@peterould and @thechurchmouse chat about all the news from the back end of 2011 as well as Facebook rankings, church furniture and a whole horde of other items. Then we turn to our interview with the one and only Canon Andrew White, Vicar of Baghdad and all round good egg. He shares with Peter how he ended up in Iraq, what he does with his life when he’s not in the Middle East and how God has blessed him in Iraq in ways he couldn’t have done anywhere else. It’s an absolutely unmissable listen with the Twurch of England 2011 Vicar of the Year!

I’ve posted about her before, having first come across her when she supported Jools Holland at the Royal Albert Hall in London a couple of years ago. She is the only support act I have ever seen who could have gone on all night – the audience loved her. Last night we went over to the Barbican at York and she was brilliant.

Imelda May not only has a great voice, but she also can sing. From the high-energy Johnny Got a Boom Boom to the poignant Too Sad to Cry, she lives the song. From rockabilly through to ballad, she commands them all. And from the moment she walks on stage she commands the space with a charisma that is at once bigger than the venue and yet intimate in her connection with the audience. Bizarrely, you come away thinking the gig is not just about her – when she thanks the audience for coming out, hopes they are going home happy, generously thanks not only the band, but also the crew and venue management, you know she means it. This is an artiste who knows her audience, doesn’t take them for granted, and repays every penny (and more) of the ticket price.

But, it’s the music that is just brilliant. Her band are superb: tight drummer, excellent double bass player (how does he do that stuff?), evocative trumpeter/guitarist, and fantastic guitarist (and writer of some of the songs). Clever, entertaining and totally engaging, her approach is summed up in the song Humble and Proud: she struts the stage with charisma and confidence, belting out these wonderful songs, yet never overreaches herself.

Just go and see her. Don’t book a seat – stand where you can dance. OK, sort of dance.

The support yesterday was Big Boy Bloater. As I tweeted, I’d never heard of him before. But he and his band (the drummer and keyboard players reminded me for some reason of the Proclaimers) were entertaining, funny and promising of more to come. I didn’t get the CD. But, I will.

Human beings need ritual points at which they stop and recall where they have come from. An honest appraisal of our ‘story’ should help prevent arrogant amnesia and recall us to a certain collective humility. We didn’t get to where we are today from some sort of historical or cultural vacuum. Which is why, whatever the worldview of people in the UK, we all need to understand and collectively acknowledge the Christian history and development of (at least) Britain.

This isn’t about evangelism or special pleading. Rather, it is about understanding how we have got to where we are… in order that we can understand why we are where we are… in order better to think about where we want to go to.

For Christians this is a regular practice.

The people of Israel were ordered to build into their annual diary particular rituals designed to remind them of their roots. Warned that growing affluence would make them forget, they had to do physical things to ‘live’ the memory. (See Deuteronomy 26, for example.) The basic story of the Hebrew Bible is this: God calls his people to show the world who and ‘how’ he is – a vocation that brings responsibility, not privilege or status. This gets contorted – they forget that once they were slaves who had nothing and they begin (as they were warned would happen) to think that their growing wealth was the product of their own hands alone. Their refusal to remember their story – and then live graciously towards others – led them into exile and the loss of all their identity landmarks.

If we forget that we needed grace, forgiveness, generosity, we will enslave others. If we forget that we were once hungry, we will consume while others starve. That’s the logic.

The Christian community re-members constantly. The Eucharist (Holy Communion) involves a re-telling of the Christian story – a putting back together the ‘members’ or the memories. That is why it is called a ‘eucharist’ – a thanksgiving, because we should not be able to leave this corporate celebration of grace without being reminded of our vocation to give grace.

More could (inevitably and obviously) be said. ‘Never forget’… and build in phyiscal rituals that bring us back to reality – that’s the message that goes beyond military casualties and penetrates our whole common life. But, now I have to go out…

I have now read the piece in question and can’t believe (a) that it ever got written and (b) that the CEN actually published it. The editor claims he didn’t actually read the article, but would have asked for the language to be toned down if he had. Leave aside the question of an editor not reading what goes into his (very short) organ, but how did such an article ever get published anywhere?

Basically, it compares the gay lobby in the UK with the advance of the Nazis in the 1930s. It speaks of the ‘gay Wehrmacht’ and the ‘Gaystapo’. This sort of nonsense clearly doesn’t take seriously a rational, theological or humane argument about sexuality, but merely shocks by its sheer awful ineptitude.

You would have to be brain dead to write this stuff and think that anyone in their right mind would not think it outrageously stupid. What did the CEN think it was publishing it for? Or, for whom? It is less Allo Allo and more a mockery of the gruesome bits of Schindler’s List.

Alan Wilson has done a good piece on it, so I won’t repeat or rehearse it. This sort of thing needs to be ridiculed, not argued with. But, I will shine a light on it from a different angle.

World War Two ended in May 1945. British people haven’t moved on. Our sole point of reference for anything to do with Germany is that war. History teaching has been dominated for decades by Hitler and the rise of fascism from 1933-45. Our tabloids still invoke stereotypes from war comics every time we play Germany at anything sporting. The mocking chants at international football matches of ‘two world wars and one world cup – na na na na na’ demonstrate the poverty of our understanding and the puerility of our cultural references. This is not something we should be proud of.

It is why some of us are concerned to promote the learning and effective teaching of modern languages in the UK – and to urge a history curriculum that moves beyond the easy dramatics of the Nazi period and allows Germany to grow up. I wonder what any young Brits might understand of the thinking going on in Berlin about the Euro and the EU this week – incomprehensible without some understanding of German post-war development, economic structure, political sensibilities and cultural engagement.

When Alan Craig wrote his ridiculous article he obviously didn’t consider the reality of the Nazi experience in Europe or think about how his spurious and offensive comparison might be interpreted. Or maybe he did – which is far more worrying.

Suffice it to say, despite its name, the Church of England Newspaper does not reflect the Church of England most of us know. It should apologise.

The delayed publication of the latest report by the St Paul’s Institute shows that, even if the City was unaware of it and the Occupy protesters ended up on the cathedral steps more by accident than design, the Church was already well underway with serious questioning of the values that drove City culture in the 25 years since Big Bang. The Value and Values report (subtitled Perceptions of Ethics in the City Today) was published yesterday.

Contrary to the press accusation that this report had been ‘suppressed’ for a couple of weeks, it should by now be blindingly obvious what criticism (of naff timing and incoherent process) would have been levelled at the Church if it had gone ahead and published according to the schedule. Given that the report is fronted by both Dean Graeme Knowles and Canon Dr Giles Fraser, it would have been kind of hard to put it out with both of them in the process of resignation.

Of course, that inconvenient truth won’t satisfy those who revel in selective amnesia – the same condition that slates the Archbishop of Canterbury for questioning the values of our dominant economic and political culture, then forgets he had done so when the later story breaks and they can’t get him to feed the hungry media machine with further repetition.

Anyway, the report makes clear that there are some good people in the City – people who are already sensitised to the disconnect between the Square Mile and the real world. Indeed, the report makes clear that many of those who work in the City do understand the reasons behind the rage against perceived injustice. It highlights the way technology has dehumanised financial transactions. It recognises that reward has become divorced from work and that the Big Bang created a failure to drive value with values that assumed a common humanity. Money has become an end instead of a means to a greater end that we choose.

I was once asked to give an after-dinner speech at London’s famous Mansion House to a company of insurers and financiers. These people, among whom there was a plethora of motivations, had raised enormous amounts of money for a range of charitable causes and I wanted to recognise this and thank them for it. But I also wanted to reconnect this generosity with a humane appraisal of the transaction. I think I said something like:

this is not a case of the strong giving to the weak, but of the ‘weak who have’ giving to the ‘weak who have not’.

(I finished by quoting Jesus who said “it is easier to get a needle through your eye than for a rich man to pass a camel”… or something like that, anyway.

The point is that wealth can create a security that hides basic human frailty. We all weep and bleed and feel lonely in the universe on a dark night when our relationships have failed or we find ourselves wondering what it is all about. What unites us is the common humanity that has somehow got lost in the scrap for money.

Perhaps the Church is in a good place to stand between the City and the rest of the world. We ‘do’ people and we ‘get’ the people who live in both worlds. It is our business – confusing and compromising though it sometimes feels – and a church that follows Jesus Christ (who opted into this compromising and material world) can do no other than stand where the fault lines fall and try to hold it all together.

Read the report and the critique that concludes it. This wasn’t a craven cathedral at all – it had opened itself up to judgement. The tragedy is that the protestors didn’t turn up just a few days later, once the report had been published.

Naturally, the theme arose from the events in London and elsewhere and the questions raised by the Occupy movement. Away from the heat of the particular (how St Paul’s Cathedral was handling the ‘crisis’, for example), it was possible to take a step back and ask some of the important questions about money, markets and morality. The programme can be located here, the particular discussion coming over half-way in.

It seems to me that the key to discussing these issues lies in nobbling the assumptions behind the language we use. Markets are never ‘free’ in the sense that they are neutral: they are shaped by human choices, values and priorities. The question is: which choices, according to which priorities, derived from which values, shaped by which assumptions about who we are and how the world should be?

John Milbank spoke of the ‘disconnect between the City and real people’, but this disconnect also exposes the vacuum in identifying and shaping the moral framework within (and from) which our financial business should be done. This is not anti-capitalist. Rather, it is a recognition that capitalism needs effective regulation, a shared set of moral values, a framework of mutual accountability and honest language.

City workers were asked if there is a moral framework within which the City or the markets operate. Odd question. Of course, there is – there is no neutral space shaped by value-free (or self-evidently noble) morality. The question simply has to do with the questions I cited above. I was a little unnerved to hear City workers saying things like, “We work incredibly hard” and “We are just doing a job”. I can think of other (incomparable) circumstances in history where such disclaimers are disallowed.

Anyway, I have to go to work on the sabbath. There clearly needs to be a more general debate within society about who shapes the moral framework for our business and economic life and how we better engage wider society in ownership of those choices. But, for this there has to be a growing experience of mutual responsibility at every level, reduced abstraction of economic life, a rehumanising of business, and a re-definition or re-articulation of public economic morality.

And we need to re-examine the connection between individual moral choosing and the common moral framing of our common life. After all, the economy exists not for the sake of the market, but in order better to shape our common life for the common good.

While walking around the arid farm, and wondering how on earth a future might be shaped out of this disaster – the breadbasket of Africa become the basket case of Africa – my misery was interrupted by something easily missed and apparently trivial. It was a single rose, about twelve inches high, planted and watered in a small hole in the dry soil. It looked feeble and misplaced – almost futile. But, as everything else seemed to be closing down and smelling of death, here was a prophetic symbol of hope. It seemed to be saying that the is a future – that there is more to reality than what appears as the immediate evidence of your eyes. It was placing a question mark over the dominant gloom, whispering a new melody over the grinding music of doom.

In my presidential address to the Bradford Diocesan Synod this morning I called for our diocese to be ambitious and prophetic and I said it like this:

We should be ambitious. We should be confident about our vocation and the God who gives us it.
In all these matters we are being invited to be prophetic. I know the word is over-used. (I remember the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that when people ask him to be prophetic, what they really mean is: ‘Say loudly what I want to hear you say!’) But, to be prophetic in the biblical tradition is to catch a glimpse behind the curtain of our time and place – a glimpse of the glory of the God who, in the face of our pessimism and gloom, always whispers words such as ‘resurrection’, ‘renewal, or (in Walter Brueggemann’s memorable phrase) ‘newness after loss’. Being prophetic is to plant a seed when everyone else tells us the ground is dried up. It is to build a house when everybody else is demolishing and leaving. It is to sing a song when everybody else has gone silent. It is to build a boat when there isn’t any water… yet.
It is to be a sign of hope – assuming a future. As Rowan Williams says of Dostoyevsky, there is never a final word in the conversation; there is always more to be said. Just as there is nothing new under the sun, there is never an ‘end’ in the economy of a God for whom even death doesn’t finish everything off.

The Occupy movement does not have a monopoly on prophetic action. Every action, word or symbol that defies ‘endings’ by holding out even a tiny promise of a new beginning – a future beyond the loss – is prophetic. And hopeful.

It still seems odd to me that the present government wants to measure the well-being of the people of Britain without reference to religious or other motivation for living or choosing. I wonder if such inconvenient ‘truths’ as the recent Barnardo’s findings will be taken into consideration in such research. When Jesus said that to enter the kingdom of God you have to become like a little child he might have been stating a fundamental truth about human society and not just making a Christian attitudinal observation: that the well-being of our children is an indicator of the health of our society or culture.

Back in 2000 Rowan Williams (then Archbishop of Wales) identified the commodification and sexualisation of children – with adults competing childishly with children instead of behaving like adults – in his book Lost Icons. He raised questions that went to the heart of our society’s obsessions, seeing behind the confident exterior some of the ugliness that was festering unhindered behind the curtains. He was largely ignored – not for the last time.

Back in 2009 The Children’s Society published the report of the Good Childhood Inquiry. Being the largest evidence-based research ever conducted into the experience of and consequences of childhood, it provoked some interesting and (often) self-justifying responses – particularly from observers who couldn’t question the evidence, but found the conclusions inconvenient or unconducive to personal lifestyle preferences. There were those who quickly tried to forget it.

Following publication of Barnardo’s latest poll results this week, the airwaves have been full of debate about why British children are the unhappiest in Europe. But this again is inconvenient because it questions our values, priorities and lifestyle preferences.

This comes close to home for me not because of the events going on in London and other major cities around the world, but because I have just spent the day in Bradford at a Clergy Study Day where serious collective attention was being paid to issues of power, poverty and provision in relation to the so-called ‘Big Society’. (This day was planned a year ago, well before I even knew I was coming here, and the theme was clearly on the church’s radar well before the Occupy movement was even conceived.) Clergy deal every day with these issues on the ground.

Politicians and bankers might well have serious charges to answer, but that doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook. Why do we persist in ignoring inconvenient voices? Why do we ignore the evidence and continue to allow – or even foster – a culture that makes our children so miserable? Or do we just have to conclude that, actually, our children have just got it wrong?

We need to dig deeper and more honestly if we are to understand our cultural malaise. But, understanding won’t necessarily translate into action unless we genuinely have the will to change.

1. Why isn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury saying anything?

2. Shouldn’t the focus be on the bankers and the real object of the protestors’ ire (and not on the cathedral’s management of the situation)?

3. Why aren’t other bishops speaking out?

Now the Archbishop of Canterbury has contributed specifically to the current situation. And the church has turned the debate to the real object of the protestors’ ire. And other bishops are speaking out about the issues raised.

So, what am I being asked in the media now?

1. Is it the place of the Archbishop of Canterbury to intrude in questions of politics and finance?

2. How many marks out of ten would I give to the handling by St Paul’s of the situation on their doorstep?

3. Shouldn’t bishops be attending to what is going on in their own diocese?

Now, call me naive, but isn’t that a bit odd?

OK, it’s a bit of a game for the media: how to find new angles on a story that is in danger of becoming a bit boring. That’s fine and I fully understand it. But, let’s not pretend it isn’t what happens. (And, for the record, I think some of the media reporting of and comment on this stuff has been excellent and very important.)

The other interesting element from a media point of view is the immediacy of the hungry 24 hour media beast – which requires feeding on demand. Memory of previous meals disappears. The fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury hit the headlines just a few months ago with his New Statesman editorial is simply fogotten – he has to speak now. The fact that the Government lambasted him for suggesting that there might potentially be unrest because of the lack of attention being paid to reform of the financial world is simply forgotten. The fact that many bishops and other commentators have been raising these questions for years and have been either ignored or called ‘sensationalist’ simply doesn’t hit the radar. Is this not just a little bit ironic?

If I were a journalist, I would be trawling through the last couple of years of the Archbishop’s speeches and writings and ask if he was being clever, prophetic or just wild. I would then go to the Church of England’s ethical investment material and poke around some of its (probably by now) decade-long concerns about excessive remuneration in the boardroom. There I might even discover in the annual reports of the main investing bodies (Church Commissioners, Pensions and CCLA) an analysis of voting against excessive pay, which (I am told) is consistently the most frequent issue to do with corporate governance. In the last 12 months the EIAG has written to all top 350 UK companies who break the Church’s EIAG framework, explaining in detail why they will vote as they do (in some marginal cases they abstain, rather that vote with management).  When they meet with companies as part of their active engagement programme with UK Boards, remuneration is often one of the topics on the agenda.

Even the Pensions Board annual report said:

In our proxy voting the main issue on which the Board did not back management remained executive remuneration. The EIAG and the Board share a deep concern about excessive increases in recent years in the amounts payable under variable remuneration schemes – both annual bonuses and longer term incentive plans – and will be considering in 2011 how to step up engagement with business on this.

If I dug a little deeper into the St Paul’s Institute I might even discover that it has been fostering dialogue between the City and Church for several years – that is, taking a proactive lead in raising and debating the matters of serious concern now. In fact, (and I only learned this the other day), only days before the current events began outside St Paul’s the Chair of EIAG was there at the cathedral launching his new book - an examination of the causes of the Credit Crisis and subsequent Western world recession. (Not that I have read it…)

None of this takes away from the serious questions raised about the church’s handling of the St Paul’s situation – and it isn’t an attempt to shift the spotlight onto the media… except to suggest that some fruitful areas of exploration have not been spotted and that we should also be canny about the reporting of the story itself as it develops.

Has anyone asked the Archbishop of Canterbury yet why he wasn’t listened to when he predicted exactly what is happening now?

I hope the media keep pushing us on all fronts.

This morning I woke up to two stories: (a) the Archbishop of Canterbury writing in the Financial Times about the need now to move from general protest to specific solutions and (b) the Bishop of London doing a good job on BBC Radio 4′s Today programme.

The point of both of these was to push the agenda away from the protests themselves and on to the reason behind the protests: the frustration of millions of people around the world that the people who caused the global financial collapse continue as if little has happened (bonuses, etc.) and everybody else suffers. These questions – regardless of how we got to them in the last couple of weeks – will now be centre-stage as the particular ‘issue’ of St Paul’s and its handling of matters steps back into the less interesting shadows.

It would be interesting to see where the imagination is to be found within the spheres of pension funds, banks, financial institutions for re-shaping a global financial system in which reward is based less on numbers and more on ethics, and in which the distribution of wealth is driven by a vision of the common good and less by the compulsion to ‘have more’. The concept of ‘reqard’ might be significant here.

The world we are now in demands unusual business. That is to say, responses to the current crisis seem mostly to be technical and within current assumptions of what an economy is and how an economy works. It is at the level of assumption that the protests are directed.

What is now required – while these questions are on the front page, as it were – is a re-visioning of what an economy is for. Surely the mantra of the last thirty years, that we are economic beings in an economic market, is being seriously challenged. We do not exist for the market (the market economy); rather, the economy exists for us (a human economy).

This now needs to be cashed out in technical terms (bank taxes, challenges to assumptions about ‘attracting the right people by paying the hiughest salaries, etc.) and the advantages, costs, etc. identified. Many of us won’t understand the financial technicalities. But, we can certainly contribute to the articulation of an alternative vision.

Off to another day of meetings…