Ascension Day: a reflection

Even in these times of ordeal, we must celebrate. All around us, people are lonely and afraid. They are suffering and dying. They are grieving, lost and sad. There isn’t a household in England that the virus hasn’t touched in some way. We could easily feel as forlorn as the disciples gazing at the sky Jesus has disappeared into. Like them, we could imagine he had abandoned us. 

Yet as it says in the funeral liturgy of the Orthodox churches, ‘even at the grave we sing ‘alleluia’. Forty days after Easter, it is still the season of resurrection. Christ is risen. In our troubles it’s all the more important to celebrate and allow this marvellous springtime to help us say ‘yes’ to life. For death is swallowed up in victory. 

And today, Ascension Day, we celebrate Jesus as Christ the King, our Sovereign enthroned in glory. It is as he has been proclaiming throughout his ministry, that God reigns. Ascension affirms that the exalted Christ ‘fills all things’, as the Letter to the Ephesians puts it, so that he may be in our midst and all around us, among us and within our deepest selves. Far from having left us orphaned and alone, he is Immanuel, God-with-us in time and eternity. And he invites us to embrace his reign and renew our citizenship of this glorious kingdom. Our hearts are full of joy.

Jesus’ ascension is of a piece with everything he has been to us in his incarnate life. In the New Testament his exaltation is spoken of in the imagery of the coronation of the kings of Israel. The Letter to the Hebrews quotes a chain of texts from the Psalms to show how the hopes and longings projected on to Israel’s human rulers are realised in Jesus who has sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’ (Psalm 2); ‘Your throne, O God, is forever and ever’ (Psalm 45). 

But if we follow that imagery back to its source we find we are drawn to the duties of kingship as well as its privileges.  The king is to be God’s servant, loyal to the covenant. He is to be the agent of peace and justice, the guardian of the vulnerable and poor. In another psalm (82), God sits in a cosmic court with the heavenly beings gathered round him. Are they worthy to be called gods, he asks?  The test is simple. ‘Maintain the right of the lowly and the destitute; rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked.’  

But these lofty princes fail dismally and are condemned. ‘How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?’ ‘I said you are gods, nevertheless you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince.’  In high office they have forgotten who they are and why they have been raised up. They have forfeited the right to govern. They have ascended the hill of the Lord only to be toppled by the sin of pride.   

Not so the exalted Christ.  For he bears the imprint of the nails on his body, and takes us with him into God’s very heart. As we should have been singing today in the Ascension Day hymn:

See! the heaven its Lord receives
Yet he loves the world he leaves:
Though returning to his throne,
Still he calls mankind his own.  

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of him as our great high priest who even in his exaltation is not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters and to be with us. ‘We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect was tested as we are.’  That letter could not be more emphatic on this point that Jesus passes the test of what it means have ascended as the highest of the exalted ones, above all principalities and powers. High and lifted up as he is, nevertheless he is present to the lowliest of his family to deal gently with us, and especially with the needy whom he calls in St Matthew ‘the least of these my brothers and sisters’. 

So humility and service, not pomp and pageantry, describe the ascension of Jesus. For he is the same Lord who healed the sick and spoke kindly to the neglected, washed his disciples’ feet, felt the agony of Gethsemane and went out to die.  Any other messiah would not have been born in a stable with nowhere to lay his head, been executed between thieves, risen secretly behind the stone, or ascended on an obscure hilltop with only a handful of witnesses to tell of it.  

But this Messiah has taken the form of a servant, never more to lay it by. His ascension is as ‘kenotic’ as his incarnation and crucifixion: an act of humble self-emptying, for this is how he is not only in time but in eternity. There is one glory for the Lord who took the form of a slave: one abasement, one lowliness, one meekness, even in his exaltation and enthronement.  

Only this Messiah could still bear the marks of the nails as the risen Lord. Only this Messiah could be pictured as a Lamb upon a throne. Only this Messiah could be our great high priest who feels for humanity, intercedes on our behalf, and serves us by washing our feet. Only this Messiah could humbly come to us in bread and wine so that we might welcome him and exalt him in our hearts. 

We want to know in these times that God is not far away from any one of us. It’s the marvellous paradox of Ascension Day that while in one sense Jesus has ‘gone away’ as he said he must, yet he is closer to us than our own souls. He walks alongside us to lighten our burdens and share our joys. We can trust him to comfort us and help us, answer all our longings and make us whole again.

Ascension Day 2020
Ephesians 1.15-23, Acts 1.1-11, Luke 24.44-53

St Oswald: the king who shared his bread

In today’s gospel the crowd does what crowds always do: follow the leader who promises bread.  Jesus has just fed them with the five barley loaves and two fish.  Now they follow him across the lake, still hungry and expectant.  The appetite of crowds is never satiated.  ‘Amen I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves’.  In the unfolding of Jesus’ awareness of his vocation, this is a milestone.  Last week’s gospel reading told us how, after the distribution of the loaves, Jesus realised that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, so ‘he withdrew again to the mountain by himself’.  Later when Jesus has taught how he is the living bread from heaven, John says: ‘many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him’.  Crowds are fickle barometers of favour.  From popular acclaim to the loneliness of ridicule and contempt is a short journey. When the thousands have vanished and only the disciples are left Jesus faces them and himself with an awful truth.  ‘Did not I choose you the twelve? Yet one of you is a devil.’  The shadow of betrayal is felt.  This king has come to die.

The king who gives bread and dies for his people is celebrated in one of the saints of this place whose feast falls on Wednesday.  The king who feeds the poor is how Bede lovingly depicts St Oswald.  One Easter Day, he and Bishop Aidan sat down to feast.  ‘A silver dish was placed on the table before him, full of rich foods.  They had just raised their hands to ask a blessing on the bread when there came in an officer of the king, whose duty it was to relieve the needy, telling him that a very great multitude of poor people from every district were sitting in the precincts and asking alms of the king.  He at once ordered the dainties which had been set up in front of him to be carried to the poor, the dish to be broken up, and the pieces divided amongst them.  The bishop, who was sitting by… grasped him by the right hand and said: ‘May this hand never decay’.  In a thirteenth century missal there is a charming image of Oswald’s charity.  Under the table where he and Aidan are sitting are two poor men crouching like dogs, pathetically lifting up their hands to catch the crumbs falling from their masters’ table.  Oswald holds the precious vessel he is about to break up, a symbol, perhaps, of how he will give up his own life. On the table are bowls with loaves and fishes.  The meaning is plain: Oswald is like Jesus.  He gives bread to the hungry.  He gives himself to his own. 

I wonder if Oswald is the neglected saint of Durham.  His head had been interred with the relics of St Cuthbert and carried brought to Durham with the Lindisfarne Gospels by Cuthbert’s community, finally to be laid to rest in the shrine behind the high altar.  There in the feretory there is a thirteenth century statue of Cuthbert.  He has lost his own head in some violent act of the Reformation or civil war.  But he has kept Oswald’s head, which he holds in his left hand, which is how Cuthbert is often portrayed in medieval iconography.  Once there would have been a statue of Oswald, like Cuthbert, flanking Blessed Mary in the central, most prominent niches of the Neville Screen above the high altar.  You can see him in stained glass, in Thetis Blacker’s striking banner in the feretory and, maybe, in a wall-painting in the Galilee Chapel.  Of all our saints, Oswald is the one whose relics appear all over Europe as a true catholic martyr.  Given his vital role in the unification and Christianisation of Northumbria, and therefore the Christianisation of England, he deserves our recognition. 

What do we know about him?  He was not the first Christian king of Northumbria: that honour belongs to Edwin.  But it was he who decisively led his nation into embracing the gospel.  He had been exiled on Iona as a young man and had been baptised there.  After Edwin’s death, he inherited a weak and divided kingdom threatened by native British rulers.  Famously, Oswald set up a cross at the place we now call Heavenfield, above the Tyne near Hexham, and ordered his soldiers to pray for victory against the British king Cadwallon.  This established both Oswald’s kingship and his faith.  From Iona he summoned Irish missionaries to preach the gospel in his kingdom, from where Aidan came and founded his monastery on Lindisfarne as the base for the Northumbrian mission.  Oswald often travelled with Aidan on his journeys, translating the message into English, caring for the poor and building up the church.  He was both parent and midwife of a project that changed the face of England. He died in battle in 642 at the hand of the pagan king Penda of Mercia, ‘slain by the heathen fighting for his fatherland’ says Bede, not just for Northumbria but for a kingdom not of this world. 

Oswald is a potent model of the Christian statesman.  Bede portrays him as the ideal king, a new David who unites his kingdom against the threats it faces, establishes a secure capital, promotes religion, dispenses justice, cares for the least of his people as well as the greatest, and finally gives himself up for their sake.  The synergy between the two cities, sacred and the profane, church and state, is symbolised by the geography of the sites associated with the Northumbrian royal court.  Oswald’s capital at Bamburgh and Aidan’s monastery on Holy Island were within sight of each other.  It was a reminder to this world’s ruler of his divine call and accountability: ‘knowing whose minister he is and whose authority he hath’ as the Prayer Book puts it.  For Bede, the politics of God and of mortals serve the same end, that justice, truth and peace should be established in the nation.  He is saying something that we may not always welcome: that God works through institutions as well as individuals.  This is why we have organised religion embedded in the structures of society, part of the glue that holds it together. 

If Aidan is a model of mission, Cuthbert of sanctity and Bede of wisdom, Oswald is an inspiring image of leadership.  No doubt public life today is infinitely more complex than the 7^th century, but that does not mean it is more exacting or difficult.  Yesterday I led a pilgrimage of Cathedral Friends to the wondrous Saxon cross at Bewcastle deep in the Cumbrian fells.  The church is dedicated to Cuthbert, so perhaps Cuthbert’s body and Oswald’s head rested there on their long journey.  The cross dates from Cuthbert’s time, the generation after Oswald.  You can see a replica of it in the Cathedral dormitory.  As I gazed at the intricate knot-work chequers and vine scrolls on the shaft, I thought about complexity and order. It’s as if the artist is saying: this world is puzzling and chaotic.  How do we chart our voyage across it?  And how, in particular, does any leader negotiate the hazards of public life in the face of difficulty and threat?  The answer is: by going to the source of pattern and order, God the Creator and Saviour of the world, and by emulating this ordered life in how we live out our humanity.  And given that this is a churchyard cross, it is also saying to us: the clue if self-giving, service, sacrifice.  

I have been reading a remarkable new book called Good Value: reflections on money, morality and an uncertain world.  Its author, Stephen Green, is Chairman of HSBC.  He is writing about globalisation and the question the economic crisis is putting to us.  We can assume that in his role, to negotiate the economic, political and societal challenges of today is a daunting assignment.  But he is not only an economist but an ordained Anglican priest.  He is not afraid to speak about what is demanded of us in these difficult times, how we need to live according to wise, ethical and humane values that are not simply based on than the impersonal market forces of price and profit.  He is keen on altruism and on doing something for posterity instead of falling for the Faustian bargain of selling our soul for the pursuit of gain.  He calls for a style of leadership ‘whose essence is not psychological dominance, but which seeks to share itself, to set an example, to instil the instinct of leadership in others, and thus to serve the common endeavour…. Seen as domination, leadership impoverishes both the leader and the led; seen as service… it enriches both, and is more enduringly effective.’   He might have been writing of Oswald sharing bread, giving himself for the people.  Bede would certainly have approved. Our leaders should be paying attention.  So should we.    

Durham Cathedral, 2 August 2009 (John 6.24-35)

New Reformations? Wisdom and the Church

Introduction

This is the final address in this year’s Lenten series at Warwick, New Reformations? Tonight our theme is “wisdom”. But please don’t assume that because this sermon brings the series to an end, somehow wisdom is going to supply a summing up, a full-stop. Far from reaching watertight conclusions, it’s more in the nature of biblical wisdom to identify and ask the right questions, and model good ways of asking them. This is all I can try to do tonight.

But how important that task is! It goes to the heart of our Church of England’s identity that owes so much to the Reformation. I am not simply thinking of the questions about authority, church polity and sacramental theology that dared to be asked five hundred years ago. We must ask the questions of today as a church that is constantly in search of reformation in every generation. The legacy of our history is not simply to have been reformed but to be constantly in a process of being reformed, or as they said in the sixteenth century, reformata atque semper reformanda.

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Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible

Let me begin by asking what it means to be wise according to the scriptures. I then want to raise some of the challenges facing our church today where I believe wisdom is very much needed. In our reading from the book of Proverbs, the characteristics of the wise man or woman are set out. To be wise is to respond to the invitation of a gracious lady whom the text calls Lady Wisdom. She walks the street, calls out from the heights, stands at the crossroads, takes up her position at the town gate. She is in every public place, where men and women go in and out, where choices are made about which way to go, where leaders gather to transact business, where the young congregate to learn and shape their lives. “To you O people I call. Learn prudence, acquire intelligence; hear, for I shall speak noble things, and from my lips will come what is right.” She goes on to describe the treasures she has to offer to those who listen: “wisdom is better than jewels, and all that you desire cannot compare with her. Riches and honour are with me, enduring wealth and prosperity.”

If we look into these first nine chapters of Proverbs, we glimpse what wisdom means. It has many levels. We learn how to manage our household well (what we call oikonomia from which we get the word economy). We learn about shrewdness, common sense, speaking well, having good judgment, being prudent with our resources. We learn the virtues of hard work, careful speech, living purposefully, finding fulfilment in being diligent, becoming aware of other people and the environment we live in. We learn how to know ourselves better, understand the ambiguities and contradictions of our flawed human nature. We learn where to find happiness and how to avoid misery. We learn about our own creatureliness, how we live in a morally ordered universe where creation can teach us and where destinies are set. And we learn that wisdom is fundamentally a religious quality whose source and end are God himself: “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and to know the Holy One is insight”.

In all this, there is one overriding message, that the goal of the wise man or woman is to become a human being who is aware emotionally, spiritually, physically, practically and theologically. We could call this the quality of being present to God, to one another, to the world and to ourselves. When the church father Irenaeus said that “the glory of God is a human being fully alive”, I think this is what he meant. To be wise, to be aware, to be “intelligent” in all these dimensions of living, to practise “mindfulness” as we say nowadays – all these are synonyms for the God-given wisdom that, says Proverbs, makes us fully alive, fully human. As the New Testament says, Jesus himself is the embodiment, the very incarnation, the perfect realisation of divine wisdom.

There is a special emphasis on leadership in the wisdom literature. Some scholars conjecture that books like Proverbs were compiled precisely to contribute to the education of future leaders, especially young men in the royal court – witness repeated phrases like “listen my child” throughout the book. In our own day, leadership training in the church and in secular institutions of many kinds has enthusiastically taken up the phrase “reflective practitioner” to characterise what it means to lead well. The thinking is that people, communities and institutions need more than anything to become self-aware, conscious of who and what they are, and how they need to be in wholesome relationships both personally and collectively. And you only create healthy communities by leading them in healthy ways.

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Wisdom in the Church: Three Case Studies

This is where I come to the second part of my address. For if the church is to become intelligent, reflective, generous, engaged, self-aware, compassionate, prudent, virtuous and wise, if indeed it is going to reflect the character of the God who is all these things, then it must be led by people who are formed in these ways too. I am not saying that no institution is better than its leaders. But the values by which leaders live are profoundly influential in shaping the communities they are responsible for. In the church, the ordinal spells this out carefully, reminding clergy that to be responsible under God for the household of faith is an awesome vocation indeed. These were some of the themes I explored ten years ago in my book Wisdom and Ministry. I can’t recall a time when the leadership of our church was under so much public scrutiny. We feel for the House of Bishops who need the wisdom of Solomon in responding to the challenges they are faced with.

But scrutiny is good for us. It reminds us of our accountability. I am going to come to two of these matters shortly. But let me first say something about my own situation as a recently retired priest, and how it has made me think about the Church of England’s role in the modern world. I retired eighteen months ago after nearly thirty years in full-time cathedral ministry, first as Canon Precentor here at Coventry followed by twenty years as Dean first of Sheffield and then Durham. I loved cathedral ministry and owe a great deal to Coventry for having taught me something of the craft of it. It was at Coventry that I learned how far-reaching in society and public life the mission of a cathedral can be, and how cathedrals, through their architecture and art, their music, their liturgy and preaching, yes and the life of their communities are powerful magnets that increasingly draw worshippers, pilgrims, visitors and those who are curious about faith from far and wide.

(1) The Church and Decline
We landed in retirement in a rural Northumberland village. The parish church is across the road and is served by an able young priest. He is at the same stage in his ministry as I was when I served my first incumbency in the same diocese. But that was over thirty years ago. Now, as we re-enter parish life and contribute what we can, we realise how the churches have declined in the decades we were away. The church everywhere, apart from the suburbs and market towns, is facing real threats to its long-term survival. I’m not only thinking about dwindling congregations, the buildings they have to maintain and the lack of resources with which to do it. I’m also wondering where the next generation of lay leaders is going to come from when multi-parish benefices become ever larger and clergy time is increasingly stretched. When our silver-haired generation dies out, where are tomorrow’s churchwardens, treasurers, PCC members, worship leaders and musicians going to come from? How long will the present model of parish ministry be sustainable?

Those who have analysed historical trends over the last half century tell us that organised religion is in decline in secularised western Europe. It is a fact on the ground. It is not due to the church’s faulty strategy or lack of vision or evangelistic effort or social engagement. But the institution finds it extraordinarily hard to admit to decline publicly. Bishops and dioceses devise slogans that relentlessly accentuate the positive. The word growth is usually in there somewhere, linked to Renewal and Reform. You won’t find ads at the back of the Church Times that begin: “we are a declining church, but we are learning to grow smaller gracefully. We aim to be wise in this generation, and we do not lose heart”.

How does wisdom speak into this situation? I think she would say a number of things. First of all, speak the truth and don’t massage the facts. And if the truth is frightening (which I think it is), don’t panic. Do everything you can to understand it and help others understand it, bringing to these difficult questions the critical, analytical tools with which reason has endowed you. Expect to find a great deal of complexity in what you discover that will not be susceptible to the usual solutions, for example programmes of evangelism, certainty in theology, throwing money at dwindling congregations. Wisdom says: ask yourselves where you detect the work of God in the events and processes of our time. The scriptures are, I think, less concerned with organised religion and congregational life than we may think, more outward-focused in bearing Christ to the world in word and work, more concerned with truth, justice and the weightier matters of the law. Above all, keep hope alive among those who continue to bear witness to God’s presence in times of suffering and joy. And in everything, don’t be afraid. Be of good cheer. In his death and resurrection, Christ the Lord has overcome the world.

(2) The Church and Brexit
Next, let me turn to a matter that has been much on all our minds in the past year, and indeed, in the past week. Last Saturday the European Union celebrated its sixtieth birthday. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister triggered the Article 50 process by which this country will leave the European Union.

I may as well own up to my feelings of profound sadness here. My mother was a German-Jewish war refugee and I was brought up to think of continental Europe as my home, with Britain as an essential part of it. My mother died just after the referendum, scarcely able to take in the realisation that the country that had given her a home, protected her from harm and befriended her in 1937 could now walk away from its cultural, historical and spiritual roots. But we are where we are, and in or out of the EU, we need to continue to be good Europeans, good allies, neighbours and friends across the North Sea, the Irish Sea and the English Channel.

However, my question tonight is about wisdom and how the Church of England contributed to the debate about our nation’s future. I was disappointed. We knew after the 2015 election that a referendum would soon be called and that we would be required to make the biggest political decision of our lifetimes. Some of us begged the Church of England to debate it at its February meeting last year, just as the referendum campaign began. But there was silence, no collective voice from the national church that could help bring Christian wisdom to the momentous decision we were being asked to make. You would think that the future of the nation was a matter of indifference to the Church of England. Even if the church was never going to take a view (though the other national church in Britain did, the Church of Scotland), not to have anything to say, not to help shine a Christian light on these extraordinarily difficult matters strikes me as a real failure of leadership. It’s true that an emergency debate was allowed at the July Synod. But by then it was too late. On Brexit Day last week, England’s national church had nothing officially to say about the future of the nation, no reflection to offer, no prayers to say. I felt ashamed of our silence just when we needed Christian voices to speak into a vital and contentious debate.

What is the learning here? What we find in the wisdom literature is that it is not afraid of complexity. Books like Job and Ecclesiastes do not pretend there are easy answers to the fundamental questions of human existence such as the problems of suffering and of meaning. So the national church could have warned us against the perils of binary choices, those fatal either-ors that trap us into thinking that everything must be black or white. The Church could have said: beware of thinking that all right (or all wrong) are on the side of either Remain or Leave. Even though we have to vote this way or that, listen to the case made by the other side; weigh up the evidence, assess the arguments, come to an informed conclusion. The word for this is discernment. The Church is supposed to be good at it. If only it had placed its long spiritual experience of wise discernment at the service of the nation when we needed it so much.

(3) The Church and Same-Sex Relationships
Finally I want to say something about the matter that is said to “threaten to tear the Church apart”, human sexuality and in particular, same-sex relationships. As we all know, the recent February General Synod decided not to “take note” of the House of Bishops’ report. If I had still been a member of the Synod, I would have voted with the House of Clergy not to “take note”: the report simply didn’t do justice to the complexity of human sexuality in the light not only of Christian teaching but also how to interpret that teaching knowing what we now know from science and social science about our sexualities. It seemed to bear no relation to the careful “listening process” that had been set up in every diocese to enable us to hear one another’s experience and speak frankly about sexuality. And given that a majority of lay people in the Church now support the view that committed same-sex love is as God-given as heterosexual love and that the state was right to legislate for gay marriage, the report was not just questionable as theology but bad politics too.

I watched the whole of the Synod debate. It seemed to me to be mostly well-informed, emotionally intelligent and respectful. As in the debate about women in the episcopate, the Synod can show a remarkable capacity to engage in contentious matters without sacrificing courtesy: given the wisdom literature’s strong emphasis on listening and using words with care, we can be proud of the example our representatives have set. But now the Bishops must find a way of bringing back to the Church a way forward in its understanding of sexuality that will command consent. And this calls for wisdom of the highest order because as we know, there is a real threat to the unity of the Anglican Communion should the Church of England depart (as it would be seen) from the traditional moral disciplines of the Church.

I need to tread carefully here. But as with the debate about the European Union, I may as well come clean. My belief is that whatever the complexities in the decisions we are called upon to make, we must always try to “do the right thing” without fear of the consequences, however hard they may be to face. In other words, we cannot let consequentialism dictate the way we make ethical choices; we must not allow the ends to justify or control the means.

This calls for real moral courage. I am in no doubt about what a decision to endorse same-sex marriage and to solemnise or bless it in church would mean for many Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America. I’m also in no doubt about how hard this would be for many in our own churches to accept. At the same time, it cannot be right for our Church to retain any vestige of discrimination in the way we think, speak and act, whether it is inequalities endured by those of colour, women or gay people. So when I speak about acting courageously, I mean with the integrity that is informed by wisdom, and with consciences that have been educated by long immersion in the faith of the scriptures nurtured by the sacraments supported by the prayers of the faithful. Wisdom’s presumption is that in our decision-making, we do not look for easy ways out, nor do we crumple under pressure, nor do we take the pragmatic, politically expedient option. We behave with principle and seek to follow the way of justice and truth. I am not saying this is ever easy. But I am saying that anything less is not to act out of Christian wisdom. It comes back to wise and holy discernment. 

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Cruciform Wisdom
I believe these three examples show how inescapable the task is of seeking wisdom for and in our church. While we live in times of bewildering complexity, I hesitate to say that previous generations would have found the task of interpreting scriptural wisdom any easier. A church that is semper reformanda can never say to itself that this work is finished. Wisdom ought to make us curious and sharpen our questions. We should expect new light and truth to break forth from God’s holy word as we make read the ancient text out of our contemporary experience of faith.

But let me end by reminding us of the way wisdom is configured in the New Testament. St Paul tells us that “wisdom” by itself is not enough. What matters is to cultivate a cross-shaped wisdom that eschews human cleverness and instead looks to the crucified Jesus as both the power of God and the wisdom of God. Paul says that what we must do is to “have the mind of Christ”. So it’s never a bad idea to ask the question, when faced with hard choices, “what would Jesus do?” It is always easier to ask than to answer, of course. But to begin to frame the question in that way is to affirm how important it is always to ask our questions and do our discernment Christianly. For if Christ is no less than the incarnate wisdom of God himself, and God’s power and wisdom are found not, in the end, in human knowledge or achievement but in Christ crucified, where else can we possibly go? Especially as we prepare to celebrate his passion and resurrection in the Holy Week of our salvation that will soon be upon us?

St Mary’s Warwick, 2 April 2017
Proverbs 8.1-21   

Storm, Stress and Salvation: the gospel of Paul in a turbulent world

I doubt if St Paul envisaged archdeacons in his ecclesiology though I guess that to do the job well you need pretty much the entire panoply of spiritual gifts he lists in his letters. I worked closely with archdeacons on two bishop’s staffs for twenty years, as well as benefitting from archdeacons on the Cathedral chapters I served as Dean. I hope you will hear it not as flattery but as real appreciation when I say that I hugely admire what you do. Everything I have heard during this absorbing conference underlines that. You are profoundly committed, visionary, people, but prudent and practical too, and unlike some bishops and deans, good at the detail, a combination of gifts that make you the gyroscopes that keep our dioceses upright. On behalf of the national church, I want to thank you. 

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. I always think of Caravaggio’s great painting of that story, with the poor man, blinded by the great light that has assaulted him, spread-eagled on the ground while his huge horse rears up above. Chiaroscuro, we call Caravaggio’s technique, exploiting the dramatic interplay of light and shadow in art. Your conference theme Open to God in a Turbulent World captures the light-and-shadow aspects of the human journey and the path we walk as the people of God. A Damascus Road it is not for most of the time in our public ministry. Yet when I read the story of Paul and how he was prised apart on that road, I recall the late great Leonard Cohen’s immortal lines about the chiaroscuro of every life-changing encounter: 

There is a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in.

At last Paul’s long-repressed inner turbulence is exposed for all to see. Torn between passionate love & violent hatred, something in him must have longed to still the tectonic plates colliding within him. Is this what Caravaggio is getting at? I see his painting telling us something not only about Paul himself but the storm and stress that surrounded him. Caravaggio’s day was the same. So is ours. In today’s epistle Paul sets out a catalogue of his trials and ordeals, the turbulence he has endured for the sake of the gospel. I doubt any historical era is immune from turbulence, whatever nostalgia colours the way we speak about the past. But I don’t think anyone will deny that our own times are seeing more than their fair share of it, and this is mirrored in the church too.

It’s been a privilege to overhear you entering into this theme during these past days. Our speakers, all of them first rate and some of them profoundly moving have between them created a remarkably coherent exploration of how we need to be "open to God in a turbulent world". One thing that has struck me is the difficult tension between trying to control turbulence and doing the risky thing of stepping into its flow to see where it takes us. What if turbulence, for all its discomforts, were not always an enemy to be feared, but, sometimes at least, opened up new channels of flow that might reshape our history in better ways? "Rivers do not flow in straight lines." 

We wouldn't be human if we weren't shaken by these "fightings and fears within, without". We are living in times when people of faith have to hope against hope in order to keep hope alive. I see that as a central task of the church today when good people find their spirits crushed by events spinning out of their control, and succumb to resignation, despondency and even despair. It's been refreshing to come to a conference that has genuinely tried to address how we should contemplate a world in which the lights seem to be going out in so many places. I'd thought I would hear much more than I have about Renewal and Reform, the tension between strategic development funding and resourcing parish ministry, mission action plans needing to be diligently worked up and applied to save the church from terminal collapse. What a relief! Instead, what we have been doing is the more difficult but even more important task of pondering how best we can respond to the turbulences of our time, whether in church, society or global politics.

Let me speak into our specific role as senior leaders in the church. After thirty years in three cathedrals, I'm now learning how to be a superannuated villager in the Northumberland countryside close to Hadrian's Wall. It's eye-opening to see what challenges the rural benefice is facing. It's partly about resources, but more, I think, about the ageing and declining pool of lay people who are confident and willing enough to participate in the leadership of the local church. My wife and I sit in the congregation each Sunday and contribute as lay Christians. I go across to church on weekday mornings to say matins with the Vicar, a young and able priest who is the same age as I was in my first incumbency (but who is making rather fewer mistakes than I did at that point in my ministry). I admire and fear for younger clergy because it would be so easy for their vitality to be sapped by the sheer scale of the turbulence they are facing. It's not that there is any sign of this now. But ten years down the line: who knows? So I'm glad about the investment being made across the church in mentoring, consultancy, spiritual guidance and other forms of close, intentional support, and I'm also glad to play a small part in the networks in our diocese that are there to help clergy so that they do not lose heart.

In a fascinating Bible reading, we heard insights from Esther about how to be responsive to God in a world of chance and change. In turbulent times, we are easily driven by the sneak of danger to seek security in some imagined status quo that is familiar to us. Or if we feel the need to do something, we go on the offensive and throw what we can at the crisis. But both those ways feel more reactive than responsive. And reaction is driven not by an open unafraid engagement but by panic, anxiety and fear. To apply this to the church we serve, reaction seems to characterise the rhetoric we hear from some church leaders who are unwilling to ask the question, where is God in the turbulence itself, where do we glimpse his presence and hear his voice even in our institutional decline? And what might this point to in the reshaping of our life together? But if this conference has taught me anything, it is always to go back to the question, what is God doing in the storm and stress? The Elijah story tells us that we need to be as present to the earthquake, wind and fire as the still small voice. 

In the desert tradition that owes so much to Elijah, discernment or diakrisis is one of the spiritual gifts most to be coveted by spiritual leaders. At its heart lie the twin tasks of listening and interpreting. We've heard a lot about them in this conference: how we discern God's activity so that we can join in, whether it's among the poorest of our world whom Christian Aid serves so wonderfully, or in the theatres of conflict like Afghanistan where the pity of war draws out our empathy both with those who suffer and those who serve; or nearer to home where we want to bear good witness to the gospel in our cities and countryside, suburbs and estates. On the first evening we learned how the novelist has to sit still, look hard and listen intently if he or she is going to be a truth-seeker - but by extension that means each of us because story is at the heart of who we are and how we tell of the mighty acts of God. So to reflect yesterday afternoon on how we sustain the life of the spirit in was an essential aspect of responding well: "praying, sleeping, dreaming, looking, smiling". It isn't too much to claim that all of wisdom comes down to these avenues of discernment, for in the spiritual tradition, these are the gifts of God that lead us on the path of insight and illumination. In the gospel reading, Jesus thanks God for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom not to the imagined wise and intelligent but to infants, a theme developed at length by St Paul in his Corinthian letters. 

We started out on the first afternoon reflecting on mission. Whenever that word comes up I think of the title of a great book written more than a century ago, Roland Allen’s Missionary Methods – St Paul’s or Ours? The Feast of St Paul is a day to pull that book off the shelf. When I was a curate in the 1970s, my much-loved training incumbent Bob Jeffery, once a member of this conference who died this past Christmas, insisted that I read it. “We’ve got it all wrong” he would mutter crossly. “We don’t listen to the voices of the indigenous, the local and the least privileged and powerful. We don’t hear what the context is telling us let alone bother with the hard work of interpreting it to the biblical text and the text to it. We don't learn how to sing the Lord's song in a strange land, and we don’t trust the Holy Spirit to nurture and grow disciples. If we did, how different the Church of England would look.” Diakrisis. 

Whom am I to tell you this? You work with the reality day after day. But here’s what’s distinctive about archdeacons. You do these things in minute particulars. Bishops (and even deans) can climb clear of what are disparagingly called “operations” and get away with painting big pictures in very broad brush strokes. It can all get a bit excitable. But not archdeacons. When I chaired the DAC, I saw how invaluable archdeacons were at reminding the committee that its decisions were not just about conservation and development, but were in the service of mission. "There is nothing too ample for you to overflow, nothing too small that your workmanship is not revealed" we heard R S Thomas say yesterday. 

When I was about to become a dean, I looked for books to read on leadership. This was before the days of strategic leadership programmes and mini MBAs.  My wife suggested the Hornblower books. I read through the entire series and found them highly illuminating. Here’s one example. “In the ships of the line in which he had served there had only been minutes of battle for every week at sea, and he had gradually become fixed in the idea that seamanship was the one requisite for a naval officer.  To be master of the countless details of managing a wooden sailing ship; not only to be able to handle her under sail, but to be conversant with all the petty but important trifles regarding cordage and cables, pumps and salt pork, dry rot and the Articles of War; that was what was necessary. But he knew now of other qualities equally necessary: a bold yet thoughtful initiative, moral as well as physical courage, tactful handling of both superiors and subordinates, ingenuity and quickness of thought.” (C.S. Forester, Lieutenant Hornblower)

Something like that could do as a role-description for an archdeacon. That passage to me encapsulated all the arts of leadership from understanding the detail (because you are at heart a practitioner) to the high moral qualities that make a man or a woman stand out: imagination, intelligence, fortitude, responsiveness, emotional awareness, self-understanding, good judgment and the determination to collaborate. And all this, placed within a theological and spiritual frame, lays the best possible foundation for being leaders in mission not out of anxious reaction to storm and stress but because it is right in itself. These are the marks of intelligent, far-sighted leadership because they emerge out of careful discernment. This is what we must cultivate if we are to have the spirit of St Paul.

I am currently reading a remarkable book A Different Path: an emotional autobiography by Neville Symington, a psychoanalyst and ex-Catholic priest. He speaks about the two pillars of a healthy life. "Friendship and wisdom are the most precious fruits of civilisation" he says. So I’d like to commend to you as a model for an archdeacon the "wise friend". More than any other role in the church, yours invites you to be both the source of insight and discernment, not dispensed from a distant centre but in that all-important place that is very close to the parish clergy and the people they serve. In a turbulent world, they, we, need your wisdom and your close friendship in equal measure. 

In our conference, in one way or another, every address, every workshop, every act of worship and a lot of the table talk has been about recovering this vision of life and our involvement in it. To be open to God in a turbulent world tests our spiritual resilience in ways that unsettle and disturb us. Like the disciples in the boat on storm-tossed Gennesaret, we cry, “help, Lord”. And we are heard. "Thou art my rock, thou art my rest" says George Herbert in words quoted to us on Monday. 

Turbulence can obscure our sight by unbalancing us or hurling dust into our eyes or towing us into maelstroms from which we can't pull ourselves out. Symington tells how he "went into the Church so that, identified with a savage God, I would not see these dark forces of unreason within me." The analyst and the spiritual guide both know that we must get to know and befriend the demons lurking in the shadow, whether in the institution or in our own selves. If we don't, they will never be stilled and we shall never see clearly. But like Elijah’s earthquake, wind and fire, like the ordeals that St Paul writes about, turbulence that is faced with courage and equanimity can purify our vision of God and how he is present to us when we are most disorientated and afraid. It takes great faith to read things that way, yet how can we read them any other way as we hear St Paul's magnificent words on this his feast day: "as dying, and see, we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything"?

So as we make Eucharist and say our farewells, it's with the resolve to be newly open to God in a turbulent world, to be cheerful and courageous, filled with hope and poised to be wise friends to all for the sake of the gospel. This Eucharist invites us to participate in Love's great work in the world, God's project of reconciliation and redemption and the making new of all things. Maybe, one day, we shall look back and know why we were here as part of it, doing what we did for God through change and chance and providence. And, just maybe, we shall understand how all of it was "for just such a time as this".

At the National Archdeacons' Conference, Swanwick, on the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 2017

2 Corinthians 6.1-10; Luke 10.17-24

King Solomon's Mines...of Wisdom

I was looking forward to being back in my old college to preach tonight. I am very sorry indeed that an infection prevents me from travelling at the moment. I’m grateful to the chaplain for reading it to you instead.

The High Court ruling about Parliament’s role in Brexit, Guy Fawkes’ Night yesterday, and Tuesday's American election make for an interesting constellation of events. In their different ways they all make us think about political authority: what it means and how it should behave towards the citizens it governs. For people of faith they pose the even larger question about where God belongs in the structures of human society. In the language of our New Testament reading, what does it mean to “give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”?

The story in our Old Testament reading doesn’t answer these questions. But it does shine a light on the nature of leadership. The young king, unsure of himself at the outset of his reign, goes into the sanctuary, the place he senses he will grow wise in.  God appears to him, and asks what gift he should give him.  It’s an annunciation moment: when the angel comes, what will he say?  Like Mary, he rises to the test.  He asks for the only gift worth having: wisdom.  How else can he govern this great people?  There is a divine sigh of relief.  God is pleased with his prayer, and gives him not only what he has asked but also what he has not asked: riches, honour, glory.  And the story goes on to show how Solomon’s wisdom was such that Israel ‘stood in awe of the king, because they saw that the wisdom of God was in him.’

But things are more ambiguous than we might think.  Is Solomon cynically praying for what he knows God wants him to ask for, calculating that in a world where outward show counts for so much, God will give him riches and victory and power anyway?  It would be churlish to be too suspicious. The natural reading of the story echoes our instincts when we begin any new task we know we are ill-equipped for. Helplessness has a way of concentrating the mind. I prayed just such a prayer on the day I was ordained in this very chapel forty years ago this year. At least Solomon is wise enough to know that he must ask to be wise.  It’s only when we know what we don’t know, the ‘known unknowns’ in Rumsfeld-speak, that we begin to be wise.   

No, what is intriguing is how the author introduces his reign at the outset.  He could so easily have begun with Solomon’s noble prayer. Instead, he embarks on the new king’s career with some not very subtly disguised hints that all is not happy and glorious.  First, there is his marriage alliance with Pharaoh’s daughter. Egypt is the place Israel had left behind in the exodus.  To marry into Egypt would be a betrayal of history. It anticipates what the text says later on about how Solomon loved many foreign women along with the daughter of Pharaoh, who ‘turned away his heart after other gods’.

Then there is the reference to his building ‘his own house, and the house of the Lord and the wall about Jerusalem’.  We might say that this is precisely what kings do. But think about this: whereas it took just seven years to build the temple, no less than 13 years were spent on his own palace with no expense spared.  In Solomon, a king had arrived ‘like all the nations’, just what they had so misguidedly asked for in the days of Samuel.  And notice the order in which these grands projets are listed: his own house first, then the house of the Lord, then the city walls: king first, shrine second, the people and their safety last of all.  There is already a hint of the forced labour with which Solomon realised these achievements and the heavy taxes he levied to pay for them, something for which the northern tribes of Israel never forgave him, and which after his death led to the kingdom’s fatal schism. Was God still king in Israel? – that was the big question.

So Solomon is introduced to us, not altogether as the legendary wise and good king, but as a man already compromised in his public life and personal relationships.  In this, he is his father’s son, for the story of the golden days of David is also one in which the conflicts of his private life threaten to subvert his public role and destroy both the kingdom and its king with it.  The storyteller is unsparing in his scrutiny of how Solomon’s reign ended badly. His huge wealth, his taxation policies, his exploiting of slave labour, his comprehensive harem of women from across the world and his toleration of their gods all betrayed the promise of his early years.  No doubt the story is reading the ending back into the beginning: the overture is warning us that we must prepare to be disappointed in this man. 

So Solomon’s prayer is the petition of an already compromised ruler. It suggests that the king is not so much the innocent child as the young man who knows about the ambiguities that could lure him from the path of wisdom. He can glimpse his demons, the conflicted desires that could get the better of him, the seductions of money, sex and power that corrupt even the best of leaders.  And he can also see that good leadership calls for real integrity of mind, heart and motive. Is this why he prays for wisdom?  If it is, we should admire Solomon for his emotional honesty.  What else can purify his ambitions, wash them of the corrosive instincts for self-aggrandisement and the pursuit of pleasure that a king in the ancient world would have to be superhuman to resist? 

Our society likes leaders who can be either heroes or villains.  It’s good at erecting pedestals but enjoys it when they are fallen from. We find it hard to accept that our leaders are flawed, that their failings could be forgivable, and that even their brokenness could be the raw material of greatness or at least dignity.  This is precisely the drama being acted out before our eyes in America: whose personal story makes them more fit to be Commander in Chief? The scriptures don’t regard Solomon as unambiguously good; perhaps he is more of a tragic figure brought down by the flaws in his character, and in this he is of a piece with so many in public life we could name. 

But I like to think that Solomon never forgot how his best instincts led him to ask for the wisdom to know not only how a king should govern his people but how he should govern himself.  The oversight of ourselves is a task we all have to face, leaders or not.  We know how we fall short of what the psalm calls ‘truth in the inward parts’.  But our exemplar is not any human king, not even Solomon in all his glory.  It is the one who is God’s wisdom incarnate, who comes to forgive our failures, and mend our broken lives and make us fit to serve him.  In him, our Redeemer, a greater than Solomon is here.

Balliol College Oxford, 6 November 2016 (1 Kings 3.1-15, Matthew 22.15-22)

What Makes a Good Leader? Sermon at the Mayor's Civic Service

In an age with a love-hate attitude to celebrity, leadership has never been more demanding than it is today. My imminent departure from Durham has exercised my own mind on what I think I have tried to be and to do as a spiritual leader in the last twelve years; my colleagues are asking the question, what is needed in the next Dean of Durham? Today, our thoughts are focused on a new Mayor of Durham who steps into this role as Chair of the County Council. I am sure I speak for all of you when I say at the outset that our prayers and good wishes are with Jan as she begins her mayoral year. We shall all want to support her mayoralty in every way we can.

On the 9th September, we shall mark the day when The Queen becomes the longest reigning English monarch, overtaking her predecessor Queen Victoria. We shall honour this remarkable achievement at a special evensong that day. I have been looking at her Coronation Service to see what hopes and expectations surrounded her when she was crowned in Westminster Abbey in 1953. Here are some of the prayers from that day.

Strengthen her, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter; Confirm and stablish her with thy free and princely Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom and government, the Spirit of counsel and ghostly strength, the Spirit of knowledge and true godliness, and fill her, O Lord, with the Spirit of thy holy fear.

The Lord your God endue you with knowledge and wisdom, with majesty and with power from on high; the Lord clothe you with the robe of righteousness, and with the garments of salvation. May wisdom and knowledge be the stability of your times, and the fear of the Lord your treasure.

The Coronation rite asks many things for the Sovereign: peace in her times; stability so that her realms may flourish, a fruitful reign, the capacity to serve well and to oversee the administration of justice. These are all good aspirations for the exercise of every kind of power, prayers we can all echo for those who undertake public roles on behalf of other people. But if ask what was uppermost in the minds of those who, centuries ago, composed the coronation service, I think we would have to say: wisdom. It is a theme that runs through so many of the prayers for a young sovereign on her coronation day, because it is the secret of sound leadership, as Solomon knew when he prayed for the gift to govern his people wisely. There is nothing that so adorns a leader as his or her embrace of wisdom, or as we might say, insight and awareness, discernment, understanding, and sound judgment. These are the qualities that inculcate a sense of trust and confidence: you believe that those who possess them are in it not for themselves, not acting out of self-interest or aggrandisement, but for the sake of others. And there is nothing that so corrupts leadership and discredits it as the lack of those hard-won qualities.

By coincidence, in this year that we reach a milestone in the history of the monarchy, we also celebrate the eight hundredth anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta. Last Monday, I was in that sunny meadow at Runnymede with thousands of others to witness the ceremony that commemorated this event. Her Majesty was there, lineal successor of King John; and the Archbishop of Canterbury too, the spiritual successor of the great Archbishop Stephen Langton who, we believe, contributed to the drafting of the text. I wondered whether The Queen was thinking about her 63 years on the throne, and the nature of our constitutional monarchy whose carefully defined relationships with Parliament and the body politic go back ultimately to Magna Carta. For the checks and balances that discipline leaders, so signally lacking when an autocratic sovereign collided with recalcitrant barons, are essential to the good ordering of a modern state. It took many centuries to get there: 1215 was the start of a long journey. But we now take them for granted, not only in the monarchy but in every other aspect of public life. It comes down to the fundamental principle of our freedoms, that all of us are equal under the law, and no-one is privileged, however ancient their office or exalted their powers.

We might think these constraints, these limitations on power make it easier to lead. On the contrary. They make leadership an extraordinarily subtle art that calls for the kind of wisdom I have been speaking about: the insight and discernment that enable us to understand the gears that synchronise our roles with the complex and intricate systems and processes of our public institutions.  This is true of leaders in government; it is true of leaders in the church (take my word for it), and of leaders in every other sector of society. You, Madam, are a constitutional mayor. I am a constitutional dean. In our more sinful moments we may wish we had more power than we do. In our better hours and days, we are profoundly grateful that it is as it is. And so I come to my fundamental question. Where does it come from, this gift to be wise?

Our Old Testament reading speaks about wisdom as the gift of the Spirit, ‘a breath of the power of God, an emanation of the glory of the Almighty’. ‘She is more beautiful than the sun; against wisdom, evil does not prevail.’ The Wisdom of Solomon is one of a number of texts written to instruct those who being prepared for leadership. Wisdom in the Old Testament means many things: a shrewd knowledge of the world, the capacity to read human life and behaviour, the ability to manage oneself well and order the affairs of the institutions we are responsible for, a moral compass that is orientated towards what is good and right, and more than anything else, a reverence for God who alone is wise, in whose name we mortals exercise leadership. All this is part of wisdom’s ‘admonition to rulers’. You could sum it up like this: know your role; know what you are responsible for; know your place in how the world is ordered; know your people; know yourself. If we want to clothe wisdom in contemporary dress, the seven Nolan Principles of Public Life that people in public life sign up to nowadays do a good job: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and leadership.

But there is one more dimension that we who lead must always remember. Our New Testament reading spells it out in a marvellous paradox. ‘Where is the one who is wise?’ asks St Paul, ‘has not god made foolish the wisdom of the world?’ So it depends on what kind of wisdom we cultivate. He tells us that it is not human wisdom or intelligence in itself that we should aspire to, nor the crude coercive force of naked power that we find so seductive. Rather it is to trace both power and wisdom back to their God-given source. Where do we find this? It is ‘Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength’.

Which is why we hold this service at the start of the each mayoral year. It is to worship and acknowledge our dependence on God from whom all good things come, among them the best gifts and virtues we aspire to. And it is to pray for our Mayor and all who lead that they may be equipped with everything they need to inhabit their office with the wisdom and justice, the compassion and humanity that will serve and build up the common good. In one of the psalms, a blessing on the city goes like this: ‘May there be no breach in the walls, no exile, no cry of distress in our streets. Happy are the people to whom such blessings fall. Happy are the people whose God is the Lord.’ Indeed so, God only wise in all places and in this place, our beloved city and county, this northern land of saints.

Durham Cathedral
At the annual civic service, 21 June 2015
Wisdom 7.22b-8.1; 1 Corinthians 1.18-25

A Toast to St Chad's: the Rector's Feast

The first thing I want to do tonight is to pay tribute to Dr Margaret Masson for her outstanding leadership of this college following the death of our Principal. We all owe her and her colleagues whom she has already paid tribute to a huge debt of thanks. Her wise, steady and inspirational presence are exactly what is needed at this demanding time. Margaret: we salute you. 

The last time I got up and spoke at a dinner in St Chad’s was at the Domus Dinner in March. I was sitting next to Joe Cassidy. The conversation was lively as it has always been at countless formals here. We talked quite about retirement, and he tried to persuade me to stay on as Rector here for a while after leaving the Cathedral. I laughed and said that this would be to break the rule of a lifetime. When you leave a place, you leave, I said. I also told him how much I liked his new portrait in this hall – one of the best, I think. I think he was proud of it.  

On my other side was an alumnus of the college who has been remarkably successful in his chosen profession. Nothing unusual in that, of course – it’s what we expect of Chadsians. We got talking about the college as it was in his day, and as it is now. He was full of praise for the way Chads has been led during the past decade and more. We agreed that Papa Joe needed to hear this. So we both paid tribute to him and the warm applause that followed showed that we had accurately judged the mood in the hall. Not long after that, he was dead. I shall always be glad that he lived long enough to hear not just the praise and admiration of all who were in the room but, I hope, the real affection of all whom we represented, that is to say, every generation of Chadsmen and women who owe so much to the way he touched our lives. I don’t often say that someone was ‘much-loved’ but it was true of Joe and continues to be.

This was coming through yesterday when I was privileged to join in part of the College Council’s strategy day. We had a fascinating discussion about what make this college what it is, what we cherish about it, what makes it distinctive among Durham’s colleges - the best indeed! - and what we believe its central purposes and values are. It’s important to do this work thoroughly as we think about what we look for in our next Principal. But it was clear yesterday how deeply Papa Joe had influenced the shape and character of this college. His name frequently came up in our discussions, not because we should or could look for another Joe, but because we wanted to distil from his era an enduring legacy as we look to the future. 

I have to say that I am full of admiration for the way St Chad’s has come together and forged ahead during this past term. Yes, of course the college has been grieving deeply in a time of sharp loss, and grief can’t be put away in a matter of a few days. There’s a Jewish saying about this. As you know, one of the marks of grief in Judaism was to rend your clothes as a sign that in some deep way, life has been torn apart. Someone asked a Rabbi whether, after a period of mourning, it was permitted to sow them up again and carry on wearing them. Yes, said the Rabbi, but the sown-up tear must always show. You mustn’t pretend it isn’t there, because even though life must go on, it’s never the same when someone you care about dies. 

St Chad’s has handled this really well. You have supported one another marvellously during a dark time. Life has gone on, the college is flourishing, our exam results are the best ever, and as I've said that’s a tribute not only to Joe's achievement but also to Dr Masson and her colleagues, all who share the leadership of the college. I want to include in that the three common rooms and their leaders. What I saw yesterday was a college that is in excellent spirits, vibrant, forward-looking, embracing a future that is filled with possibility and promise. I have been privileged to be a small part of that.

‘Have been…’ When Joe died, the Chair of the Council asked if I would stay on as Rector for a year even though I shall have left Durham. So this is not my final Rector’s Feast that I thought it would be. I am looking forward to being back during the coming year and to seeing you all again.  

Let me finally say three things. 

First, a thank you. Thank you for all that you put into this College.  Thank you if you are leaving, and thank you if you aren’t just yet. You receive so much from Chad’s because you give so much.  There is a wonderful loyalty among Chads people past and present. It has moved me to hear you speak about your love for this place and its community. It’s right to recognise it and applaud it.

Secondly, a thought for those of you whose days at Durham are drawing to a close. I hope you don’t dwell on the word ‘leaving’. What you have been given here is just a part of a journey: your learning, your personal development, the way your citizenship and your values have been shaped, maybe too, faith and friendships that will last a lifetime.  St Chad’s will always be a permanent part of that journey. You can take people out of Chad’s, but you can never take Chad’s out of the men and women who make up its worldwide family.  I hope you’re as proud as I am to belong to this great extended family.  I know you are. 

Thirdly, an invitation. Come back often: you will always be welcome. Stay connected as alumni.  Let me wish you the very best for the future, wherever life leads you.  And because this is a Christian foundation and we are allowed to speak in these ways, I am going to add, may God bless you and keep  you always.

Here’s to your future.  Here’s to the College’s future.  The toast is: ‘St Chad’s’. 

18 June 2015    

Ant-wisdom and Bird-wisdom: Practically Human in Life and Ministry

Introduction

Many of you will know William Blake’s famous water colour of Babylon’s 6^th century king Nebuchadnezzar.  He has been reduced to the status of an animal prowling around on all fours, his face half human, half beast.  (In fact, this condition known as lycanthropy afflicted his son Nabonidus, but the Book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible attributes it to Nebuchadnezzar on account of his legendary arrogance.)  The message is that power, when it is driven by hubris, has a corroding effect on the character of the perpetrator.  In this condition of abasement, conscience and rationality are forfeited.  A person is driven by their appetites; or as we say, they are at the mercy of their animal instincts. In the church where I was an incumbent, there was a series of four corbels in the south aisle that charted the decay of a human soul, a kind of rake’s progress except that the besetting sin in his case was greed. A noble face in the first corbel began to be distorted and show animal features in the second. By the third grotesque it was clear where he was going, and by the fourth he had become fully pig-like. It was like a medieval version of The Picture of Dorian Gray with its secret picture that accurately depicts the erosion of a human soul. The message is: you become like the gods you worship, or as Seneca said, to honour the gods, it is enough to imitate them. ‘Human beings are like beasts that have no understanding’ says one of the wisdom psalms.

Let me jump a few centuries to the 21^st.  A few years ago in the Cathedral, we held a controversial exhibition of sculptures by the South African artist Jane Alexander. Her work is her response to apartheid and oppression, and it depicts human beings not in the nobility of fulfilling their humanity, but in the tragedy of failing to realise it: falling short, we could say in the language of the Letter to the Romans.  They were troubling pieces of human beings and animals in various states of disfigurement and distortion, and we were advised not to allow children into the exhibition unsupervised. The message was that the ‘dominion’ given to humanity in creation has become corrupted, so that all relationships are susceptible to being skewed, whether within societies and collectives, in the interpersonal sphere, or towards the natural order. 

Alexander talks about ‘humanimals’, partly in the good sense of wanting to place human beings within the created order of fauna (where animals as often as not judge us by their behaviour), but also in this debased sense of human ‘bestiality’ driven by the id, breaking the boundaries of civilised existence, wreaking havoc across a divinely-ordered world.  As a theologian, my take on her work was that it was an interpretation of the fall, rather in the tradition of Dante’s Divine Comedy where sin becomes visibly expressed in the bodies and bearing of its practitioners. In Jane Alexander’s masks and deceptions, like Dante, in the bizarre contortions of her figures we see not only how other people are but also how we ourselves are, both as oppressors and as victims.  Exhibiting these pieces in a sacred space pointedly raised questions about the nature of humanity, both in the state of destructiveness and collapse, and by implication as potentially redeemed by divine grace.

The theological issue here is what it means to be created as (or in?) the image of God. Whatever that is, and there is a large literature that discusses it, we can agree that becoming wise and therefore more fully human leads to the divine image in us being restored, those distortions and contortions imagined in art and sculpture being gently bent back (which is what the word ‘religion means’ into their proper human shape. So let us turn to the conference theme Being Human, Being Wise. I have been asked to give this address under the title ‘Practically Human in Life and Ministry’. I like the meanings cunningly elided in the word ‘practically’.  It partly means being practical about wisdom, asking how being wise makes a difference to ordinary life. But it also smuggles in the idea of an ‘almost’, of having potential and being on the way to realising it. The thing about wisdom in the Bible, as I am sure you have heard earlier in this conference, is that its scope is as wide and deep as human life. It plumbs the depths of the riddles of existence: why is there suffering, why are we mortal, what purpose exists in the universe? The great wisdom texts of Job, Ecclesiastes and some of the Psalms engage with these questions at a profound level, disturbingly so for some people who would prefer their faith not to be troubled by these complex and elusive dilemmas. But biblical wisdom also has as much to say about chronos as it does about kairos – ordinary time as well as the ecstasies and the agonies of human life. And it is aspects of our ordinary days that I want to focus on today.

In 2008 I wrote a little book called Wisdom and Ministry: the call to leadership. For those who have not read it, it tries to make links between the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible and Christian ministry today. It partly does this by exploring the ‘big’ themes in the classical wisdom writings such as Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and the wisdom psalms. But it also takes as exemplars key characters in the ‘narrated wisdom’ of the Old Testament: stories like Joseph, David, Solomon and Daniel that everyone agrees are among the best in the Bible.

Perhaps it’s worth saying why I wrote the book at all.  There is no limit to the books on ministry, and I did not want to add to them without having something distinctive to say.  That ‘something’ was to try and address a deficit I detected in the biblical models the church draws on in its discourse about ministry.  If you look at the Anglican ordinal, you will find its recommended readings from the Hebrew Bible peppered with the calls of prophets. Deacons get Samuel, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Priests get Second and Third Isaiah and Jeremiah. Bishops have Second and Third Isaiah and Ezekiel. I spoke in the General Synod debate about this when the new texts for ordinal were being discussed. Why is vocation to ordination in the Church of England presumed to be like being called as a Hebrew prophet? There is a lot to be said for prophets of course: ‘O that all the Lord’s people were prophets’ says Moses.  But I do not think Anglican parish ministry is very like being an Isaiah, a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, at least most of the time.  If we model it on that presumption, I think we shall be misleading ordinands about what it is they undertaking.  Indeed, I think it raises expectations that are not helpful. 

However, there is another influential group of writers in the Hebrew Bible waiting in the wings for us to take them seriously in the context of ministry.  These are the wise of Israel who have left us such a rich deposit of texts.  Every ancient near eastern society had its wise. They seem to have had a special role in equipping young men for leadership, especially in the royal court. The Old Testament has even taken over a long section of an ancient Egyptian text called The Wisdom of Amenemope almost word for word in a passage in the Book of Proverbs. This illustrates how cosmopolitan wisdom was in antiquity. So I asked in the Synod: why has this tradition not been recognised as a source for ordination readings?  I decided to test the viability of this idea out for myself, as I was invited to give the ordination retreat addresses in Durham soon afterwards. The retreat was entirely based on wisdom texts from the Old Testament. That was the seed of my book. For me, coming to the end of my full-time ministerial career, if I have learned one thing since being ordained 38 years ago, it is that what is needed in the church’s leaders, in any leaders, but especially among the ordained, is wisdom.

It is tempting to stay with these marvellous texts. However, with this literature as our starting point, I want to go beyond them in reflecting with you on two aspects of practical wisdom today. I wish I could have explored ten more: the scope of wisdom is so all-embracing. In particular, I wish I could have explored how wisdom can inform our interpersonal pastoral practice, though some of this is in my book. I want to focus on these particular areas because both of them touch our lives all the time, yet the questions wisdom puts to them are not always as much noticed as they should be if we are to be ‘practically human’ in our ministerial roles and our personal lives. These two ‘wisdoms’ are themes distinctive to our modern world which I have been reflecting on recently and would like to share with you. Perhaps what I can offer are two worked examples of practical wisdom that may help us apply sound wisdom principles to other aspects of life so that we become wiser in our thinking, our practice and our behaviours.

So that you have the road map, here are my two themes: organisational wisdom and digital wisdom. Having begun this lecture on an animal theme, I’d like to offer two images to represent each of these, drawn straight out of the wisdom literature: the ant and the bird. They can be our non-human travelling companions, and help us, say our texts, learn about practical wisdom. There is ant-wisdom, and there is bird-wisdom. I doubt if these are very different: each may turn out to be an aspect of the other. So let’s look at them in turn. 

 

Organisational Wisdom: the Ant

The first is organisational wisdom. Perhaps I should explain why I have taken this as my first worked example. For 26 years my day job has been in cathedrals, and for 18 of those as a dean in two places. When you are directing and caring for the life of a cathedral, especially a large one like Durham, you find yourself searching for models to help you understand what kind of organisation you are leading.  A cathedral is of course a religious foundation.  But it is also an educational institution; a leisure destination; it is heritage and parkland; a concert hall and exhibition gallery; a museum; and not least, a retail and catering outlet. In all these, finance plays a large part. So we are a small to medium-sized enterprise, a business with a turnover of several million pounds. Now, I do not baulk at the thought that Durham Cathedral is a business. We have no choice about that. So the important question is: how do we make sure that it is a good business? And by ‘good’, I don’t only mean successful.  I mean a virtuous, ethical business which a Christian church can be proud of. And this is one place among many where organisational wisdom is not simply desirable but essential.

What do I mean by organisational wisdom? It certainly includes paying attention to the sound principles of ‘economy’, oikonomia, literally ‘household management’ about which proverbial wisdom has so much to say. The virtues of time-wisdom (as my colleague Stephen Cherry calls it in one of his books), leading and managing people well, keeping your word, using your resources prudently, planning for the future, responding with agility to crises: all of these are reckoned to be essential in the Hebrew Bible’s assessment of practical wisdom if your enterprise is going to flourish.

The locus classicus is the 6^th chapter of Proverbs with its admonition to the lazy to imitate the ant:

           Go to the ant, you sluggard. (NRSV has lazybones but that lets us off too jokily when the author is deadly serious; and anyway, the word sluggard is marvellously onomatopoeic of the idle man or woman who is an addict to somnolence and sleep, lying prostrate, bloated by lack of application and effort, turning on their bed like a door turns on its hinges as Proverbs says in another place.) Go to the ant; consider its ways and be wise. Without having any chief or officer or ruler, it prepares its food in summer, and gathers its sustenance in harvest.

And then the unforgettable portrait of the sluggard:

            How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you rise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a thief, and want, like an armed robber.

So ant-wisdom embodies the virtues of good organisation, planning for the future, working collaboratively and knowing how to read the signs of the times. The opposite is sluggard-folly, not just laziness but making everything vague and ambiguous, not to say pointing the finger when things go wrong which in the end will subvert the structure and bring it crashing down. This is a familiar theme of wisdom literature in its many manifestations: consider how well-ordered the natural world is. It is that way because a well-ordered God has made it. So emulate this well-ordered state, and you will find that it transforms your organisation.

Of course, reflective wisdom looked into the heart of creation and found it more complex, more elusive and more baffling than Proverbs seems to think. This is what makes Job and Ecclesiastes the masterpieces of Old Testament wisdom. But that is not to undermine the value of practical wisdom, any more than quantum theory undermines Einsteinian or even Newtonian physics. It depends what job you need them to do.  In one way, precepts like those in Proverbs simply state the obvious. But the obvious, stated in a larger context gives them a particular range and depth. The 6^th century Rule of St Benedict is another example of how the profound and the practical live easily side by side as they do in Proverbs. The most-read parts of the Rule focus on the Christian life, what obedience means, the various degrees or steps of humility, living the religious life together in community and so on. But much of it, given no less emphasis in the cyclical reading of the Rule in Benedictine communities, focuses on how to order the liturgy, when to say which psalms, managing the convent’s finances, stewardship of kitchen implements and garden tools, and looking after your clothes. What transfigures those workaday instructions is the context they are placed in which is wisdom, virtue and discipleship. ‘Who sweeps a room as for thy laws makes that and the action fine’ says George Herbert in the well-known words. The message is: calibrate your organisation according to wisdom and virtue, and it will change everything.

This is where I have concerns about the relentless ascendancy of organisational and management language and practice in the church. You cannot lead any organisation these days without finding yourself speaking about strategic objectives, KPIs (key performance indicators), USP (unique selling points), key messages and outputs for niche markets & target audiences and so on. As well as being a Cathedral dean, I am a governor of a school and a university, the president of a Durham charity, and the titular head of house of a Durham college. Whether the business is religion, education, arts and leisure or healthcare, the discourse is the same. And so is the tension, which sometimes feels like a widening gulf, between practitioners and administrators: those whose job it is to (jargon alert) deliver the core business and those tasked with resourcing and administering it.

I don’t want to make cheap jibes about people who work hard to keep the wheels on our sometimes fragile institutions. They need our respect and gratitude. However, I have a hunch that the processes we follow and the language we use to talk about them ought to be consistent with those institutions’ values. In the case of a Christian organisation like a cathedral, we should expect theology, religious practice and organisational behaviour to inform one another. In my shorthand, religious values should make an organisation wise, to the extent that its behaviours might be nuanced differently from those of other organisations. For example, in our governance and leadership roles as a Cathedral Chapter, it is tempting to map our functions on to those of a board of charity trustees with the Dean as Chair. In our management roles we might think of ourselves as a senior team with the Dean as CEO.  But the reality, both in Christian history and in the Cathedrals Measure that underlies our statutes, is that our roles don’t fall easily into either of those familiar organisational models. What a Chapter is required to exercise is oversight, what the tradition calls episcope, and that is shaped not just by systems theory or good organisational practice but by Christian theological reflection in an ecclesial context. 

Here are two more examples of organisational life. When it comes to setting objectives, we should not so lock ourselves into a rigid planning mentality that there is no space for the manoeuvrability, agility and spontaneity that are needed when circumstances change, or new opportunities arise, and we want to respond quickly to what God may be doing in an unforeseen way. Similarly in our employment practice, where we are subject to the law like any other employer, we should try to resist going straight into adversarial procedures – grievances, complaints, disciplinaries etc.) without first trying, as the gospel urges us to, to make friends with our adversary quickly, to resolve issues through face to face meeting and personal conversation. I am not being naïve here: often, informal personal  approaches will not work, and this is when we should not be afraid of formal processes as a way of caring for and protecting the interests of both employee and employer. We should not too quickly sacrifice the interpersonal for the structural. And this, it seems to me, is how theological wisdom-shaped values can make a difference, allowing what we do to be illuminated by how we do it.  

What am I saying here? Not at all that an institution, least of all a Christian one, should be inefficient, unprofessional, casual about financial discipline, careless about sound stewardship and planning. I like good institutions, and I like good organised religion precisely because at their best, organisations not only harness human energies, creativity and skills but also discipline them, give them shape so that they work for the betterment of us all.  This is what Proverbs admires in its ant-wisdom. But an ant colony is more than an organisation. It is a true organism with its own self-generating life and wholeness, a community of living things whose task is to express what Bonhoeffer called ‘life together’. There is a danger that organisations lose their grasp of this insight, mutate into impersonal, mechanistic principalities and powers, take on a kind of demonic persona which, unchecked, ends up by suppressing what is wise, humane and life-giving in communities and relationships. Honora O’Neill’s Reith Lectures of a decade ago offered timely warnings against micro-management and the culture of mistrust it creates. If I read the poetry of William Blake aright, this dehumanising tendency of institutions was the aspect of the industrial revolution he most hated. Its destructiveness is chillingly chronicled a generation later by Charles Dickens in his novel Dombey and Son where the construction of the railway becomes a metaphor of the suppression of love, intimacy and humanity in Dombey’s soul. In his late great work Bleak House, the dead hand of remorseless process, this time in the Court of Chancery, ends up with legal costs wiping out the entire value of the estate whose succession it has been engaged for generations trying to determine. I have sat in meetings that have felt like ‘Jarndyce versus Jarndyce’ and nearly lost the will to live.

You are all engaged in pastoral practice of various kinds, as am I. We can perhaps translate organisational wisdom into an important pastoral principle which perhaps does not get stated as often as it should.  It is this: that organisations and structures need and deserve pastoral care every bit as much as individual people. In particular, the tasks of caring for the whole church, or our local expression of it, cannot be made less of a priority than exercising pastoral ministry towards individuals. This is a familiar tension for anyone leading or managing in every organisation. When someone has to be disciplined, made redundant or dismissed, the cry goes up: ‘you only care about the organisation, not the people’.  So in the church and in other person-centered organisations, senior teams agonise about applying difficult processes to individuals in case that should appear (as it is often presented) as a lack of pastoral care for them personally. On the other hand, too many benign institutions, churches among them, refuse to take necessary action against employees because it may damage the organisation. And this is often a form of cowardice. How the church negotiates this difficult boundary between being over-forgiving and unduly rigorous is an important aspect of its wisdom, and its corporate mental and spiritual health.

Here is a current example. I am told that the Church of England is now going to require every candidate for the episcopate to answer a questionnaire on his (and one day her) sexual history. This exercise is to be supervised by a current bishop and reported to the Archbishop of the province. This is meant to ensure that bishops are monogamous, and if they are single, or are gay and in civil partnerships, that they are celibate. I am sure we all understand the anxieties that are driving this process, not all of them fuelled by debates in England.  But I want to ask whether this presumption of suspicion about clergy who will already be senior leaders in the church, and the intrusive way it sounds as though it will be enacted, is the way to raise confidence? I hardly think so. It worries me that the church is becoming such a low-trust organisation.

How much of accepted pastoral practice is transferrable from individual to collective pastoral care, I wonder?  I am thinking of client-led approaches to the talking therapies of counselling and psychotherapy, for example, where the primary task is to listen attentively, learn the person’s story, understand the context and try to offer interpretation that will help both the direction the narrative takes and the language used about it. How do we listen to the ‘story’ an institution tells and allow it to inform our pastoral response? In the words of our conference title, how does an organisation not only become wise but also more human? I have been struck by a book from the 1980s by James Hopewell, Congregation: Story and Structure. Informed by both social anthropology and theology, it argued that local churches have their own distinct narratives that need to be understood before any effective ministry can be offered in them. He linked this with the angels of the seven churches in the Apocalypse, which he took to mean that churches, like all organisations, have their own ‘personality types’ which we should not ignore, their own ‘grain’ that needs to be well-understood if effective ministry is to take place within them. Insofar as wisdom means insight, understanding, seeing into the life of things, this could be a question we could usefully discuss.

 

Digital Wisdom: the Bird

The second aspect of practical wisdom I want to explore is digital wisdom. Like the organisations we belong to, the digital world brings us into structures and networks that far transcend our own intimate relationships. The difference is that it does this without our always being fully conscious of it. There is a wisdom text in the 10^th chapter of Qoheleth that is made for the Twitter age. ‘Do not curse the king, even in your thoughts, or curse the rich, even in your bedroom; for a bird of the air may carry your voice, or some winged creature may tell the matter.’ So bird-wisdom means being careful what we disclose, where, and to whom. Even where I think I am most alone, most anonymous, reckon I am seen by no-one and leave no traces, some little creature with wings can exploit my laptop, my phone, my tablet and give me away.

Our need for digital wisdom is not simply important, but urgent. Ours is the first generation to be living with the real and complex changes that are happening to us as a result of almost universal electronic connectivity. That the invention of the internet has brought us huge benefits is something I do not need to argue today. Access to information on a scale undreamed-of to any previous generation is an asset without price. But neither do I need to remind you of its dark side. The well-publicised exploitation of the web to fuel ideological extremism, terrorism, violence and pornography is well known. We don’t need anyone to tell us not to venture into places with big red ‘keep out’ signs. If we go there and come to harm, we have only ourselves to blame.

But there are less visible hazards out there too. I am thinking of the threats posed to personal privacy and security through digital surveillance, something we have heard a lot about in recent weeks. Not only are smartphones sophisticated tracking devices, but we leave indelible traces in cyberspace through our emails, our visits to websites and the content we share through social networking sites. We are right to worry about the as-yet unforeseen consequences of this for politics and society in the 21^st century. And it should make us think very carefully about how we behave in a world where there are no secrets, where everything is in principle open, public and disclosed. This is where bird-wisdom comes in: be careful what you say when you think you are on your own. Someone is probably listening.

In the history of ideas, it may turn out that whenever any new invention or discovery leads to an intellectual revolution and significantly shifts a culture into new ways of thought, the risks are greatest in the first and second generations. It was in the aftermath of the invention of nuclear weapons that the cold war posed a particular threat.  The mechanisation of labour that the industrial revolution ushered in is another example of the inevitable time-lag in realising the threats it brought as well as the opportunities. The inventions of printing and photography may other instances. Technology always accelerates away from our ability not only to use it responsibly and manage it safely, but even more importantly, to give it shape and discipline by placing it a landscape of values and ethics. 

Wisdom has a special emphasis on the care, nurture and protection of the vulnerable. Among these are the young. Their formation and upbringing is a major, perhaps the major preoccupation of this kind of reflective biblical literature. In the first few chapters of Proverbs, the writer develops the imagery of a young man walking along the street trying to find his way through life. From houses on either side, two ladies call out to him and attempt to entice him into their homes. The one is Lady Wisdom, who promises a life-giving banquet of bread and wine, an environment in which to flourish and grow as a human being. The other is Dame Folly.  She also offers a feast of a kind to delight the senses and promises immediate and easy rewards. But her way leads inevitably to corruption and death. The trouble is, they both sound plausible to a young man who is easily led. These chapters tell us what the purpose of Proverbs is: to educate the young by informing their hearts and consciences and minds. This it does partly by encouragement and promise, partly by warning.  How we protect young people in the largely ungoverned environment of the internet, how to steer them towards Lady Wisdom rather than Dame Folly, is already a very major concern to policy-makers and parents alike. At the same time as the web builds up and plants, it also destroys and overthrows.

I need to declare at this point that I am an enthusiastic user of social media, especially tweeting and blogging. The little tweeting bird Ecclesiastes warns us about is my symbol of the gifts and dangers of social media. I have been reading about a book I have not yet seen called The Psychodynamics of Social Media by Aaron Balick. He argues that a tweet is more like a thought than a statement, and yet, as we have seen when things de-rail in spectacularly public ways, it is also a statement that has legal existence and carries consequences, specifically libel; and if not that, then outcomes that can damage reputations, including your own, for good. We are not used to a world where thinking aloud can put us at risk; but as psychologists recognise, it is the way in which the instant feedback of social media acts as a kind of addictive intoxicant that raises the stakes alarmingly. It does this because it privileges the instant over the longer-term: this minute over the next half-hour let alone tomorrow or next week. Add to that the disinhibiting aspects of being, as we imagine, alone with our computer.  As Ecclesiastes says, a little bird is waiting to carry messages far and wide.

Earlier this year, I encountered this worrying aspect of social media for myself. Having married into a Sunderland-supporting family 40 years ago, I was concerned, with many others, about the appointment of their new manager Paolo di Canio. As you know, he had proclaimed himself as ‘not a racist but a fascist’, had given a notorious fascist salute at a match in Italy, and proudly wore a tattoo honouring Mussolini. I wrote an open letter on my blog asking him to clarify his position. I don’t say that the blog ‘went viral’ but it was picked up by the national and local media and evidently put him under some pressure. His helpful clarification came the next day. So in a sense, the story is over. All the nationals welcomed it, some of them making uncalled-for flattering comments such as ‘the Dean hitched up his cassock, took aim, and scored spectacular goal’. I had a lot of grateful emails and tweets from supporters. 

But the unpleasant surprise was how much digital vitriol was flung in my face, this too mainly from fans. How dare the church interfere in something it knows nothing about. How dare I take on the role of the North East’s thought-police. How dare I assume that the club’s fans weren’t able to think for themselves. And so on. If you read the blog, I dare say some of this stuff is still there in the comments. I didn’t respond to the abuse, but I did try to engage in dialogue with the more measured critics. I said that all I was doing was to point to what di Canio had said and done on the record and, given the vast influence football has on the young, this was a matter of public interest. I mentioned my own German-Jewish ancestry, with my particular awareness of the fascism poses to the world. Some of this has become an intelligent debate about football, politics and faith and of course I welcome this. If you follower The Secret Footballer in the Guardian, or have read the book, you will find that there is at least one thoughtful Premier League player somewhere who asks himself these kinds of questions, and this evidence of reflective football is most welcome.

I am telling you this because the boundary between the supposedly safe internet domains we tend to inhabit and the places of hatred, abuse, trolling and bullying is gossamer thin. Touch it, and it is as if the entire web trembles. I am not saying that sometimes, social responsibility may need to take us close to a dangerous edge: there are always risks in trying to do something good. ‘Evil happens when good men and women do nothing’ said Edmund Burke famously. But I have learned that even a relatively blunt tool like a personal blog can get caught in an undertow that can quickly drag you away from the safety of the shore into very turbulent waters indeed.

We need, says Balick, to become acutely self-aware in our use of social media, to retain our sense of individual responsibility and educate our consciences rather than lose our own identities to the digital black hole. The internet is very much a place where we are in danger of gaining the whole world and losing our own souls, our deepest selves. So where is digital wisdom to be found? Last year I wrote another blog called The Responsible Tweeter. This was an attempt to frame some basic principles of good tweeting, not only how to get the best out of 140 characters, but to draw proper boundaries around the use of a tool which, because it is so powerful, also poses significant risks. It seems to me that we simply have to know not only what is legal and what isn’t, and what is ethical and what isn’t, but what is wholesome, life-affirming and wise. I love Twitter for its elegant miniaturism, how so much can be said in so little.  This is wholly in the spirit of wisdom literature: most of Proverbs could be encapsulated in tweets, as could the Beatitudes and many other sayings of Jesus. Like photography, the discipline puts a frame round the content and powerfully focuses its point. But this can be for good or ill – and for interesting or boring. So I thought I would try my hand at twelve principles or commandments of Tweeting.  Others have offered good online guides to Twitter that contain many or all of these.  However I’ve encapsulated each principle in 140 characters or less so they can be lifted out of the blog and tweeted self-referentially in the very medium for which they are, not so much a set of imperatives as a series of hints and nudges. The emphasis is on the positive: mostly 'dos', a few 'don'ts'.  And while they were written for a particular form of social networking, most of the principles can I think be transferred to any other.

Here then are twelve precepts.

1        Be judicious. Powerful tools need careful handling. You are on a public stage.  Apply the same criteria as you would to any public medium.
2        Be chaste. Promiscuous tweeting suggests addiction. Only press ‘send’ when you have something to say. If not stay silent.
3        Be courteous. Don’t disparage or insult others (you risk libel as in any print medium). In dissent, be questioning rather than assertive.
4        Be disciplined. 140 characters impose a verbal boundary. Stick to it and don't sprawl lazily across multiple tweets on the same topic.
5        Be conversational. The art of tweeting is to engage with others, not hurl speeches into the void. Invite responses and give them.
6        Be interesting. Life is not all information, observation, profundity or humour, but don’t bore followers with trivia. Try to be original. 
7        Be tentative. The question-mark is a great way of turning bald statement into an invitation to explore. Better to travel than stand still.
8        Be communitarian. Social media are at their best in creating online communities and relationships. It is good not to be alone. Join in.
9        Be discreet. Don't break confidences, substitute for meeting, hold private conversations publicly or disclose improperly. Keep boundaries.
10      Be self-aware. Twitter can raise awareness, affirm spiritual and humane values and inspire others. Serve wisdom, truth, goodness, justice and wholeness.
11      Be generous. Share your own good things: stories, photos, blogs etc., and others' too.  Retweet/favourite the best. But don't self-promote.
12      Be relaxed. Don't obsess about follower numbers (sins of pride or envy). Small communities are often the best. Learn, grow, chuckle, enjoy. 

 

Conclusion
 

I raised the question: are ant-wisdom and bird-wisdom different? Probably not. Both have to do with the practice of wisdom in life as it is lived in public, exposed, collective ways. The larger, ‘macro’ worlds we inhabit, both organisational and digital, need to be redeemed, and become wise and humane, something that can come about when they are populated by wise individuals. At the same time, we as persons inhabiting our ‘micro’ worlds can individually grow and flourish and become better human beings and better disciples as benign macro worlds help shape personal character and identity.

I have not given as much time to working out the exegesis of the relevant wisdom texts as I would have liked. However, I am sure it can be done, and indeed, if there is enough encouragement, I would love to develop some of these ideas in a future book. Today, I do not claim more than perhaps to have sown a few seeds that may bear fruit in our reflection and discussion. I am looking forward to hearing what you have to say in response, and hope that under God, we shall all become wiser for having been together here this week and tackled these elusive but vital aspects of being healthy, virtuous and wise within a healthy, virtuous and wise church.

At the Conference of the British and Irish Association for Practical Theology (BIAPT),
York University, July 2013