A Comet and a Painting: can Philae inspire us to face the apocalypse?

Regulars know that I take to blogging as a way of responding to what has stimulated my imagination. I can't complain of a lack of material this month.

1950 was a good year for Comets (the capital 'C' is meant). Late in 1949, the De Havilland prototype jet aircraft 'Comet' that some of us remember was rolled out to great acclaim. Tests began in earnest in 1950. Meanwhile in the altogether vaster arena of the Solar System, two key theories about comets were first proposed. One was the 'dirty snowball' concept about a comet's make-up; the other that comets originate in an obscure region beyond the planets in the Oorst Cloud that surrounds the Solar System. The next year, the theory that a comet's tail is caused by the solar wind acting upon it was also put forward. All three are now established as central to our understanding of what comets are and how they behave.

All this in the year I was born....

What's prompts this recollection is of course the news in the past hours that the Philae-Lander has settled on the surface of Comet 67P. While the status of the landing craft's security and functionality is not yet certain, everyone agrees that it is a momentous achievement on the part of the European Space Agency.

Two years ago, I blogged on the journeys of Voyager One and Two (it's still on this site: 28 October 2012, Now Voyager! Travelling the Solar System). These journeys to give us stupendous images of the Solar System's outer planets were already the stuff of dreams. But Philae's landing on her - and surely now our very own - comet makes Voyager seem like a sight-seeing trip. I tweeted that the bouncy landing, not at all wanted by the scientists, had something of a jump for joy about it. Maybe that echoes what many of us were feeling: the sheer exhilaration and gratitude that we are alive to see this day. I said that it would take a Thomas Hardy to do justice to the poetry of this event.

There's a metaphor here. 

I don't know whether Philae will help change the consciousness of the human race. We dared to hope as much of humanity's first steps on the Moon. We were right: extending horizons has always been a goal of human exploration not primarily as an act of colonisation or possession (whatever was intended at the time), rather enlarging the imagination and learning to see ourselves in new ways. 'Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp' said Robert Browning in Andrea del Sarto: whatever else he means, it must be to do with our potential to transcend and renew ourselves, take hold of a larger vision of life; 'or what's a heaven for?'

As a person of faith, I still want to say that events like today's still have the capacity to change minds and hearts. Science is God-given, even if God isn't always recognised in scientific endeavour. But I am a lot less sanguine than I was in those heady days of the Apollo 11 landing in July 1969. When I saw today's image of a leg of Philae perched under what seemed like a rocky cliff, I didn't grasp the distortion of perspective. Simply as a photograph, it reminded me at once of something very different: those vast apocalyptic canvasses painted by Northumberland artist John Martin of Haydon Bridge (whatever had that lovely little village done to him to beget a son of such morbidity? Maybe in our retirement we'll walk the John Martin trail through the woods and gorges of the South Tyne and Allen Valleys and find out). In his darkly grand vision, human beings, all our civilisation and achievement, is depicted as transient and insignificant compared to the mountains, rocks and cliffs that rear up on all sides only to fall on and crush hapless men, women and children. See for example The Great Day of His Wrath, the third painting of his famous Last Judgment triptych. (If you Google it you'll find his paintings online.)

Why, when I saw the Philae image today, did I associate to that painting without hesitation? I think because in my mind from a few hours earlier was yet another shocking report from Syria about the plight of millions of innocent people in despair at the cruelty of their fellow human beings. Philae delights us and excites nothing but admiration, yet still there terror on every side. It's the shadow that falls across us all, even in our best, our most ecstatic moments. We are perched precariously under a huge and ominous cliff.

But then I mused: if ESA can pull off such a feat on a far-distant comet through concerted international collaboration, surely the four deadly Horsemen of the Apocalypse could be tamed if there is the will to do it? It's a stupendous ask, but as Advent approaches with its bitter-sweet themes of Death, Judgment, Hell and Heaven, the world's peoples should galvanise one another to find the same intentional energy and collaborative focus to apply ourselves to constructing a better world. People of faith are already taking a lead. We may think that the Philae-Lander mocks our inability to make any lasting difference. But I believe it can also inspire us to act collectively to save our planet and its peoples. We must make sure it does. There isn't an alternative.

Isn't this what God calls us to as we gaze on a remote comet and marvel?

Germany: thoughts on Remembrance Sunday

The week Coventry will mark its most significant anniversary of modern times. On the night of 14 November 1940 the German Luftwaffe sent 515 bombers over the medieval city and destroyed it. The operation was code-named 'Moonlight Sonata'. 568 people are known to have perished. The Cathedral was reduced to a ruin. 

50 years later, I was on the staff of the 'new' Cathedral. It fell to me to devise an act of worship to commemorate the city's destruction. It was a big challenge because the service was bound to be heavily freighted with symbolism. Many of those who would be attending were survivors of that terrible night. They had lost members of their families and seen their homes destroyed in the firestorm. Listening to their stories would be the key to understanding what we needed to do in the light of how they remembered half a century after the event and what meanings they attached to it. 

For me, an unforgettable focus of the service lay in its two principal guests: the President of the newly united Germany Richard von Weizsäcker, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. Because of the central place Coventry Cathedral has always given to forgiveness and reconciliation, we wanted to explore how these senior representatives of Germany and the UK might publicly recognise each other's presence during the service. After months of negotiation, it was agreed that there would be a simple exchange of symbolic gifts representing our two nations, a handshake, and a form of words for each of them that included the prayer 'May God bless the people of your country'. You can imagine the power of that moment: so small in scale, so huge in significance. 

Earlier that day in the ruins, another remarkable event had taken place. It was unplanned: only a few people were there to witness it. A Luftwaffe pilot who had flown a bomber over Coventry in 1940 had decided to come to the commemoration. By then of course, he was an elderly man. He arrived alone, walked up the nave and stood silently in front of the rubble altar gazing at the gaunt charred cross that had been made out of two scorched roof timbers that had fallen across each other during the fire. He took in the words carved in the wall behind the altar: 'Father, forgive'. And quietly he began to weep. One of the Cathedral clergy happened to be there, took him by the hand and embraced him. He said it was a transfiguring moment of his life, as if the whole world's history of alienation, bitterness, bloodshed and cruelty had fallen away. In that moment, reconciliation became real. 

I had these memories in mind as I watched the beautiful, poignant ceremony at the Cenotaph on TV this morning. I am always moved by it, but today I was especially touched by the Commonwealth High Commissioners laying wreaths, and then, for the first time, the Irish Ambassador - a marvellous, conciliatory gesture. But then I asked myself: where were the ambassadors of our allied nations in the wars of the past century? There was a powerful interview with a Dutch veteran who spoke of the huge debt Holland owed the British for its liberation, despite the calamity of Arnhem. I may have missed it, but we did not hear anything from the French, the Russians or the Americans. Are their ambassadors invited to the Cenotaph? Are they invited to lay wreaths?

And inevitably, the logic pushed me to ask: what about Germany? Is that nation represented in any official way in our Remembrance ceremonies? My experience at Coventry, not to mention many visits to Germany, suggests that it is not as difficult as it sounds to make small but important gestures of friendship on these vitally important national occasions. Germany has been prominent among our continental partners since 1945 in helping build the common European home that we share. Anglo-German friendships flourish all over Britain through sporting, civic and cultural exchanges. Is it not time to give this public recognition on this most solemn day? 

I don't want to be insensitive to the feelings of ex-service men and women, though I have never come across rancour or bitterness in any of those I have known. The opposite, in fact. But if you ask why this touches me personally, as well as being suggested by my Christian faith, it's all part of my family history. As the child of a British father and a German mother, I began to learn at an early age that nursing ill-feeling is simply feeding a poison-tree, to quote William Blake. My Jewish mother and grandmother had been driven out of Germany by the Nazis and had lost relatives and friends in the death camps. My father served with the UK armed forces but I never recalled him uttering a word of hostility against his former enemy. 

Today, 9 November, is not only Remembrance Sunday. This year, it also happens to mark the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany in 1989. All thoughts in Germany today have been on the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the end of division, the hopes for the new future that opened up for the German people a quarter of a century ago. Perhaps this is the time to think in new ways about those who did us grievous harm but now count themselves among our friends. Not 'forgive and forget' - reconciliation is far more difficult and costly than that. But maybe, 'we can't forget, nor should we. But we can begin to forgive'. It could add an important dimension not only to what we remember today, but how to remember well. 

Jesus taught us to love our enemies. He prayed for them from the cross in those words quoted in the ruins at Coventry, 'Father, forgive'. Nothing less than this is needed if we are truly to heal memories. You could say that this is how we 'remember forward' towards the better world we hope and pray for and, on this day, publicly pledge ourselves to help build. 

More about Germany in the two previous blogs inspired by Neil MacGregor's magnificent series of programmes on BBC Radio 4. 

'Germany - memories of a nation'

I've been signed off work while recovering from surgery. So with time hanging heavy on the sofa, I went to the iPlayer and downloaded all 30 of Neil MacGregor's programmes on Germany - Memories of a Nation. The series ended yesterday, and inspired me to blog about the part Germany has played in my own life. 

I've no hesitation in saying that this series has been among the very best radio listening this year. BBC Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service all give me huge enjoyment each day, so that's a big claim to make. Neil MacGregor is a consummate radio performer - suave, authoritative, interesting, personable, and with just the right degree of tentativeness in his judgments that makes you want to go on thinking about what he has said. Whether it is the Holy Roman Empire, Dürer's engravings, the death camps, hyper-inflation or beer and sausages, he has the gift of a born educator which is to make us curious. I hate to invoke what's rapidly becoming a cliché, but it does seem to me that he is something of a national treasure.

So what do I take away from these excellent programmes? Here are three (tentative) observations about Germany that have been taking shape in my mind as I've been listening. 

First, the infinite capacity of the German people for invention. I guess that what inspired MacGregor to embark on this series was the endless creativity of Germans in the arts, whether it is literature, painting, architecture, sculpture, music or performance art. Most of the 'objects' which act as focal points of the German story are art-works of various kinds: the coins of the Hanseatic city-state of Hamburg, the imagery on Weimar bank notes, a painting of Goethe, Gutenburg's Bible, Ludwig of Bavaria's Valhalla presiding over the Danube, the exquisite sculptures of Riemenschneider and Barlach, the Meissen porcelain hippopotamus, Bauhaus design, even the Volkswagen. The list is endless. Add to that a soundtrack drawing on German music from Bach to Weill and you have a true Gesamtkunstwerk, a 'complete art work' that embraces virtually all that human creativity is capable of. 

Of course, Germany is not unique in this respect. The same could be said of France, Italy, Spain, Britain and the Americas, not to mention the great civilisations of the Middle and Far East. We shouldn't try to evaluate the cultural achievements of one people against another. This was precisely the mistake Germany made under the Third Reich in its mindless pursuit of Wagner's 'holy German art' and its purge of all that the Nazis reckoned to be 'unGerman'. MacGregor quotes Heine's prescient saying, 'where today they burn books, tomorrow they burn people': what other people has ever treated its own heritage so callously? But no one is going to deny that the contribution of German-speaking peoples to the world's cultural legacy has been immense. Without it, we would be immeasurably the poorer. 

My second observation is perhaps a special case of the first. It's the German propensity for myth-making. It takes a certain kind of mentality to invent stories about your people that turn out to be pervasive and formative. In this, the Germans have been past masters. I'm thinking of how, after the collapse of Roman civilisation in Northern Europe, it was a 'German' (yes, I know it's an anachronism to use that word) who reinvented the idea of a people united under a single figurehead and bound to one another by common values and traditions. Charlemagne, or Karl der Gross (depending on whether you tell the story the French or the German way) created the notion of a Holy Roman Empire that gave identity and meaning to the disparate Allemanic world for more than a thousand years. His coronation at Aachen in 800AD launched a myth that even today has not lost its potency. 

This was just the beginning. In his turn, Luther's Bible helped fix the German language into a vehicle that could articulate the voice of a whole people, just as Shakespeare and the King James Bible did for England. The poetry of Goethe, the paintings of Kaspar David Friedrich and the folk-tales collected by the Brothers Grimm helped create the romantic idea of Gemany as a mythical northern land of forests, mountains, light, shadow and far horizons. Next came Bismarck whose Prussian determination forged the new myth of a United Germany, fought for with 'iron and blood', 'Deutschland über alles', meaning not world domination so much as putting 'Germany' as a nation above all other loyalties to region, state or locality. The Nazis' consummate myth-making about Aryan supremacy was only another iteration of a long series of imaginative re-inventions. Which is why, if I have a criticism of the series, I missed a programme about Wagner and his own capacity for mythologising, surely a key influence on the distorted vision of Hitler and the Third Reich.

My final observation is something I hadn't thought about before listening to these programmes. It's a throw-away remark MacGregor makes that while the public art of other nations celebrates their victories and honours their citizens' achievements, so much 20th century German art does the exact opposite. It memorialises shame, sorrow and defeat. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, the Topography of Terror where the SS once had their headquarters, Barlach's grieving soldiers in the war memorial at Magdeburg, Käthe Kollwitz's heart-searching etchings of bereaved mothers are among many Gedenkstätten where contemporary German art memorialises the tragedy of its own story. There is a strain of melancholia in the German psyche that is exactly captured in Dürer's famous etching of that name, and which perhaps helps explain the paradox of its people. If every nation has its archetypal flaw, perhaps this is Germany's. (It raises the question of what the British or French flaws might be.... Scope for another blog?)

I was especially struck by one programme that focused on the gate of Buchenwald concentration camp, the 'beech woods' where Goethe used to walk. The inscription says, not 'Arbeit Macht Frei' as at Auschwitz, but 'Jedem Das Seine', 'to each their own'. It's a Latin saying quoted by Luther; Bach wrote a cantata with that title. The elegant contemporary lettering was designed by Franz Ehrich, an inmate who had been a Bauhaus artist. This to me captured the paradox of Gemany: how a dark shadow falls even in places of inspiration and beauty; or put it the other way round, even in the terrible crucible of suffering and death that Nazi Germany became, the creative instinct could never be extinguished. Someone bothered to affirm the best a human being was capable of, an unconscious protest against all that diminished and demeaned.

Today, 25 years after the Iron Curtain was torn down and Germany became a united nation once again, there are still painful memories of a dark past to be healed. In this respect, I think Germany has found a language with which to acknowledge, 'own' and speak about its tragedy and shame in a way that France, with its own conflicted story of defeat, occupation, Nazi collaboration and anti-semitism has found much harder. Armistice Day can help us all to feel and remember, not just loyally but accurately. That MacGregor's fine series concluded at the Reichstag on the threshold of Remembrance weekend and the anniversary of German reunification is surely an intended part of the narrative. It has certainly made this listener think - and be grateful. 

Germany - memories of childhood

Neil MacGregor's wonderful 30-part BBC Radio 4 series Germany: Memories of a Nation came to an end today. 

Germany has always been part of my life. My very earliest childhood memories are of Germany in the early 1950s. As I've written before, my mother was born into a German Jewish family. She came to England as a refugee in 1938. After the war my parents needed to go back to Germany to sort out the family's affairs. I recall that on one of these trips we were in an attic room in some modest B&B. I was lying in a cot which tells you how young I must have been. Through the little window across the street was a church with a huge copper-green spire. Its two bells were tolling a semitone apart; to me even as an infant, the elemental sound somehow bore into my soul, seeming to be filled with both an ethereal beauty and a profound longing. 

The fact that my very first memory is both musical and religious makes me stop and think. Then I remember playing with toy cars and bulging pine cones on the rush floor under the tables of our Gasthaus restaurant. I could make out the tips of pine trees outside, so it was either the Harz Mountains or the Black Forest where I know from photographs we spent time. Another recollection is of the island of Nordeney in the North Sea. I was amazed and not a little alarmed by the artificial wave machine in the local swimming pool, my first experience of reliable German 'Vorsprung durch Technik'. 

My mixed parentage made me a European: the first five years of my life seemed happily suspended between two languages, histories and cultures. My mother had become a fluent English speaker as a nurse in London during the war, and my father learned German when he met her. So our home was bilingual: I'm told I spoke German with a distinct North-Rhine accent (my grandmother was from Cologne and my mother from Düsseldorf). I was read to and sung to in German as well as English. My father found German music stations on the immense wireless set that stood proudly in the corner of the living room and whose valves took many minutes to warm up and start buzzing and glowing. 

What was never spoken of (after all, I was under 5) was what my mother's family had undergone in Nazi Germany. I only gradually began to piece this together and even now am learning about aspects of it that I had not known before. The first stirrings of awareness happened when I went to school. I must have picked up early on that in 1955, a mere 10 years after the end of the war, it didn't do to be heard speaking German in the street. When I was collected at the school gate, I insisted that we always speak English. Soon I had dropped German altogether. I never quite lost an intuitive understanding of how the language works, but in adult life it felt as though I needed to learn it all over again - one of many regrets as I look back and think about what has been lost.

As a teenager I fell under the spell of France where I spent my gap year. The nearest I got to Germany was in its eastern province of Alsace where I worked for a few months near the beautiful city of Strasbourg. I lived with a Protestant family whose Grand' Maman could recall German and French battle lines drawn on opposite sides of the road in her village during the Great War. Alsace had been part of Germany following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, to be liberated and French again after 1918. The church services were mostly in German, and everyone spoke the local Alsatian patois, a Germanic dialect incomprehensible to all but the natives. In a land so fought-over, it was understandable that attitudes to Germany were ambiguous. Maybe, I reckoned, you could be a Francophile or a Germanophile, a Romantic or a Teuton but not both.

Since those days I have been back to Germany many times to preach and take part in events in the Rhineland, Bavaria, Dresden (in the days of the Democratic Republic), Berlin and on the Baltic Coast of Schleswig-Holstein. I began to re-connect with the country, acknowledge my roots, and recognise my debt to it for the way it has shaped so much of my life, often unconsciously. This hasn't always been easy when its history is so coloured by terror and shame. 20 years ago in Düsseldorf, I went to the Goethestrasse where my mother's family had lived. It is a street of fine 19th century villas, but where her house should have been, there was a gap. An allied bomb had scored a direct hit; now an unlovely block of flats had been built on the site. It was a painful discovery (though if by some miracle my mother had still been living there, that bomb would have seen to it that neither she nor I would be here today). 

These are among the reveries that have been reawakened by Neil MacGregor's series on Germany. This blog started out as a response, but it rapidly turned autobiographical. Should I apologise - or is this part of understanding why I've found these programmes so stimulating - and, to my surprise, moving? I'll write a Part 2 that tries to reflect on some of the issues this series has raised. It feels timely. This weekend sees not only Remembrance Sunday in this Great War centenary year, but also the 25th anniversary of the reunification of Germany in 1989, not to mention the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1938 which many see as the true igniting of the Nazi Holocaust. Food for thought during the coming days. 

Meanwhile, you'll find all the broadcasts on the BBC iPlayer where I think they will be available for a year. Well worth tuning into. 

Poppies: memories and many meanings

I wrote about poppies last year. You write about them at your peril....

This week I read a piece about an ITV newscaster who had opted not to wear a poppy on screen. It wasn't that she was against it: she did wear one when not in front of the camera. Her argument was that ITV didn't allow her to wear anything as a broadcaster that identified her as a supporter of other charities such as breast cancer awareness, mental health or child poverty (I've forgotten her actual examples). So why, she argued, should the poppy, paid for and worn in support of the Royal British Legion, be an exception to that rule? 

I admire the logic and the ethics, but I'm afraid she is misreading the symbolism. She hasn't quite cottoned on to what the public mostly think they are doing when they wear the poppy. In social sciences-speak, she has got the semiotics wrong. 

The poppy is far more than the logo of a particular veterans' charity. As the poppy field in the Tower of London moat demonstrates, it is not quite like most other symbols. The fact that millions of people have already visited that display speaks for itself about the universal meaning the poppy has acquired in the 100 years since it became the emblem of loss and bloodshed 'in Flanders Fields'. I don't say that it's unique - national flags and religious symbols are other instances - but it's rare for an 'invented' symbol, especially a modern one, to cross over successfully from restricted to universal meanings. This is in contrast to 'natural' symbols like light, motherhood or the journey which have always carried archetypal meanings.

In today's Guardian there's a trenchant piece about the Tower of London poppy field by Jonathan Jones.  He argues that as a symbol, 'poppies muffle the truth' by substituting for the sheer horror of the Great War a generalised grief laden with noble notions of honour and pride. It is too beautiful for its own truth. 'I strongly believe that an adequate work of art about the war has to show its horror, not sweep the grisly facts under a red carpet of artificial flowers.' As a purely British symbol, it does not even include the fallen of allied nations such as the French, let alone the slaughtered youth of Germany. What is more, it airbrushes out of John McCrae's poem the clear imperative to the living to 'take up our quarrel with the foe'. And it certainly doesn't do justice to Wilfred Owen's bitter protest against the nationalist rhetoric of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori which is quoted by Jones, as it so often is in protest pieces. 

There's much that is persuasive about this argument (which doesn't deserve the Daily Mail's cheap jibe of 'sneering' against an earlier online article by the author). Yet once again I find myself asking whether it's got the semiotics right. It's too either-or. The trouble with symbols is that they are so complex and elusive, 'multivalent' as the theorists say. They never only mean one thing or the other. What may promote beautiful high-minded thoughts in one person can have the effect of drawing the next person into a raw experience of horror and despair. It's never possible to use the language of 'should' or 'must' when talking about symbols because the way we read and respond to them is a highly complex matter of shared meanings, collective and personal experience, cultural history, social psychology and emotional make-up.

I doubt that I am speaking merely for myself when I say that when I wear the poppy, I don't restrict its meaning only to the fallen of our nation or its allies. Jones mentions Christopher Clark's brilliant book on the complex origins of the Great War, The Sleepwalkers. When I read it earlier this year, I was thinking about how we would memorialise the centenary of the war's outbreak on 4 August 1914 in Durham Cathedral. One of the readings offered at that vigil as the lights in the nave were extinguished one by one was 'In Flanders Fields'. Far from seeming incongruous in a setting where we intended to remember all the war's victims, it was in fact profoundly moving because the words and symbols were able to move us from the particular to the universal, from the tragedy of individual losses to the catastrophe of the whole human condition.

I mentioned religious symbols as among those that have 'crossed over' from the particular to the universal. Take the Cross. Like the poppy it is capable of an infinite variety of readings. Historically it stands for terrible suffering exacted on the innocent by unspeakable cruelty. 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' Yet it soon came to stand for the fruits of that awful death as well: reconciliation, forgiveness, promise, peace, even triumph. It's an 'also', precisely not merely 'instead of'. You can see this development of a rich and complex idea happening in the pages of the New Testament just as you see it in the different ways people have responded to the visual image, indeed, in the different ways we find ourselves responding to that same symbol at different times in our lives. I think Jones' simplistic complaint about how the poppy has degraded and softened the symbolism of war would not stand up to scrutiny in the case of the cross which strikes me as a remarkably similar development. 

So I shall continue to wear my poppy. I do it with grief for so much loss and waste of human life, with shame for the folly of the human race and my part in it, with sorrow for the crucifixions of so many in the conflicts of our day, with prayer for the peace and healing of the world, and yes, with gratitude and pride for the courage, loyalty and service of so many past and present who have laid down their lives in war. I do it too as an act of personal resolve: to play my part in handing on the 'quarrel' with all that is cruel and wrong to the next generation so that together we can build a kinder, better, more peaceable world for those who will inherit it from us. 

Are they not all the seas of God?

I've blogged about my family history before. My mother was born in Weimar Germany into a Jewish family in Düsseldorf. Soon the Nazis came to power. Things went from bad to worse to terrifying. Almost too late, my grandparents found a way of getting their two children into Britain. My mother was sent to this country as a teenager and began life all over again in England. She married here and five years after the war I was born. 

She crossed the sea as a refugee, and this country took her in and gave her asylum. The British record in welcoming persecuted Jews from continental Europe is not without ambiguities. Nor did all the refugees find as ready a welcome in Britain as had been hoped. But it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. When so many of her relatives and friends perished in the death camps, my mother survived. And that was thanks to this country that saw a need and tried to respond to it. It was in the spirit of a people for whom humanitarian care has mattered.

75 years later, Europe is facing the biggest refugee crisis since the war. This time the sea that is carrying hundreds of thousands of desperate, frightened people towards its shores is the Mediterranean. Many of them are fleeing vicious perscution and untold hardship, and have paid unscrupulous middle-eastern or north African people traffickers to cram them into vessels that are not seaworthy 50 metres from the shore. It is a dangerous voyage. Only the reckless or those who have abandoned all other hope would attempt it. The Italian search and rescue operation Mare Nostrum has saved no fewer than 150,000 refugees from the sea in just one year.

But incredibly, just when cooperation across Europe is so much needed to help these hapless refugees, Britain is refusing to support it. Yesterday's Guardian reported that 'British policy was quietly spelled out in a House of Lords written answer by the new Foreign Office minister, Lady Anelay: "We do not support planned search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean," she said, adding that the government believed there was "an unintended 'pull factor' encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths...The government believes the most effective way to prevent refugees and migrants attempting this dangerous crossing is to focus our attention on countries of origin and transit, as well as taking steps to fight the people smugglers who wilfully put lives at risk by packing migrants into unseaworthy boats."'

It is hard to believe that such specious stuff can emanate from the Upper House. Indeed, it is not just specious but heartless. Can this be the same nation that acted in such a principled way in the 1930s? But it is an unintelligent response too because it seriously misreads the human psyche when life is under threat. The CEO of the British Refugee Council Maurice Wren was quoted yesterday: 'People fleeing atrocities will not stop coming if we stop throwing them life-rings; boarding a rickety boat in Libya will remain a seemingly rational decision if you’re running for your life and your country is in flames. The only outcome of withdrawing help will be to witness more people needlessly and shamefully dying on Europe’s doorstep....The answer isn’t to build the walls of fortress Europe higher, it’s to provide more safe and legal channels for people to access protection.' In today's Guardian Amnesty's UK director, Kate Allen, says: 'This is a very dark day for the moral standing of the UK. When the hour came, the UK turned its back on despairing people and left them to drown.'

I'm not pretending this is straightforward for any of us in Europe, especially those on the front-line in the south. But Britain simply cannot pass by on the other side. It would be an act of cynical, shameful neglect. The word 'unforgivable' has been used. To the British as members of the EU, what happens across the continent ought to be our proper concern, no less than the English Channel and the thousands in the Calais refugee camps who have made it across continental Europe and are ready to take the last big risk of passage into England. Far from shrugging the Mediterranean boat-people off as someone else's problem, we should be taking a lead in contributing our effort and resources to help.

It's a principle deeply embedded in the Hebrew Scriptures that we should care for the stranger who comes among us, especially the vulnerable and poor. I would not be here now if it weren't for this honourable humanitarian ethic of embrace. 'Are they not all the seas of God?' asked Walt Whitman. We owe it to those who are in such a terrible plight to make sure that when they are in peril on the seas off Europe, they will find through our willing minds and hands God's help and care that they need so much. We owe it to our fellow human beings not to turn our face away in this hour of crisis. 

Extraverts and Introverts: a plea for understanding

I once attended an act of worship whose leader issued this challenge: 'we're going to sing a song of praise to God that children love. It has actions. Here they are [demonstration]. So come on all you introverts, let yourselves go and enjoy it!' We duly complied, as we English tend to do in front of others. Maybe I was the only one who felt grumpy about it. Maybe not. But it left me thinking about introverts in the church and why we should have been singled out for mention that day. I don't suppose you would get away with challenging black or gay or even female worshippers like that. 

But it wasn't the church's equality and diversity policies that made me think. Rather, it was my own experience of church life. The other week a simplified Myers-Briggs personality-type questionnaire was doing the rounds on Facebook. Never one to resist a challenge, I took the test. Yet again, I came out stubbornly as an introvert - INFJ for those who know what that means. Since I first did it 30 years ago, I have always emerged as irredeemably introverted. Despite my formative Christian experience in vibrant evangelical churches, despite all these years of leadership in parish and cathedral, despite all the exposure to crowds of people many of them strangers, despite loving this privileged kind of ministry that takes a priest into so many different communities, despite all that I am still an introvert.

Time was when I used to wish I were different. But a wise spiritual director helped me to accept who I am and celebrate the gifts I bring. I now understand how we introverts learn over a lifetime to behave in extraverted ways: getting up to speak in public, working a room full of people we don't know, being genuinely interested in others, asking for money to support the church, knocking on unknown doors to offer pastoral care or support - it's all part of the job as every priest knows. And introverts are often very good at it, because of their nurturing both of the inner spiritual life and the great importance they attach to authenticity in personal relationships. Good 'performance skills' are required in all leaders, and introverts are as accomplished in this as extraverts. It's true that extraverts find some aspects of leadership more congenial than introverts, and less costly personally. But some of the finest leaders in all sectors are introverts, people who don't make a lot of noise or draw attention to themselves, but are quietly effective in what they do. 

I've been reading Susan Cain's book Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking [Viking 2012]. She has a lot to say about leadership in a world where extraversion goes with popularity and that loves the charismatic and the celebrity. She quotes two respected gurus among a vast literature on what makes a good leader. One says that what effective leaders have in common is 'little or no charisma, & little use either for that term or what it signifies'. Another affirms that 'many best-performing companies are run by Level 5 Leaders with no flash or charisma but only with extreme humility & intense professional will'. I find this encouraging.

I was especially interested in what she had to say about the prevailing evangelical culture in North America. She attended a large act of worship in one of the US's most flourishing mega-churches. First there's the warm-up. '"Good morning everybody" beams S---, then urges us to greet those seated near us. Most people oblige with wide smiles and glad hands.' Then comes the sermon. '"If you're a business leader, you need to read the Book of Jeremiah over and over because he was a genius CEO."' Straight out of the Harvard Business School then (another institution that comes in for interesting scrutiny). The author says she can't help thinking of an 'Unleash the Power Within' seminar she attended, with all those electric smiles and shining eyes. 

She acknowledges that it is all well-meant and well-done. This is a church with a great record of outreach and social care. 'But at the same time I can see how hard it must be, inside this world...for [this church's] introverts to feel good about themselves.' The (introverted) conservative evangelical pastor who took her into the service said afterwards 'with gentle exasperation': 'greeting people, the lengthy sermon, the singing - there was no emphasis on quiet, liturgy, ritual, things that give you space for contemplation... Sometimes I feel like I'm going through the motions. The outward enthusiasm and passion that seems to be part and parcel of [the church] culture doesn't feel natural. Not that introverts can't be eager and enthusiastic, but we're not as overtly expressive as extroverts. At a place like [this] you can start questioning your own experience of God. Is it really as strong as that of other people who look the part of the devout believer?'

I can hear extraverts cry: 'choral evensong is all very well for you introverts. What about us?' That's an important question. I guess that the task of liturgy is to embrace all sorts and conditions so that everyone is included and no one feels alienated as somehow a second class worshipper. That was Thomas Cranmer's great project - to create a liturgy that was genuinely common prayer, words and rituals that would not divide people but unite them in one koinonia, a fellowship of faith and love. This postmodern world has made the ideal much harder to attain than in his day. For now there are supposedly no grand narratives any more, only bits and pieces, all equally valid, with which we play at bricolage and piece texts and actions together in whatever way we choose. Extraverts and introverts are bound to do that in very different ways. 

But I would like to think that together we can create liturgy that is generous enough to have space for everyone. I doubt if an introvert would introduce a liturgical silence by saying 'Come on all you extraverts, just shut up and be quiet for once!' What matters is how we are natural and easy about acknowledging in public the extraverted and introverted sides that make up each of us. That calls for traditional Anglican grace and sensitivity that I need to learn and re-learn as much as the worship leader with whom I began.