in ways that engage those on the edges of or outside the church, alongside refusing to give up on what’s there already. There’s also an issue that pervades church life generally, of cliques forming and those on the outside not being taken seriously, on both ‘sides’.

With that backdrop, Karlie Allaway’s contribution was a breath of fresh air. It gave me hope that the false dichotomy between inherited church and fresh expressions/pioneer ministry is gradually being broken down, at least in some contexts. Allaway is a Roman Catholic, and she reflects on the challenges and joys of living together in community and the central role for her of sacramentality. Coming from that tradition myself (I’m a recovering Anglo-Catholic!), it makes a great deal of sense that a sacramental worldview “does something profound to your imagination. When you can see how beautiful everything is meant to be, or rather actually is, this makes you look differently”. Making the connection with Walter Brueggemann’s ‘The Prophetic Imagination’, she argues that sacramental communities could be surprisingly prophetic through the experience of being marginalised, and thus learning to see things differently. From this base, her community engaged meaningfully in mission and made a difference to others. I also appreciated her vulnerability, and her prayer of becoming is beautiful.

Overall, this is an interesting book that made me think, has influenced my preaching and worship leading, and challenged my understanding of mission. It has a good range of material, and while full of thoughtful reflection on experience, isn’t light on theological exploration. However, I did also feel somewhat irritated that, although better than most at not succumbing to the temptation to pit inherited church and pioneer ministry against one another, this was still there, implicitly if not explicitly, in many of the essays. I can’t help but wonder where someone like me fits into the picture. I’m attracted to the Methodist Diaconal Order because I like the idea of working on the margins and with those outside church, though the importance for me of the sacraments means presbyteral ministry makes more sense. I also feel a desire to step out, take risks and try new things, but to do so from a base in inherited church, rather than as a pioneer minister. So where do I fit in? Or is the real value in not fitting in anywhere?

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.

FtM Chest Surgery Diary - Eight Weeks On

On the 4th December 2014, I had my chest surgery (sometimes called top surgery) at long last, with surgeon Catherine Milroy at St George's Hospital in London. This procedure served to change my previously female-appearing chest into a male-appearing chest as part of the process of gender affirmation/reassignment I've been going through over the past few years. For me, this has been truly life-changing already, because as I outlined in this previous post, having breasts caused me a great deal of distress as a transsexual man and created practical difficulties due to the need to bind them and through them causing me to be misread as a female.

 

In the hope of being helpful to others contemplating having chest surgery, I thought it may be useful to document the process as I go through recovery and adapt to my changed body.

 

The procedure I've had done is called a bilateral mastectomy with a nipple graft, meaning that the breast tissue that blighted my chest has been removed, a male-appearing chest has been crafted, and my nipples have been cut down to size and placed in the right part of my chest. I had to go down this route because my chest was quite substantial (DD cups - God has a sense of humour!), but smaller guys can have a keyhole procedure more akin to liposuction. This has the consequence that, as the photo below shows, I have scars around where my pectoral muscles lie which will fade with time but never entirely disappear. However, it does mean that I can now feel comfortable when I look in the mirror for the first time since I hit puberty, and can wear whatever I like without worrying about how visible my breasts are, both of which are awesome!

Eight weeks after chest surgery

In preparation for the surgery, I lost two-and-a-half stone so that my risk of an adverse reaction to the general anaesthetic would be reduced and to try to ensure a smoother recovery. Things didn't quite work out like that, as I got an infection in my left nipple and needed antibiotics to sort it out. I'm told it won't look as good as the right one, in that it won't have the pigment in it that it should, but it will discernibly be a nipple! I was initially worried that it would be permanently disfigured. However, despite this setback, I think the exercise and weight loss was very definitely worth it, as I bounced back quickly and my scars have healed very well and effectively.

The whole procedure meant spending a total of three days in hospital; this is something that a trawl of the internet suggests varies from surgeon to surgeon. Immediately after, it didn't hurt anywhere near as much as I'd worried it might, because my only previous experience was breaking my leg, and that was absolute agony when I came around. In the following days, I had to wait for the drains they'd put in to suck out the blood remaining around the wounds, so I wouldn't get swelling or an infection. Carrying them around everywhere with me was a bit odd, and they did hurt somewhat and restricted my movement; taking them out was the only really painful - as in enough to make me scream - part of the whole thing, though. Afterwards, I could move much more freely and felt a lot more comfortable.

Upon getting home, I began the slow process of recovering and getting back to normal. I'd been told that while I needed to go for walks, keep moving and do as much as possible, I couldn't lift more than a couple of kilos for a fortnight and therefore needed help with some tasks. I couldn't do things like housework or cooking, and not being able to reach too high meant Sally had to prepare things for me and put out plates and such like for me to use. However, I did find that, quite quickly, I could do a good range of normal things and that my chest would soon let me know if I was overdoing it! It was useful for Sally to be about to give me a bit of reassurance taking a shower, for example, but it wasn't long before I could do that myself without worry.

After four weeks, I was able to stop dressing my scars and nipples (it took me a while to get the hang of doing this myself and to build my confidence), and now have to massage my scars with fragrance-free moisturiser for ten minutes twice a day. They don't hurt, and indeed haven't very much since I left hospital - I stopped painkillers once free from infection, and even then I was relying on them more to stop me getting feverish than for pain management. Six weeks after my operation, I stopped wearing the compression vest that I was told to wear twenty-four hours a day. This was a relief, as I needed to sleep on my back and even with the special pillow Sally bought me, it became very painful. Trying to sleep on my side pulled on the parts of my scars reaching around to my armpits, and while they're now fine, it was very uncomfortable at the time. The vest also caused tingling sensations in my scars, which weren't very pleasant, but wearing it resulted in a better shape than would've otherwise emerged and preventing swelling.

So now life is getting back to normal, eight weeks on, and I can manage getting to and from work and going about the tasks of daily life without problem. I've got used to the feeling of clothes against my chest; I didn't have the panic about not binding some guys have described, but it was very odd not needing to tuck clothes under my breasts to prevent chaffing! Reprogramming my brain to not worry about covering my chest or being seen topless has taken time, but I think I've got there. Being able to wear whatever I like and not worry about how my chest looks has been liberating, but the expense of needing to get clothes taken in or replaced due to the big drop in my chest size wasn't something I'd factored in beforehand. Suiting is the hardest thing to adapt, and I've got rid of four large bags of clothes, including my favourite blazer. I can now wear smaller stuff, but will need to get rid of my belly to get into stuff that ideally fits around the chest.

Hopefully this gives an honest flavour of what it's like to have this operation and go through the process of getting back on one's feet. I have absolutely no regrets, and having been through three psychological assessments and nine months of physical preparation to be able to do this, am relieved to finally have gotten to this point. I can now get on with my life as a confident and happy young man who no longer has to pretend to be something I'm not, and who can now put the energy that was going into repressing the truth into making the most of things and looking to serve others. The healing that's occurred over the last few years means, I think, that I'm better able to love God and others, and that can only be a good thing.

Pondering the Turner Prize 2014

As part of the candidating process for ordained ministry, I have to reflect theologically on a theological book, a non-theological book, a film and a cultural event. For the latter, I have chosen to look at the 2014 Turner Prize, with the exhibition having been held at the Tate Britain in London. I managed to get along a couple of times to see the four artists’ work; the nominees were James Richards, Clara Phillips, Tris Vonna-Michell and the eventual winner, Duncan Campbell.

Richards was nominated for his video Rosebud, which manipulates and weaves together photographs taken from, among other sources, images found in a Tokyo public library censored to remove anything that might be considered erotic or arousing, VHS videos rescued from charity shops and original close-up footage shot by Richards himself. The result is a thirteen-minute collage overlaid with a soundtrack made up of amplified incidental noises in response to the visuals, which according to the exhibition guide results in “a restricted set of image sensations” that explores the joy of the act of looking. Some of shots are quite shocking, such as a close-up of a boot pressing hard on a man’s head; others retain a clear eroticism despite the censor’s best efforts, and many explore the boundaries between interior and exterior, public and private. The images quickly shift from one to another with the key action often taking place out of shot, more implied than spelt out, and the guide argues that the close-ups and high definition presentation makes even the mundane sensual.

Vonna-Michell’s work, Postscript, consists of two short films and a collection of images of such disconnected objects as fragments of old letters and a half-eaten Creme Egg, some of which feature in said films. These are both performance pieces in which the artist tells stories of searching for clues to help him make sense of his identity as a German-born man raised in Southend. They’re delivered at a breathless pace in brief snippets, sometimes repeated and often disjointed and anxiously delivered, a bit like the verbal equivalent of a random walk, while we watch a collection of slides that bear varying degrees of relationship to the narratives, but which in places provide something of a springboard for them. The first involves a search for the French sound artist, Henri Chopin, who lived close to where the artist grew up and whom his father says can illuminate why Vonna-Michell ended up in Essex, and the second an attempt to make sense of his parents’ stories about Berlin at the beginning of the Cold War. There is a vulnerability in this work, as childhood experiences and longing for meaning are interspersed with fictional twists, resulting in ultimately frustrated journeying.

Phillips is, unlike the other three, a print artist and her exhibition for the Prize involved the bringing together of various previous works. Her style is predominantly collaborative, and this was reflected in the spoken alphabet booth, the words having come from conversations during some printing work with women’s groups in 2010. The walls were adorned with recurring prints, most abstract-appearing (Phillips utilises mistakes and quirks in the printing process) and others various poses by a female model, and there was a large ‘OK’ on one of the walls. Finally, a large sculptured letter ‘K’ was used to present various prints from previous collaborations.

Campbell’s winning contribution was a film called It for Others, which I have to confess I didn’t see in its entirety, but which offers a profound and compelling discussion of the impact of commoditisation of art. It was inspired by a 1953 film by Chris Marker and Alan Resnais called Statues Also Die, about the “objectification and fetishisation” of African art in the face of western consumer demand, focusing on the Benin sculptures in the British Museum. As Campbell’s anxious female narrator points out, when discussing them, the Museum’s director conveniently overlooked uncomfortable aspects of and questions around colonialism when interviewed, and robbed of their original purpose and meaning, these everyday items become dead. Campbell takes this further, and as we’re shown various African masks, we’re also invited to ponder how art is ascribed its monetary value. A later part of the piece uses anthropomorphic food advertising using various scenarios around a dining table. Another section features a striking original piece of choreography by the Michael Clark company, spelling out ideas from Marx’s Das Kapital. Perhaps the most powerful bit of the film, though, is an exploration of how images of IRA martyrs came to be used for commercial and political aims during the Troubles – the famous image of Joe McCann by a fire ended up on Christmas cards!

My reaction to the four pieces, which I’ve outlined in the order one was directed around them in the gallery, was varied. Richards’ film got me thinking a little about quantum mechanics, in which the act of looking determines the state of an object (think Schrödinger’s Cat); seeing things very close-up and/or from the edges lends a different perspective to the act of looking, in which meanings aren’t always clear, yet to be fully formed by seeing clearly. I wonder how much of our perception of God is like that… I found Vonna-Michell’s films fascinating as well as frustrating; they invite us to ask ourselves what forms our sense of identity: how far is it to do with our parents and origins, especially in an age where many are keen to trace family trees, the things of our past and inner sense of who we are, or something found by looking beyond this to the bigger picture of the story of God?

I must confess that Phillips’ prints didn’t particularly grab me in any meaningful way, but I did find Campbell’s film compelling. The questions raised around the value we place on objects and indeed people are highly pertinent, especially in this neo-liberal and consumerist age with its Black Fridays and appropriation of seemingly anything for monetary gain, and they link in with some of the themes in my non-theological book by Owen Jones, which I’ll explore in a later post. Moreover, it got me thinking about how things might be different if we viewed the world not in these terms, but through a lens which tries to reflect the value God puts on people and things.