Birth and Death In Lent

Jenny and I are like Simeon and Anna in the temple, getting old while we wait for a child to turn up. Not that we are quite ready to say Nunc Dimittis just yet. The child in question is our daughter’s first baby, and our first grandchild. I blogged when we first heard that a birth was on the way. He or she (the parents have opted not to be told which) was due on Shrove Tuesday, so was inevitably nicknamed Pancake. Now it is ten days into Lent, and still there is no nativity. We are learning a lot about waiting.

Meanwhile, a friend and his family have also been waiting in these early days of Lent.  For them, it was the last illness of his mother; the waiting was quite simply for her to slip away peacefully, as they hoped her death would be. We talked about these different kinds of waiting, one of us for a birth and the other for a death. Like T. S. Eliot in The Journey of the Magi, we had seen birth and death and thought they were different.

 

But perhaps they aren’t.  When we keep vigil by a loved human being going through one of life’s sacred passages, when we wait for a birth or a death to come, we realise how similar they are, to people of faith at any rate. We are born, we die, we are re-born in some new and unimagined way. Both usually involve waiting and pangs, and generous helpings of patience, endurance and hope. There is often not much else that we can do than be present to what is happening and to those who wait with us: we must allow things to take the time they take.  

This theme of how we spend time has a Lenten aspect to it. This Lent, a Durham idea about trying to live in a way that is less busy has captured the imagination of a surprising number of people. It was stimulated by Stephen Cherry’s recent book Beyond Busyness. There is a website with resources: www.notbusy.co.uk, and even a red wristband to wear as notbusy people. The Twitter hashtag #NOTBUSY is being well used. All this is to open up space in our lives so that we pay more attention to God and to one another; perhaps, in the words of a slogan we coined in my Coventry days, ‘do less well’ (read those words several times putting the accent on different words).

I’ve found in the first two weeks of Lent that waiting for our grandchild has instilled a keener sense of wanting to be less busy so that I can concentrate on this great event that is about to happen, be present to the experience of anticipated delight and joy.  Of course, everyday life doesn’t stop when someone is born or dies, though it can feel like it – ‘stop all the clocks’ said Auden in a brilliantly observed line of poetry.  For time does change in the way we experience it, which is why we find it astonishing that the world goes on as if nothing has happened to us. 

This different and more sacramental quality is what I am trying to notice.  I want to try and embrace what we might call ‘God’s time’ with its gift of a deeper experience of being alive. And I want to allow this glimpse to make some difference to my ordinary days.  Lent with its intertwining of mortality, springtime, renewal and resurrection hope is an exquisitely rich season. So, waiting and preparing for Easter, and waiting and preparing for a birth or a death, belong together. Lent gathers up so much of life, its shadows and its light and everything in between.

And if ‘death is swallowed up in victory’, then birth too is an act of defiance against all that is deathly and deadly in our world. A birth brings not just delight but hope for the human race: life begins again. The old English word ‘Lent’ means spring. Soon the green blade rises.  

For my recent sermon on not being busy in Lent, see my blog of sermons and addresses at 

deanstalks.blogspot.com.

Equal Marriage: Gamaliel's View

After the vote in parliament on equal marriage, how should the churches respond?

 

Some of the rhetoric of church leaders has been little short of hysterical. To call gay marriage a ‘catastrophe’ or hammering the final nail in the coffin of marriage is not the measured language of responsible debate. In a recent tweet, I urged that Christian leaders should turn the volume down.

 

I have been a bit baffled by some of the arguments on both sides.  For instance, it worries me that in the draft legislation for same-sex marriage, there does not seem to be any clear understanding of marriage as a covenanted relationship that requires loyalty and fidelity.  I am told that this is because the lawyers can’t agree about what constitutes same-sex consummation or unfaithfulness.  So straight away this makes equal marriage unequal because it is not defined in precisely the same covenanted way as heterosexual marriage. It is not surprising that some Christians are concerned about weakening the classical understanding of marriage by not placing the vow of faithfulness right at its heart.

 

On the other hand, I am worried by assumptions on the ‘conservative’ side that to allow couples of the same sex to marry somehow undermines the institution of marriage. If this were true of gay marriage, it would be even more true of unions including a divorced party. Indeed, if the vow of fidelity is of the essence of marriage, then divorce and remarriage are in theory a far bigger threat to it than enlarging covenanted unions to include same-sex couples. In fact, this has not turned out to be the case. So I can understand the claim that to advocate gay marriage is in fact to honour marriage as a wholesome institution, good for individuals and good for society because it fosters stability.  This is the very opposite of subverting it.  So I recognise that it's seen as a matter of justice (I don't say human rights) that same-sex couples should be able to enter it too.  

 

There’s a story in the Acts of the Apostles that may help.  A Jewish leader called Gamaliel had to intervene in a furious row about whether or not the infant Christian movement should be tolerated. When things threatened to turn violent he said this: ‘Fellow Israelites, consider carefully what you intend to do…because if this plan or undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God you will not be able to overthrow them; in that case you might even be found fighting against God!’ (Acts 5.33-39)  In today’s febrile atmosphere of heated debate, what would Gamiliel say to us now?  Here are some thoughts.

 

1  We should remember our history. In his speech in Acts, he warns the traditionalists not to be too hasty to condemn.  The Church of England has been in this position several times in the past century.  The furious debates about artificial contraception in the early 20^th century are barely remembered now, but at the time contraception was rejected by bishops and church leaders as a terrible threat to the nature of marriage as meant for procreation.  The legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults was another example, the remarriage of divorced people in church yet another.  The Church of England has found ways of accommodating itself to all these developments.  We have seen this as recently as the past decade.  Bishops’ initial hostility towards civil partnerships has become at least a working recognition of their importance to the extent that they are now invoked as desirable as arguments the new-fangled gay marriage. The church will, I’m pretty sure, do this once again and come to recognise equal marriage; if it can’t welcome it, it will at least become pragmatic about it in time. 

 

2  Wait and see how the argument develops in the months ahead. Don’t rush into condemnation. It doesn’t do any good, it will probably make you look foolish, and in the future you may find you wish you could take back things you had said in anger or haste.  Gamaliel does not invoke the principle of Christian charity, but I think he would have urged us to debate with restraint, moderation and courtesy.  The megaphone never clarifies arguments; only thoughtful reflection can do that. There is no point in shouting at Parliament for supporting equal marriage, or at those in the church who are at least prepared to consider that there might an important principle here.

 

3  There is no likelihood of turning back the tide of events.  So the church must learn to live in the light of them. We are beginning to do this in the welcome we give to gay people in the church (though there is still a long way to go: if the bishops really believe that civil partnerships are good or not-bad, the church should be able to bless them as it has come to bless the marriages of the divorced).  What we especially need to do now is to make sure that the legislation is informed by the wisest and best insights that Christianity has brought down the centuries to its understanding of marriage, such as the dimension of fidelity and covenanted love that I mentioned earlier.

 

And if charity directs the way we respond to equal marriage as everything else, I believe we shall continue to hold the goodwill and respect which, despite everything, many people still have for the established church. 

 

Farewell to the Bishop of Durham

We have said farewell to Justin Welby. This time next week he will be Archbishop of Canterbury, exchanging the see of Cuthbert for the see of Augustine. Bishop of Durham for 14 months, he has lived up to his name of being only ‘just in’ as some of us have been quipping at the risk of lèse majesté.  It was a wonderful service; the conventional media epithet of bidding ‘an emotional farewell’ doesn’t begin to do justice to it. Words, music, silence, ceremony, humour and communitas melded into a rather special parting of friends. The full Cathedral was a tribute to the respect and affection he has earned here in the North East after only a year.  

Today, the day after, some choristers have come to the Deanery for tea. I meet each of the year groups annually to help them think about Christian faith and what their involvement in the Cathedral means to them. Over chocolate cakes, I asked them what they had made of the service.  ‘Brilliant!’ they said, which pleased me. Everyone I’d spoken to after the service had said the same, but choristers don’t always enthuse about liturgy. ‘What did you enjoy about it?’ I asked.  ‘The Bishop has a great sense of humour.’ ‘It was funny when he couldn’t unwrap the leaving gifts.’  ‘All the cameras were looking straight at us.’ And then, less whimsically, ‘Love the Kenneth Leighton Magnificat’. 

Then someone said: ‘But I was sad too.’ Another added, ‘Yes, there was a point in the service when I found I was feeling something.’  Some others nodded, recognising that these two lads spoke for them.  I asked what had touched them. ‘When you and the Bishop walked alone up to the high altar with the big gold stick, and disappeared behind the screen, and when you both came out again, it had gone’.  I have to say that the youngsters’ grasp of the power of well-crafted ritual pleased me even more than their enthusiasm had done.

In case you don’t grasp the significance of this action let me explain. It’s about the symbolism of laying down office and leaving behind the responsibilities that go with it. The ‘big gold stick’ is the Bishop’s staff or crozier. Some say that it is a sign of the Bishop’s authority and jurisdiction in his diocese; others that it represents his pastoral care of his people. Either way, he lays it down when he stops being Bishop of his diocese. In Durham, by long tradition, the ‘spiritualities’, as they are called, are ‘guarded’ by the Cathedral Chapter because the Cathedral is the Bishop’s church and houses his ‘cathedra’ or seat.

The slow walk the Bishop and I were making was to Cuthbert’s shrine, the Cathedral’s emotional and spiritual heart.  In the privacy of this hidden, holy place behind the high altar, the Bishop handed the crozier back to me as Dean.  In the name of the Cathedral Chapter (its governing body), I received the crozier and laid it on the shrine, the great black slab that marks the place of his burial. It was a pledge to take good care of it (meaning the office as well as the object) until the next Bishop comes into the shrine to take it up again during his enthronement that marks the beginning of new chapter for us all.

We stayed there silently for a while, each of us alone with our thoughts and prayers. I’m not sure I can put into words the profound significance of that moment. Then we emerged and walked back down the quire to the crossing where he knelt before the Bishop of Jarrow and me.  Bishop Mark Bryant commissioned him to go out to his new work in the spirit of our northern saints; and I blessed him in the name of the people of the diocese. Then Justin blessed all of us, and soon after that it was over.

Too soon, some of us were thinking.  As he said, his farewell sermon should have been ten years in the preparation, not just one. And yet we're proud here in Durham to be sending this good man to Canterbury. And the affection, the thank-yous, the prayers, and the memories will linger for a long time to come. If there had to be a parting, it could not have been better marked than this. And the choristers knew it.  

 

 

Why We Need Holocaust Memorial Day

Next Sunday is Holocaust Memorial Day. So I thought I would blog a few reflections on it, partly to help me prepare for a sermon I am preaching in Oxford on the day itself. Last year I blogged about the big schools' event we have in the Cathedral to mark the day each year. But here are some more personal thoughts.

Lost in Translation is a book by Eva Hoffmann, published in 1989.  She was born in Poland just after the end of the war.  Her Jewish parents had been victims of the Holocaust who had lost family members in the death camps.  They were among the few survivors of a once flourishing Polish Jewry.  Her parents decided, like many of their generation, that there was no future for them in Poland.  So they emigrated to the new world to make their home in Canada. 

She had a dream a few days after arriving there.

I’m drowning in the ocean while my mother and father swim further and further away from me.  I know, in this dream, what it is to be cast adrift in incomprehensible space; I know what it is to lose one’s mooring.  I wake up in the middle of a prolonged scream.  The fear is stronger than anything I’ve ever known…. I try to calm myself and go back to sleep, but I feel as though I’ve stepped through a door into a dark place…and from then on fragments of the fear lodge themselves in my consciousness, thorns and pinpricks of anxiety, loose electricity floating in a psyche that has been forcibly plied from its structures.  Eventually I become accustomed to it; I know that it comes and that it also goes, but when it hits with full force, in its pure form, I call it the Big Fear.

This is the voice of a Holocaust survivor, in her case of the second generation.  It is the inherited memory of the ordeals either or both parents underwent during the Nazi Shoah.  It is only recently through psychoanalytic engagement with children of survivors that such memories can be unconsciously transmitted to the next generation.  This ‘colouring’ of life is frequently described as an unexplained shadow that haunts existence.  Although it is not restricted to the holocaust (the memory of any terrifying experience, particularly if endured for a long period of time, may well be inherited by children), the events of the Shoah provide the most extreme instance of it in the history of the west in the past century.

I recognise an echo of Eva Hoffman’s story in myself.  My mother was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family in Düsseldorf.  Her father owned a thriving business in the town.  He had fought for Germany in the Great War and was proud to be an assimilated Jew in a civilised and flourishing nation.  They were liberal Jews who observed Passover, did not eat pork and would not have been seen shopping on Yom Kippur, though they did not attend synagogue regularly.  They loved what Richard Wagner called in Die Meistersinger ‘holy German art’: it was a cultured home full of books and paintings and music.  The 20^th century was for them a time of optimism.  Then came the rise of Hitler.  Like most of their family and friends in the Jewish community that time, they did not at first see in Nazism more than a temporary aberration from the historical values of a great nation, a fit of madness that would soon exhaust itself. 

Almost too late, they realised that they must act to save themselves.  My grandparents fled to Holland, leaving behind family and friends most of whom ended their days in Auschwitz.  After the invasion of Holland, they went underground, being hidden by a couple of extraordinarily courageous evangelical women in Edam.  In 1945, my uncle who had been sent out of Germany before my mother and joined the Black Watch drove his tank into the town square of Edam, and calling through his loud-hailer asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of his parents.  My grandfather died shortly afterwards, broken by the war.  But my grandmother lived on to a great age, first in Holland and then in this country where she exercised a deep influence on all her grandchildren, particularly this one.  I paid tribute to her in a blog last year.

It didn't dawn on me at once that the Holocaust was part of my own formation.  My mother had married my father in 1947.  He was an Englishman she had met during the war.  He was a disenchanted Anglican who had discarded churchgoing along with short trousers and model railways.  He regarded religion as a principal cause of human division and conflict, of which the war was a recent instance.  Any vestigial faith my mother might have had was shattered by the experience she had lived through.  So I grew up in a home in which religion was not to be spoken about: at best it was an irrelevance, at worst, malignant.  But we did not speak much about the Holocaust either.  It was one of those ‘secrets in the family’: it was simply too painful.  At times the spectre of anti-semitism would come up, and I was reminded by my mother that as a child born to a Jewish mother, I was myself Jewish according to rabbinic law and while this was not something to make too much of, neither was it to be forgotten. 

It was only as I became a teenager that I became curious about my family’s story and my own identity.  Even now, I can only say that at best it is work in progress.  For instance, I was not expecting when I first drove my family through Holland on holiday in the 1990s how moved I would be to find myself in the country that had taken in my family when they needed asylum and kept them safe.  Again, when I led a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 2000, and we visited the Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem, I was not anticipating that I would be incapable of speech in the face of what overwhelmed me there, particularly the memorial to the millions of children who perished at that time. 

I began to understand three things.  Firstly, that I was a ‘survivor’, and that it was really rather extraordinary that I was alive.  Second, that the personal history I have been describing was for me a participation in the fragility and dislocation that so often emerge as the dark heart of things in a broken world, Eva Hoffmann’s ‘Big Fear’.  But third, that we must never succumb to despair: tragedy must always purify our vision and point us towards redemption.  If it does not do this, if it does not lead to a more just and humane aspiration for life, then the last word will have been uttered by all that is evil and destructive. 

This is why we need Holocaust Memorial Day. In the well-known tag, if we do not learn the lessons of history in this generation, we are doomed to repeat them in the next....and we have: in Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Sudan and so many other places that have become part of the litany of places where innocents have been massacred not just in recent years but today. 'All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men and women to do nothing.'

 

Lost Sons

SPCK have just published my new book, Lost Sons: God’s Long Search for Humanity. I don’t want to indulge in self-promotion (moi?).  But now that it’s out I hope you’ll allow me to say a little about it.

Earlier this year the title felt as though it had a rueful irony to it.  A book is like a baby: a unique individual whom you have begotten. Its life becomes separate from yours; it has a character, temperament and will of its own. This offspring just didn’t seem to want to be born. It felt like a lost child.  The labour pains were considerable.

I’ve pondered why this might have been.  Maybe the content touched me too personally.  I am after all a (late) father’s son and a son’s father.  So the theme of sons who are lost and found was bound to bring up material from my own past and present.  It would take a psychotherapist (e.g. my wife) years to get to the heart of what all this might mean. 

The book looks at stories in the early part of the Bible that tell of sons who are ‘lost’ in various ways. Abel is murdered, Canaan cursed, Ishmael abandoned, Isaac destined for sacrifice, Esau supplanted, Joseph betrayed, Moses hidden. Adam is the archetype of them all, and us: the child who hides himself from God. In each case I try to show how Jesus in his passion and death is God’s ‘Lost Son’. It is not that these Old Testament stories are all ‘types’ who prefigure Jesus. But the first Jewish readers of the gospels would have known these stories intimately and would, I guess, have brought their own associations to the passion story, seeing ‘pre-echoes’ if you like in these lost sons.

But the wonderful thing about God’s Lost Son is that he is ‘found’ again in the resurrection.  And this turns out to be true of many of the ancient lost sons. Ishmael is rescued from the desert.  Isaac is not killed on the altar because an angel stays his father’s hand.  Esau is reconciled to the brother who supplanted him as Joseph is with the brothers who sold him into slavery.  Moses is discovered in the bulrushes and brought up in the royal palace. So the book is about resurrection as well as death, even if sometimes we have to go looking for it in dark and baffling places.

This may remind you of the parable of the Prodigal Son or, as I think it’s better called, the Lost Son and the Loving Father. It was constantly in my mind as I was writing.  In the introduction, I tell how that marvellous parable seems to have a counterpart in the Hebrew Bible in the moving story of Abraham and Isaac (depicted by Chagall in the painting on the book’s cover – see to the right, and don’t miss the little crucifixion scene in the top right-hand corner). In both stories it isn’t just the son who makes a journey to a ‘far country’ (an idea that appears in both stories) but the father as well: physically for Abraham, imaginatively for the father of the Prodigal. Perhaps the book is an invitation to make that journey as both father and son, ago into a far country and in doing so, enter more deeply into the mystery of the passion.

I dedicated the book to my wonderful not-lost son Aidan.  My three equally wonderful girls are asking when I intend to write a book called Lost Daughters and dedicate it to them.  I am thinking about that.

The Responsible Tweeter

This is my 50th blog as the Decanal Woolgatherer.  What to write to mark this half-century?

This has been my first year of trying my hand at using social media.  In that time I have become especially interested in the opportunities and threats they pose, and what constitutes a responsible, ethical use of them. In particular, Twitter has caught my imagination for its elegant miniaturism, how so much can be said in so little.  But this can be for good or ill – and for interesting or boring.

I wrote an early blog about the spirituality of Twitter which you will find buried on this blogspot below the output of the last few months. But 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'.  

Here goes then.

TWELVE PRINCIPLES OF RESONSIBLE TWEETING

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 wise. Twitter can raise awareness, affirm spiritual and humane values and inspire others. Serve 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. 

Female Bishops: on not letting it go

This is the blog I did not want to write.  It is of course about the vote in Synod on women in the episcopate. 

Tuesday 20 November at 6.15pm is now one of those ‘you’ll always remember where you were when it happened’ moments. We had just come out of evensong.  At the service we had heard one of the finest of all psalms, 104: ‘O Lord how manifold are thy works: in wisdom hast thou made them all, the earth is full of thy riches’.  We had prayed for the Synod and its work.  Afterwards a group of us chatted amiably outside the Deanery gate in the dark, waiting for the result. When it came, it was a palpable shock.  We couldn’t believe it. I felt for all the female clergy and how devalued they must be feeling.  I felt for the whole church in throwing away a wonderful opportunity to enrich its ministry.

 

When I looked at the voting figures a few minutes later, I was baffled. The overall majority in favour was much bigger than I had dared to hope: nearly three quarters of those in the chamber. That, read against the fact that 42 out of 44 dioceses had supported it, meant that the resolution had achieved the convincing majority politicians would die for. It looked like a fair following wind (of the Spirit?) for women in the episcopate. It was only the Byzantine synodical rules of engagement that did for it.

Since then, I have had many conversations with people inside and outside the church. Inside, there is shame, anger, despair.  Outside there is incomprehension and the sense,  even among those who wish us well, that the Church of England has shot itself in the foot, lost its authority and put its role in the nation at risk.  As we can see from the quality press, it has stirred up a national debate about how fit the church is any more to fulfil that role. To quote Father Brown, it was never impossible that the vote could go down, but it would be incredible.  This is what our fellow-travellers are saying to us.  There is no answer to it.

In Tuesday’s backwash, there was an ominous symptom of attitude in the church that needs examining.  We were told that General Synod will not now meet in February but only in July 2013. This is extraordinary.  When the nation is in crisis, Parliament is summoned within days to consider it and guide those who have to make rapid decisions in life-threatening situations.  When the Church of England is in its gravest crisis for decades, the Synod postpones its next meeting and decides that it will be sufficient to meet in 8 months’ time.

This looks like a bad case of loss of nerve. It's as if we are in denial that the situation is as serious and urgent as it is.  This is how it’s being perceived in the nation. Most significant at a time of trial, it looks like a failure of governance. There is a big reputational risk here. Just when you want your governing body to be there and exercise its proper authority, it vanishes like the Cheshire Cat into the thicket not to be seen again till the sun comes out next summer. I urge the Synod to meet in the next few weeks to show both church and nation that it has noticed what is happening and is doing something about it.

............

‘Where are we now on women as bishops?’ I asked in a previous blog.  Actually, the same as where we were on Tuesday morning: poised to take this life-changing step with conviction, confident that theology, the nation’s zeitgeist and the will of the church are all behind us. The trouble is, the system for doing that is now discredited. It is time for reform.  Here are some of my thoughts about this.

1.  Voting by houses in the Synod should be abolished.  In an age of collaborative ministry, we are all one in the chamber.  There is no case for a system which, in an extreme example, could have a motion carried unanimously in the houses of clergy and laity but be lost by a single vote in the house of bishops.  The majority would be 95% in favour but it would still be lost in a vote by houses.

2.  We should overhaul the system by which laity are elected to the Synod.  Having deanery synods as the electoral college for each diocese is the weak link in the chain because not enough laity are convinced that serving on a deanery synod is a good use of their time.  This opens the way for parties and pressure-groups to exploit the system and get their adherents on to deanery synods to vote in partisan General Synod candidates.  I should like to see a universal franchise of all the laity on electoral rolls (who are already eligible under the rules to stand as candidates), just as the licensed clergy are already franchised.

 

3.  All candidates for election should be required to state where they currently stand on the likely big issues of their quinquennium so that the electoral colleges know what, as well as whom, they are voting in. Elected members are representatives not delegates, and they must be allowed to listen to arguments and change their minds.  But some preliminary indication is needed.

4.  The General Synod needs to be a lot more versatile and light-footed so that it can meet at short notice for a day to debate real emergencies. This is one of them. Arguments about spaces not being available are specious. Most of the nation’s cathedrals could easily accommodate such a meeting, and among them, half a dozen would be available quickly.  

............

Someone replied to one of my tweets: ‘just let it go; get over it’.  Well, here is why I am not letting it go, because the system that resulted in this fiasco is itself wrong.  Had a majority in the house voted against, that would have been a different matter.  I don’t have a problem with losing an argument and accepting that the organisation wants to go in a different direction – so long, that is, that the process for reaching that place is fair.  My issue today is that it isn’t.

A final thought.  I firmly believe that we shall have female bishops in our church one day, perhaps soon.  It’s not a question of whether but of when. I have a hunch that when it comes back for decision, it will be in a sharper, more convincing, more unafraid form than it did this time.  That will be a much better outcome for the future.  Tuesday’s will turn out to have been a Pyrrhic victory for those whom history will inevitably pass by. We have seen this all before, in relation to slavery, contraception and remarriage after divorce.  The church usually gets it in the end by God’s grace.  I simply want to see us get it in my lifetime. 

 

I pray for that, and have not lost heart.