New writing

Thanks to all those who’ve been asking about my new book: “Recipes for Good Living: the Beginners Guide to Spirituality.” It’s published on June 29th but is available for purchase now online.

The third volume in my “Risk” series is well underway. People have been asking for a taster. So here some thoughts about the Church’s vocation, from “Risk-shaped Ministry.”

There was a time when the idea of vocation –of calling– had a deep resonance with people everywhere. God was understood to have created the world; but the Hebrew verb “barah” of Gen 1:1 means both to “create,” to “actualize.” So in creating us, God is directing us in the ways which will actualize our potential. As though, at our creation, God spoke to us and called us into particular forms of potential and promise that are unique both to our species and to each of us in our own individual humanity and personhood. Everything has been created called, and actualized. Everything, quite literally, has a calling, a vocation.

Jesus too had a vivid sense of his own unique vocation discerned powerfully at his baptism when, rising out of the water, he heard a heavenly voice calling to him: “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased (Mk1:11; Lk3:22. See also Matt3:17).” And this sense of divine vocation into his own birthright and destiny as a “Son of God” is one that he seeks to extend to all those he meets on his journeys. For all are called to join the community of those who were being re-created –re-called– to a life of healing, service, and inclusive belonging. And the astonishing creativity amongst whom this discovery was made –in that band of followers around Jesus as much as in the early church community described in Acts– was as transformative as it was infectious.

Unfortunately, given the hierarchical societies in which early Christianity existed, it was impossible for long for the church to maintain the radical notion that all people might be called, empowered, and transformed in this way. So the notion of having a vocation eventually became restricted to an entirely male order of ordained deacons and presbyters who swiftly took control of the church and its practices and who served to maintain and police its boundaries.

Since then, save for the very recent usage of the term to denote a specific range of “vocational” training courses for often less well-paid kinds of employment, the idea of vocation has become almost entirely bound up with the notion of clericalism. To the point where a more meaningfully creative, inclusive, and collaborative sense of the vocation of all people – believers and non-believers alike – has been effectively lost.

Yes – we might justifiably rail about the dominance of the clergy that so often actively excludes lay participation. We could easily lament the way in which overwork and unrealistic expectations put unbearable pressure on the fewer numbers of clergy that are coming forward (or for which the church can afford to pay). We should certainly recognize that clergy have often become the scapegoats for the sorry state in which the church finds itself. And some of this we will consider later. But the significant issue, to my mind, is that we need to discover and share a new and alluring sense of inclusive vocation.

Just as vocation originally referred to God’s creation of the universe, by creating, speaking, and calling it into being, so vocation is intimately connected with matter, atoms, and stardust: with the stuff of life, with flesh, bodies, and bodily fluids. And any Christian understanding of vocation must by necessity also include this dimension.

Christians need to be people who are familiar and at ease with the embodied nature of vocation. For vocation is not a calling to the mind or spirit alone. Vocation does not seek to separate the immaterial heavenly soul from its sinful earthly body, as people once believed. So a fresh understanding of vocation, of God’s calling of individuals and communities, must help us to engage and celebrate the very physicality of our once so despised bodies and senses, as least as much as we have hitherto chosen to rely more or less exclusively on our minds and spirits, for moral discernment, social action, and imaginative, creative discipleship.

Consequently in a world where we have gradually allowed market forces to hijack “very successfully the language of desire and longing (Grey, 93),” and lost the word “erotic” almost entirely to pornographers, a new sense of vocation will enable us to articulate and engage with what Mary Grey goes on to call the “new economies of desire (203).”

For desire has become the currency of the world in which we live. It is desire that, for good or ill, lies at the heart of what it means to be human and to be community. We desire because we lack and are incomplete. We desire because we are afraid. We desire the “Other” that lies beyond us. We desire to be part of the greater whole: the families, communities, and nations of which we are a part. We desire because we want to be known and loved. We desire because we are motivated. We desire because we are called further into the future, the unknown, and the mystery of God. We are creatures of desire: “I am, I want and I will,” observes Ann Morisy (Bothered & Bewildered, 2009, 10).

So a significant role for the church lies in becoming fluent in understanding the language of desire. For desire may call us on or hold us back, distract us from our course, or inspire us to continue. Desire may give rise to selfishness or urge us on to build communities of justice, equality, and radical amazement. We must use the visceral knowledge, given us by virtue of our embodied vocation, to foster an ability to discern and navigate the ubiquitous dynamics of desire that affect us all, and which can –if we choose it–be put powerfully at the service of others and for the building up of humanity.

This new understanding of vocation will, in turn, line out a fresh valuing of the diversity of the reality of personhood. For, if all matter is called into being, then all people are called into their own inalienable personhood, into personal “meaning making,” and into creative relationship with others. All people, without exception!

For too long the church has behaved as if only a certain class of people (mostly white educated males) was somehow divinely designated as more valuable to God than others. But more critically, in its desire to prioritize and protect this one group, it has disempowered and disabled all the others. It has done this by infantilizing them, cultivating a culture of submission and obedience, and by actively denigrating and discriminating against them. Anyone who is not normatively white, educated, and male becomes a “problem”: women, the mental and physically ill and disabled, the socially unacceptable, gays, lesbians, transgender people, and those who can be otherwise readily categorized as “perverse” or “defective,” or else simply as “not-like-us.” In the eyes of many churchgoers and leaders, they are effectively non-persons who can be routinely singled out for direct and indirect discrimination by institutional churches. Anyone who doubts this should look at those churches that have negotiated exemption from legal anti-discriminatory laws. And yet these very individuals and groups are largely the same people with whom Jesus had most to do!

For far too long we have clung on to the idea that personhood –being a “real” person– equates with some idealized state of physical perfection and rational ability, and normative gender, sexuality, and race. What a renewed sense of vocation helps us to appreciate is the fact that personhood is a generous and inclusive “rainbow” category that cannot be reduced to a single preferential color, religion, gender, sexuality, and physical or mental ideal.

Accordingly a clear assertion that every individual is a unique person, and that personhood –in all its God-given diversity– should be the simple and irreducible benchmark by which we recognize and value a brother or a sister, becomes the means whereby people of faith can make creative connections with others. Many of whom are already further down this road of inclusive thinking than we are.

An inclusive model of personhood, that doesn’t judge people if they fail to measure up to traits that are deemed normative by the narrow measure of statistical averages and historical and cultural prejudice, is one that most readily fits both with the vision of the kingdom-kindom acted out by Jesus, and with the sense of God’s vocation –calling– of all people. For, irrespective of the particular accidents and characteristics with which people are born, or which emerge as a result of their upbringing or social or cultural situation, it’s clear that God calls all people into maturity and wholeness. God wishes that all people, across the globe, should flourish and find justice and fulfillment. And Christians need to co-operate more with that divine impetus than they have hitherto managed.

A new sense of the richness and diversity of persons, and of God’s calling all people to fullness of life, inevitably results in myriad different expressions of what it means to live a spiritual life.

It is then sadly ironic that Jesus’ notion that “‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ (John10:10)” has manifestly failed to be espoused and valued as an unconditional and non-negotiable undertaking within the life and mission of the church. For far too often what passes for fullness of life and spiritual flourishing is little more than the careful shepherding of individuals through an historic set of well-worn and formulaic activities and requirements that seem almost predetermined to discourage and limit exploration beyond a safe and rather dull and colorless spiritual terrain. All too frequently Christian teaching focuses entirely upon individual salvation, making few connections with global justice issues or with action in the real world. Moreover the arcane language and clichéd terminology of their expression means that they hold little if any attraction for outsiders. Very often they don’t manage to stretch the experience, or release the full spiritual potential, of even committed Christian individuals and communities.

This tendency to diffuse spiritual aspiration and prevent it from nurturing mature self-reflexive individuals, or from engaging with the urgent needs of the world, has been characterized by psychiatrists and mental health professionals as creating “a false spirituality which traps people into narcissistic self-development (Michael Wilson, 1985, [Willows and Swinton, 2000, 173]).” Moreover the churches have given scant attention to the ways in which prayer itself can feed pathological tendencies and so be “psychologically … unhealthy (Peter M. Gubi, Prayer, 2008, 37),” creating unrealistic expectations and warped perceptions of reality. These are hard truths for church-goers to hear!

But it comes as no surprise then that people outside the church are reluctant to consider, or use, the church as a resource for their spiritual development or to give it responsibility for their spiritual flourishing, as they once did. And it is desperately sad that, given all the experience that the Christian tradition has of prayer and spirituality, the church does not show greater interest in listening to and supporting the spiritual aspirations of those –also called by God– who yet have no formal religious affiliation.

There has always been a much larger and more exciting range of expressions of spirituality and prayer within the world’s religions than most of their adherents are ever aware of. And a commitment to affirming the calling of all people into a relationship with the mystery of (what religious folk call) God will necessitate a still broader conception and tolerance of the immense diversity of forms that prayer and spirituality take. If the church is to rise to the challenge of understanding and communicating meaningfully with the experiences of those who are in very different places on their spiritual journey, then it must be prepared to stand with one foot outside its rigid preconceptions of what is “orthodox and acceptable,” and listen attentively and respectfully to others if it ever wishes to be asked to share its own treasures and experience.

And, now without the slightest shadow of doubt, it must be clear that this new understanding of vocation will necessitate a “fresh take” on church. The legitimacy for this view comes from Jesus himself, when he anticipates that the coming of the Spirit would rupture the established religious routines of his day:

“‘no one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.’ (Mk 2:22, see also Matt. 9:17 and Lk. 5:37-38)”

The safe “second nature” routines of church have covered the jagged edges of the gospel with a time-polished patina that reflects not the radical image of Jesus but the satisfying familiarity of our own faces. It’s for this reason that Walter Brueggemann talks of Christians today as “living against the grain of our true vocation (Mandate to Difference, 2007, 42)” and hopes that the church will be able to accept the Spirit’s invitation to move “beyond ourselves [and] the dominant script (203).” (A script that James Alison accurately exposes as “the paralysed world of ecclesiastical half-truth (2001 (2006), 210.”)

To move beyond this paralysis will be a risky undertaking; but then this is generally the case with the things of the Spirit. And it will take a good deal of imagination too. So there will need to be a central place for daring and imaginative interpretations of scripture, liturgy, and social action as the Spirit urges us on into that stage of liminality –that in-between space of dark unlearning before the twilight of possibility– that most of us need to inhabit before we can take the further leap out into what lies beyond.

It is here, in the semi darkness before a new dawn, that we will at last become receptive to hearing afresh the subversive gospel memories calling the church “out of its apathy, naïveté, and amnesia, and [drawing] it into dangerous new ground (John Swinton, Resurrecting the Person, 2000, 127).” But it will be far from easy for us.

Copyright Terry Biddington 2012

Broadcast BBC Radio 2 April 19th

To my mind the world is divided between those people who think life is a race and those who think it’s more like a marathon.

For the first group: life is one continual mad dash to get things done, to achieve their goals and get to the glory of the finishing post, the latest productivity target, or the next deadline: preferably ahead of everyone else. For the second group: life is more like a hard slog requiring not so much speed as stamina and the grim determination to see things out to the end.

And at this point, yes, I need to salute all of those who will be taking part in this Sunday’sLondon marathon, whether for personal fulfillment or to raise money for good causes. I salute them – since it’s more than I could ever do either to run a race or compete in a marathon!

That’s because I’m one of those people who simply likes to take life one step at a time, as slowly as possible. Some, of course would scorn this as being ‘life in the slow lane.’ But I prefer to think that I’m trying to savour life as I encounter it: moment by moment and day by day.

I can put it no better than the poet Philip Larkin who said that days are what we live in. They come every morning and wake us up, again and again. Days are good places to be and we should be glad to have them for as long as possible.

But at the end of some days I sit down and wonder where the time went. Perhaps you’ve done that too.

So, to counteract this feeling, I deliberately make space each day to just sit, and be, and watch. The way the wind blows in the trees, or how the sunlight shines off the passing traffic, the mannerisms and expressions of folk walking by, or even my own steady heartbeat. On such occasions as these, when I consciously spend my time –rather than just let it slip through my fingers– then, far from wasting it, the time I have available seems somehow to expand, deepen, and enfold me. It allows celebrate one more day and to savour the life I have to share with the world.

Broadcast BBC Radio 2 April 12th

Every now and again time seems to acquire a richer texture: and we find ourselves caught up in something bigger than ourselves. The weeks surrounding the death and burial and Princess Diana were, for many people, such a time. And, perhaps for others, the 16 days of the Olympic Games or the three weeks of Euro 2012 will be something similar.

For Christians everywhere, of course, Easter week is precisely such a time. The slow aching drum beat of Holy Week’s walk towards the cross, the jagged anguish of Good Friday, and the heavy silence of Holy Saturday –when the world waits in numb confusion– give way to the stone- shattering jubilation of Easter day itself.

Whatever else we might say about Easter, it’s clear that what those first terrified disciples of Jesus witnessed was an experience that changed their lives utterly and forever. And it’s an experience that still changes lives today.

What it did was to blow their minds, enlarge their vision, and create a sense of profound challenge that still echoes down the centuries. Not just a triumph over one man’s adversity: but a warping of the trajectory of humanity’s self-development.

What a pity then that the institution charged with cherishing the story for future generations has become a place of such narrow mean horizons. Preoccupied with issues that are insignificant for most of us, it has effectively failed to honour and witness to the astonishing life-embracing experience of resurrection that is Jesus’ Easter gift to those of us who claim it.

Thank God then that, though the fossilised and death-dealing structures of the institutional church have failed us, today’s followers of Jesus are –in the words of a former UN Secretary General– still able to be ‘illuminated by a steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.’

The challenge for those who call ourselves Christian is to follow Jesus in consenting to the possibility of a bigger more inclusive vision: one that he shared and felt was his own destiny to bring to birth. Like him, let’s take the risk of letting go of all that holds us back, and walk instead the road that leads to new life.

Broadcast BBC Radio 2 April 5th

It may not be the best known of festivals but, for Christians everywhere, today is Maundy Thursday. Now, if you’re at all like me, you’ll need a gentle reminder.

Back in the day, people had all sorts of expectations about Jesus: warrior chief, political leader, anointed king, religious guru, other-worldly prophet or messiah. But when they finally asked him for clarification, he simply took a towel, knelt down and washed dirty feet. A very humbling corrective for those of his followers who had –and still have– grand ideas about influential power mongering or achieving popular celebrity status!

For, in taking up the towel instead of either the pen or the sword, Jesus gestures towards what was – and still remains – a radical and deeply subversive way of serving humanity. And, along with much else about his life and teaching, it’s what drew him to the inevitable demise that is at the heart of what Holy Week commemorates.

By washing dirty feet –the task of women, servants and slaves– Jesus took his contemporaries greatly by surprise. When his disciple Peter objected to this apparent self-debasement, Jesus turned on him big time: ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.’ Unless you learn what real service is, you can’t be part of my vision. Ouch! We see Peter’s jaw drop with incredulity and the onlookers holding their breath in amazement.

Now, for Christians, Holy Week itself is when time stands still and when the world looks on, holding its breath in amazement! But –and here’s the thing– whether or not we are religious, we all need those extraordinary gestures, moments, and occasions when the human capacity for self-transcendence so inspires us that we begin to see that everything is possible and that each of us can make a real difference for our global human family: if we are so minded.

The remarkable truth of Holy Week, one that gives the lie to so much the world would have us believe, is that it is after all possible for selfless love to stand against the manipulative and cynical ways of the world and speak powerfully again of hope.

Broadcast BBC Radio 2 March 29th

Sometimes life gives us extraordinary teachers. My Mr T was one of them. Unique, unforgettable; a complete one-off!

Mr T was my history teacher. Now long gone to his grave, bless him. But I remember him still: glaring about the classroom as we failed to answer his questions. Reading our blank faces he would splutter and bellow with increasing desperation and outrage, demanding to be told the reasons for some ancient historical controversy, or else the exact date World War II had begun: the day his life was changed for ever.

But often the things he tried to teach us were nothing compared to the things we actually learned from him. Life can be like that, can’t it? He’d come back after fighting in the war to discover that a family with a ‘foreign sounding name’ had moved in over the street from his home. Without even unpacking, he’d marched across the road, seized a bike from the garden of the family in question, and smashed it to pieces.

For once there was silence in our classroom, as each of us listened in utter amazement. Mr T stood there weeping and shaking his head: mystified as to his actions. Through his tears he spoke to us about the painful lesson he’d learned that day, about the need to forgive, and to see people as fellow human beings living life as best they might against the great backdrop of history.

And it’s still a hard lesson each of us must learn. For all around the world people are daily falling into the trap of seeing others at second hand: through the distorting lens of ignorance, slapdash thinking, blind prejudice, and deliberate misrepresentation. So we carry on as though we’d learned nothing at all from our teachers in the past or from the lessons of history.

That’s why I think it’s about time we learned a lesson from young people in our schools and universities who have the opportunity, as never before, to grow up to value a world of wonderful diversity where everyone is understood to be the same, precisely because everyone is different.

Broadcast BBC Radio 2 March 22nd

I know a group of people who’ve given up religion for poetry. And most days I’m tempted to join them!

You see, it seems to me that we live in a world that’s become “flattened by prose.” We’re drowning in a torrent of words – in the press and media, and in the superficial daily exchanges, texts and tweets that pass for communication. And most of the time what we utter is all so much empty, pedestrian, drivel. Words have become devalued and meaningless. So monotonous and dull that no-one pays attention to them anymore.

And religion doesn’t seem to help either. For while religious debates routinely use texts as weapons, and far too many preachers preach only prosaic platitudes, worship itself seems mostly to have become about filling the ‘scary sabbath silence’ with yet more wearisome words. As though our faith depended on it!

Words are weighing down our souls! For we have allowed them to lose their magical restorative power to create new hope for humanity. So to help us out from under this weight of deadly prose, let’s bring on the poets!

A poet’s work is to wake people up, help us see the world through fresh eyes, and make breath-taking connections and discoveries.“Poetry is dancing,” a philosopher once mused, while prose is just “ordinary walking.” While another said: “Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.”

The world sure needs to dance to the rhythms of poetry right now. And the good news is that all of us can be poets. Yes: a curious thought – but true! All it takes is a willingness to let the words we use be spoken only to heal and encourage each other. To bring contentment, hope, or peace to other human beings. To transform the world though the possibility of imagining things completely afresh and of dancing to a very different tune.

Are we up for the challenge of replacing pedestrian prose with the power of poetry? I hope so. But, if the plan fails, well: as the actor David Carradine once said: “If you cannot be a poet, then at least try to be the poem itself.”

Broadcast BBC Radio 2 March 15

My mother is a niffler. No. Please don’t adjust your radio! You heard me right. My mother is a niffler. What about yours? Or is she more like a blast-ended skrewt?

These magical creatures, you will surely recall, are some of the things that Harry Potter encounters at wizard school. Harry and his friends learn to value the useful niffler – because it can find treasure hidden underground. And he discovers that the blast-ended skrewt needs very careful handling because of its unpredictable behaviour and dangerous sting.

Now, to my mind, mothers are a bit like magical creatures. For a few of us may well feel that our mothers are unpredictable with a dangerous sting – and needing delicate handling! Others will value the gentle nurture they give us. And some of you, perhaps, may appreciate how our mothers teach us to find priceless treasure buried deep within us and in the routine tasks of everyday living. As my mother did for me.

Mothering Sunday is a chance to celebrate our beginnings in our mothers. How, from birth until long afterwards, they give us so much and influence us in so many ways. To know the love of a mother is indeed a blessing.

But, mothers also teach us one of life’s most important lessons. That, sooner or later, we must all cease being children and become, instead, adults: offering nurture, care, and wisdom. Not just to our own children but for the whole of humanity.

Letting go of childish ways and becoming an adult is a hard journey to make. But it’s an essential one to travel if we are to respond to the urgent need our world has right now for mature self-giving love and practical common sense.

Becoming a spiritual mother or father is a task that all of us can undertake. It happens when we stumble upon the priceless revelation that all people everywhere are part of the one human family. And that everyone deserves an equal chance to unearth, explore, and share their gifts for the wellbeing of the global community in which we live.