Papacy or Piracy?

It isn't often that Christianity makes front page news these days but the 21 October, 2009 headline in the Times, 'Papal gambit stuns Church' is an eyebrow raising exception. Pope Benedict XVI's offer of 'personal ordinariates' will enable Anglicans to enjoy full communion with the Catholic Church while holding on to certain elements of their Anglican identity. As many as 1000 'priests' might leave the Church of England, according to the Times.

So, what are we to make of this ecclesiastical bombshell? To an extent I feel ill qualified to comment. I am a Mennonite and not a Roman Catholic or an Anglican. Much has clearly been going on behind closed doors. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury was notified only at the very last moment. A great deal depends on whether this initiative of the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, previously Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith (i.e. the Inquisition) is viewed as an act of 'hospitality' or a kind of religious predation. Pope Benedict ruffled ecumenical feathers when as Cardinal Ratzinger he signed the document Dominus Iesus in 2000. Dominus Iesus addressed the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and other religions and churches. That document insisted that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true church and that all other Christian denominations are not churches but merely possess some ecclesial elements. According to Liberation Theologian Leonardo Boff (himself no stranger to scrutiny by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the faith) as a result of this document fifty years of ecumenical work an inter-religious dialogue have 'apparently vanished' ('Fundamentalism, Terrorism and the Future of Humanity, p.9). In short I find it hard to believe that Pope Benedict's current initiative is anything other than shameless opportunism based on a Fundamentalist notion that Christian unity is a matter of 'homecoming' to Rome. On a personal level I also confess a good deal of irritation that amidst all this talk of 1000 defecting priests and which bishops might jump ship, the laity have merited hardly a mention. They are presumably to be transported like luggage.

Overall, my reaction is one of sadness and dismay. Just when it seems that the church is emerging with courage into a the brave, new Post-Christendom world something like this happens. I'm as keen on the importance of history as anyone but must we continue to play Reformation and Counter-Reformation as if we were stuck in a 16th Century Groundhog Day?

So, what is the best we might expect? As someone who has had a great deal to do with Methodism since the late 1970's I very much hope that the state of relations between Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism will breathe new life into plans for Anglican-Methodist reunion which stalled in 1972. The current Anglican-Methodist Covenant is a positive move but feels like a half way house. As a concerned observer I'm hoping that when one door closes another will open. Of course that might be utopian enough to be a thoroughly Anabaptist point of view!

Distance Spirituality

During the 1980's I was a student at London Bible College. For the class of 1982 'doing a degree' almost always meant three years in residence, whether in halls or digs. The London School of Theology (the renamed LBC) continues to receive residential admissions but for more than ten years now has also been involved with theological distance learning. LST's experience and mine reflects over twenty years of revolutionary change - the collapse of Western Christendom, ecological trauma, the advent of an internet age and an accelerating, radically individualized Postmodernity. It's enough to make anyone feel slightly breathless!

Without doubt theological education will face further challenges of its own but I have been thinking about the relevance of distance learning to spirituality, specifically the potential of retreats as a vehicle for 'distance spirituality'. For as long as I can remember there have been spiritual writers and practitioners who have sought to relocate the experience of retreat into everyday life. During the early 1990's when I worked for Leeds Nightstop my colleague from Faith in Leeds, David Rhodes was already developing 'Retreat on the Streets'. It was also at this time that I came across Carlo Carretto's nourishing book, 'The Desert in the City':

With a little imagination even a hole under the stairs , even a
garret,
can become our 'poustinia', our desert, where we can recollect
ourselves and savour silence and prayer.

Since then so much has changed but it seems to me that one of the fundamental shifts is how much more clearly we can now see that the 'desert in the city' experience now describes the normal state of the church after Christendom. We no longer 'retreat' from the centre to the margins, because we are already there.

Some rural retreat centres have sought to reach out and extend the scope of their work beyond their traditional activities. However, an exciting if scary challenge awaits such centres and the whole church. An increasing section of our society is both unchurched and sharply antipathetic to Christian Faith. I have lost count of the times when I've heard that Christianity is bankrupt and belligerent. Retreat Centres are far from perfect (I've one or two scary stories to tell) but overall they are attractive places for people outside the faith constituency as well as Christian retreatants.

Whilst existing retreat centres will continue to play an important role there is tremendous scope for the adaptation of retreats for new contexts. The advent of internet churches and online Christian community raises an intriguing possibility of the 'cyber-retreat'. The ongoing development of emerging churches might lead us to expect that some of these 'fresh expressions' will grasp the missional potential of retreats. As New Monasticism and Neo-Anabaptism gradually expand there is every likelihood that the rich vein of community-mindedness in both Traditions will generate new and culturally relevant manifestations of 'retreat'. Perhaps too, retreats will be re-imagined as a kind of 'distance spirituality' where the physical location for 'retreat' is the home or the workplace instead of an island or the countryside and 'Muhammad' (spiritual guidance, silence and reflection) comes to the 'mountain' (the retreatant). Even more important Christians must realise that the conditions which enable 'retreat' are not a given. The locked or shuttered chapel is a symbol not only of numerical decline but the erosion of silence. The creation of space for healing and quiet will demand labour, discipline and imagination.

Are retreats in retreat?

We all need a little encouragement from time to time. My nomination for good news story of the season came from the Leicestershire based retreat centre, Launde Abbey which to date has raised more than £800,000 to avoid closure and begin essential works. Launde is a special place and I look forward to being marooned in the snow there again, as I was earlier this year. Other retreat centres haven't been so fortunate, though. So, what's going on?

Traditional retreat houses find themselves caught in an awkward place amidst some perplexing and contradictory trends. On the one hand Christian organisations are implicated in the wider crisis of the Western Christianity following the demise of Christendom. Christian voluntary organisations and retreat centres have traditionally relied heavily on the churches, whether for staff, volunteers, financial support or guests. In fact, many retreat houses associated with monastic or other forms of residential Christian community are experiencing this crisis directly in the form of an ageing and declining membership. Further, retreat centres face a challenge common to many other residential institutions - an increasingly demanding public, no longer willing to do without en suite rooms or plush facilities. This problem is exascerpated when retreat houses are extensive, expensive listed buildings in out of the way rural locations. Yet, on the other hand, perhaps paradoxically, there is convincing evidence that demand for retreats has never been higher. In a stressful, clamorous and increasingly complex world the appeal of silence and reflection is potent. For a culture which is increasingly antagonistic to religious authoritarianism the retreat seems to form a crucible in which retreatants are able to explore spirituality and personal development in a welcoming and hopefully non-judgemental atmosphere.

Provisionally, I draw the conclusion that retreats are not in retreat but rather in transition. I believe that the time of the retreat has come. However, finding appropriate vehicles for this renewed interest in spirituality seems hard as chunks of Christendom float past our windows like so many iceburgs. Just as there is an 'emerging church' there is also an 'emerging spirituality' but like the former it is sometimes easier to see what this spirituality is emerging from rather than what it is becoming.

There are perhaps clues as to the future of emerging spirituality and the retreat in the strategies of churches and other Christian institutions in dealing with their early 21st Century cultural settings. As churches are learning to exist without the trappings of privelege that existed under Christendom (e.g. favourable legal status, church buildings, a 'normative' cultural role and access to State coercion) so the retreat has begun a journey from the centre to the margins and from large residential establishments to smaller decentralized 'retreat houses', perhaps linked to creative expressions of Christian community, emerging churches or 'distance spirituality' (the counterpart of distance learning). There will always be a place for welcome in the wilderness but most of these emerging retreat centres will be embedded in local communities like newsagents and chewing gum on the pavement. Yet, they will still be places of retreat - as rooted in silence and hospitality as Launde or Lindisfarne.

Why I Can't Celebrate Remembrance Sunday

I have sometimes been asked which aspects of the Christian faith I find most troubling or problematic. Near the top of that list is Remembrance Sunday. It's almost 20 years since I have attended a Remembrance Day service. Speaking frankly, though I love the Autumn I hate this weekend and the feeling that as a Christian and a pacifist I am in exile from my own church.

It's not that I have a problem with remembrance itself. To remember the dead - civilian and military - and recall the horror of war is a fine thing to do. Remembrance Day started out as an act of consolation and a cry for lasting peace, rooted in the carnage of the 1st World War where nearly 10 million soldiers and more than 1 million non-combatants perished. Yet over the years it has been transformed into a justification of war, however nuanced. Its focus has narrowed to concentrate on our armed services , to the exclusion of both civilian casualties, enemy combatants and conscientious objectors, some of whom were imprisoned, persecuted or even murdered. If I'm really honest it's not just the transformation of the day that makes me uneasy, but its symbolism - places of Christian worship festooned with martial colours. It does bother me that this will give offence but in all good conscience I cannot participate in a service which transforms the Church of the Prince of Peace into a conscript temple for militarized civil religion.

Blinking painful - but otherwise intact

I'm a keen film buff. There will be a lot of you know what it feels like to head back into the daylight after sitting in the dark for three hours. The past few months have been very dark for me and definitely no popcorn! Little by little I'm back in the daylight, even if I'm blinking a bit. It's good to be back and blogging.

Such Fallow Fellows

Yesterday I sat in a Bethnal Green park, people watching and reading - Letty Russell's 'Just Hospitality', published posthumously following the author's death in 2007. I appreciated the reflection on 'safe space'. We could do worse than shape and savour such space, then give it away extravagantly. Russell also observed that hospitality has fallen into disuse in society and in our churches (p.19). How much more of authentic Christianity, I wondered, has atrophied and withered, or (to change metaphor) is parked in some forgotten historical siding: Methodist Class meetings, every member ministry, the presidency of the whole people of God at the Eucharist and pacifism to name a few. Alongside of the ground we cultivate - our ordered and well administered plantation - is the fallow ground of riot and risk, full of overgrown paths we have long abandoned or that we never had the courage to follow to their destinations. The way of hospitality always entails a creative relationship between safety and risk - each host makes a gift of safe space and imperils that space in the vulnerability of welcome; every stranger brings the promise of blessing and a potential for danger. Often though we are risk averse, peering timidly over our fences at what might have been: such fallow fellows!

Lights, Camera ... Fiction?

I hate having my picture taken. Mum keeps a few in her bottom drawer, like incriminating evidence. Otherwise, it's just my digital experiments or a scary photo taking during a very unhappy time in Jersey where a journalist lined me up against a wall and made me take my glasses off. 'Any last requests', I was thinking. A more recent image shows me standing on the Promenade at Rhos-on-Sea. I look a little older but I like it better. Photos can airbrushed to flatter or deceive but it seemed to me that the Welsh picture was honest in a way that I hadn't expected. It was a contented photo, which said a good deal about how I was feeling. The Jersey scene was revealing too, though not in a way I care to remember.

There’s a good deal in Scripture about how we appear on the outside and what we are on the inside. Samuel is given the unenviable task of recruiting a king (1 Sam 16) but not before God reminds him of the job description. Personal qualities are essential. Brad Pitt lookalike not required. Jesus has some scathing words for religious types with shiny faces like whitewashed tombs and minds that rattle like bones (Matt 23:27). God has simple expectations – reality and appearances should match. The word for this has an old fashioned ring to it these days – ‘integrity’, which comes from the same root as ‘integrate’ and carries much the same meaning. Christians should be integrated people; our inner and outer lives in balance.

Of course, the point of doctoring photos to remove the wrinkles is to avoid people seeing us as we really are. Hypocrisy wouldn’t be tempting if we weren’t convinced there was an advantage to making others think we’re wiser, richer, sexier, holier, more beautiful or less ordinary. But, perhaps we should learn something from our own photographs. They give away more than we realize. We can focus on our ‘best points’ but somehow something in an expression or the way light and shadow falls across a face will tell the real story. ‘Keeping up appearances’ may make a good sitcom but it’s a rotten way to live a life.