Author Archives: nlunn

When I put my head above the parapet earlier last year on the issue of Equal Marriage I did so because of a hunch. It wasn’t a fully formed argument nor was it clear but it was there. I am unsure where it exactly came from but it seemed to be a strange positioning against same sex marriage or, to be more precise, against those who were promoting it in the media. This was made strange by my gut reaction to same-sex unions which is fully positive. I said then that I opposed the Equal Marriage legalisation due, not because of any discomfort with homosexual relationships but because of the tenor of the public discussion. I was finding myself saying those distasteful words: ‘I’m not homophobic but..’ I didn’t know what I felt exactly but I knew I needed to say something about my discomfort.

My views were not only dismissed but were found and attacked. I was attacked, personally for expressing such views. I was insulted and bullied. Vitriolic words were sent to me. Within this I tried to remain calm and collected… and then I failed. I lashed out and in my aggression I found myself plunged into more despair and upset because I felt I’d let my God down, for whom I’d give up the praise of any human to be with.

When I fell and I tried to deal with my shame and began the necessary confessions I was taunted and abused further. All this not by fascists, not by Nazis but by ‘liberals’!

It was so strange. With one voice they spoke of their desire (and a correct desire) to be valued, accepted and understood by their society. Underneath their voice, however, was a divisive tone which essentially wanted me to stop talking. My feelings were of no value to them because of who they thought I was. Ironic. Those who wanted equality for all, tolerance and acceptance were making me feel so outside of society; out-dated, abnormal and alone.

They were protected by a vast majority of people all screaming that they are a minority. They fail to acknowledge publicly that, in fact, they are a powerful minority. This is not a conversation about majority and minority because I have come to some clarification that such terms mean nothing anymore. There’s a powerful minority in power and don’t speak for us the majority, ‘the people’. But, also we are a minority trying to overthrow the majority oppressive view. It’s all perception, misdirection, game playing and non of it real truth! The only thing that such conversations about placing ourselves in different configurations of majority/minority do is divide. But we want to be one, don’t we?

An even more upsetting thing about these times was that because I didn’t want to stand fully, unquestioningly with a political liberal agenda, I was cast out and looked upon as a fundamentalist or ‘conservative’. I use the term ‘conservative’ in a derogative term because that is where our media seems to have led us to, which is interesting. With this perception people assumed so many things of me and pre-judged me. ‘Homophobic’, ‘bigot’, ‘fascist’, ‘pathetic’.

Even writing these things is making me dismiss it all as ludicrous. How dare I speak in such terms! You can’t be bullied because you’re ‘the standard’, you’re ‘normal’, you’re the thing that everyone is trying to be ‘equal’ to: white, male, heterosexual, middle-class.

At the same time I feel like I deserve all that they are saying to me. Maybe you are closed-minded, prejudiced, irrational, stupid. Maybe they have a point; maybe I need to change and forget… the hunch.

It still sits there deep in my belly that something in this whole process doesn’t quite add up. Something doesn’t feel right. I want wisdom; pure unadulterated wisdom. Wisdom that is of God (which many people won’t appreciate or understand.) Wisdom comes from waiting, from silencing myself and the world around me to sit in the abyss of silence and re-engage, truthfully with the world through the Holy Spirit (which many people won’t appreciate or understand.) Wisdom that is from that outside place and realm; an imagination that can think of a real alternative to problems in stark contrast to what we re-conceive of half-realised patch-ups in our limited concept of reality.

I thought this was about language; in a way it is. We have no shared custom of language anymore. Is it any wonder that concepts such as ‘justice’, ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’ can be owned by both sides of an opposing debate. Words such as ‘marriage’ and ‘love’ are strongly believed to be understood by a speaker but it is not the same concept, one to another. In this environment it becomes impossible to speak because the shared understanding of what words mean is gone. The whole debate is vacuuous because no one shares life and I find myself returning, increasingly, to that Jewish spiritual insight, ‘it’s all meaningless.’

The hunch comes from Stanley Hauerwas. I return to his writing again and again (mainly Community of Character!) Along with him; John Millbank, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the quiet, compelling life and spirituality of Thomas Merton. It’s all a big mess in my head that drives my passionate heart to beat to this inescapable rhythm that seems to put me into conflict with this liberal force surrounding me. I don’t have to fight. I don’t have to say anything. I could stay quiet and ‘live and let live’… but as my wife told me “you would if you could but you can’t, can you?’

She’s right. The hunch has become a compulsion…

I am no closer to resolution. I still feel uncomfortable about the content of the debate on Same Sex Marriage despite knowing and feeling the desires of couples desperate to proclaim their love from the rooftops. Then there’s my wife’s voice again. She puts it simply, ‘I don’t know what my opinion is. We’ve cherry picked our way out of the Bible that it doesn’t matter. I’m called to love God and love my neighbour and I’ll do that.’

YES! Let me unpick that…

the church’s first social task in any society is to be herself… to be the kind of community that recognizes the necessity that all societies, church and political alike, require authority. But for Christians our authority is neither in society itself nor in the individual; it is in God. (Stanley Hauerwas)

The issue with the liberalism that is so prevalent in the media is it promotes self built stories. Whatever you ‘feel’ is right is right. “This is my experience”. I have read a book recently, which I was asked to review, on homosexuality and the church. It was a good book with some helpful contributions and reminders but it’s main argument was essentially: ‘This is how I experienced it and you can’t argue with that.’ No discussion in case I dare question the authors self-perception; self-identity!

In social debate personal stories are emotional bombs; set them off and no one has a chance. The story is a powerful weapon in our society because we have no standard story which can compare all stories to. ‘Tradition’ is lost out of fear of being dogmatic and unchanging. The problem is the baby of shared history has plummeted with the bath water.

Liberalism is successful exactly because it supplies us with a myth that seems to make sense of our social origins… A people do not need a shared history; all they need is a system of rules that will constitute procedures for resolving disputes as they pursue their various interests. (Hauerwas)

With no need to ascribe to a shared tradition/story there’s no requirement to agree what is right or wrong. Personal experience and opinions are sacred because without them where are we? The Same Sex Marriage debate shows our society for what it is; desperately lost, with no map, no common language, people talking at cross purposes, not listening, not reflecting on what is at the heart of this problem, what is linking this with all our problems.

Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one. (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

 

The most coercive aspect of the liberal account of the world is that we are free to make up our own story. The story that liberalism teaches us is that we have no story. (Hauerwas)

Individuals all trying to cohabitate with other individuals. We don’t know who we are. We have no shared history, no common language, no desire to be radically dependent on another. This is because there is so much division. Walls comfort us, barriers protect us. If we lose them we are open and vulnerable to attack and so let us agree to live in our separate lives, managing interactions through protecting laws so we can continue to feel ‘love’. This love, however, is cheap. It fails as soon as you’ve experienced it. It’s cosy for a moment and then is sand. It is all meaningless…

… But a people who have learned that strenuous lesson of God’s lordship through Jesus’ cross should recognise that ‘the people’ are no less tyrannical than kings or dictators. (Hauerwas)

We have no one else to blame for the sad, empty, disappointing existence we experience than ourselves. We have created a system of society by which we can constantly remain in conflict whilst feeling like we’re making progress towards peace. We praise the legislation on slavery, gender equality, racial equality, sexual equality… None of these have been achieved. “We’ve made steps towards them, though.” The final step, in all of these issues, remains the hearts of the other people you share the planet with. Value in the eyes of another comes not from legislation but from trusting, long term, committed relationship. Our society refuses this in its promotion of individualism, subjectivity and dismissal for any need for shared history. The closest thing, and probably the only thing, close to this authority is the Bill of Human Rights which has no universal basis except itself. It requires another authority. This is a bizarre state of affairs that this document and the beliefs held within it are un questionable, except that it is fallible because it doesn’t mention sexual orientation in it and so we add and amend, reinterpret to fit in with what it should say because it was human’s who made it, right?

The root of this problem is that we feel our authority is to be found in humanity. The problem is that humanity is not trustworthy. We are fickle, broken. We could equally do good as do bad. The foundation on which we build our society is transient and movable. The Bill also uses language which, as we are seeing, is interpreted by a society made up of human’s with mixed motives. The same, of course, could be said of the Bible but the strength and protection of the Christian tradition is an understanding that you read it with God, through God the Holy Spirit, testing it with tradition and Divine revelation.

And the final arrow the sticks into my body as I teeter on the parapet is the most painful. I look and see that the same confusion is found within the Church as well as without. They proclaim the values made of straw and the principle standing on shifting sand. The Body of Christ apes society and culture in a desperate attempt to be ‘relevant’, to feel ‘acceptable’, ‘valued ‘ and ‘loved’. It dresses up in a mini skirt and high heels and walks out into the night proclaim “I can do what I like with my body because of the freedom bestowed upon by my own innate dignity.”

I find in myself being asked the question “What would you do?” or ‘What’s the answer to?” I want to say “I’d start from somewhere else” or “I’d ask a different question.” I don’t know where that place is or what the question might sound like but I know that anything we do won’t make us ‘happy’ or at ‘peace’.

But as I say that I am reminded that I am a Christian who believes strongly that Christ entered into our world, not where he would have (in fact, did) start from!…

You see even in saying that I find myself recoiling because that concept is hijacked by a liberal understanding of the incarnation. The incarnation has been grasped by a liberal theology which promotes a type of humanism. It is very popular because it can be used by society at large with no feelings of threat or challenge because it essential tells secular society that God thinks that everything they are doing are morally right. Jesus is being brought in from the wings in the Same Sex Marriage debate as the ultimate secular humanist and he wasn’t. He upset human society.

Jesus was the bearer of a new possibility of human and social relationships… the incarnation is not the affirmation of God’s approval of the human… but God’s breaking through the borders of man’s definition of what is human. (Hauerwas)

Where does this leave me?

To be honest; I’m done. We are so far from any meaningful equality and no concept or authority which can be the moral goal, the virtue paradigm. We can build one up but it will fall like all the other moral idols we have had in the past. Our heroes are falling, one by one and with each toppling crisis we are buried struggling always to stay afloat except…

The formless void. The dazzling light which seems to penetrate the rubble of our lives. The only constant. It is there, silent because words cannot encompass nor conceive it. When in its presence it compels beauty from within you and you weep because it is so painful to sit knowing how far short you are from its radiance. Through it you see necessary difference held in perfect harmony as three persons dance in one unity. Everything is brought into sharp focus and you laugh at how distorted your view of reality was and Love… Love sings so pure you can hardly bear to hear it. It is unrecognisable and you laugh because whilst you were sure what it was, now you realise you were sat in the dark talking of things far beyond our capabilities and you see yourself and everyone so messed up and far from the target and particularly yourself…

Oh Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.

On Tuesday night the Church of England voted against the legislation that would allow women to be ordained as bishops. That sentence needs clarifying on a couple of points before I continue…

‘the Church of England voted’: the General Synod is the legislative body of the Church of England. The General Synod meets two or three times a year for four or five days depending on issues arising. It is organised into three distinct ‘houses’; bishops, clergy and laity. General Synod is made up of representatives of all 44 diocesan synods organised in a similar way but over a smaller geographical area; the members of which are nominated from deanery synods, which are smaller still.

For a significant motion (like the legislation for women bishops)to be passed it needs to be voted in all three houses by a clear majority, 66% of the vote. This is where there has been some discussion in the aftermath of Tuesday’s vote. When I say ‘the Church of England’ I mean the decision making body of the Church of England and not the whole Anglican populous in this country.

‘the legislation that would allow women to be ordained as bishops’: the Church of England has already voted in favour of the ordination of women as bishops in theory by the majority spoken above. It is now a matter of making that expression of intent a reality in practice. The legislation being discussed on Tuesday was an attempt at this practical aspect. The Church of England wants women bishops; we haven’t discovered how to do that with integrity for the whole church body.

As the dust settled around this vote there have been some reactions expressed in public that are understandable but not necessarily wise. There have been some expressing a desire to scrap or change how votes are taken in General Synod to allow everyone to have a say. Some have suggested that the bishops should be able to override Synodical decisions. Some have suggested that the Church of England is weak and fails to lead its people. Most of these opinions express, for me, a lack of understanding of what is happening. We, as the church, are not organised so that our leaders have power. We are organised so that our leaders serve. As a leader in the Church of England I serve; I serve broken, fallible, emotional and unpredictable people who demand things that may not be good for them, who express things which haven’t necessarily been processed and thought through but I serve them nonetheless. Would I act or say what they do and say? No but I am called to serve them but… I’m also called to help them to grow and transform themselves from what they are now into the  likeness of Christ. It is a difficult and long process of holding and waiting. This process is made harder by the fact that I too am needing the same thing. I am broken, fallible, emotional and unpredictable. 

We, as the church, have a social narrative which underpins our discussions; the principle of ‘I am a fluid entity in search of solidity in another.’ What this means is one principle behind our society in the church is the understanding of self as changeable. If we are unnable to change then we refuse the power of the God we believe in who transform us daily by His Spirit.

So the reactions have been boldly claimed and emphatically announced but are they right?

One question arising from Tuesdays shock vote is over how the laity, sitting in the house of laity, are nominated and from what demographic. Synod is understood to be a representative body speaking on behalf of the whole communion in this country. How can the vote against the motion vastly contradict a previous vote in favour by 42 diocesan synods out of a possible 44? It must come down to which laity is sitting on General Synod.

Although the question needs to be asked we do not need to change the synodical structures. The system works and Tuesday’s vote shows that it works. The solution to the ‘problem’ is to encourage more members of the church to respond to the call of God to change the world from a seat of responsibility. Mark Russell once told a seminar at Soul Survivor Conference that there are two ways to change the world; from bottom up and from top down. He suggested we need to do both in order for change to stick. This is profoundly true and is one reason why I’m so keen to sit on synods (deanery and diocesan only…for the moment!) What Tuesday night shows us is that those sitting on the laity have put themselves forward to be responsible and they have acted. They went through the system and got to General Synod by nominations and votes. We, as the Church of England, put those people there by our votes. We cannot then ask who is representing us in the various houses. We got what we voted for. If we wanted a different outcome we need to look at ourselves and ask; is it me who needs to speak?

I was deeply encouraged by the amount of my lay friends taking an interest in the synodical governance of the church after Tuesday. It no longer was a dry, impotent body but one that has an impact on our mission, our life together and our worship. Synod is important and powerful. If you are upset and angry about the vote on Tuesday and you are not on a synodical body (deanery, diocesan or General) then maybe you should test a call to stand up and represent.

It is deeply upsetting that it was such a painful motion that finally woke us up to our responsibility and missed opportunity to speak. It was as if shouting from the bottom up just wasn’t loud enough; we  need to also join the voices at the top to ensure the centre (and it really was the centre in this vote) hears what is being discerned. After all this is said, synod works. It ensures that the whole body is united in a decision. If one part hurts the whole body hurts, or in this case if one part of the body is uncomfortable, unsure and angry the whole body is. We have been too lax in our responsibility to discuss and connect together. We mock and belittle the point of meetings and synods but then are upset when they don’t speak for us. Being elected onto synods is not like government elections its about being willing.

My time on deanery and diocesan synod has been frustrating but only when I sit and listen to the voice in my head which says you have nothing to say on this issue. I have sat and listened to some bizarre opinions during synod but always they are listened, counter balanced and discussed.

The other reaction that came from Tuesday night was one that upsets me more than any other: This feeling that we need to ‘get with the program’. That a government body who say with their lips they listen and respond to the people but in their action fail to respond to the vote against welfare cuts, NHS, war in Iraq and many others is hypocrisy of the highest order. The political process in the house of  parliament is so separate from the  people that it relies on opinion polls and gossip to make a decision. The Police Commissioners vote is just one proof of this. Equal Marriage is being passed despite reservations by a large part of our society…

And here I am, arriving at my main point. Synod works because it forces us, as a Christian family to be aware of the minority and to ensure that the decision we arrive at is collaborative. The vote on Tuesday shows us not that we need to force, bully or violently oppress a minority voice but, frustratingly, continue the discussion. Yes, this faction may not want to discuss the issue and may enjoy the hostage situation in which they hold the power but, nonetheless, we must. Justin Welby said in his first press conference after the announcement of his move to Canterbury that we are to disagree in love. This is what that looks like!

We in the church don’t do what government do which is twist and distort opinion and PR to suit our own will but rather face up to the conflict, to enter into the pain of living together. Nor do we respond in the knee jerk way that popular culture does. We are not like the Jeremy Vine Show which any voice, if shouted loud enough and insistently enough gets what they want. Synod ensures a deep collective discernment and if it is not completely collective we wait, we heal, we forgive and we unite in love. We allow the shouters and impassioned voices are heard and wait for them to shout themselves into silence and then we wait for the dust to settle and discern what is the wind and what is our own frantic movement causing the dust to fly.

What this means in terms of moving forward is not about forcing this motion through to the detriment of this ‘insignificant minority’ but rather about continuing the process of disagreeing in love. We have come along way since the motion was first introduced; we’re heading in the right direction. The response should be to continue to love one another, painful, upsetting, confusing and frustrating as that always is but that’s what we do as the body of Christ.

As I process all of this along with my brothers and sisters, there’s so much to say but that’s not what’s needed. Silence, contemplation and prayer, that’s what’s needed. Our society has nothing that unites them and so the fear in these situations kicks in causing frantic change and rash decisions but we, in the church have one thing that unites and it comes into its own in situations just like this. Synod works because it forces us to admit that no matter how hard we shout it is in silence and calm surrender that we can, as a whole body move forward together into the presence of God who will transform us increasingly into the likeness of Christ… frustrating, isn’t it?