Lent for Extroverts 36: The Importance of unimportance

It's important not to feel important in this job. Or to make sure your feeling of importance is legitimate. 

Because once you start to let others make you feel important you will fall into one of two equal traps: you will enjoy feeling important because of others' projections onto you as a church leader; then you will feel lost when you do catch a glimpse of your actual unimportance as an Anglican Minister in the big secular world out there (where recently only 19% of people in the street could name the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury).

Because it's a funny mixture of things in the 'National Church'. People outside the church are interested looking in, up to a point. They see through what can look like the self importance of the church's pomp and ceremony, but at the same time they might be attracted to it because at its best the pomp and ceremony, which we do quite well, reflects the otherness, beauty and holiness of God. 

Pomp and ceremony of the 
enthronement of the new
Archbishop last week

The dog collar gives you a certain recognition in the neighbourhood and some people will look to you to solve the problems of the church, to a larger and larger degree depending on your status. That is why successive Archbishops have spoken of the huge 'burden' of expectation. One might almost say that to the extent that the church is floundering, that's the extent to which everyone is desperate that the leader will quickly sort it all out. Did the first century Christians who were fearlessly proclaiming Christ in the midst of persecution and martyrdom go around saying 'What we need is strong leadership'? I doubt it; they were too busy getting on with being the priesthood of all believers.

Various factions looked to Jesus to be a certain leader: political; miracle-working; conquering Jewish King. None of these was on Jesus' agenda. His sense of importance was found in God alone. It's really no more welcome to be feted than to be criticised, as I've been reminded when tempted to feel a sense of clerical importance, for example when tourists in Oxford appear to enjoy taking photos of large groups of clergy as they process out of an Oxford College in their robes during Holy Week. 

Just another 'famous for a few weeks' singer that
everyone loved. Then forgot.

A sense of false importance is the double bind of celebrity culture too. You're led to thinking fame is desirous, but when you achieve it, it must be endlessly propped up by constant exposure to fans and the fickle critique of the media who fall in and out of love with your latest song, film or TV appearance. I just couldn't watch the X factor any more because of this blatant ignoring of the real facts of fame, and the assumption that mere exposure will guarantee a better life. And sadly it's also true that Christian leaders can be flavour of the month. Or not. Look at the crowds during Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and then again on Good Friday.

There's nothing wrong with feeling proud to belong; having dreaded the onset of vestments in my life, I now feel proud to wear them, even sporting the collar on the tube; but any sense of importance emanates only through the grace of knowing I'm loved and called by God, like anyone else.

Lent for Extroverts 23: Stressing about stress

I've been thinking about stress lately, reading books about stress and assessing what makes me stressed. As part of my ongoing Curate's training, I was asked to read a long report on clergy stress, written ten years ago by The Society of Mary and Martha, a retreat House who deal in giving stressed clergy a break when they are undergoing times of upheval or burnout.

I was slightly stressed about having to read about clergy stress, along the lines of the self fulfilling prophecy: even if I'm not too stressed right now, I might well become more stressed if I imagine half the things in the report happening to me at some point in the future (overwork; burnout; marital breakdown). A couple of years ago I read Yvonne Warren's The Cracked Pot (also 2002), about how Anglican clergy were (or, crucially, were not) coping with stress. It's either an unfortunate or a very accurate title, but reading it a few weeks before my Ordination, I ended up feeling like a bit of a crackpot myself.

There were a number of 'Epiphany' moments during three years training at Theological College (like, 'oh, gin is quite nice; why have I never drunk this before?' Answer: wrong churchmanship; and 'actually, perhaps it's true that all people who get ordained are looking for ways to heal unresolved issues in their lives, i.e. we're all mad'...oooh, too deep; moving swiftly on...) 

...But one Epiphany moment that really sticks in the mind is a question that we were asked during a lecture on self care and finding suitable support in a job that lacks boundaries and which by its very nature, involves dealing with people at life's breaking points. After outlining all the ways self care should be attended to - observe your day off; find ways to recuperate and refresh; see a spiritual director; put time into friendships outside the parish; find a work coach or counsellor if need be - the lecturer asked this: 'And guess who it is who is responsible for finding all this support? You.'

That was the crucial thing. If you're already overworked and under supported, it is unlikely you will have the reserves to do all or any of the above. Finding a spiritual director who suits is not always straightforward; you will have to find a list; look up various phone numbers and contact them; drive somewhere and it all takes energy. Which you don't have if you're stressed and overworked. 

Which is why there seems to be an observed disconnect between the apparent emphasis on care in the Ordained Ministry; the lack of self care that some clergy practice, and the fact that not caring for oneself, and long term ill health due to stress can go for so long without anyone in a senior 'caring' position being aware of it, till it's too late. 

There are such things as 'accountable friendships', but it takes a lot of courage to ask your friend and fellow clergy person 'How are you doing spiritually?' and not come across as patronising. And clergy competitiveness (what? yes, competitiveness), English reserve and being too busy even to get together with such a friend mean that it really does seem as though the responsibility for not getting long term ill through unregulated stressed, as per the hapless clergy in The Cracked Pot rests with......me.

1662 anyone?

I am feeling very, very Anglican. I have sung my way through a full blown BCP Choral Evensong. We only manage one occasionally - it's not often a 350th Anniversary comes up (wonderful, but a lot of hard work).  


It made me think about language, liturgy and context. Do I cringe at, or poetically and theologically love the language of the Book of Common Prayer?


On first exposure, I thought it was hard going, then I looked at the bits we miss out....I'm wondering if it's time to reinstate them? Take the Holy Communion, and the danger of drinking and eating unworthily:


'lest, after the taking of that holy Sacrament, the devil enter into you, as he entered into Judas, and fill you full of all iniquities, and bring you to destruction both of body and soul' (Cambridge University Press Edition, p.247).


'For then we are guilty of the Body and Blood of Christ our Saviour; we eat and drink our own damnation...we kindle God's wrath against us; we provoke him to plague us with divers diseases, and sundry kinds of death (as before, p. 250). 


I'm kind of in awe of a society where Holy Communion was taken so seriously (but still very grateful I wasn't around when they burnt at the stake all those who held a different view from the prevailing one...)


I have a few issues with the idea that God speaks mainly through Elizabethan language - it was Cranmer's intention that God's Holy Word should be heard 'in a language the people understandeth', but if no one understandeth it 350 years later, what do we do? Its biggest fans are generally people who had a Prayer Book upbringing, or Oxbridge students with chapels and choirs and very high IQs. 


Same with the King James Bible - Michael Gove has this week enabled a free copy to be presented to every school in the country, and now headteachers are gong on the radio complaining no one can understand it. Fair point, or lowest common denominator argument....?


I couldn't understand half the hymns we sang in Junior School in the 70s, but that doesn't mean they didn't affect me - their words haunt and comfort me down the years:


''A man that looks on glass, 
On it may stay his eye; 
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, 
And then the heaven espy.'' (George Herbert) - a favourite with 8 year olds back then.


So I guess I'm torn. There are bits that really stick in your mind after a while: 'We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we from time to time most grievously have committed, By thought, word and deed, against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us...' (as before, p. 251). 


But there's also a lot of grovelling. We 'most humbly beseech' Him an awful lot, never quite believing he actually LIKES us (?) When I do something wrong, is God so very angry with me? What about the prodigal son? I rather liked that story until I read the Prayer Book.


It must be that magic they say over you at Ordination, but I'm getting so Anglican I'm worried I'll cease to care what the 'common' person thinks of the 1662 Prayer Book and if it can speak to him  today.


So, how Prayer Booked-out are you?


Consider the following Anglican words and phrases and if they confuse you at all:


The Daily Office (yes, the commute is ghastly...)
The Second is like, namely this...(as mother to a teenage daughter, I had to stop myself giggling first time I said this and remind myself it didn't mean like, you know, like when people say 'like', like every second word...)
kindle God's wrath (I haven't got a Kindle...the word worked well for me as a lower case verb, till it became an upper case noun...bother)
Lover of Concorde (I never got a chance to fly, but my dad loved it)
The Comfortable Words (like a DFS sofa, you just lie back and sink in)

Common Prayer (public school educated, I feel this common stuff is a bit beneath me)


Ah, language...by it we are undone...

Remembering Christina Rossetti

Remembered today in the Church of England Lectionary is Christina Rossetti, poet and sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, of the famous Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which wrote and painted its way through the 1840s to the 1880s, producing such classics as Millais' Ophelia and Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd.

Christina was never a formal member of the Brotherhood, Victorian gender roles disallowing such such a thing, but unofficially she was an important member of the inner circle, whose considerable poetic prowess revealed a life of rather sombre self denial and consequent devoted Christian faith.

She was twice unlucky in love. Her engagement to the minor Pre-Raphaelite, James Collinson, was called off after he became a Roman Catholic, and her love for Charles Cayley came to nothing when she became convinced he was not a Christian.

Her poetry is harshly uncompromising about the brevity of life and sweetly sad about the certainty of death.
                                When I am dead, my dearest,
                                               Sing no sad songs for me;
                                               Plant thou no roses at my head,
                                               Nor shady Cyprus tree.
                                               Be the green grass above me
                                               With showers and dewdrops wet;
                                               And if thou wilt, remember,
                                               And if thou wilt, forget.

She can do sensuous too, though, as in Goblin Market - a poem about female desire and temptation (is it God or patriarchal society which determines what is forbidden?) 

                              She cried 'Laura' up the garden,
                                             Did you miss me?
                                             Come and kiss me.
                                             Never mind my bruises,
                                             Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
                                             Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
                                             Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
                                             Eat me, drink me, love me:
                                             For your sake I have braved the glen
                                             And had to do with goblin merchant men
(definitely not a children's poem...)

For my money she is best when she turns her thwarted feeling towards the consolation of faith, as in the middle verse of the perfectly constructed A Better Resurrection:

                                           My life is like a faded leaf,
                                           My harvest dwindled to a husk;
                                           Truly my life is void and brief
                                           And tedious in the barren dusk;
                                           My life is like a frozen thing,
                                           No bud nor greenness can I see:
                                           Yet rise it shall - the sap of Spring;
                                           O Jesus, rise in me.

Her passionate nature was drawn to both ends of the Anglican spectrum - first Evangelical, then Tractarian, so today there is much to celebrate - Anglicanism in all its many hues; a woman railing against patriarchy; a Pre-Raphaelite poet and a Christian who found that putting one's hopes in this life alone is ultimately futile.

THE IDIOTS' GUIDE TO ANGLICAN CHURCHMANSHIP

I wonder what flavour the next Archbishop of Canterbury will be? 

Even now, in vestries, parish halls and pubs, small groups of interested parties are weighing up the options and making pronouncements about the need for one churchmanship to prevail over another. We must get 'our man' in.

The papers will pit imagined candidates against each other, taking bets on possible outcomes and painting things in broad brush strokes for easy identification - 'Catholic', 'Liberal' or 'Evangelical' - terms which are at best only understood by select church people and at worst, properly understood by nobody.

So in an attempt to clarify, or you may say, muddy the waters still further, here is:

The Idiots' guide to Anglican Churchmanship - the three main types, the highs, the lows, the complications and the mix ups.

(Anglo-)Catholic

Highs: Incense. Barring a really sore throat, I'm all for it. Why not use all your senses in worship? The sense of smell is the only one of the five sense directly linked to the emotional control centre of the brain. Which explains why I suddenly thought the presence of God had come upon me while watching my son play football the other day. In a garden nearby someone was burning fresh apple wood - it just smelt like divine worship.

Lows: Unhealthy interest in arcane nomenclature of ecclesiastical vestments. To cotta or not to cotta? That is (apparently) the question.
Grown men in lace......................................enough said.

Liberal


Highs: Permission to use your brain.
In other disciplines the word 'liberal' has a proud pedigree - it means freedom after all - so why is it such a dirty word among some? I've concluded that it's a 'good' word in direct proportion to to the extent to which you perceive yourself to be in a minority, or in a group that in some way has been historically restricted. So 'liberal' has always been good news for women who feel called to Ordination. This fact alone complicates churchmanship considerably.

Lows: A kind of scrupulousness and over-sensitivity about the more extreme and invigorating expressions of worship. The liberal middle ground can feel a bit safe. There's a jumpiness about intense Anglo-Catholic passions on the one hand, and on the other, a nervousness about heartfelt evangelical/charismatic songs which contain any hint of penal substitutionary atonement, the wrath of God, the certainty of faith, Christian truimph(alism) and Jesus being 'altogether lovely.' Apologies if occasionally us more enthusiastic types just want to jump up and down and punch the air and shout 'Our God is AmAzing, yeh!!!!!' - it must be terribly embarrassing for you.

Evangelical

Highs: They can find books of the bible (even quote great chunks of it) without resorting to the index. 
Lows: A bit wordy. You can feel like you have digested a lot of the same sort of food after 15 years of 35 minute sermons on the cross. Yes, yes, we all know Jesus died for our sins but what about mounting country-wide concerns about gross financial inequality/global warming/rubbish conceptual art/Britain's Got Talent?

Complications

The Charismatics
Can you actually get Charismatic Anglicans?
Two word answer: New+Wine.http://www.new-wine.org/

Highs: Personally I find the idea of a lot of Anglicans in a massive camp site getting over excited about their faith quite refreshing - though you may need to take a couple of paracetamol. Also they do have some good tunes, thanks to a bunch of young guys called mainly Tim and Matt and some really groovy minor 9th chords:

http://uk.search-results.com/web?l=dis&o=1921&q=Give+us+your+courage&atb=sysid%3D406%3Aappid%3D151%3Auid%3Dae467a4663bc1909%3Auc%3D1326739929%3Aq%3DGive+us+your+courage%3Asrc%3Dcrb%3Ao%3D1921

Lows: A lot of the tunes are too high for ordinary people to sing: it goes back to the incense thing - after a while you just get a sore throat.










The Emerging Church
This is a biggie and complicates
everything still further.

Take the UK's Faith/Justice/Arts festival, Greenbelt for instance. http://www.greenbelt.org.uk/festival/2012/

Where else would you find 1970s former charismatics rubbing alongside LGBT campaigner, Peter Tatchell; Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr; Chaplain to the House of Commons, Revd. Rose Hudson Wilkin and sacramental Fresh Expressions? (plus an awful lot of Anglican clerics going around incognito, eating vegetarian falafel pittas.)

The edges are blurring...I even went to an Anglo-Catholic Charismatic conference in Hertfordshire last year - Benediction of the blessed sacrament with people lying all over the floor, 'slain in the Spirit.' Loved it. Came back very confused.

Single issues such as poverty and hunger unite those from differing backgrounds under yet another label - radical - and get you into trouble with those who want to keep labels a bit more well defined. So contrast/compare Sara Miles, liberal Episcopalian and radical author of Take This Bread (Random House, 2007) and Shane Claiborne, 'evangelical' founder of The Simple Way...

http://www.thesimpleway.org/shane/

All of which is to say that eating just the pink liquorice all sorts, or just the black ones, or sticking rigidly to the stripy ones, can be a bit boring (OR sensibly safe - after all you know you like those ones, you've always liked those ones and you know where you stand with those ones...)

And is variety always a good thing? I'm a big fan of a well organised supermarket but sometimes I get bamboozled by all the choice.

Have you ever felt the need to vary your diet/restrict it a bit more for simplicity? Does anyone out there want to ditch labels and get on with just serving one another in Christ? Or is that hopelessly naive, even dangerous to the true expression of the gospel/Church undivided?

Over to you.

aaaaagggggghhhhhhh, the sermon.

The sermon. 

Long, short, boring or riveting, at some point in an Anglican service the priest is expected to stand up and spout. As an exercise in balancing bible with current events; doctrine with experience, it's pretty challenging. Cardinal sins: too much personal information/too little personal information; too much enthusiasm/too little enthusiasm; for a mother - talking about your children too much, especially if they are unfortunate enough to be in the congregation. Evangelicals like 'em long; middle of the road-ers are happy with 10 minutes; Catholically-minded brethren insist on calling them homilies (?) Increasingly I'm wondering how they sit with education theory and practice which rightly values interactive learning. Didn't Jesus do something along those lines too? I sometimes come home and imagine what would have happened if I had just stood up and asked a whole lot of awkward questions that needed debate, stirred things up a bit. After wanging on for a while and noticing that some are looking at the floor/ceiling/have head in hands (clearly responding in profound repentance so that's okay) I do wonder sometimes....and Anglicans are so polite - you never can gauge a response ('Nice sermon, thank you').

So what are people expecting from a sermon? (Thoughts welcome) and what is the general point of it? (Thoughts welcome) And as for the pulpit - in this egalitarian, de-constructing, post-modern era, is it not a totally anachronistic piece of church architecture? Or am I just stirring things up a bit?