Author: Danny Webster

Kyrie, eleison – Lord, have mercy

Danny Webster 2 Comments

It is times like these that I wish writing could soothe all the sores that the world bears. Maybe if I could whip up a big enough batch of chocolate brownies then perhaps everything would be all right.

But I can’t, and as much as I wish it could I don’t think it would be enough.

The past couple of days have been too much, every where I turn I see conflict. I see violence and I see mendacity. The latest escalation of violence between Israel and Palestine has spurned another, more immediate incantation of dispute. One that is closer to me, one that draws me in, and one that makes me angry.

And that’s just twitter.

I’ve watched as a few incredibly passionate advocates voice adamant opinions and trade blows by virtue of asserted evidence, disputed claims and the occasional theological aside. That last one as a casual attempt to shut down conversation and prove their point beyond doubt.

And I have nothing to say. A couple of times today I hovered over the unfollow button ready to rid my timeline of their debate. I got even closer to pleading with them to give it a rest, but realised I’d end up drawn into a stream of replies I had neither the time nor inclination to engage in. It’s not that I don’t care, just that I don’t understand, and in that space of incomprehension the vitriol emitted from both sides of the debate pushes me towards a default position of ignorance informed only for a desire for reconciliation.

It places me in the naïve position of calling for an acknowledgement of the wrongs of both sides, it pushes me to call for both sides to cease the fighting. It almost takes me into the realm of Ellie Bartlett’s teacher who in the West Wing responded to her analysis of the problems of the Middle East with the retort “Wrong, it’s because it’s incredibly hot. And there’s no water.”

I am sure that I should be more informed, I am certain I am in no place to enter into the arguments of the rights and wrongs of decades of conflict based on millennia of history. But that doesn’t mean my basic plea lacks validity. There should be less killing.

I can go on quoting the West Wing, when challenged by Governor Richie in the debate President Bartlett says: “every once in a while, every once in a while, there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts.” The problem comes when even on those days littered with body bags we can’t tell the right from the wrong.

What struck me as I observed the feuding played out in spurts of 140 characters, with vehement defence that each side’s calls for peace had more morality than the other, was: we can’t even keep peace in our discussions. What hope is there that there could be peace between the sides (even how they are described is disputed) in that hot, dry, place with centuries of animosity?

But of course there is a hope. There is a hope that in our most wicked and mendacious of ways, whether firing a rocket or a tweet filled with anger; we can cry Kyrie, eleison: Lord, have mercy.

And he will. For he must. Because he loves the world. And we long for that day.

That’s all I have right now. I have no judgement to offer. No words that will soothe, no mediation, no alternative perspective, no baked goods to dull the pain. Just a hope. The only hope.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first

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Today the next Archbishop of Canterbury was announced. In the New Year Justin Welby will leave his current post as Bishop of Durham and move south to take over from Rowan Williams as head of the Church of England and worldwide Anglican Communion. This is a big deal, it will matter a lot in the coming years who takes this role. And it seems to me they’ve chosen a good man, he cited the West Wing in the press conference after the appointment was officially made public, so that bodes well.

But that’s not what I’m writing about, I’ve already done so elsewhere, I did that yesterday afternoon. More I wanted to think about the mass of press releases and quotes that were bombarded at journalists and the twittering public at the strike of eleven this morning. Press officers furiously overriding their scheduled auto send or publish as Downing Street tweeted the official version of events ten minutes early. I should know, I was one of them.

Because the announcement had been rumoured for several days, and more or less confirmed by Wednesday evening, it gave everyone plenty of time to check his biography, scour his prior public pronouncements, draft quotes and get it all lined up for the official announcement. So by the time he took to the lectern in the Guard Room at Lambeth Palace to speak to the assembled journalists and many more as the pictures were broadcast live, the quotes were winging their way to the news desks and editors. Ruth Dickinson from Christianity Magazine tweeted a photo of her inbox.

The contrast struck me as the questions came in and were answered by Justin Welby with humility and grace. That here was a man who seemed to barely seek the post he was now set to take, that such inclination against preferment was almost a pre-requisite for the role. But there were hundreds tweeting their comments and statements at breakneck pace to grab the attention of any journalist struggling to fill their copy. Which is unlikely.

I’ve no doubt the quotes and the calls for prayer are sincere. I am certain that all those sending out their congratulations and best wishes really do think exactly what they are saying, it’s not the content that I’m a bit perturbed by. It’s the rush for preferment in the pages of the press. The mentality that says, here on one of the very few days when the church gets to dominate the main stream press on an issue of its choosing and in a way it decides, we end up trying to jostle to the left or the right of the man to gain some reflected glory if only one of those writing the story for the nationals might choose to use our quote.

In my own complicity I realise this stinks.

We should pray for Justin Welby, I think he sounds a fantastic man for the job, I hope that those quoted by the press will call others to do likewise. I hope that we will get behind a man taking on a position few would choose to carry, and if they did are likely unsuited for its burdens. I hope that he gets our support and our encouragement and not just as a way to segue into calling him to support our causes and views however noble they maybe.

The Centaur and the Heir – Chapter Two

Danny Webster 2 Comments

If you haven’t had a read of the first chapter of my nanowrimo endeavour, The Centaur and the Heir I suggest you read that first The Centaur and the Heir Chapter 1

But otherwise, for the three of you who have read it and are waiting for the next instalment with baited breath here it is: The Centaur and the Heir chapter 2

The Centaur and the Heir – Chapter One

Danny Webster Leave a comment

Last year I posted daily instalments of my nanowrimo endeavour. This year I’m going to do it a bit differently, every few days I’ll give you a new PDF which you can download and read – if anyone feels like being super clever and even more helpful and telling me how to turn this into an ebook I might even put in in the kindle store (for free).

Below is instalment 1 of The Centaur and the Heir, with just a taster to wet your appetite.

Susan pulled herself up out of her seat. It felt to her as though she had been there for day upon day, it could even have been a full week for the way that time seemed to have stalled as she drifted into restless slumber of silence. In fact it was only a little more than half an hour since the last visitor had left and the storm of noise and conversation had given way to a peace more threatening than any hail of inquisitive kindness she could imagine.

If this feels like a wordy and long-winded way of setting out her condition and state of mind it is but a glimpse of her own tumultuous considerations. When Susan realised the time had passed so slowly she thought herself stupid for ever doubting it’s glacial pace. Archie was due to visit later that afternoon and she knew he would not fail her. He had done as she asked even in the most painful of abstentions.

Susan found herself frustrated at the failure of time to move to her whim. But you know how it is, why when you are waiting for something to happen it seems to never come, but when you are having such joy the time never seems enough. She wished the hours had passed, maybe even days gone by in flash when pain could have been sidelined and the gnawing absence subsided. It was in the midst of this melancholy that Susan’s eyes alighted on the painting she spent most of the last few years refusing to make eye contact with. … Read on

The Centaur and the Heir Chapter 1

Writing in the shadow of CS Lewis

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Last year I decided to write a novel in a month. Over the course of November I wrote on most days and ended up with 32 chapters totalling over 56 000 words. This was not just for the sake of it. Although once I’ve said a little more you might think there was no greater purpose. Nanowrimo, or National Novel Writing Month, is a challenge to write a 50 000 word novel from scratch during November, you can plan beforehand but not write, and because the rules are actually more or less non-existent plenty of people do it in different way – including working on existing projects.

Last year I had no plot until the night before I started. I lay in the bath and came up with a cast of characters and a couple of defining events and then started writing. It was a bit crazy and I lost a fair amount of sleep and by virtue of posting a chapter each day to this blog lost quite a few readers as well. The story was basically a Christian romance novel. It was pretty dire. I had about half a dozen regular readers, and the plot development was aided by a couple of crowd sourced brain storming sessions where new characters jumped onto the page and interacted with each other.

This year I’m doing it again.

I said I wouldn’t. A bit like Steve Redgrave when he got out of the boat, except it’s not at all like that. I felt I had achieved something, shown what I could do with a large helping of self disciple and swift typing skills. I also felt it was unnecessary to do that again to produce something that I would never get published, or even try to get published.

But then I came across a single line in a book and I knew I would do it again. I was reading through Rowan William’s book about Narnia, The Lion’s World and found a letter from CS Lewis to a reader regarding Susan Pevensie: “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive in this world at the end, having by then turned into a rather silly, conceited young woman.” It goes on a bit but I don’t want to give anything away.

I had the starting point for my story. And I had all of October to research and prepare.

Unfortunately moving house and doing a lot of work writing meant my research amounted to reading books 1-6 of the Narnia series, and hoping to get through the Last Battle in the next couple of days. I also have only a vague plan of what will happen in the story, but as well as a starting point I also have a rather intimidating back drop against which to write and ensure at least some measure of continuity.

Firstly though, it is worth stating very clearly that this is fan-fiction, it is not to be published other then on this blog and I am doing so for no financial gain. I don’t know who owns the copyright for the books and characters, but no infringement is intended. I am also doing this from the place of huge respect and appreciation for the series and CS Lewis’ other writings.

Secondly, this is rather scary, CS Lewis is a brilliant writer with hidden gems within and between each sentence, reading through them again has drawn out new aspects and reinforced other themes I’ve seen before. In writing a sequel to the series I have the challenge of deciding how closely to try and follow his style and themes. I am setting the book a few years after The Silver Chair and probably more or less contemporaneously to The Last Battle. This poses two additional challenges, firstly to ensure the language and especially the dialogue is appropriate to the period. The second challenge is that the Narnia books are written about children and for children. Down to the little asides CS Lewis throws in about grown-ups not understanding things and similar, the writing is so brilliant because it is simple and profound and presented from a childlike mentality – especially the earlier books.

What I intend to do is shift that a few years forward. Susan will be twenty-one at the start of the book and I intend to write from that period in life, with a mind towards readers also at a similar stage. While I will try and situate the novel in the right era, i.e. starting in 1949, much of it will take place in Narnia so that becomes less relevant.

A final challenge is that in The Last Battle the old Narnia is passing away. That’s why I say that it’s more or less contemporary, because I’m making the most of the discrepancy between times in different worlds to present a story happening in Narnia before it draws to a close, yet after Peter, Edmund and Lucy are on their way to Aslan’s country.

I hope you enjoy reading, I don’t think I’ll post daily, but probably twice a week or so in longer chunks but as PDFs so as not to overload the blog posts. Currently undecided on the title, either The Centaur and the Heir or Hunting the Heir, or something else that strikes me soon.

There’s no place like home

Danny Webster 1 Comment

Dorothy tapped her red shoes, said it over and over again, and found her way back to Kansas.

At about 2.30pm on Friday I walked into a small office, I gave my name and new address and walked out with a bundle of keys. I could have been anyone. I didn’t tap my red shoes, they were brown and lacking in glitter. I also didn’t chant ‘There’s no place like home’.

Earlier in the day I had whisked the sheets off my single bed and wondered whether this would ever happen again with any regularity. I’ve been told that once you get a double bed there is no going back. I had noticed my bank accounts were supplemented by a new account that morning, abundant not in the resources it contained but in the debt it recalled.

It suddenly became very real. I felt as though there ought to be some great solemnity to my actions as I turned the key, entered the block and juggled my way through various keys to reach the space that is now my own in a more tangible sense than ever before. I spent that first night in a sleeping bag having carried a few essentials on the bus, my excuse was the delivery men expected any time from 7am the next day. The truth: there was no way I was not staying here – even the prospect of going away for a few days next week seems slightly weird.

For the past few months this process has absorbed me, and if you follow me on twitter then you’ll have picked up on that too. I hear from my Mum (not on twitter) of conversations she has with those well acquainted with my movements documented in 140 character exerts. When I start instagramming photos of my packing progress I know things have gone too far. For weeks and months I have had room for precious little but mortgage applications, survey reports, property information forms, planning permission and elusive asbestos reports. When I realised I was reading documents my solicitor was not I perhaps should have taken the hint.

I think I have got lost in the process to dull the effect of what the move means.

I may have been in my old house longer than people stay in bought properties but it was always with the potentiality of leaving at short notice. I could wake up one day and in a month be in Australia having left my job, my house and with no one else holding me to the place I currently call home. But home just became a little less flexible.

It’s one of the reasons why I hesitated before jumping in, I like flexibility, I like being able to change plans without consultation or consequence. In short I like independence.

But in every act of chosen constraint is a new freedom. There are things that I am now less able to do, but others that become far more achievable. I have a home where I can welcome guests more readily; I can indulge my book loving, cookware hoarding, habits. To borrow the phrase of Andy Crouch, the horizons of the possible have now shifted.

It means I commit to being in a place I wondered if I would ever call home. But in that commitment, and as a direct result of that choice, I am more able to make home a reality. I first wrote ‘feel like home’, but then I stopped, paused, deleted, and realised the internalisations of the very habit I am wrestling with: to think of home as something other, something more achieved, settled, and perfect. So it is not about feeling like home, it is about making home happen. It is about choosing that this is the place I am.

Boundaries between adolescence and adulthood are far more permeable than before, moving out later, getting married a little older, waiting to have kids, it all pushes the threshold into realms less perceptible or shared. For many marriage is the great threshold when you relinquish a life you had and commit to something new and something shared. But I am not married, it is conceivable I never will be, so I can not pretend life waits for me to resolve my insecurities.

My bookshelves are up, books categorised and alphabetised, boxes of assorted tat I couldn’t bring myself to part with still await sorting and refining. Under my desk sits a box of CDs without a home, although I dutifully placed my CD player on the shelf and attached the wires it rarely spins the disks. Because times are different and habits change. The normality of one form of life gives way to another.

And in the transition between rooms that feel foreign to realising they are home, the temptation to say ‘mine’ stilled by the voice that says ‘ours’.

The politics of doctrine

Danny Webster 8 Comments

The US presidential election is in full swing, and after a rather low key convention season spiced up only by Clint Eastwood and an empty chair it now looks like there is a proper race on the cards. Mitt Romney suffered a massive blow when footage of a meeting with major donors was released presenting his apparent views giving up on 47 per cent of the electorate. But any advantage gained by Obama was surrendered in his lacklustre debate performance. Even the swing states which looked like falling decisively for Obama are now up for grabs.

And in the past week or so two significant church figures have waded into the political fray with their more or less unequivocal support for Mitt Romney and the Republican Party.

I’ve said before and I will keep on saying so, politics cannot be separated from our religious beliefs. The US is famed for its separation of church and state, but this is a very different concept than separating politics from beliefs. The former is a structural arrangement where no church or faith has a institutional position above any others, the latter is the inevitable consequence of individuals with views, values and beliefs engaging in any democratic system.

To suggest that religious beliefs should not be involved in political decisions is to suggest that beliefs tagged ‘religious’ are worth less than other views, values or ideologies. It is to say they should have no place in politics and it marginalises religious beliefs at the expense of non religious, secular, values. Values which, I would argue (but will not do so here), however noble and agreeable are less rooted or sustainable.

All of this is a prelude to what is causing considerable discomfort as I observe the unfolding of the US election. I got in a little bit of hot water with some thoughts I threw out on this blog before the London Mayoral election earlier this year, in particular for stating my opposition to Christian political parties. Based on what I say above the question emerges: if the role of policies and ideologies in politics is to posit a view of the good life for individuals, communities and the nation, and that view of the good life for Christians stems principally from their religious beliefs why shouldn’t those beliefs come together to form a coherent political platform?

Furthermore, I want to say with some certainty that there is an important place for common and shared doctrine within the church and that we don’t each on our own decide what matters for our relationship with God. I also do not believe that doctrine should relate to solely ‘spiritual’ matters, for to draw such a distinction is to undermine the significance to the wider world which beliefs have. What I believe the Bible teaches, and is shared as the doctrine of the church, is not just good for individual believers or the community of the faithful but also all of society. So while my beliefs may be personal, they are also shared, and also, by their very nature need to be public.

And yet I do not think churches should back political platforms.

Last week I read an editorial in the Christian Post by Wayne Grudem and followed various links to find a four page document listing the views of ‘Party A’ and ‘Party B’ on 24 topics. This was in response to Pulpit Freedom Day which sought to provoke a judicial ruling on IRS regulations which restricted political statements from the pulpit but had been never tested in court. I was deeply uncomfortable as I read the editorial and despaired when I read the document in detail.

The landscape was further populated with controversy when Billy Graham issued a statement following a meeting with Mitt Romney that said everything possible to back him without giving a formal endorsement. The statement even ended: “I’ll do all I can to help you, and you can quote me on that”.

Wayne Grudem and Billy Graham are obviously entitled to vote for whoever they prefer, and they are also free to say so. They are free to join the campaign and even work specifically on outreach to churches on why one candidate is better than the other.

But they have both crossed a line. And that line is to suggest that there is only one candidate and party who Christians in good conscience should vote for.

I have read enough, although not all, of Wayne Grudem’s Politics According to the Bible to not be surprised by his position. Likewise Billy Graham is known to have been close to President Bush (both). There are three aspects of their statements where they mix partisan identity with religious belief in an unhelpful way.

Firstly, and this specifically applies to Wayne Grudem’s list of issues and party positions, it is a caricature of what the party positions are. The list is structured like a party political broadcast: ‘Party A is wonderful and does great things, Party B wants to kill all the kittens’. While the list doesn’t in itself tell you which side to support it is not an attempt to inform voters of the parties’ positions but to persuade them to vote for one side while parodying the other.

Secondly, both Wayne Grudem’s list and Billy Graham’s statement prioritise certain issues as the important voting pivots for Christians. When Billy Graham hails Mitt Romney’s strong moral values it is explained with reference to his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage. Likewise while Wayne Grudem’s list is wider it reads as though designed to complement the Republican party platform. Their position ignores the fact that some Christians, while caring about those issues may consider the position of other candidates on other issues as an equally or more decisive factor.

Thirdly, they are using their positions as figures of authority within the American evangelical church to support political positions and particular candidates. This comes back to where I began, I think there are important common stances for the church to take and hold to, and the rule of teachers and preachers to inform and disciple is crucial. But when this transcends into discipling congregations into the correct way to vote it misses the mark.

Because politics is difficult, it is messy, and it is complicated. And political parties are populated by human beings who in their frailty and falleness will fail to achieve all that they might even wish to do. And like all of us their motives will be a mixture of the noble and the misguided. Even politicians with explicitly Christian identity will disappoint. When we attach our Christian identity to a political programme we position the role of government above the role of God. And the irony of US evangelical leaders doing this towards a party that disdains big government is not lost on me.

The overt support of a specific political party also confuses motives with methods. While there are differences in the intended ends between the candidates and their parties, on many issues the differences are in how to achieve those ends. Take tackling poverty for example, neither party would desire that people stay in situations where they cannot feed their family, but how to respond is not something we can use the Bible to draw specific policies from. Any attempt to do so, and this is what Wayne Grudem tries to do is, I’m afraid, an incredibly poor use of scripture.

I think that Christians should engage in politics, and I think they should join political parties, I think we should also live in an acute awareness that how our beliefs are worked out on the political stage will vary. And therefore, any attempt to take religious beliefs and turn them into a political platform is fraught with challenges and, I believe, inappropriate to be expounded from the pulpit.

The words and actions of many leading figures in the evangelical church offering support to the Republican Party misses one final fact. Many evangelical Christians vote Democrat regardless of what their leaders say. By using the pulpit for something that it is not there to do there is the risk of exacerbating the cleft between what congregation hear and what they do. Tell people to vote, tell congregations to join parties, even help them get information about the parties. But if you cannot do so in a non-partisan manner, keep it out of the pulpit.

Why I didn’t blog this morning

Danny Webster 2 Comments

I was fuming. I read the words and they just got worse. My temper rose and my brain started to whir.

I was plotting what I would write, the words that would critique the post that had got me riled. I was imagining my acerbic wit weaving its way across the page. How I would make my point in such destructively understated prose. I plotted the layers I would sequence to use words to make one point directly and another more subtly in line with others across the arc of my writing.

I was angry. Someone had said something I didn’t feel should be left unquestioned. But my motives were less pure. My mental scheming stopped dead with a tweet that pulled me from my fanciful flight of blogging heroism.

I was not being civil. I was ready for war. Funny things these internal squabbles, inside the body of Christ when we tear each other limb from limb to make our point. Civil wars are anything but civil. I’ve done it before and it left me cold. My stats may have gone through the roof for a day or so. I may have won plaudits for the way in which I took down someone who said something I disagreed with, and moreover slighted many others not including myself.

I was right. I was sure I was right then, and I was sure I was last night. When Mark Driscoll made comments about British preachers I thought I would come to their defence. And last night I thought I’d come to the defence of another maligned group damned with the faintest of praise from one of my more conservative brethren. I tweeted my horror, just moments before Preston Yancey tweeted his call for civility. It could have been straight to me. I do not know whether it was about the same fracas but the words struck home.

Being right wasn’t what mattered.

I paused. I reflected on the days that followed my post about Mark Driscoll. I thought about the debates that ensued in the comments, on facebook and twitter. I remember hovering several times over the delete button in the back end of the blog. For all that I liked what I had written I did not like the way it was being received or how it reflected on me. I was ready for the whole piece to be consigned to the dustbin of internecine blogging. And I reflected again on the amount of search referrals I’ve had this week after blogging about Vaughan Roberts and his interview about same sex attraction.

I am not responsible for what people search to find what I write, but I am responsible for what they find and read. For quite a while my response to Mark Driscoll was my most read post (now superseded by Jennie Pollock’s guest post). If I had written in anger this morning, if I had offered a redoubtable defence of my case, I may have received acclamations for bravely saying something others were thinking. I may have got a boost to my statistics after a quiet summer. But I would be offering a tone of debate and discussion I could not defend.

I would be writing for the attention it would receive. I would not be building bridges or helping unite a frequently factious church. What I would write would be for my benefit and not anyone else’s.

People who know me will know what I would have said. And those who don’t but read these words, well I’m afraid I’m leaving it there. I’m determined not to become a landing page for those looking to pick fights between sections of the church. I’m not going to slag off this individual, and I shall do my best not do so to any other. I’ll engage in debate and discussion, I’ll write about what I agree with and disagree with. I think difference is healthy and the church should foster a culture where we can speak of our difference in a civil manner and not hurl threats of excommunication if you don’t tow the party line.

But body blows are too far. Personal attacks are not needed. I want people to read what I write, but not at the expense of pulling someone else down. Scoring cheap points is a pastime I can live without. I guess this is a mantra. Or a positive revolution as suggested elsewhere. Let’s be civil. Let’s make civility fashionable.

And let’s make each other pie as frequently as possible.

Friendship with the other

Danny Webster 2 Comments

I’ve always had lots of female friends. There’s something about using the word female over girl that immediately takes the romantic assumption from the form of words and convinces me it is as simple as that. Because at most points in my life my closest friendships have been with girls.

Yet when I suggested yesterday that maybe this wasn’t always the most ideal situation it prompted a deluge of justification for why they are healthy, important and biblically directed. I call four direct messages a deluge. In the early days of the life of this blog I wrote about how friendship can get in the way, and I stand by those thoughts but maybe I am trying to reduce relationships to a simple form that cannot hold them.

I reflect on the nature of the many friendships I’ve had and cherished. Of the girls at school who in hindsight treated me a bit like their non-gay, gay best friend, the non threatening bridge into the male gender who they’d pepper with questions and attempts to reassure themselves of their attractiveness and possibilities for romance.

I think about the friend who as we walked told me she now liked the man who’s advances she had previously rebuffed.

Of the lady who made me nearly cry with her insight to my character. And I only liked her more.

Perhaps I ponder why it was a certain girl was sure I was interested in her because of how I chose to spend my time.

The friends I’ll meet for dinner and not think twice. Until later and the encounter is replayed in my head and the doubts begin to fester as to the status of our friendship.

The two girls I spent a whole day with not so long ago. Friendship I enjoyed without pressure or the need to act up to impress or to be one of the guys.

I could blame it on my family and their friends, my sisters, their friends and the almost entirely female friendship pool I grew up surrounded by. On my darker more sombre days I wonder if I play certain cards to keep emotionally detached: enough friendship to sate my loneliness, but not too much to ever cause a rupture of unease. I opt for the easier option in the short term even if it becomes more complicated as life roles on.

Last night I listened to Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, pontificate on the nature of personhood and how a proper grasp of this moves us beyond a focus on the individual and towards a fuller and healthier understanding of each other. The bearded wonder was at his cerebral best, which meant I didn’t understand too much, and quotes from Lossky, Spaemann, Sennett and Augustine provided some needed light relief. Maybe once I’ve had a chance to listen to the audio again, read the transcript and rubbed my head a little more, grown some more facial hair and accumulated the subsequent wisdom I might record some more thought through reflections.

He said something along these lines: “What makes me a person… I stand in the middle of a network of relations, the point at which all the lines cross.”

So whether the relationships are clarified, confused, distorted or direct, it is the patchwork quilt which we inhabit that makes up much of what defines as a person rather than any anatomical structure.

He also said:

Last summer I wrote a couple of posts while reading Alan and Debra Hirsch’s Untamed and explored the idea of otherness and the need for a deep ‘I-thou’ relationship with each other that fully values the other as something different to yourself. The differences that lie between us are what makes it so important that we grow closer together. We understand each other better by a life that is lived together.

In Christian theology we are used to referring to the otherness of God but we need to get better at embracing the otherness of each other. There’s a tendency to want us all to be alike, custom built, unique in the eyes of God but conformed by the power of the church.

Of course there’s confusion, misdirected emotions, ambiguity over whether you like someone or they like you. And it’s easy to see the tortured web we weave and opt for the clarity of straight lines. Boundaries and definitions, what is in and what is out. What is allowed and what is not. What is inappropriate and leads towards sin and what is healthy, positive and life affirming.

But here’s the thing. Risk is life affirming. Have you ever felt fully alive playing it safe?

Ambiguity is the love child of a universe embracing both chaos and wonder. Otherness is the gift of a God that wants us to get better not become the same. A wise lady put it like this: “Rules lack the grace required for the complexity and nuances of human interaction”.

I could seek clarity from every friendship I form with a girl. We could have a contract, it could be laid out whether or not we were pursuing anything other than friendship. There could be defined steps and processes, it could be recorded and audited, inspected and refined. It would remove the confusion that haunts as you lie in bed at night and wonder the precise meaning of the final words, or intent behind the body language you thought might convey something approaching affection.

It would also destroy the beauty that forms as you approach someone else, hesitant, faltering, nervous. If I knew all the answers I would ask no questions, and if I did not question the nature of the other I would not know just how different it is yet how alike we are. If I am only affirmed in my personhood by relationships with others, that relationship, whatever form it might take has to come before any determination of where it might end.

Ambiguity is part of the fun. Let’s enjoy it, and not run away scared.

Godbaby controversy

Danny Webster 2 Comments

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A few weeks ago the Church Ads group released their plans for their annual advertising campaign which continues the theme ‘Christmas starts with Christ’. The whole point is to encourage the public to think about Christ amid the festivities, presents, mince pies and mulled wine.

The adverts tend to be arresting and they tend to be controversial and this year’s is no different with the BBC and the Daily Mail reporting shock at this image of Jesus promoted by the church. Words like blasphemous and irreverent abound.

Firstly, the picture is a little freaky. It also doesn’t look particularly Middle-Eastern. Secondly the cries and wees slogan is a little base.

But while both these can count against it l, they also work in its favour. The image grabs your attention and the words remind you of the humanity of Jesus, of his incarnation – he was one of us.

The test will be whether it work, when on the billboards and bus stops it provokes conversation and gets people talking about Christ at a time when he is often neglected. I also think it provides a challenge to the church, do we like our god clean and sanitised? I don’t think it does what it is criticised of doing – making Jesus a laughing stock or reinforcing the idea that he’s not real, just a toy good for a bit of diversion.

One final thing that’s of interest: yesterday afternoon I got a call from the BBC looking for someone from the Evangelical Alliance to go on this morning’s breakfast show to talk about the adverts, and they expected we’d be speaking against the ads. They certainly divide opinion and we’ve had lively discussions in the office, but I found it slightly disconcerting that the evangelicals were the go to people for a voice ‘against’ something.

Update
Simon Jenkins gives his defence of the advert.

And the Beaker Folk point out why it might not work.

Bishop of Bradford Nick Baines explains his not quite so enthusiastic support for the ad.

Here’s the slightly less provocative version of the ad