A Letter about Europe

Dear Frans Timmermans,

Thank you for your letter about Brexit that was published in the Guardian on Boxing Day. I was touched to read it. It’s as if you’d bothered to write to me personally with a generous, kind Christmas message. I’m sure a great many other British people were heartened too. And I don’t simply mean Remainers like me. I imagine fair-minded Brexiters will also have appreciated your affection for our country, your sorrow at this parting of friends, your hope that despite everything we continue to be good colleagues, partners and, yes, family members of this continent of Europe that is our common home.

But I’m only speaking for myself in what follows. As this year draws to a close, I am more than ever aware of my deep personal relationship with continental Europe: of my debt of gratitude for the ways our continent has formed and shaped me, and therefore of an intense sadness at the loosening of the ties that bind us together as Europeans. You’ve told us about your own past that has given you your love for Britain and the British. Let me tell you a little about mine.

The day your letter appeared in the Guardian, 26 December, was my grandmother’s birthday. Omummy, as we called her, would have been 125 or thereabouts - she never admitted to her age, only that she had been born in the early years of Kaiser Wilhelm’s reign. For she was German, born in Cologne, brought up in an assimilated middle class Jewish family in that Rhineland city. She married a fellow liberal Jewish man from downstream Düsseldorf, where he owned a factory that produced quality leather goods. They bought a large nineteenth century house in the Goethestraße and brought up their two children there, my uncle Karl and my mother Dorothea.

I needn’t tell you what befell my family when the Nazis came to power. My mother and uncle were sent to England as teenagers and made their lives here. My grandparents fled to the Netherlands - your own country - and when the Germans occupied it, were hidden underground in Edam by two devout evangelical sisters who looked after them for three long years. Amazingly, they survived. My grandfather died soon afterwards, but my grandmother eventually came to Britain where she lived to a great age. My mother married an Englishman, and my sister and I were born in London where we were brought up.

So in my childhood, three countries featured strongly in my growing awareness of who and what I was - Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. My mother was fluent in all three languages. We spoke a lot of German at home. My grandmother would sit me on her knee at the piano and play Bach, Beethoven and Schubert to me. Leather bound volumes of Goethe and Schiller lined the top shelves of the living room bookcase (as they now line mine). We often visited Germany and the Netherlands, and later on, France and Spain. We didn’t need to discuss “being European”. It was taken for granted that this was what we were. It belonged to our family’s DNA. It was part of our identity.

When the UK joined the European Union in 1973, I don’t recall great family celebrations. It was simply the obvious thing to do to go with the flow of history. Not only for Britain’s economic benefit but (and you’ll understand why this was so important for my family) to guarantee peace across the continent so that my generation wouldn’t have to face the grim ordeals my parents’ and their parents’ generations had undergone.

In the summer of referendum year 2016, my (widowed) mother lay dying in a north London hospital. Many of the nurses who cared for her so well were from EU countries. We talked about the coming vote. “We won’t do anything so stupid as to leave the EU, will we?” she asked me several times. “I so hope not” I replied. “I think the British have more sense than that.” I was wrong. I could tell how painful the Brexit vote was for her. We didn’t speak much about it. She died three weeks later. I’m glad she did not live to see it become a reality as we shall do at the end of January.

Why am I telling you all this? Because you were kind enough to reassure us that you wouldn’t stop seeing Britain as part of the European family of peoples. I can’t tell you how important it was to read those words. For me, with my personal history, being European is a fundamental part of my identity. I can no more contemplate losing my EU passport than I can ceasing to hold a UK one. It’s not simply that to me, all the arguments point to Britain continuing to be a member state - economic, political, historical, cultural, environmental. There’s a sentient dimension too. It’s a matter of the emotions. To me, the EU circle of yellow stars on their deep blue field evokes just as as much a sense of loyalty, belonging and gratitude as the Union Flag does. I recognise myself in these symbols. My past, present and future are bound up in them. They are signs of the family I belong to.

Or were. It’s hard not to feel profoundly dislocated by the Brexit vote and its aftermath. I won’t deny that the last day of January will be difficult. I’m trying to learn how to live with the inevitability of no longer being a European citizen for a while*. There’s no point in being bitter about it or going on rehearsing the reasons why to many of us, Brexit is such a terrible prospect. We thought we’d made the case for remaining, but it turned out that we lost that argument. Perhaps none of us recognised until it was too late that this was always about much more than merely rational argument. What I’ve explained about my family history perhaps tells you why. For it really feels like an imminent amputation. I reckon Brexiters find that an absurdly overblown image. I find it just as baffling that some people can be so matter of fact about it.

But your generous letter shows us that even after Brexit, we British can, indeed should, go on thinking of ourselves as Europeans. And to be fair to some of my Brexiter friends, this is something they have been saying too. It’s reassuring that on the European mainland, you and many others regard us in this way. Thank you. It means a great deal. I feel profoundly sad that it’s come to this parting of friends. But in case no-one else thinks of saying it, thank you for all the ways in which our decades of EU membership have enriched this country since the 1970s.

So happy new year! And here’s to our continued friendship and collaboration with the other nations of our European homeland in the decade that lies ahead.

With best wishes
Michael

*PS Just to clarify: I’m not entertaining hopes that the UK will rejoin the EU in my lifetime. There are lost causes that even I am learning to accept. I simply mean that I intend to apply for dual German citizenship on the grounds of my mother having been stripped of her German nationality and rendered stateless through her exile by the Nazis. I’m not making any assumptions, but I’ve now been sent the application forms by the German Embassy. They have been extremely helpful in my contacts with them so far.

The Election - thoughts at Grey’s Monument

This is a bit longer than usual. You’ll understand.

For the first time for decades, I didn't stay up all night to watch the election results. By the small hours of the night the outcome was as clear as the day. Perhaps I should have been on my knees during the watches (I blogged about praying for the election last time). Instead, I went to bed. And slept quite well in the circumstances. I woke early and for an instant thought I heard someone say "behold, it was a dream". But it wasn't. It was the morning of 24 June 2016 all over again.

What do I say about this election result, I asked myself as dawn broke. Today is St Lucy’s Day, 13 December. It used to be the shortest, darkest day of the year in the unreformed Julian Calendar of John Donne’s times, inspiring his famous Nocturnal about “the year’s midnight”. How apt! Was Boris Johnson teasing us when he chose this particular date? He is, after all, a lover of classical antiquity.

But Lucy was the Roman girl-martyr who brought light into dark places, hence her lovely name. The play on darkness obscuring light and light penetrating darkness fascinated Donne. Light and dark come into things in elections, I thought to myself. Altruism dragged down by naked self-interest, narrow tribal loyalties pierced in our best moments by an awakened conscience and a deeper feeling for humanity - there’s a real dark-and-light chiaroscuro in our thoughts, emotions, speeches and behaviour at election times. It’s what we should expect at liminal times like these, but the strength of my own feelings never fails to take me by surprise.

Here’s what I posted on social media from my bed. 

So the UK is going into exile. I must accept Brexit & live with it. It will be bitter for me personally & I think, taking a long view, for the nation collectively. The biggest mistake made by Labour & the LibDems? Agreeing to a General Election at all. That decision was a disastrous misreading of the signs of the times. And of the capacity of both party leaders to win trust on the nation’s doorsteps. Good people of all faiths & political views must now come together for the sake of the planet, for the sake of peace & for the sake of the poor. We must keep hope alive.

I chose those words carefully. And felt better for writing them. Yes, it will be bitter, I thought, not just because of Brexit, but for all the other reasons so many of us feared a landslide like today’s, especially on account of the poorest and most vulnerable people in our nation. Yet there’s a difference between feeling what we feel and acting out those feelings. I’ve consistently campaigned in this blog on the foundation that the clear command is to love our neighbour, and indeed, our enemy. Perhaps today poses precisely that challenge, not to harbour resentments and hatreds towards those for whom this has been a day to rejoice while some of us feel like strangers in a landscape we barely recognise as our political and cultural home.

It would have been easy to gaze at the TV news all day. But we decided instead to get out of the house and go into Newcastle to look for Christmas gifts for the family. We walked up from the station along Grainger Street. There, ahead of us, presiding over the city’s Christmas market, was the statue of the 2nd Earl Grey on top of his Monument. I felt a surge of admiration for this man, one of Northumberland’s greatest, who was Prime Minister from 1830-1834. In times as fractious and turbulent as our own (read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, set in the early 1830s - I blogged about her recently), Lord Grey championed and saw enacted the Great Reform Act of 1832 that abolished rotten boroughs and launched the long, fitful journey towards universal suffrage. 

What would this lover of civil and political liberty have made of today, I wondered? I’ll leave experts to comment on an unreformed electoral system that (among other oddities) gives us an outcome in which a Tory landslide of 365 seats can result from the votes of a few hundreds of thousands of voters in swing constituencies while in total, more people across the UK have voted against the Tories than for them. I think the good Earl would say that electoral reform is still a work in progress. There’s no hope of progressing it in the next 5 years, but I believe election results will lack firm credibility and ownership for as long as Parliament fails to address this fundamental problem. 

But wandering among the Christmas shoppers, I didn’t want to dwell on these challenges. Nor did I want to engage in a long post-mortem or play the blame game about the failure of Remainers to get our act together. Later, certainly, we need to think very hard about what went wrong. But not now. What was needed today was to reflect, ponder, and pray about how to manage disappointment and bitterness, and live with a result many of us had feared, yet dared to hope might be averted. Maybe I should have practised disappointment more, like Diogenes famously exploring futility by praying to a lump of rock. All of life, we have to learn to “live with”. It’s a mark of being adult that we make some progress along the path of graceful acceptance when things don’t go our way.

The Grey Monument bears witness to a man who, despite endless frustrations and discouragements, channelled his energies into what would help the nation flourish. In our time, this has to mean rebuilding the sense of being one nation again. As I said to begin with, we owe it to the planet, to world peace, and to the poor who are always with us, to come together with all people of good will to renew ourselves to pursue what is just and right and good. And to keep our hope alive.

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Maybe one way in which we do this is by learning to act more out of trust. Or (to paraphrase something Bishop Michael Ramsey once said about prayer), if it’s too soon to start trusting people again after these political storms of the last three years, at least to want to. And if even that’s too much to contemplate, to want to want to. 

Yes, there’s so much that’s wrong with our politics, both the decisions we are making and the way we are making them. We are right to challenge falsehood, mendacity and the casual disregard for careful process when we see them. We are right to be angry for the sake what’s good and true. But we must examine our motives, and make sure we’re not feeding self-righteousness. Nurturing blame and bitterness gets us nowhere. What’s needed is to help a grown-up public conversation to begin again on the basis of our common humanity. We need to make a presumption that our conversation partner wants the best for others, not the worst, that they care for their fellow human beings, for the needs of others, and for the future of the world just as we do. 

Anglicans call this the “charitable assumption”. It undergirds good pastoral practice. Yes, it strains credibility sometimes, when we wonder if others are as honourable as we’d like to think they are, yet I do believe it’s a vital principle of courteous, graceful, good-neighbourly behaviour. It entails, for example, attentive listening in the spirit of “maybe I can learn to see it your way; and is it possible that you could come to see it mine?” That’s not to equivocate about our hard-won principles, only to understand them in the context of the bigger picture which is always more complex than the simple binaries we love so much. As Bishop John Habgood once said, it’s all very well “being prophetic”, as long as you see all sides of a question. Or try to.

I was touched and moved by something my daughter wrote today to our family WhatsApp group. She’s allowed me to share it here. We had been in touch with our children to ask how they were feeling about the election. She replied:

I feel ok - perhaps that it is my role to promote a sense of steady-ness for those around me who are very upset. But you know, I am a super-rational pragmatist. 

I also feel that I too learned a lot from watching the Tory victories through the 80s and early 90s, something about coping with the disappointment, even tho I didn’t understand it. 

I feel relieved that the waiting and dreading and liminal is over. That in itself releases new energies eventually. And on that we do need to be out of this Brexit impasse so that attention can be spend on domestic agenda. So I understand that vote.

And I feel that it is better to know what you don’t understand about your country than not know. Not that we, in our liberal bubbles  know now, but we need to learn. 

And we need to be kind to ourselves and to everyone we meet, especially those whose opinions we don’t understand and especially those who are marginalised. And we need to listen to those people whose opinions we don’t understand and expand our bubbles. 

That’s what I think. But yes. Obviously awful, but we don’t know what this will mean. And we do know that there are a lot of young activists coming up, that the generation emerging is not like the generations before it so things will shift. we need to learn and to listen, to mentor and to work in whatever way we can to generate communities in which people can listen to and learn from those with whom they might fundamentally disagree. And we need to borrow coping strategies from those places for whom this kind of political marginalisation is the norm - who can ONLY rely on the state to frustrate and disempower them, which is still probably most places in the world . 

Perhaps it is denial, but I am still just grateful to have a vote and a state that provides any protection or health care at all. 

So we also need to be grateful. Not least because we are not the people who will be most marginalised by this decision. And maybe that sounds a bit selfish, but we need to try to appreciate what we have, and have a good Christmas together and emotionally nurture and sustain each other.

I will never lose faith in the power of love, of community, of relationship and of the collective. Aluta continua! Weep today. And the work of rebuilding starts again tomorrow.

So well said. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Methodist Church have also found just the right words for today. They have published an Open Letter to the Prime Minister following his return to office. This is church leadership at its best. They speak for me.

More to come (if you can bear it) as we go on trying to understand where we now find ourselves after the election. 

That Election Prayer!

Before the last general election two years ago I wrote a blog about how we might pray in the days before we cast our vote. I recycled it recently and it got a few appreciative nods. Enough said, I thought.

But then I saw the official prayer issued by the Church of England for this 2019 election. Here it is.



God of grace and truth,
send your Spirit to guide us
as we discover your will for our country.
Help us to discuss the issues before us
with courtesy, truth and mutual respect,
and grant that all who stand for parliament
will seek to serve the common good,
through him who came not to be served but to serve,
Jesus Christ our Lord.

Oh dear!

Yes, I have to say that it left me feeling decidedly uncomfortable, and I admit, embarrassed. Judging by responses on social media, I'm not alone. Everyone endorses the sentiments about courtesy, truth and mutual respect. We all want those who are standing for parliament to seek to serve the common good (but why seek to? - such a weak, padding kind of phrase when what we're longing for are men and women who will go beyond "seeking" actually to embrace "serving" without fear or favour). And I'd have thought we would want to focus our prayer specifically on those who are elected to parliament rather than simply standing. But let's not be pedantic when there's a bigger matter at stake.

It's the opening petition that's the trouble. Send your Spirit to guide us as we discover your will for our country. I don't think this will do, either as prayer or as theology. Which is saying the same thing. Lex orandi, lex credendi: as we believe, so we pray; and as we pray, so our belief is formed and shaped. Doctrine, liturgy and spirituality are not separate from one another. They are a single entity that expresses our response to the God whom we worship and serve. I'm saying that this and every liturgical text not only tells us something about how we pray. It's a mirror that unmasks and reflects back to us what we truly believe, in this case about God's will and purpose for us mortals.

Or at any rate, us mortals who make up the United Kingdom. This Church of England prayer seems to put into our minds and mouths the idea that whatever the outcome of the election, it will prove to have been God's will. This is what we are asking the Spirit to help us discover, as if having said our prayers, it's simply a matter of unwrapping an early Christmas present on Friday the Thirteenth to find out what we've been given.

Shouldn't we have learned by now that it's a dangerous doctrine to elide what actually happens in life with God's will and purpose? The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz may have believed that ours is the best of all possible worlds (among other reasons because a world that exists at all is arguably better than one that doesn't). Alexander Pope put it into verse.

All nature is but art unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, "Whatever IS, is RIGHT".

Voltaire was at first a keen disciple of this kind of optimism. But he had to learn through his disappointments in life that it most definitely isn't the case that whatever is, is right. In 1755 an earthquake in Lisbon destroyed the city and killed tens of thousands of innocent people. That terrible catastrophe put an end to his innocence. It gave him a feeling for tragedy. "If Pope (the poet) had been at Lisbon, would he have dared to affirm that all is well?" Candide is his witty demolition of optimism as a doctrine that does justice to the way things are. It doesn't. It's hopelessly simplistic. And for that reason, perilous.

I think the Church of England's prayer falls squarely into the optimistic trap of believing that whatever is (whatever the result of the election), is right. It seems to believe that the election outcome is the answer to the question we put when we invoke the Spirit to help us discover your will for our country. Job done. Prayer answered. The mystery of providence grasped and understood!

But what if providence were infinitely more inscrutable than this way of praying seems to affirm?

How we understand "God's will" in relation to the complexities, ambiguities and baffling realities of life, particularly to pain and suffering, is called theodicy. Some of the greatest minds of the Bible gave themselves to exploring it, most famously the author of the Book of Job. That book concludes that there is no conclusion, no answer or formula that will "explain" the mystery of providence and the reality of suffering. Events are facts on the ground, but they don't tell us about God's purpose. This was the problem Voltaire had to face when the wake-up call from Lisbon overturned his optimistic view of the world. The outcome of the election will be a fact by Friday, but whether we think it's a good or bad result is in no way connected with "God's will for our country". That's just a lazy optimistic assumption. Politicians (and clergy?) may like the convenient idea that whatever is, is right. But as an intelligent account of the world and of human life, it won't do.

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So what can we say about the election and God's providence? And how should we pray about it?

Kierkegaard said that life has to be lived forwards but understood backwards. This is the only way we can begin to make sense of how God is among us. Not by looking back at events and pronouncing a verdict ("yes, that must have been his will!") but by glimpsing how God is present in the ebbs and flows of human history and in the stories of personal life. How we try to respond when someone is terminally ill or is killed in a road accident can help us here. Intelligent faith doesn't say, never says, "Oh, it must be God's will" (whatever is, is right!). Instead, it tentatively asks where God's presence might be discerned in the very midst of a person's suffering, suggest how God is among us not as presiding over pain but as its victim. Isn't this what the passion narrative teaches us?

So yes, there are election outcomes I would prefer to see this week, and outcomes I'd find it hard to welcome. I'd go further and suggest that some of those outcomes are closer than others to my own vision of society, informed by my Christian faith. But note the pronoun! It's a personal perception. Whether it's held by many or few doesn't make it "the will of God". I'm not even sure we can confidently speak about the will of the nation in these febrile times, let alone the will of the Almighty.

Therefore, faced with the inscrutable mystery of divine providence, I'd prefer to say nothing about God's will, and not speculate about things I can't possibly know or even guess at. "Before that of which we cannot speak, we must remain silent" said the twentieth century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in one of the most important sayings of our time. To say nothing, that is, other than to urge us all to continue in the spiritual task of discerning the signs of the times and responding as intelligently as we can to whatever the present moment suggests we must do next. That can begin to happen when theology and prayer learn how to be humble, cultivate reticence, discover how not to resort to words when the silence of not knowing would be the better, wiser, more creative response.

I think this could help faith gain respect in an era when we are so much more aware of the complexity of things than our forebears. We must wean ourselves off the easy talk about "the will of God" and the old religious formula and its modern equivalents, whatever is, is right. That kind of God-talk may bring comfort in the short-term. But it won't sustain us for long, because it's not only manifestly false to our reading of events, but as we've seen in our own times, utterly discredited. It's religion-lite with an untroubled conscience, not the tough, demanding Christianity we learn from the New Testament that requires us to wrestle with the dilemmas of believing. The assumption that mortals can ever know God's will in any ultimate sense shouldn't even be hinted at in the way we pray.

And if we're ever tempted back into naive spiritual optimism, all we need to do is to whisper a word or two that symbolises what we can't know and ought not to speculate about in terms of the providence of God. We simply have to name catastrophe or evil for what they are to put paid to idle theorizing. The Lisbon Earthquake. Auschwitz. All cruelty, slavery and abuse. Or when death is untimely and wrong as it so often is. And when the pain won't go away. Or when a relationship is irretrievably fractured. Or simply when events bewilder us, when the paper the book of providence is written on seems darker than the words themselves and we can't make head or tail of them.

Why do we pray? Because we believe that God cares about the world, about nations and peoples, about every human life. It's an act of trust in our Creator and the grace and truth we recognise in him. By praying, we defy despair and affirm that we do not lose heart, whatever the circumstances. Who can say what effect this great project of hope may have? But we do know for sure how it affects us in our best moments, even if we often seem to be doing little more than holding other people in our hearts. That "work" of prayer, for me, is to do a very great deal! Prayer deepens our feeling for others, aligns our care and compassion with God's. It makes us open to new possibilities, helps shape our aspirations, commits us to act in the name of all that is right and good and so point to the grace and truth that are already among us. In the end all prayer is an act of love - for our neighbour as well as God.

Which is why we must pray this week. If we didn't love our nation and our fellow-citizens, why would we bother praying for them? Here’s an excellent prayer produced by the Methodist Church that does it beautifully.

And  here  once again is the election prayer I commended in my earlier blog. It's not a perfect text. But at least I can say for it that I'd be content to say Amen at the end if I heard it read in church. Which is more than I'm able to do with the C of E's latest offering. Sorry! 

Why I'll be Voting LibDem

We need to keep a clear head about this election, and remember why it's been called. There's one reason only: the last Parliament's impasse over Brexit. Like Theresa May before him, Boris Johnson just could not "get Brexit done". The election was his response to that predicament.

Since it was called, the conversation has spiralled out from Brexit. In an election campaign, political parties all set out their stalls. Voters are fair game. Spend, spend, spend is the order of the day. Understandable at this time of year: Black Friday beckons. Whose wares sparkle the brightest, are wrapped the prettiest, seduce us into thinking that they offer what we most want or need?

I want to remind us that Brexit is the reason for this election, and it's Brexit that should be the focus of the debate. That's not to say that the climate emergency, international trade, the economy, health, education, security, transport infrastructure, devolution and much else aren't crucially important to the flourishing of our country. But when we examine those themes and how we want to address them in the immediate future (the next five years), they all converge on the decision this nation must make in the next few weeks or months about its relationship with the European Union. It's not that the short-term urgent must displace the long-term important. But what we do about Brexit will profoundly influence the direction our country takes in the coming decades, and how we engage with all the other crucial priorities we face.

Here in England, only the Greens and the Liberal Democrats are unambiguously campaigning on a pro-EU ticket. The Conservatives want to "get Brexit done". Labour promises a People's Vote on a renegotiated Brexit deal, but Jeremy Corbyn won't himself campaign for Remain or Brexit. We know where the Brexit Party stands. I find much that is highly attractive in the Greens' programme and won't deny that it's tempting to support them. But I've concluded that the Libdems stand the best chance of providing a realistic challenge to the two main parties and adding substantially to the elected members holding the balance of power should we elect another hung Parliament (which may be the best outcome we can hope for in these unpredictable times).

For the avoidance of doubt, I should confess at this point that I'm a paid-up member of the Liberal Democrat Party, and have been since I retired. If you want to, dismiss everything else I write on the grounds that I would say that, wouldn't I? But let me press on and hope you may come with me.

Jo Swinson has had a mixed press since she announced that the heart of the Libdem Manifesto would be a commitment to revoke Brexit. The Sheffield audience at the Leaders' Question Time broadcast was surprisingly hostile - where were Nick Clegg's former supporters from the Sheffield Hallam constituency where we once lived? She is not quite fully formed as a leader. She needs to inhabit the role, discover how to nuance conviction with a realistic assessment of what's achievable and where compromise will be needed. She would do well to cultivate subtlety. And maybe not knock the Labour Party quite so brutally. Politics is the art of the possible. This takes time - a luxury you don't have when you're plunged into the maelstrom of an election campaign. But Jo is bright, energetic, fluent, and completely committed. Despite the reviews, I think she and Nicola Sturgeon can be pleased to have given as good as they got in that unforgiving bear pit of the #BBCQT arena.

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So what about the Liberal Democrat manifesto commitment to "stop Brexit"?

It's been much criticised as going back on the outcome of the 2016 referendum. "How dare you ride roughshod over a democratic decision we made!" "Why can't you get over the fact that you lost!" "How can you be so arrogant as to pretend to know better than the nation as a whole!" We've heard a lot of talk like that. And yes, the Libdem stance could look more than a little cavalier if presented too clumsily. A lot of this is the cut and thrust of electioneering. But underneath it is, I think, a misunderstanding about the intellectual basis of this "stop Brexit" pledge. So it's worth examining this if we are to give Jo Swinson a fair hearing.

There are two objections to it. The first is that as a matter of politics, it's theoretically flawed; the second that as a matter of tactics, it's ill-judged and unlikely to win support. In terms of the audience, I'm not thinking of conviction Brexiters but of people who voted Remain in 2016 and who would be expected to be sympathetic to the Libdems. Clearly, plenty of them believe that the referendum result should be honoured, even if they don't like it. And some have argued that the Libdem platform should have been: vote for us and we'll push for a People's Vote and campaign to Remain in the EU. To them, the absolutism of the "stop Brexit" rhetoric is not calculated to gain friends and allies, and to win over waverers.

First, the theoretical objection. The logic of "stop Brexit" is in fact clearly set out in the manifesto. The election of a Liberal Democrat majority government on a clear stop Brexit platform will provide a democratic mandate to stop this mess, revoke Article 50 and stay in the EU. In other words, if (yes, I know - a big "if") the Libdems were elected, that would be the evidence ipso facto that stopping Brexit was what the nation wanted, for it would have elected the party that had promised to deliver precisely that outcome. That argument is unassailable. Just as it would be if we voted in a Labour government whose manifesto commitment was to nationalise the railways. The executive would go on to do just that because the election had provided the necessary mandate. I applaud a party that's prepared to be unambiguous about its core message. I'm glad to be able to vote for it on the basis of my ex animo belief that any Brexit will disadvantage our nation compared to the benefits we currently enjoy as EU members, and a no-deal Brexit would be nothing short of a catastrophe.

As to the tactical objection, the manifesto addresses that too. In other circumstances, we will continue to fight for a people's vote with the option to stay in the EU, and in that vote we would passionately campaign to keep the UK in the EU. These "other circumstances" are those in which the Libdems don't gain an overall majority. Yes, we know that's going to be the outcome, even if we can expect to see Remainers swing behind the Libdems just as they did in the recent European Parliament and local elections. But political parties always campaign on the basis of the vision that drives their ideals and values. This is what we want to hear and get a feel for: what do you really stand for? It's true, as someone said (was it Abraham Lincoln?) that parties campaign in poetry but have to govern in prose - but poetry is important in the task of winning hearts and minds. I won't say that there aren't risks in the Libdem strategy of going for broke over Brexit. But the sheer chutzpah of championing a single clear message may prove to reap an unexpected harvest.

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I live in a constituency that voted to Remain in the EU. The Libdem constituency party thinks there's a good chance of doing well here. But while I understand the reasons for voting tactically, I find I can’t swallow my principles and vote for a party I don’t believe in.  Our former MP is a Tory who voted Remain, but now believes we must "deliver on the result of the referendum" and has studiously supported the Government in its attempts to do that under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson. It’s high time to challenge that thinking. I too want to "get Brexit done" - consign it to history through the democratic process of a general election, restore the status quo, focus once more on the challenges that face our nation, and, secure in our partnership with the other nations of the EU, respond to the immense global crises that confront the human race and so help create a better future for our world.

I've regularly rehearsed the arguments for EU membership in this blog since before the referendum. Just scroll down and have a look. In this, as in everything else, we are "better together". This election is all about Brexit. Let's talk about it!

In praise of George Eliot on her 200th birthday

This week marks the bicentenary of the birth of one of England's greatest novelists, George Eliot. She was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, not far from Coventry, the city that was to play an important part in her life and be immortalised in her novel Middlemarch.

Coventry was where I discovered George Eliot. We lived there from 1987 to 1995 when I was Precentor of Coventry Cathedral. In that time I was asked to go to Nuneaton to dedicate a memorial to its greatest daughter. By then I was reading the novels, and someone must have overheard me exclaiming how marvellous they were. And indeed, what prompts this bicentennial blog is precisely the revelation these great books proved to be when I opened them for the first time. I read through all her mature novels in the space of a year and wondered why it had taken me so long to discover them. Or, I think it's as fair to say, to be discovered by them. I'll try to explain.

In 1994 I gave a lecture at Nuneaton's George Eliot Hospital to mark the 175th anniversary of her birth. I posted it last week (on my other website where I post lectures and sermons) as I gave it at the time. The title was "Mary Ann Did Not Go". Mary Ann Evans was of course her real name. And "did not go"? It referred to a diary entry of her father's lamenting her refusal to attend church with him one Sunday morning in 1842. The church in question was St Michael's, Coventry that would later become the Cathedral and be bombed in the Luftwaffe raid of November 1940. You'll understand my keen interest in that episode. It belonged to the story of my place of work. And anyway, we clergy are as interested (or should be) in why people don't go to church as why they do.

Middlemarch was the first of her novels that I read. It was a good place to begin. It's not a perfect novel (is there such a thing?) but it's undeniably a very great one. Was it Virginia Woolf who said that it was one of the few novels written for grown-ups? In Middlemarch, many of the themes of her novels are worked out on a large canvas: human lives being lived out in small communities of dense networks and intricate relationships; the contrast between the intimate scale of ordinary human concerns and the broad sweep of a history that was, always is, changing the nation irrevocably; the place of church and religion in an industrialising and increasingly sceptical society; the portrait of a flawed clergyman surrounded by his books and driven by the need to uncover "the key to all mythologies". Was he, the unlikeable Casaubon, relentless pursuer of the inexplicable, too close for comfort? And was it significant that the book's beautifully drawn heroine Dorothea, a fictional creation Mary Ann must have been particularly fond of, had the same name as my mother?

If you are a priest, you live and work on these kinds of threshold all the time. Your task is to try to interpret how the various narratives we are part of interact and converse with one another: the larger, universal story of God as he is in the world in relation to the more intimate stories of who and what we are as men, women and children living ordinary human lives at particular times and in particular places. Of these, the church is a symbol that looks in both directions: worldwide and local, belonging to every place and to my place. "Mary Ann did not go" to her local church. But she never lost her interest in, her fascination with, religion. Church and clergy feature in most of her novels, as I point out in the lecture. Her last novel, Daniel Deronda, was as explicitly about religion as any English novelist of her century got.

In this respect, George Eliot brings an implicitly theological perspective to her characters and their settings. She knew enough about organised religion to respect it as an irreplaceable social glue and catalyst of moral good. Though she had also read the writings of honest doubters like Renan, Strauss and Feuerbach and knew not to invest religion with a metaphysical reality it can't sustain. For her, the continued potential of religion lay in the sentient dimension of imagination and feeling. Maybe she never quite grew out of a nostalgia for a secure and happy childhood in which religion played a central role. There's something rose-hued about Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life as there is about the prelapsarian world of The Mill on the Floss before the flood. She was perhaps the quintessential embodiment of the Victorian crisis of faith: intellectually troubled but emotionally more attached than she might have admitted.

In all this, George Eliot is, I think, a theologian's novelist. Her range, intelligence and depth of insight are perhaps the closest an English novelist has ever got to Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Cor ad cor loquitur. A theologian recognises a kindred spirit, even when a theological heart is manifested in a different discipline. It was this, as much as anything, that first drew me to her writings. She was as important a discovery to me as John Henry Newman had been twenty years earlier, about whom I wrote a blog last month. And looking back as I do now, I see that the kind of Christianity I'm increasingly drawn to - liberal, questioning, generous, socially concerned, inclusive and above all, humane - owes more to her than I realised at the time.

I guess I recognised in George Eliot a novelist with a sense of place. I came to think of her as a geographer of the human spirit, at home in the landscape of the mind and a reliable guide to reading its map so as to chart our paths across it. But I also warmed to her physical sense of place. I'd moved to the Midlands from North East England and had felt the loss of its regional distinctiveness, its strong, definable character, the accents of both people and place. I think I was looking for a native voice who could help me find my home in "Loamshire", as Mary Ann called it. I came across these words in Daniel Deronda, new to me then though, I discovered, much quoted long before it became fashionable for some of us to describe ourselves proudly as "citizens of the world".

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

Has the elusive idea of "sense of place", of the importance of being nourished by attachment and belonging, ever better been put into words? Every great novelist has this sense of place, whether it's Dickens' London, Hardy's Wessex or the Bronte's West Riding. But I hadn't realised how literature can help bond you to the particular geography you call your own until I needed it to do that for me. And although I now live a long way from Goerge Eliot's Midlands, I can't revisit them in my mind without construing the shapes and patterns of the human textures she laid over them in her writings. Only the greatest of writers achieves this to the point of depositing ideas and images in the mind that you know you'll never forget.

To mark the anniversary of her birth this week, Kathryn Hughes has been presenting A Life in Five Characters on BBC Radio 4. George Eliot never wrote an autobiography (if only she had! - wouldn't it have been one of the most luminous and intelligent of all nineteenth century lives?). Instead she wrote her life into her leading characters: Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, Janet Dempster in Janet's Repentance - a novella which was a new one for me, Silas Marner in the novel that bears his name, and finally, on her day itself, Gwendolyn Harleth in Daniel Deronda.

Kathryn Hughes has also written an engaging piece in The Guardian in honour of the bicentenary, "What George Eliot's 'provincial' novels can teach today's divided Britain". She writes with the Brexit referendum in mind, and the current election campaign. "This recent habit of reducing people to types would have appalled Eliot. Her chief message is that we must learn to identify and honour the particular differences between us while acknowledging our shared humanity. Art is the nearest thing to life, she wrote in an essay in 1856. It is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.... Until we have understood what life is like for the Tullivers and the Dodsons, we are in no position to judge them for holding preferences and opinions that are so different from our own."

Verb sap. The great writer still speaks. Two hundred years on, we need to listen carefully.

The Prince, Privilege and Public Life

I wasn't going to watch the Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. Not out of a sense of propriety: there was more entertainment to be had on other channels that night.

But then I read some social media posts. And commentary in next morning's papers. I realised that bigger matters were at stake than mere royal titillation. So I sat down, logged on to the BBC iPlayer and started paying attention.

I don't want to speculate. I don't know whether the Prince was telling the truth or not (or at any rate the whole truth). I don't know what to make of his having "no recollection" of meeting Virginia Giuffre or having sex with her. I can't make any more sense of the notorious photograph of them together than he apparently can. I don't pretend to understand his memory of a precisely datable evening in the Pizza Express in Woking, or the clinical pathology that inhibits perspiration. I don't know how to evaluate his demeanour and body-language during the interview.

And I'm not clear whether the Prince's readiness to submit to this intense interrogation was courageous or foolhardy though the consensus is the latter. Others are experts: they must judge. All I'm competent to say anything about are the words he spoke, on the record, taken at their face value. And what these words mean when someone in public life speaks them, someone who is at the very pinnacle of the establishment by virtue of his being a senior member of the Royal Family.

In a modest way, as a clergyman, I've been in public life for most of my adulthood. I've learned a little about how exposed you are in a leadership role, how your words and actions are placed under an unforgiving spotlight you are never quite prepared for until you find yourself there. I've discovered, sometimes the hard way, how your behaviour is calibrated against the values of the organisation you serve (in my case the Church of England) and against your own professional and personal values, whether they are stated or implicit. ("Would Jesus have said or done this?") In a sense, you have no private life. You are not your own any more.

So watching the interview was a profoundly uncomfortable experience. I could all too easily imagine myself sitting across the table opposite Emily Maitlis for what I would probably remember as the most uncomfortable hour of my life. I could imagine myself perspiring (unlike the Prince) under her scrupulously courteous yet relentlessly forensic examination. I might persuade myself that I could bluff my way through it by turning on the charm, or rely on clever formulae rehearsed in coaching sessions. But I know I would not be capable of maintaining any pretence for more than a few minutes. An hour is a long time in the dock. The truth would out in the end. If it were me.

I don't know about Prince Andrew. Only he knows the full story. But let's make the presumption that his truth was told too, all of it, or at least all that was relevant to the scope of the interview. What did I make of that as I imagined myself in his shoes?

My answer is that if it were me, I would reckon that I'd already rendered myself unfit for public office. Both on the basis of what I hadn't said as well as what I had.

It's what the Prince didn't say that was most culpable. Jeffrey Epstein's record is not a matter of conjecture. He was a convicted sex offender. He procured ("trafficked") women and underage girls for sex with himself and others. The Prince's close association with him and the inevitable collusion with his lifestyle and behaviour would already have posed grave reputational risks. But for him not even to hint in the interview that he understood how Epstein's abuse of women and girls would have created victims who would be damaged for life is beyond culpable. Not to express the slightest care for or sympathy towards them, not to deplore Epstein’s behaviour would be incredible if we had not heard for ourselves this sound of a gaping royal silence.

As for what he did say, his only acknowledgment of any misjudgment, the only hint of having made a big mistake was in respect of visiting Epstein after his release from prison in order, he said, to terminate his relationship with him. That gives the game away: in that admission, the Prince was acknowledging that his relationship with Epstein was altogether toxic, hence the need to end it. There was a mysterious reference to "honour" in doing this face to face rather than through a phone call. Let us suppose so. But there's something oddly self-regarding about invoking your own sense of honour when the entire conversation has been about what most people would regard as at least flirting with serial dishonour. The register of self-justification hardly matched the narrative. It felt dislocated, out of context.

You'd have thought that the Prince would have been advised by his coaches to adopt a seriously contrite approach to this interview. Maybe to have said something like this. Yes, I've messed up badly. My behaviour has been at best self-indulgent, not to say unforgivable. And worst of all is the plight of the women and girls who were victims of my friend's predatory abuse with which, by my silence in not condemning it, I've colluded. How can I ever put right that terrible wrong done to them? How can I show them that the damage they have suffered will go on weighing on my conscience for the rest of my life just as it will forever haunt theirs? As it was, he came across as entitled people often do - not guided by the same moral compass most of us invoke when placed in ambiguous or compromising situations.

I'm trying not to speculate about things the Prince either denied or was silent about. I'm going only on what he said in front of us all. He must make up his own mind about what he does next. But if it were me, what would I do?

I was asking myself that question all through the interview. But it's really not that hard for me to answer. I'd have had to admit to a sense of shame that events had brought me to this point. I honestly do not think I could continue in public life in the light of it. Not with honour. I'd be too compromised by my past, and I'd risk in turn compromising the institutions in which I held a public role. If I said I'd be too ashamed to continue in office as a public leader, I'm not overstating it, I think. I recognise that it may feel different for a member of the Royal Family. But I'm also questioning whether it should be different. Honour and trust come into everything we do and are in our public roles. Leadership that is worth anything collapses if they are forfeited. So I would have to say that if it were me, I'd now have reached that point, and it was time for me to retreat back into private life with as much dignity as I could muster. Not because my reputation had been damaged beyond repair. Not even because of the harm I had done to my family, my associates and my institution. But because (I hope) I’d want to do the right thing as a matter of principle: taking responsibility for my behaviour and acting with integrity in the light of it.

In my leadership roles I've learned a lot from the Seven Principles of Public Life that people holding public office in appointed or elected roles are required to sign. These roles include health and education, the police, the courts, the civil service and national and local government. The Principles are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, and the example we set in leadership. We are right to prize such ethical standards and measure our behaviour in the light of them. We are right to expect that our leaders and representatives in public life will try at all times to live up to them.

I wonder what answer Emily Maitlis would have got if she'd put them to the Prince?

The Berlin Wall 30 years on

In old(er) age I find myself looking back on the times I’ve lived through and how they’ve shaped me over the seven decades I’ve been alive. I was born in 1950, the precise midpoint of the twentieth century. What have been the most significant events of world history that I can say have touched me personally in some way?

Any list is provisional of course. We can’t easily judge what events will prove defining in the grand scheme of things when we are too close to them. Even a lifetime can be too short to make sound historical judgements. There’s too much foreground; things don’t stay in place long enough to see them as part of the bigger picture. We need distance and perspective, and even then the relative significance of historical events and the meanings they carry can be hotly contested by historians. But I believe there are key “moments” in our own lifetimes that have already gathered the flow of history around them and acquired a kind of symbolic, even mythic, status.

So I’m speaking about my subjective experience of world events, those I remember as having a powerful effect on me in the first half of my life. My current seven candidates are these. (I wonder what yours are?) I’ve already blogged on two of them.

1962 The Cuba missile crisis;
1963 The assassination of President Kennedy;
1968 The student riots in France;
1969 The first moon landing;
1973 The accession of the UK to the European Communities;
1975 The end of the Vietnam War;
1989 The fall of the Berlin Wall.

On Saturday we shall commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the last of these. So let me reflect briefly on the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I paid my first visit to Berlin that very year, 1989. But I was too early to be part of history. It was June. That summer the Kirchentag, the great two-yearly gathering of German Protestant Christians, took place in Berlin. It was an amazing event. I stayed with a family in Dahlem in the then Western Sector. There was a bewildering variety of activities to take part in: lectures, seminars, music, film, theatre, art... and a lot of theological and political debate, not only in churches and lecture halls but on street corners and in pubs and clubs. Here in the UK we don’t have anything quite like this festival of culture and faith that draws tens of thousands of people, not least the young, from across the country for five days of intense engagement and festive enjoyment. I was struck by how much talk I overheard about “our common European home”, particularly of course the aspiration to unite Germany. It was exhilarating. But that summer talk of peace and reconciliation in Germany still felt like a beautiful dream, nothing more.

To gain some respite from all this heady stuff, I needed time to wander round the city, drink in the atmosphere of this extraordinary place. In particular, I wanted to visit the East. I recall a journey on the U-Bahn that took me from one part of West Berlin to another that entailed crossing under areas of the eastern sector and passing through long-abandoned ghost stations. From inside deep cuttings I could look up at the grim tower blocks of the East shielded by intimidating rolls of barbed wire laid above the rail tracks. By contrast, crossing Checkpoint Charlie on foot in either direction did not seem as big a deal as I’d expected, not for a westerner with a British passport. Even crossing back into the West didn’t entail a long wait or a search. It was a very different matter for East Berliners, that was clear. Security around the Berlin Wall did not suggest any lessening of tension at that fault line between the two Germanys, the two Europes and the two worlds of East and West.

Back at Coventry Cathedral where I worked at the time, we continued to pray for peace and reconciliation across Germany. We often thought of the German cities with which Coventry had special relationships, whose great churches had been bombed by the Allies just as Coventry Cathedral had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe raid of 14 November 1940. I’d visited three of them: Lübeck which was (just) inside the Bundesrepublik, Dresden, then in the GDR and Berlin which straddled both. There, I’d attended Kirchentag events in the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church on the Kurfürstendamm, whose spire, the so-called “Hollow Tooth”, damaged by Allied bombing in 1943, served as a much-loved war memorial in much the same way as Coventry Cathedral.

So you can imagine the feverish excitement on 9 November 1989 when the news broke that something remarkable was happening around, and on top of, the Berlin Wall. We were glued to our televisions, in our case a large old black-and-white (read on to discover why this detail is relevant). It was soon clear that not only had the Wall been breached but that the East Berlin security forces were doing nothing about it, watching, a few even smiling, while people took pick-axes to the fabric of the Wall and surged across newly opened gaps. That officialdom stood by and did nothing to stop this outbreak of unthinkable lawlessness is one of the abiding memories of that day. You’ll remember it well enough or will have seen the footage scores of times.

Having been in the city so recently, and given my Anglo-German parentage, I found it immensely powerful to watch these scenes, and extraordinarily moving too. All the more so because we were expecting to commemorate the anniversary of the dreadful “Night of Shattered Glass”, the Kristallnacht of 9 November 1938 that constituted the first concerted, violent Nazi assault on Germany’s Jewish community. Instead, we found ourselves celebrating this magnificent dawn of a new future for Berlin, and Germany, and Europe. If ever I watched an event that seemed to be an image of the kingdom of God, it was this breaking down of walls, this elimination of the barriers of division, this reaching across to fellow men, women and children in peace and friendship and hope.

It felt like one of the greatest moments of my life. It still does. I was back in Germany the following year, in Bavaria this time at a conference of young adults. The joyous hope-filled energy at that week’s gathering in the mountains was palpable. And participants were in no doubt that all of them were pledged to play their part as Christians in the reconstruction and renewal of a united Germany. And not just Germany. “Our common European Home” was back on the agenda in a revitalised way. And the handful of British Christians who were there were enthusiastically embraced as colleagues and friends in that great project. “The Cold War is over. We are all Berliners. We are all Germans. We are all Europeans” we agreed, in the spirit of John F Kennedy’s happy phrase when he came to the Wall on his unforgettable visit in 1963.

In a Wordsworthian way, it felt good to be alive and see this day. Indeed, I needed to do more than merely see it. I needed to bear witness to it because of the story that would undoubtedly reverberate across coming generations. We could not have foreseen how difficult this project of reunification would prove, what stresses and strains it would place on this new Germany that was rising from the ashes. We did not imagine how hard it would be to eradicate the division between the privileged West and the more deprived East, nor the rise of far-right populist politics in cities and towns of the GDR (and not only there). We believed that the European ideal would quickly vanquish old enmities and bring about a Europe that was democratic, prosperous and free. We thought we could glimpse “the end of history” and the emergence of a new world order of peace among nations.

How naïve, you may say, this “first fine careless rapture”. And yet across Europe, people of Christian faith, other faiths and of no explicit faith but immense good will continue to collaborate for the peace and flourishing of Europe and beyond it, the whole human family. My own Europeanism has always been an important part of my self-awareness - how could it not, given my parentage? But as I look back, I now see what an impetus the events of 1989 gave me to commit to my identity more consciously. Hence my profound disappointment and sadness at the prospect of Brexit, not to mention the challenges the European Project is facing in many other parts of our continent.

But on Saturday, we should celebrate all that the fall of the Berlin Wall promised, and the real achievements that have been wrought across a reunited Germany. On this thirtieth anniversary, it’s worth pausing to be grateful for what happened in November 1989 that raised the hopes of millions of people all over the world that oppressive regimes do not have absolute control over human lives. For if the events of that month seemed like an image of the kingdom of God, then we should go on praying “thy kingdom come” with the heartfelt conviction that lasting change can happen and the lives of nations, societies and people be permanently transformed for good. That’s a prayer to make our own during the commemorations that will take place on this weekend of Remembrance Sunday.

What about that black-and-white TV, you ask? It wasn’t long before the East German Embassy in London was closed. It had state-of-the-art TVs to give away. One of them found its way into our home. Not only was it a colour set, but it even had a zapper (aka remote). For our four children, not to mention their parents, Christmas came early that year!

Half-Term at Haydon: Isaac comes to stay

In other news, our 6 year old grandson Isaac has spent half-term with his grandparents here in Haydon Bridge. You’ll forgive me for laying aside the serious stuff I usually blog about. He has gone home today and we are missing him. The house is suddenly very quiet again.

It was an important week for him and for us. These were his first ever nights away from his parents. Would he lose his nerve about it at the last minute? Would he be overcome with homesickness while he was here? Would he cope with Halloween without his friends and neighbours to trick or treat? Would he sleep and eat properly? How would we fill the time? These were grown-up anxieties of course, not his. But they made us realise how out of practice we were at caring full-time for a youngster. It was as much a rite of passage for us as for him.

When I went to Leeds to pick him up, I knew I needn’t have worried. He was up for this great adventure. We spent most of the train journey talking about railways. He has obsessed about railways ever since he was a toddler. We looked at images of Mallard and Flying Scotsman in his steam loco magazine. We looked out for “Opa’s Train” on the East Coast Main Line (i.e. the Class 91 electric loco 91114 named Durham Cathedral which has my name on the cab door). He was quiet for a bit while he ate his sandwiches. I wondered what he was thinking about? The memory of saying goodbye to his parents and little sister perhaps? Or the prospect of being special for the week, having the undivided attention of his Nana and Opa?

We’ve had a great week. There was Shaun of the Sheep - Farmageddon at the Forum Cinema. The Tullie House Museum in Carlisle provided interactive Roman history and railwayana. We visited no fewer than three soft play centres - at Carlisle, Haltwhistle and Hexham. Isaac is confident and good at socialising, so he quickly finds friends to play with at these places. And it’s reading time for us adults. He came to the Oxfam book shop where I volunteer and enjoyed the novel sight of my struggling with the till to process his purchases (which included DVDs chosen for his sister and cousin: I was touched by his kindness, even if he looked expectantly at us to find the cash).

What else? We watched You Tube movies of Thomas and Friends and of sophisticated trains created out of Lego - another favourite activity of his). I read him Ronald Dahl’s Witches at bedtime, suitable literature for Halloween week (a funny, intriguing book - but a bit on the misogynistic side, I thought). He has a wicked sense of humour. Irony is going to be his forte one day, I think. He dressed up for Halloween, put a pumpkin in the window and enjoyed the comings and goings on the street. The level crossing in sight of our house was a reliable source of pleasure (thank you, Northern Rail and the RealTime Trains app). He was out of bed by dawn each morning, but we set him up with croissants and juice, and he was fine. We asked him for feedback on the week (quality of accommodation, meals, entertainment etc., with the options “good”, “very good” and “fantastic”). We did all right on the whole.

One of the nicest moments was at a soft play. A young parent came up to us and said, “That’s such a lovely polite boy you have there. You don’t often see behaviour like that these days.” This took us by surprise, not because it isn’t true (it is) but because it was unsolicited. That’s a big tribute to his own parents, of course, our daughter and her husband. And it made me realise how respectful Isaac was being during his time with us. He is no goody two-shoes, thank God, but he does say please and thank you, and at 6 o’clock in the morning bothers to knock on the bedroom door with “I’m sorry to wake you up but...”. Winsome. Endearing. Delightful.

We are lucky enough to be enjoying a retirement in which we have time to give our three colourful, talented, much-loved grandchildren Gabriel, Maddy and Isaac. As most grandparents discover, this is somewhat different from the memory of caring for our own children when they were at that age. The responsibility is bounded for one thing: there comes a time when you have to give your grandchildren back to their parents, and this affects the quality of the time we spend with them. Then there’s the fact that grandparents are at an altogether different life-stage from where we were when our children were young.

Then (and I’m aware this is a middle-class-professional’s perception), family time was heavily contested by the demands of the day job. My children are candid about how difficult I found it to be truly present to them when they were growing up. I wish I had been better at it. I really do. Grandchildren are not given to us as a second chance to make a better job of it - they are human beings in their own right who are growing up in a world in many respects very different from the one in which we tried to be good enough parents thirty or forty years ago. Our children have to bear the consequences of the mistakes we made in our parenting, and we have to live with the memory. The miracle is that mostly, they survive and flourish, despite as well as because of us. And that they seem able to forgive us.

But grandchildren do offer us the opportunity to reprise what should have been among the best experiences of our lives if we have been entrusted with the gift of children. For now, with the wisdom of years, we can try to give back something of what we have so abundantly received, and continue to receive, from those who love us. This came home to me not so much when we were enjoying outings or engaging in projects but in the quotidian uneventfulness of ordinary time: moments when we were content simply to be together whether it was at mealtimes, walking along to the village shops or reading to him at bedtime. Gone was that feeling I remembered so well that there was always something else I ought to be doing: a list of admin jobs to be tackled, a meeting to get to, parishioners to visit, sermons to write.

“What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in his enigmatic poem. “They are to be happy in. Where we live but days?” It would be easy to project on to our grandchildren a kind of prelapsarian innocence and happiness that in adulthood we realise is lost to us. Was it ever like that? Even the best childhood is not without its shadows and its pain. Maybe our grandchildren can help us reconnect with our own childhood, not the rhapsodic dreamlike fantasy but the more ambivalent reality where the troubles of growing up are as keenly felt as the joy of being alive?

Our grandchildren are not there to heal our memories. But to be truly present to them, cherish them for the human beings they already are, love them as bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, learn how to listen and laugh and cry with them - all this is profoundly healing. It would be wrong to indulge the purple prose. It’s fatally easy to sentimentalise when writing about children. So I won’t pretend we haven’t worked hard this half-term, that there weren’t challenges we had to face. But I think I’ve glimpsed in a new way how life is pure gift. Growing old and becoming grandparents has a lot to commend it. “I love you so much” Isaac whispered when the time came to say goodbye. Heart speaking to heart when the words ran out.

It meant a lot that his parents entrusted him to us for these days away. God willing there will be many more weeks like this one for Isaac, and in time, for Maddy and Gabe. Meanwhile, we shall get used to the quiet once again. And look forward to catching up on our sleep.

Ten Commandments for Brexit

I saw a tweet today from a finance company. "Ready for Brexit? Our ten-point checklist will help you get prepared. Act now to get the financial guidance you need. #LetsTalkBusiness." I retweeted it with a comment of my own. "Ready for Brexit? Nope. Are emotional and spiritual guidance on offer too?" No answer as yet. I wait in hope.

But while I wait, I'm thinking how important it is to cross this threshold with self-awareness and insight. Readers of my blog will know that I'm a Remain ultra. I believe that voting for Brexit was a terrible mistake for the nation to make. I think it is bound to have all kinds of consequences, mostly unforeseen, for the United Kingdom, not least the union of our four peoples. I can't see that any Brexit deal will benefit Britain as much as our present EU membership does. (And I write in North East England, destined to suffer the worst impact of any part of the UK in terms of its economy, manufacturing industry and employment.)

Nevertheless, I am realistic enough to recognise that Brexit is bound to happen with or without a deal whether it's in a week's time, a month's time or some time in the future. And while a big part of me will only be dragged kicking and screaming out of the European Union, a voice within tells me to get ready to leave as gracefully as I can. Not necessarily going gently into that not-so-good night, but at least trying to recognise that generosity is needed. It’s going to be hard. I'm addressing this blog to myself to begin with, and then to fellow Remainers who like me feel the pain of Brexit and yet want to go on living as good citizens, making the best of what seems like a thoroughly bad job.

So here's my answer to the question in my tweet. A ten-point checklist to help us get prepared emotionally, morally, spiritually. Ten Commandments for Brexit, if you like. #LetsTalkWisdom.

1 Understand the pain of loss.
Emotional intelligence is important here. For many of us, Brexit is a loss of identity and belonging the like of which we probably haven't experienced in our nation's life before. If you're like me you'll feel this loss in a surprisingly personal way. This is about me as well as us. So we should expect to experience the normal symptoms of bereavement such as denial, bewilderment, emptiness, anger, bargaining, depression - and maybe only much later, acceptance and resolution. The effects of Brexit on mental health have already been noted by some psychotherapists. We simply need to notice what we are going through, and be honest about it, at least with ourselves.

2 Don't feed anger and bitterness. Try to be positive.
Yes, we were lied to in the referendum campaign. This hasn't stopped since then. Inevitably we feel that the Brexit result, so finely balanced, was based on a false prospectus fed by the right-wing media. But there's nothing to be gained by nursing hurt feelings, still less by badmouthing those who misled the nation or colluded with them. We need to find healing in our nation if we are to have a future worth living for. Being positive can begin by celebrating the years we enjoyed EU membership and all the benefits it brought. Yes, we are sad beyond words to be leaving. We heartily wish we weren't. We are angry about it and are right to be. But we can resolve not to indulge in vengeful self-pity. Even in hard times, we can cultivate thankfulness. Let the power of grateful memory shed light on the way we navigate our path through this dark time of loss and grief.

3 Treat Brexiters with courtesy.
Loving my neighbour as myself is one of the two great precepts of the Torah, reiterated by Jesus in the gospels. We need to work hard at our relationships with Brexiters, and with former Remainers who have gone along with, even supported, the government's attempts to "get Brexit done". However much we may have been abused by Brexit campaigners, however easy it might have been to give back in kind, we should not compromise on respect and courtesy towards those with whom we profoundly disagree. Perhaps there are individuals to whom we need to say that we're sorry, and with whom we should try to be reconciled. It's beneath our self-respect to treat others with contempt and nurse our hatred. In a divided nation, dignity (= "worth") has been at stake during these past three years. Let's cultivate peace and friendship where we can. Let’s try to help one another speak our truth with gracefulness. And if Brexit unravels, let’s not crow "I told you so!"

4 Remain European in heart and mind.
Let's use language accurately. We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe. It matters that we go on thinking of ourselves as Europeans, and that this should continue to be a core part of our identity as British people. To be fair to Brexiters, this is a point many of them have been at pains to underline. Whatever our nation's political alignments in the future, nothing can rob us of being geographically, intellectually, culturally and spiritually at the heart of our continent. "No man is an island entire of itself." We are "part of the main". We need to affirm this ever more strongly after Brexit. Travel in Europe if you can; if not, travel in your mind and heart. We are Europeans, and always shall be.

5 Befriend EU nationals living and working in Britain.
There's a particular need right now to embrace the so-called "Three Million" from EU countries who are living among us in this country. Many of them continue to suffer great anxiety about their future, whether their application for residence in Britain will be granted, what their prospects for employment are. (And let's remember that British people resident in overseas EU countries are just as worried about the uncertainties they face, including the elderly who can't afford to move back to the UK but face big questions about their pensions and health care.) This of course is only part of our hospitality to and care for all who live among us who come from other parts of the world. We must use our imaginations and offer help and support where we can.

6 Keep the conversation about Europe alive.
Remainers are often told to take Brexit on the chin and move on. But it's wishful thinking to imagine that the debate about the EU will end on Brexit Day. On the contrary. Negotiating our future relationship with the EU, and reaching trade deals will take many years. This will guarantee that the EU will remain on the national agenda and in its consciousness for a long time to come. And I'm certain that our children's generation, frustrated beyond measure by the actions of their Brexiter parents in denying them the future they had taken for granted until 2016, will one day reopen the question of EU membership. This may happen sooner than we think. We should encourage them. We should support pro-European politicians and policies. Democracy is a conversation that never stops. There's nothing once-for-all about Brexit.

7 Challenge fake news about the European Union.
The rhetoric of the far right will continue to trumpet "taking back control" and play down the intangible benefits of EU membership such as promoting human rights and the rights of working people, sharing in the project of peace-building across the continent, collaborating in our response to the climate emergency, working together on programmes to tackle crime, slavery, trafficking, sexual exploitation and maintaining security. As good Europeans we must go on championing the EU's efforts to build a better world not just for its twenty-seven nations but for all human beings. That means challenging the lies and half-truths that will continue to bolster those who try to demonstrate how Brexit has been the salvation of Britain. The case for the EU still needs to be made, even if, for now, we shall have to help make it as fellow-travellers rather than citizen-members.

8 Play your part to make sure that Britain remains an outward-looking country.
The referendum mantra, "what's best for Britain" was an invitation to indulge the worst of self-serving attitudes. To love our neighbour means to look for the welfare of others as well as ourselves, or as the Golden Rule says, to do for them what we would want them to do for us. In the reciprocity of mutual service and self-giving lies our flourishing. What's best for us turns out to be what's best for others too. The nations of the United Kingdom, the European Union and the Commonwealth understand this mutuality and attempt to live by it, even if the reality falls short of the aspiration. Given the environmental and geopolitical threats we face, our race only has a future if we cultivate the love of neighbour among the world's peoples. To become insular, as we risk doing because of Brexit, would be to walk away from the global responsibility our nation has historically understood to belong to its vocation. EU membership was a test of our capacity to look beyond our borders to the welfare of other peoples and, ultimately, to the flourishing of the human family. It would be the death of this humane, fair-minded, civilised country if we abandoned that large and generous vision for the world and looked only to the interests of our own people.

9 Don't be nostalgic. Live in the present.
We can't know what life will be like once we've crossed the Brexit threshold. In these days of the so-called end-game, it may feel like going into a kind of exile. Nostalgia is literally, aching for home. Exiles wouldn't be human if they didn't experience it. But when Jeremiah tried to help his people make a good exile far from their homeland, he told them to invest in their present, not the past. "Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce...Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare" (Jeremiah 29.1-7). This should be our attitude for the years we shall live on Brexit Island, be they many or few. Investing in the present opens us to its possibilities. We learn to live, not out of regret for the past but attentive to the here and now. We are always the better for doing that.

10 Don't lose heart. And say your prayers.
I think this is the most important principle of them all. Brexit may have driven us to the brink of desperation, but we refuse to give up hope. What God means by this cataclysm that has overtaken our nation only he knows. It's beyond our understanding. But we mustn't succumb to despair. So we say our prayers for the family of humanity, for our European friends and neighbours, for our nation and for ourselves. We are not expecting God to save us from ourselves and the consequences of our decisions. But prayer affirms that God has not abandoned his world. To pray is to stand in hope and solidarity with the world in all its suffering and to ask what its healing and flourishing would mean. And then to commit ourselves to whatever actions arise from our having glimpsed our human condition from a larger and deeper perspective. Contributing towards a better, more wholesome politics in our nation is one way. "What matters for prayer is what we do next." That's how to keep the flame of hope burning and not lose heart.