A FUTURE NOT OUR OWN

In the comfortable Western church, Easter can be a rather formulaic, even twee, affair. "Living outside the box" can be a matter not so much of life-and-death as 'feeling a bit pepped up'. It is salutary to be reminded that for many, many people in a world torn apart by violence, despair, sickness, death and injustice, the stakes look (and are) incomparably higher. On Monday we mark the 28th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Oscar Romero, gunned down by El Salvadorean death squads for his stand alongside the poor. His prayer/poem Prophets of a future not our own remains, for me, an extraordinary declaration of the Easter vision - hopeful and yet profoundly realistic about limits. I'm doing the intercessions at St Stephen's in Exeter today, and will use it as a preliminary reading.

It helps, now and then, to step back
and take the long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of
the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.
Nothing we do is complete,
which is another way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.

This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

We may never see the end results,
but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders,
ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.

(c) literary estate of Oscar Romero

VERY DROLL...

WRONGS, RITES, BITS AND PEACES

Goodness, a flurry of posts. These are arising from the work I'm throwing myself into at the moment, in anticipation of a holiday coming up soon! Anyway, a friend of mine who has been very supportive of Ekklesia, and valuably involved with us, has just dropped a note to draw attention to the fact that The Anglican Examiner ‘Seeing Christ in Human Rights’ forum is now up and running. She writes: "I hope it will assist in exploring ‘an alternative social ethic as followers of Jesus, those who trust in his cross and risen life’ (to use your phrase)."

My friend (whose name I am only not mentioning because I haven't checked if it is OK to do so) adds: "I read with interest your articles on the resurrection and on [the church's] foreign policy. While I am not (yet?) a complete pacifist, valuable points are made, and Peter Selby’s piece is clear and timely."

Of course Peter wouldn't necessarily go where I do with this issue either. But I responded as follows, and offer this here as a clarification of were I'm coming from, as I do recognise that it is worrying for some people, and also a little contrary, I hope, to the way the 'war and peace' debate is conducted in mainstream Christian circles:

"My aim is not to persuade Christians to adopt an ideology called ‘pacifism’, but to recognise that ultimately the way of Jesus and the way of violence point in opposite directions. We, of course, are located in the mess produced by various attempts to prove things to be otherwise, and I recognise that this is dangerous moral, theological and political territory to occupy. I do think that the refusal of violence as far as is humanly possible (and certainly as a strategy, or as a means of securing the interests of the church) ought to become a key identity marker for followers of Christ in the modern era.

"However, in seeking that path, I want to face the real limitations and contradictions of peacemaking, and not to adopt either a morally superior attitude, a selective approach to reading the world’s conflicts, or a seductive idealism or romanticism. Or to despise those who think and act differently. That is what my forthcoming book is all about - the threat of resurrection and the difficulty of Christ’s peace, not a rosy piety about it all.

"Bonhoeffer is a great encouragement in all this. He very clearly saw the way of Jesus Christ leading away from trust in the power of the sword, yet he ended up embroiled in a plot to kill Hitler. He never sought to justify this theologically, or as a matter of church policy, but only said that we must do all we can to thwart evil and throw ourselves on the mercy of God. In a not dissimilar way, Gandhi (in spite of his limitations, well recognised by the Dalits) was surely right to say that it is more moral to fight against injustice than to refuse to do so, but that we are constantly invited to a better path. This is one that Christians would have to finally recognise as gift rather than something we can achieve within our own means and strength.

"Anyway, I do think we need a different register of conversation between those who have previously pigeonholed themselves as ‘pacifists’ or ‘just war advocates’. And my active Christian non-violence does have a role for just war theory as a way of advocating limits on political formations that are not Christian. That does not mean the Body of Christ should be in the business of killing, however. Our call is to witness to an alternative form and source of power, and to lose sight of that is to risk losing sight of the Gospel. That, in essence, is where I am at."

HANDLING LIFE WITH CARE

Even if you don't take the absolutist position of according an embryo the full moral status of a human person from conception (and I don't), the scientific and ethical issues surrounding the current Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill going through parliament, and what may follow in the future, are complex and sensitive. But when Cardinal Keith O'Brien chucks around alarmist terms like "monstrous", "Frankenstein", "grotesque" and 'hideous" over pre-embryonic research; when he likens it to experimentation on babies; when he marginalises the issue of life-saving treatment for suffers from diseases like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's; when he assumes that all Christians must automatically share his view; and when he regards MPs (notably Catholic ones) as troops to be dragooned in a war, he demeans the character of the debate, I fear. I've just written a piece on this for Guardian Comment-is-Free. Not sure when it will be published, but I will post the link here.

TAKING US AT OUR SWORD?

Following up my previous article on the meaning of resurrection, and picking up on the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, I have penned this piece (Ekklesia, 21 Mar 08) on Why the church needs a new foreign policy.

"Contrary to some popular Christian teaching, the way of the Cross is not marked by the justified infliction of violence, but its absorption and transformation in the person of Jesus, who is God's person for us. Likewise, the Gospel's anticipated vindication is not apocalyptic fury but the life-giving of God alone, which is called resurrection.

"In reality, this is as difficult, if not more difficult, for Christians to believe in practice (in the way we live our lives) as it is for anyone to believe in theory (as a matter of intellectual debate).

"The way of the sword, by contrast, looks like the kind of 'realism' we need when faced with terror, threat and injustice. But realism of what kind? The issue as to whether and how the God of eternal peace features in our picture of what finally constitutes reality becomes crucial at this point. Religious leaders often seem unable to contemplate that possibility as they make their calculations, showing by default that whatever is being believed in, it is not, it seems, the 'weak power' of the crucified and risen one.

"Inviting others to accept a gospel which does not seriously change our options or put into question the destruction upon which we base our security is, it seems to me, more than a little problematic." Full article here.

[Pic: Jesus disarms Peter, regarded as founder of the church]

DISCOVERING GOD'S SILENCE

It is Friday afternoon. Jesus has cried his last and we head into the continuous silence of 'the long Saturday', where we live and shall continue to live, waiting for Sunday - or not. The Cambridge theologian Denys Turner, who has explored the apophatic core of traditional Christianity and has shown how it connects naturally to a radical political commitment, once wrote that "the characteristic form of God's presence is absence". The One who is closer to us than breath is also immeasurably beyond our senses and capacities, and the 'longing' that forms the bridge between the intimacy and the hope-beyond-hope of Christian believing looks for all the world like a gaping abyss. This is why authentic faith is closer to atheism than the 'new atheists' could ever imagine (not for nothing was that term coined for some early Christians as they refused the Roman pantheon).

On the other hand, final refusal of the gods (not least the ones who do not look at all 'godlike' or 'religious', but come to us as 'secular' liberators in the guise of science, progress, the market, the military, and so on) can perhaps finally only be sustained by recognising the unresolvable silence of the true God. Jesus is decisively silent, in a key moment in the Passion narrative, before what Turner calls, if I recall correctly, the "frivolous moralising" of Pilate. The Son of Man, the true herald of humanity, has nowhere to lay his head. He is made homeless by the world of manipulation and power. In this way the transcendent God, who is not the contradiction of what it is to be human but its mystery and promise, is "edged out of the world onto the cross", in Bonhoeffer's memorable phrase. Before all thought, all theology, all apprehension of the nameless forms of the divine, all prayer there is, says, Gustavo Gutierrez, the eternal silence of God.

A few years ago William T. Cavanaugh wrote a really interesting review article for Commonweal (13 March, 1998) called The god of silence: Shusaku Endo's reading of the Passion - a critique of the Japanese novel 'Silence'. It is ideal reading for this afternoon and tomorrow. He writes:

What Endo was really after, I think, was nothing less than a glimpse of a homeless God. Endo's work can be read as a profound exploration of the twisted logic of the Incarnation - the journey of God from heaven to be emptied into earthly flesh and the assumption of weakness by omnipotence. Endo's personal struggle as a Christian in Japan was the setting for his investigation of the paradox central to the lives of all Christians: the paradox of a crucified God. Thus Endo weaves together the spiritual anguish of his characters with an embattled and paradoxically orthodox theology. Here I want to examine Endo's theological search in his novel Silence and invite other Christian voices - including that of John Paul II's encyclical Veritatis splendor - into the novel's strange moral universe. More here.

FACING THE CRUCIFIED - AND THE CRUCIFIERS

'[W]hat is important for our church and for our religious institutes: that the powerful of this world look on us approvingly and support us, or that we be a cry of hope, good news for the despised of the earth? Jesus’ words – “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” – are applicable institutionally to the church and to ourselves.’ (Juan Ramón Moreno, Jesuit priest - killed in El Salvador in 1989)

In her excellent article Being on the side of the crucified, which will also appear in the Sewanee Theological Review, Savi Hensman raises questions highly appropriate to the narrative, message and calling of Good Friday. She asks:

"How highly do we prioritise the preservation of the current order and protection of existing patterns of wealth and privilege, which may benefit us individually and institutionally? In providing pastoral care to the privileged and powerful, are we able to remain detached from their outlook and encourage them to seek a higher good? Do we tend to adopt society’s values, dismissing as unimportant the hardship and injustice endured by the poor and marginalised, or are we bearers of good news even in bleak situations?

"When conflict escalates, can we resist the ‘militarization of the mind’? How willing are we to be transformed by a God of love, to look with unflinching compassion on those who suffer and seek to identify and address the causes?

"And how willing are we to risk losing what we have in order to gain what is incomparably better? Even when destruction and death seem to hold sway, can we trust in the new life which is to come and be heralds of hope?"

[Pic: Women's Cross, El Salvador - from Lutheran World]

RAISING THE EASTER QUESTIONS

No conjuring trick with bones by Simon Barrow (Ekklesia, 20 Mar 08). The modern temptation is to misunderstand (and dismiss) resurrection as childish fantasy, or else to reduce it to spiritualised sophistry. The shape of the core Christian hope is both more substantial and more subtle than that.

BOTH IN AND OUT OF TIME

Though it can sometimes be infuriatingly truncated (Melvyn Bragg does a good job, but has an unassailable broadcaster's penchant for short-circuiting anything that might demand the elliptical in thought terms), In Our Time, on BBC Radio 4, is an absolute "must listen" for me. Last week it was the impact of the Greek myths, next week the ramification of the dissolution of the monasteries. Thinkers and events often simply bypassed, ignored, subsumed or dismissed today are traced back into life and thought by a panel of specialists, including new and innovative reflectors as well as more established voices. It is a fine, talking heads format. I wish it was twice as long, but the 45 minutes is rarely squandered.

This week (today in fact, some 15 minutes ago as I write this) it was a programme on one of my key influences, Soren Kierkegaard. What was particularly pleasing was that, although Bragg didn't invite a theologian to take part (Steve Shakespeare or George Pattison would have been great), Kierkegaard the Christian thinker, and indeed the progenitor of post-Christendom, was not marginalised - though the website intro doesn't mention it. Trying to understand the man without comprehending his disturbing faith and tortured discipleship is, of course, nonsensical. But I have heard a number of people attempt it. Satre, though in a different place, certainly knew better.

One of the many pleasing aspects of the programme was that it also questioned what is popularly meant by terms like 'subjective' and 'objective', as Kierkegaard himself did. And it spears the fatuous but common charge that he was somehow an irrationalist, just because he punctured the absolutist claims of a certain kind of 'rationality' (one hugely popular today), dismissed the primacy of the philosophic over the lived, and challenged the pretensions of a kind of systematising and unifying thought traceable back to Hegel. As he was quite right to do. A marvellous broadcast, and for me the best Easter present I could imagine.

Whatever you do or don't do today, download the podcast when it becomes available later today and give it a listen. Or you can just listen for again on streaming audio for a week (until next Wednesday evening). You will thank me, I hope! Truly inspiring stuff - a good introduction to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, the waiting of Saturday and the promise of Easter Sunday - which for Kierkegaard (as for any mature reading of the Gospels and the New Testament) could never be some easy "happy ending".

Love, not 'fear and trembling' is the essence of Christianity, Kierkegaard believed. But that does not make it any more uncomfortable. (More on this to follow - there are some resources here.) Links: D. Anthony Storm's Commentary on Kierkegaard; BBC/OU Open2.net - Philosophy & Ethics; Howard and Edna Hong Kierkegaard Library; Wikipedia.

In Our Time examines the history of ideas, discussed by Melvyn Bragg and guests, including philosophy, science, literature, religion and the influence these ideas have on us today. Broadcast weekly 9am - 9.4am, Thursday. Repeated 9.30pm.

See also: Thinking outside the system.

TRAVELLING LIGHT

"Before you disagree with someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when they come after you, you are already a mile away. And you have their shoes."

CROSS-PURPOSES?

The BBC1 drama programmes depicting The Passion (concluding on Easter Sunday) have elicited some contrasting reactions. Nothing unusual in that, obviously, but they nonetheless invite us to reflect on the relationship between the viewer and the viewed - and they are indicative of the way the climate about religion is going, with more and less, well, passion. More on my latest Wardman Wire column, Getting cross and bothered. One additional comment: when I merrily suggested that Channel 4 hadn't got some daft, publicity-seeking Easter documentary on this year I was technically right. But they have, it should be noted, unveiled The Secrets of the Twelve Disciples, which looks as if it's going to be a right mess.

The presenter is Robert Beckford (pictured), who has already done a couple of other pot boilers (on the Bible and Jesus' family)... as well as a creditable documentary on slavery, work with Christian Aid and Pressureworks, and a couple of stimulating books on Black Christianity. I can't help feeling that he's stretching the theologian moniker a tad too far in the direction of tabloid telly with some of this stuff though. He says, attempting to be charitable.

(Now for a bit of light, but not un-serious, relief... try another dose of The Ongoing Adventures of ASBO Jesus.)

PUZZLEMENT AND BELIEF

Not so long ago I enjoyed a good discussion with the Oxford University Secular Society on "what the hell should we do about religion?" (or something along those lines). They are an interesting and open bunch, not affiliated to any one non-religious faction, and welcoming of people from different life- and belief-stances. It quite cheered me up about the possibility of thoughtful and non-rancorous conversation about "belief" and "non-belief", given much of the over opinionated non sense one finds in the papers and on the net these days, which is little more than cheap point scoring - without even being aware of that, half of the time. Anyway, Peter Hughes, a thoroughly good jurisprudence guy who plays a lead role in the OUSS, has written a response on his blog to my post yesterday on Kim Fabricius's sermon. Peter expresses (understandable) puzzlement at what looks to him like Christianity cutting its own feet from under it, and then wonders what sense one can make of classical claims about God anyway, and of motivations for apparently stepping outside accepted canons of 'proof'. It's an irenic and interesting contribution.

I think Kim's main point, with which I wholly agree, is that most of what are popularly thought of as the 'benefits' of Christian religion (neither my post nor his exempts Christianity from the criticisms we raise, incidentally) are in fact de-benefits, and have little to do with what is meant at a deeper level by elements of the tradition which are oft-quoted but little understood. Prayer, for example - which is not asking for cosmic favours, but learning to be 're-tuned' away from one's propensity to self-interest by engaging with a love which, being divine, is unconditioned and not bound up with self-perpetuation, because it arises from beyond the arena of competitive difference in which we are unavoidably embroiled. To be a follower of Christ is, from my experience and conviction, to discover possibilities of ‘life in a new register’ by simultaneously beginning to abandon (through the effect of what I can only call grace) the many efforts one may humanly make to 'grab' at it, along with attempts simply to avoid death. To do the reverse of what many critics of 'religion' think it is about, in other words.

As Nicholas Lash, a rather good theologian, points out - such ideas as these are entirely orthodox Christian ones, and the fact that they may not be understood by many inside and outside the churches is a symptom of just how deep the ignorance of reflective (and reflexive) Christian thought and behaviour has become in our culture. This is something for which I think the churches hold the greatest responsibility, on account of the way they (we) have allowed the Gospel vocation to be corrupted by the kind of interests of which Nietzsche and Foucault speak (albeit without hope of redemption, which is where I differ from them).

The rest of Peter's piece, Reasons for Believing, raises standard questions about the nature of belief in God, its status and its epistemic form, which, again, it seems to me, are widely philosophically misconstrued by both believers and non-believers. Some of the issues involved are tackled or alluded to in my essay 'What difference does God make today?', especially the second section. But I will try to give more succinct and focused responses when I have a bit more time. Disagreement on questions of belief are not going to go away, but it is helpful to distinguish between useful and non-useful lines of distinction, which is the spirit of Peter's approach too.

LOSING FAITH IN THE GODS

I've just received a message from someone saying, "help, I'm preaching on Easter Sunday - and I'm scared." It is from a 'lay person', as the Church so quaintly puts it. (Laos simply means "the people of God", but they are not quite special enough for some!). Many clergy, I fear, are too anaesthetised to think like that. But Caroline is right. There is a terror to the Easter message, and it has nothing to do with resurrection as a 'get out clause'. We will come to that issue later. First, thanks to Rob Telford, I chanced upon Kim Fabricius's passionate Palm Sunday sermon, Lose Your Faith. There's a we bit of, um, overkill here, maybe (aagh... I can be very English), but the assault on sentimental religion and the recognition of Jesus' death as an assault on false gods, many of them perpetuated in his name, is sound. I have often described Christianity, rightly understood, as the most effective way of not believing the kind of nonsense perpetuated by so much religion, Christian religion included. But in the pity is also the possibility, the echo of a future not our own. That, rather than the consolation of magic, is where we en up later in the week. Meanwhile, Kim writes that the Cross invites us to:

'Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell...

'No one puts it more starkly – or more honestly and truthfully – than Bonhoeffer. We must recognize, he wrote from prison, “that we have to learn to live in the world ‘as if God were not here’. And this is just what we do recognize – before God! God himself compels us to recognize it… God would have us know that we must live as men and women who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us… Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world and onto the cross” – and then down from the cross and into the grave. “He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.” God a Super-Power? That god is a demon, the devil. If that god is your Lord, this week is a call for “regime change”.' (Walter Brueggemann).

[Picture (c). Hans Holbein’s painting “Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb”.]

SOMETHING RATHER THAN NOTHING

"One should never forget about the temporary and transitory character of all physical theories and models. Even if some of them have successfully undergone the confrontation process with empirical data, they always can become a 'special case' of a future more general theory, or of a model. The new conceptual environment could make their present philosophical or theological interpretation no longer attractive, or even highly artificial. Scientific theories or models are per se neutral with respect to theological or philosophical interpretations. They can be interpreted in various ways as long as these interpretations do not contradict their mathematical structure. This does not mean that all such interpretations are on an equal footing; only that they cannot be refuted by arguments taken from these theories or models alone (because we suppose that these interpretations are not contradictory with their mathematical structures). Theological or philosophical interpretations of scientific theories or models can, of course, critically compete with each other. Karl Popper’s “criterion of disputability” clearly applies to them: any rational interpretation should be open for discussion and criticism by its rivals."

"...The question on ultimate causality is translated into another Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz’s question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (from his Principles of Nature and Grace). When asking this question, we are not asking about a cause like all other causes. We are asking about the root of all possible causes."

"Adherents of the so-called intelligent design ideology commit a grave theological error. They claim that scientific theories, that ascribe the great role to chance and random events in the evolutionary processes, should be replaced, or supplemented, by theories acknowledging the thread of intelligent design in the universe. Such views are theologically erroneous. They implicitly revive the old [Manichean] error postulating the existence of two forces acting against each other: God and an inert matter; in this case, chance and intelligent design. There is no opposition here. Within the all-comprising mind of God what we call chance and random events is well composed into the symphony of creation." - Michael Heller, cosmologist and winner of the 2008 Templeton Prize.

And in his New Scientist interview: "Everything depends on your concept of rationality. Science is a model of rationality. The question is whether the limits of rationality coincide with limits of the scientific method. If they do, then there is no place for religion or theology because everything outside of the scientific method is automatically irrational. On the other hand, if you agree that they do not coincide then there is a place for rational religious belief. If you look at the recent history of science and philosophy, you can see that the dominating philosophy in western countries was positivistic, it said that the scientific method is identical with rationality and that what’s beyond the scientific method is beyond rationality. Nowadays very few philosophers agree with this; we are more pluralistic."

[Picture (c) csmonitor]

FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE IRAQ WAR

"What would happen if Christians devoted the same discipline and self-sacrifice to nonviolent peacemaking that armies devote to war?" Ron Sider, Mennonite theologian in a talk which helped the coming into being of Christian Peacemaker Teams.

DISTURBING THE PEACE

As the world around him descended further into chaos in 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: "The important thing today is that we should be able to discern from the fragment of our life how the whole was arranged and planned, and what material it consists of. For really, there are some fragments that are only worth throwing into the dustbin . . . and others whose importance lasts for centuries, because their completion can only be a matter for God, and so they are fragments that must be fragments."

Teresa Berger comments: "In the end, Bonhoeffer’s own life became a fragment, abruptly broken off yet pointing to wholeness. As Bonhoeffer had understood in his prison cell, if brokenness and crisis were to become 'that edge where change is possible,' this crisis would have to be sustained by something stronger than the human. In a world whose systems of meaning do not bring life and flourishing, the crisis brought by the fire of the burning bush might just constitute good news. [The] gospel calls us... to the crisis that is God’s consuming and compelling presence. Life cannot flourish without this crisis."

(Picture: Jesus entering Jerusalem)

A GLINT OF THE IRISH

Ireland celebrated the Feast of St Patrick yesterday (early, as it cannot be celebrated in Holy Week). But what would St Patrick - arguably the most famous Celtic saint - make of the practices and beliefs called 'Celtic Spirituality' today? In the excellent online journal of the British Jesuits, Thinking Faith, Liam Tracey examines whether the Celtic church was really anything like the romantic picture often painted of it. Read the article here. This is a topic which has interested me from a number of angles over the years. The book I co-edited for CTBI in 2001, Christian Mission in Western Society, has an excellent article on the respective traditions of Columba and Augustine (usually portrayed as opposites) which unpacks the myths of 'the Celtic'. Its author, academic Michael McGraith comments, on passing a religious bookshop in Cambridge, that the enthusiastic books on Celtic spirituality are not very scholarly and the scholarly books are not very enthusiastic! Later in the same volume, Jay Kothare looks at how popularized versions of these traditions have been a surprisingly helpful resource in the multi-faith, inner city situations in which he was worked as an Anglican priest. The economy of the Spirit is, indeed, surprising and unpredictable. Incidentally, this summer my father-in-law, Willard Roth, is leading a pilgrimage around Celtic and other sites in Britain for a group of American Mennonites (as he done several times over the years). I hope to link up with them at some point. Oh, yes... the title for this post is from Kevin Scully's play (in case he is watching).

FACING THE TRUTH ABOUT IRAQ

I am honoured to be chairing and facilitating an inter-faith meeting in Central London tomorrow (15 March 2008) looking at responses to British involvement in the war, occupation and its aftermath in Iraq. Among the speakers will be Phil Shiner, a leading lawyer (also a Christian as it happens, and the Law Society's current 'solicitor of the year') who has jointly represented survivors of an appalling massacre at Abu Naji in 2004; Mazin Younis, who heads up an Iraqi unity coalition and helped rescue a young orphan from Fallujah; and David Moore, a Methodist minister and artist. There is more information here and here. (Incidentally, and since I have already been cross-questioned about this: yes, of course I deplore the sectarian killing and violence by the various factions in Iraq, and those fuelling them from the outside. But the collusion of the West with Saddam Hussein's murderous regime and the subsequent decision to launch an invasion without real thought about the laws of unintended consequences, planning for the future or willingness to accept the moral and legal scrutiny of what developed have hardly proved an adequate 'answer' to the terrible wrongs that preceded them.)

REDIRECTED DESIRES

Lent is popularly thought of, if it is thought of at all, as a matter of "self-denial". Which in turn means "being hard on yourself". A better understanding, I think, is that it is a period when we have the opportunity to go straight to the heart of things rather than getting caught up in the house of twisted desires, to develop good habits in place of destructive ones, to seek nourishment in something more substantial than, er, fast food.

"Inherent in a fast is a feast. When we fast from divisive patterns of relating with others, we feast on the amazing awareness that each face we see is the face of Christ. When we fast from building social, economic, and political walls, we feast on our universal oneness with the One... When we fast from food, we feast on prayer and God’s bountiful love." -- Marilyn Brown Oden, Wilderness Wanderings

"Most of us have to taste our need in a fierce sort of way before our hungers jar us into turning our lives over to God.... In the Divine arms we become less demanding and more like the One who holds us. Then we experience new hungers. We hunger and thirst for justice, for goodness and holiness. We hunger for what is right... Most of us are not nearly hungry enough for the things that really matter. That’s why it is so good for us to feel a gnawing in our guts." -- Macrina Wiederkehr

LOYALTY BEYOND 'QUEEN AND COUNTRY'

Good citizenship is not about flag-waving, metaphorically or otherwise. It's about the just practices, shared habits and practical ways of organising our public lives which enable people to belong to one another across boundaries like those created by nation states, not in subjection to them. What we need is global citizenship to frame our commitments to family, group and nation. In this sense, the government, which has found itself in a pickle over a suggestion by Lord Goldsmith that school pupils should swear allegiance to Queen and country, has got it the wrong way round. The bones of my response on behalf of Ekklesia are here: Good citizens question ‘national pride’, says Christian think tank. It will not escape people's attention, I hope, that there are profound theological questions bound up in all this. So I have written a fuller article called Which citizenship, whose kingdom? [Also on OpenDemocracy, What is 'national' pride?]

ONE LAW FOR THE RICH

"They deprive the poor of justice in the courts." (Amos 5.12)

For many months, my wife has been wearing a badge on her coat in support of the Law Society's What Price Justice? campaign, highlighting the dismal impact of the UK government's legal aid 'reforms' - which are heading in the direction of the closure of public law centres, the exit of key professionals from an area of law vital to the most vulnerable, and the ongoing loss of adequate representation for those at the bottom of the heap. As Madeleine Bunting says in today's Guardian ('Labour's handling of legal aid makes a mockery of its rhetoric on fairness'), what is happening is an absolute scandal. Apparently, the Legal Services Commission, which has been shrouding the issue in smoke and mirrors, in spite of losing both the case and the argument for unified contracts at the Court of Appeal, is furious about this article. Expect another hand wringing apologia shortly. The LSC and the government are just not listening to the evidence. At a grassroots level, the Access to Justice Alliance (supported by community groups, national charities, lawyers, advisers and others) continues to press for a proper settlement for legal aid. [See also this linked blog on Ekklesia]

UNITING AND REGENERATING CHURCH

Many, many congratulations to Roberta Rominger, who has just been announced as the next general secretary of the United Reformed Church. She is a very good person (and I hope the fact that I say this doesn't undermine her!) and will guide the URC with a thoughtful, creative and gently firm touch, I am sure. Not that I would unambiguously wish church leadership positions on anyone I care for right now. It's a difficult time both internally and externally. But on the Free Church front (remember non-conformity, anyone?), having Roberta at the URC and Martyn Atkins, current president, moving into a similar position at the Methodist Church is very good news indeed. Both need support, encouragement, honesty, constructive criticism and prayer from those of us operating at the margins, as well as those within the institutions. They will, of course, seek to steer their ships securely, but they both understand that the way forward in a turbulent, dare I say post-Christendom, environment comes through discipleship not safety first. Anyway, go gal! And listen to these two people, not just your policy wonks, Rowan.

THE EXCLUDING CIRCLE?

One of the many things I love about St Stephen's Church in the Central Parish of Exeter, where I have been a member for four years or so, is that every other week we have a lay-led liturgy and discussion - with space for group conversation and also for quiet reflection for those who need it. As a way of combining prayerfulness, socialising and an opportunity to be open, exploratory and thoughtful about faith and life, it sets a good example. Because we are quite small, it is also possible, and usually very fruitful, to sit in a circle rather than rows.

So far so good. The point of sitting 'in the round', picking up Letty Russell's image, is that it is inclusive, non-hierarchical and relational. And indeed that is the way that it proves, for those who are used to it and have some familiarity with 'the circle'. But if you are a visitor, it can be, ironically, worrying and excluding. This morning, not long after we had started, two people stuck their heads round the door. "Come on in", someone called out in a friendly way. Instead, looking slightly startled, they turned on their heels and fled. It would have seemed inappropriate to chase after them, but you can't help feeling a sense of regret. Had it been a "normal service", then it would have been possible for them to sneak in at the back. Something I have often done myself, in fact.

My point is not that St Stephen's should re-sculpt our Meeting Point events. Far from it. They work, for many people. Of course, we should (and do) make some effort to keep a space in the circle, a seat at the end, some spare chairs, and where possible, someone to say hello near the door. But it still won't be for everyone. No form or shape of church worship will, no matter how emergent or traditional (or something combining the two) it seeks to be. What's needed, it seems to me, is for churches with different aptitudes and styles to make the most of what they are good at, and to think of the 'entry point' in the context of what is on offer. Walking in on a circle cold will always be difficult for most people, but being introduced to it by someone you know, or through social contact is a different matter.

What's important is for us to realise that while inclusion and exclusion have their obvious patterns and dominant causes (especially when the church is deliberately being exclusive, as some are), both occur in far subtler ways, too. Blame or guilt about this, or some fantasy that there is a 'technical solution', isn't the issue. Adaptability, awareness and openness is.

Other pieces on the 'communities of conviction' theme: Communities of liberating conviction; congregating for a change; disturbing our power games; doing church differently.

DISTURBING OUR POWER GAMES

"Power understood as the ability to accomplish desired ends is present in human relationships no matter how particular communities or societies are organized. Nevertheless, Christian communities [should] recognize that the source of power in their life is the love of Christ which inspires and directs them. This is a style of power not of coercion but of empowerment of others.... It also connects to those at the margins of society who search for word of God’s love and justice." -- Letty M. Russell, Church in the Round: Feminist interpretation of the church

"The function of the Holy Spirit is to comfort the disturbed and to disturb the comfortable" -- John Wesley.

That latter quotation has long been my favourite rendition of the role of paraclete. I first picked it up years ago from one of Colin Morris's set piece oratorial master classes. It has been widely attributed but goes back, I'm told, to Wesley. That would make sense. There is, of course, both the comfortable and the disturbed in most of us, in most churches, most communities and most situations. The divine disturbance is frequently a reversal of expectations, an irruption of the excluded or marginalised into our best laid plans, a questioning of our answers, an antidote to our attempts to be "in control", a retort to the imprisonment of law and text, and a confounding of ecclesial and other power structures.

As I have often observed in relation to sentimental interpretations of Psalm 23, the word 'comfort' has resonances of 'advocate' in the Greek, paraklētos, and 'to strengthen' in the Latin, confortare ... so it isn't a matter of mere consolation. Those who think that "religion is a crutch" have clearly not seriously contemplated the Way of the Cross (we are a week away from Palm Sunday, when Jesus' entry into Jerusalem confirms the determination of the powers-that-be to do him down) or the profound disturbance of the Spirit, whose identity over and against false spiritualities, destructive Zeitgeists, lies in bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, and sight to the blind (Luke 4).

Incidentally, just as the name Corpus Christi has been abused to name nuclear weapons systems (with court prophets called in to "bless" them), so Paraclete is also the name of a military superstore. "Armour you can trust". Not quite Zechariah 4.6, then.

[Picture © UrbisMediaProductions. The Paraclete watches over a derelict small-town church in Haliewa, Hawaii.]

LIES, TRUTHS AND THOSE WHO TELL THEM

Sifting my way through the media, which I do on a regular basis as part of my work, can be pretty dispiriting. In the true meaning of that word, it can suck the life out of you. Accusation, aspersion and condemnation is so frequently the overriding currency of analysis. Little space is available for attending to what is good, true, honourable, worthy and life-giving. And when it is, you can be sure someone will try to have a pop at it.

There are, of course, plenty of things in this world that deserve to be condemned. But the tendency to see who can be blamed for what actions, to assess the worth of a person purely on one headline, and to form general judgments on the basis of who did what in very particular circumstances can result in a pretty thin moral environment. To put it mildly. Much more attention needs to be paid to the culture we are creating (not least through the media, which is the nexus of transaction for human affairs these days) and the character of persons and communities as foundational for assessing what is being advocated or contested.

This is one of the issues that Dietrich Bonhoeffer addressed in his distinctly contemporary and yet distinctly old-fashioned lectures on Ethics. Douglas Huff from the Department of Philosophy, Gustavus Adolphus College in St Peter, Minnesota, prepared a useful little summary of the resulting posthumous book for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy a couple of years ago. He puts it like this:

'To lie is wrong, but what is worse than the lie is the liar, for the liar contaminates everything he says, because everything he says is meant to further a cause that is false. The liar as liar has endorsed a world of falsehood and deception, and to focus only on the truth or falsity of his particular statements is to miss the danger of being caught up in his twisted world. This is why, as Bonhoeffer says, that "(i)t is worse for a liar to tell the truth than for a lover of truth to lie" (Ethics, p.67). A falling away from righteousness is far worse that a failure of righteousness. To focus exclusively on the lie and not on the liar is a failure to confront evil.'

Bonhoeffer, remember, was writing out of the context of the monumental lie that was the Nazi state, where good people regularly had to lie to preserve the truth, and liars could speak truths of no import to the overall scheme of the things that they were actively party to. The questions that must follow on from this are: how can truthful character be formed? and what is truth in politics? These are the focus of a fine essay by the joyously irascible Stanley Hauerwas published by the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton.

American Public Media has a good feature (in 'Speaking of Faith', with Krista Tippett) on Bonhoeffer, ethics and the will of God available here.

NO MIND-FORGED MANACLES

BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day is a good idea that involves stopping to think about life and ethics in the midst of busyness - one which varies considerably in quality. They also seem to have covertly dropped my colleague Jonathan Bartley for daring to suggest that non-religious people might occasionally get a go, but that's another matter. This morning, Vishvapani (pictured), a member of the Western Buddhist Order, gave a very interesting 3 minutes on the House of Lords' recent vote, endorsed by six bishops (though the Church of England has been equivocal about the matter), to initiate the final burial of our 300 year-old blasphemy laws. Not before time.

Vishvapani made the point that the relative lack of fuss about this shows just how little "religious authority" counts for, with most people in Britain, these days. He also correctly pointed out that legally punishable blasphemy came about as a means of protecting the state at a time when God, king and country were inseparably woven. We no longer live in such times, thankfully.

The editor of Dharma Life magazine drew on thinkers like William Blake as embodying a much more hopeful tradition of dissent. His view that this approach is automatically opposed to the idea of "a creator God" and to "Christian orthodoxy" depends upon understandings of those concepts that I'd also contest; but I would want to point out (and indeed I am doing so, right now!) that these are not the only or best ways of comprehending them. The creativity of God and the grammar of truthfulness in traditional Christian thought are deeply linked to the nonconformity that goes right back to Jesus and the Gospels.

Anyway, Vishvapani concluded that for Blake, practicing blasphemy (as defined by the state) "meant more than cocking a snook at authority. It was a way to shatter the 'mind-forged manacles' that bind the imagination, and open up new mental and spiritual possibilities. From his perspective, and from that of Buddhism, our culture's dominant understanding of human life, which is shaped by secular materialism, is also limiting. Blake regarded materialism as another false idol; and perhaps if he lived in our day, that would be the target of his blaspheming fury."

Not all secularists are materialists in that way, of course, any more than religious people are automatically non-materialists (think of the so-called 'prosperity Gospel'), or all Christian dissidents are non-orthodox, but the overall point is well made.

MY HUB BUFFED AND POLISHED

At last I have a newly refurbished home page, which includes a revised bibliography and list of miscellaneous articles/research papers, as well as links to all the other places I find myself writing these days. I've been a bit embarrassed about the old hub sitting there untouched since goodness knows when (I do, but I'm not saying). One more 'to do' box ticked, then.

POLITICIANS DOING GOD?

I interviewed Nick Clegg, the new Liberal Democrat leader (pictured), for 45 minutes on Monday. (Right now he's licking his wounds from a mauling over the Euro referendum issue, of course). He came across as a decent and thoughtful man. I can't say much about the exchange at this juncture, as Third Way, the Christian social comment monthly, will be publishing Q&A excerpts as the 'High Profile' feature, probably in their May issue. However, as a trailer, I have today done my fortnightly Wardman Wire 'Thinking Aloud' column on an issue related to Clegg's personal convictions, the matter of politicians doing or not doing God. In addition, I write the monthly 'Westminster watch' column for Third Way - which is about to re-launch with a snazzy new design. See also the earlier Ekklesia pieces: Subverting the manifestos (around the time of the last general election) and God and the politicians.

KEEPING IT ON TAP

There's always plenty of valuable material on Jane Stranz's personal blog, Of Life, laughter and liturgy. I keep meaning to refer to things there, as with Deirdre Good's and Johan Maurer's (among others - including Dave Walker, who has subverted his way onto the Church Times, I see). But then mentioning them here means you can go off and read them yourself. One of Jane's recent offerings, topical for Lent:

"The latest post on Seven weeks for Water focuses on bottled water and church and NGO campaigns encouraging us to think outside the bottle. If you can turn on a tap at home and pour yourself a glass of water you're among the most privileged 15% of people in the world. The latest Ecumenical Water Network newsletter is available... Please also keep sharing information about the Ecumenical youth summer school on water."

A nice twist on this theme is the news that British chancellor Alistair Darling will drink tap water when he delivers his budget prognostications next week. No surprise there, you would think, unless you knew about the quaint parliamentary custom whereby the chancellor has traditionally been allowed to break the House of Commons "no alcohol" rule on this one occasion. Gordon Brown, true son of the Scottish manse, used to favour Highland Spring as opposed to anything stronger, but most Tory money-men have been dedicated tipplers.

Being under the influence is, apparently, a desirable if not necessary qualification for running the British economy. I couldn't possibly comment. Incidentally, the UK's licensing laws were introduced during the first world war, to keep the workers in line - that is, to make sure that they were in a fit state to go on churning out munitions. The exceptions included Oxford and Cambridge universities, where the sons of fortune were deemed suitable to drink intoxicating beverages at any time of day or night. Ah, the English class system...

To finish on a constructive note: here's the End Water Poverty Now site.

QUICK LENTEN THOUGHTS

"Conversion to God is equally linked to conversion to the love of neighbour." - Segundo Galilea

"We should never neglect to listen to any discourse that supports piety, virtues, and good behaviour." - Bernard of Clairvaux

"Prayer should be brief and pure, unless it happen to be lengthened by an impulse or inspiration of divine grace." - The Rule of St Benedict

(The last one reminds me of the famous interview with the late Archbishop Michael Ramsey, a wonderful man. Asked how long he prayed each day, he said something along the lines of "sometimes only about about two minutes... but it takes several hours to prepare for those minutes.")

THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SOCIETY

... and, pace Margaret Thatcher, it is about more than adding individuals and families together while effectively treating them as autonomous units. (This is the import of her famous, or infamous, 'Sermon on the Mound', in which she didn't so much deny the social - in that sense her speech to the Church of Scotland's general assembly was misreported - as to reduce it to a function of the abstract person.)

By contrast, at the heart of the Gospel of Jesus, it seems to me, lies a dynamic for living towards a different kind of community founded on those pushed to the margins by the dominant political-religious order, a rediscovery of the unrestricted grace of God, the power of forgiveness and repentance, eschatological reservation, and a new set of basic social relations and practices (including economic sharing, foot washing, gathering & dispersal, and extravagant hospitality) which recognise the interdependence, solidarity and mutual creativity that builds us into something far greater (and also far more knowingly fallible) than the heroic individual can imagine.

In that sense, rather than through over-attachment to an ideology, I hope, I have always considered myself to be a socialist. I still do. But what does that mean any more, after the apparent triumph of the global market system (actually a set of systems of uneven quality, shaped by a military-postindustrial-consumer-communications complex), the rise of social movements including environmentalism (neglected by the ruling political ideas of modernity), and the death of various disastrous experiments in 'command socialism'? This is part of the debate going on in the journal Soundings, which curiously echoes the name of a publication arising from the theological foment of the 1960s in Britain. But that, as they say, is another story. One disruptively vital (I believe) question I would want to inject into secular discourses, as a Christian who doesn't think that people get to be good primarily by willpower, idealism or politics, is "whither redemption?" According to John Gray and others this is what we can no longer believe in safely. In Black Mass and elsewhere, he is often cuttingly right... but finally wrong. I shall return to that one in due course. The other key question the left is generally unaware of is post-Christendom. But I would say that.

Meanwhile, I was struck by this quotation, courtesy of Basem Adi, from Zygmunt Bauman, whose writings (often considered distinctly idiosyncratic, but still very fertile) I have been directed back to in the last year by the splendid Jordan Tchilingirian, who has assisted Ekklesia with research over the past year or so. Bauman said:

I don’t understand socialism as a type of society or social formation … I don’t believe there is such thing as a socialist society. Socialism is postulating a point of view where you are looking at things – I very often use the metaphor of a knife pressed with its edge against the existing society. Socialism is believing that no society is just enough – that there is always some injustice which ought to be fought against. To give you another comparison: if you take a bridge and try to establish what is its carrying power, you don’t take the carrying power of every pillar add them together and then divide by the number of pillars – you don’t take the average carrying power of an average pillar. But you measure the carrying power of the bridge by the carrying power of the weakest pillar. And unfortunately in our societies, you measure the well-being of a society by GNP, and [Gross National Product] is precisely like measuring the carrying power of the bridge according to the average carrying power, the medium pillar. It is wrong because the quality – and this is socialist belief and my own – that you judge a society by is the decency of living of the weakest.

Quite. That last point was central to the thought and action (praxis) of the Hebrew prophets, in whose footsteps, among others, Jesus seems to have seen himself following.

Incidentally, A selection of Soundings articles is available free in the Reading Room.

THE ECONOMICS OF SALVATION?

According to my good 'Christianity with attitude' colleague Giles Fraser, writing in the Church Times, the Adam Smith Institute - which I mentioned critically recently - has "just exploded a bomb under Fairtrade Fortnight" by asking whether fair trade is really efficacious, or whether it is just another way of well-meaning liberals keeping the poor in poverty. I agree with Giles that tough questions need to be asked, but the ones ASI poses are really not very new (Thatcherites were saying the same thing in the 1980s) and instantiating them without also looking at the manifest failures of trickle-down theory, the 'green revolution', what really happened with commodities in the 1980s and 1990s, and the other myths of 'salvation by free markets' is less bold than it claims.

Giles' article, Is Fairtrade the same as fair?, is worth reading. But I fear that in his swing from the command-economy left, he may too readily be falling prey to the blandishments of another kind of ideology. I wrote a 'quick response' for FinS, but it turned out to be an article. So it has now been published on Ekklesia as Fairness, trade and free market ideology.

CONGREGATING FOR A CHANGE

In pursuing the "what kind of church?" question for a bit, I will split the honours with my workblog on Ekklesia - which I keep in play from time-to-time, but receives less attention than it should. Doing church differently links to the online version of James Hopewell's innovative Congregation: Stories and Structures (1987), and sets it in context. When I was at Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (1996-2005) I commissioned and foreworded a series of books on shifting patterns of ecclesial life: Changing Churches (Jeanne Hinton and Bishop Peter Price), Changing Communities (Jeanne again), Changing Mission (Stuart Murray of the Anabaptist Network UK and Urban Expression) and Changing Evangelisation (Philip Knights, writing from a Catholic perspective). The idea was to create a dialogue around fresh expressions of church - a bandwagon the Church of England has now jumped on, though without an explicit ecumenical commitment. The series was part of the Building Bridges of Hope process, which was looking at ways in which congregations could transition into new situations and possibilities, taking the best of their inheritance with them.

COMMUNITIES OF LIBERATING CONVICTION

People sometimes ask me, apropos stuff that I write here, elsewhere or on Ekklesia, "what kind of churches are on this wavelength?" Or "can I find a church that lives the post-Christendom hope?" Well, yes, of course. I list some of them here on FaithInSociety. Often this question arises from some profoundly negative experiences or appraisals of institutional church life or of overbearing authority. Ones that I can very much identify with. Back in 1999 (with some amendments in 2002) I wrote an impassioned piece called Facing back or hoping forth? Based on a lecture, it still expresses my core convictions, though in its evident desire to demolish the negative, the unhelpfully fixed (stuck), the sacerdotal (as distinct from the sacramental), the hierarchical, the exclusively clerical, and the institutional, it may fairly be accused of lacking sufficient attention to preservation and transmission. There is a legitimate conservatism that is part of the overall mix, as well as one which holds us back and refuses the God who is always ahead and beyond.

But in spite of its many lesions and sins, the church - understood as a plural reality with a singular focus - comprises those communities of conviction that convey the Gospel in word, deed and mutuality. Or not, as the case may be. Usually it is a mixture of the two. We are human. As Jon Sobrino says in his wonderful book The True Church and the Poor (SCM), what is authentic within the life of the gathered and dispersed Body of Christ in the world is finally something revealed by God, not something inherent within any particular human institution. Even (perhaps especially) one that claims to be 'of God'. The church is, or is not, what it says it is in its proximity to, or avoidance of, the wounds of Christ in the world. So, though I flinch at some expressions of this (which can be very inward-looking), the notion of church as exemplary community increasingly strikes me as vital in order to give concrete expression to the personal and social transformations we seek.

Church can be a real pain, for sure. But I have little time for the self-loathing and abandonment that some rightful critiques of ecclesial power can lead to - not least because they often end up in acts of misplaced faith: projecting the kingdom of God onto this or that worldly order. I got caught up in that myself in Nicaragua in the 1980s. And while I don't at all knock the social experiments that many of us have been involved in through liberation theology, the broken dreams of Sandinismo ought to tell us where we went wrong as well as who and what we should trust. [Liberation theology after Christendom is a theme to which I shall return]

So what can and should the church-as-witness be, in different ways and in different places? The answer is a vulnerable but hopeful group of people narrated together in the story and life of Jesus, in such a way that we find ourselves linking worship (the right designation of worth-ship), prayer (seeking the grace to live beyond our means), eucharist (the celebration of God in the fleshly and the material), common life (people-at-odds who surprisingly find each other in the face of Christ) and politics (re-rendering power in terms of giving rather than claiming). This doesn't happen in one particular denomination. I know Anglican, Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Mennonite and other peace churches where it occurs very powerfully. Plus others where it does not. However the project of renewing, re-energising and re-visioning church from the grassroots is for me crucially linked to the struggle for peace, justice and sustainability within the larger world.

This is because the Gospel puts us onto a source and understanding of hope which is utterly distinctive, though frequently betrayed - the power of a love that can undergo and triumph over brokenness because its basis is not our frailty but the endlessness of divine potentiality received as gift. This is the shape of who and what Jesus is in the purposes of God and the fluency of the Spirit. If you can get that down your supermarket, through democratic bargaining, through religious obeisance, or in an adversarial, rights-based order, do let me know. I haven't spotted it yet. Or in the institutional church, very much, sadly. Instead, it often arises in unexpected people and places - not just Christian ones, but among those of all faiths and none. The Spirit blows where she will, as the Gospel puts it. It is these places in which ekklesia, both explicit and potential, named and unnamed, actual and anticipatory, happens. But how? [to be continued]