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.

John Henry Newman: a personal debt

Tomorrow, John Henry Newman is to be canonised in a ceremony at the Vatican. He will be the first English man or woman to be pronounced a saint since the seventeenth century. So this is an event of major significance to Christians in this country as well as worldwide.

And I mean Christians in an ecumenical sense, not just Catholics. For Newman was the most famous (some said notorious) Catholic convert of the nineteenth century. He was brought up as an Anglican with evangelical tendencies. But his studies of the Christian fathers and the medieval church led him progressively to contemplate a vision of the church that was larger in its embrace and more profound in its theological and spiritual reach than the protestantism in which he had been reared. As one of the leading Tractarians of the Oxford Movement launched in 1833, he preached and wrote energetically in defence of the Church of England as an organic part of the ancient catholic church, for the time being divided but always yearning for ultimate union.

That theological position proved unsustainable for Newman. Always a man of conscience and integrity, he came to realise that the logic of his developing convictions was pointing him away from Anglicanism and towards Roman Catholicism. He crossed the threshold in October 1845. It’s not correct to say that “the rest is history”. His was a questing, searching pilgrim soul, so beautifully and accurately described in his famous hymn Lead, kindly Light. Perhaps he was always too much of an Anglican to regard his conversion as any kind of terminus. Books like The Development of Doctrine articulated his belief that revelation, illumination, “faith seeking understanding” as Anselm said, never stops. “To live is to change” said Newman, “and to live long is to have changed much”. Even a cardinal of the Catholic Church!

On the eve of his canonisation, I want to recall the influence of John Henry Newman on my own formation as a Christian and a priest. In my teenage and student years, I was a fervent evangelical of the most conservative kind. I embraced Calvinism to a degree that was thought extreme even by Christian Union mentors. As an ordinand I inevitably chose to train at what was then regarded as the most reformed and protestant of all the Anglican evangelical theological colleges. (It amuses me now that some colleagues conjecture that I must have studied at Westcott House or Cuddesdon! Let the reader understand.)

In those days, nearly five decades ago, if you had a degree in theology, your training for ministry could be improvised around the Bishops’ modest academic requirements alongside gaining practical experience in pastoral ministry. My tutor sat down with me and asked what I thought I needed to do by way of study during my final year before ordination. I replied that my theology degree had given me a rigorous grounding in the Bible and the Fathers. But my knowledge of church history more or less stopped at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Perhaps I needed to dip my toe into modernity? My tutor’s response was immediate. “Your experience of church has been limited to protestantism. But there’s a bigger world out there. Have you ever read John Henry Newman’s Apologia?”

It’s one of those questions I’ll always be grateful for. Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua was published in 1864. It is his “defence of his own life” in response to Charles Kingsley’s attack on him for lacking honour and integrity in abandoning his Anglicanism. It’s one of the classics of spiritual autobiography of the Victorian or any other age. I found a copy in a secondhand bookshop and paid, I think, 20 pence for it. I don’t want to dramatise things, but it’s not too much to say that it changed my life.

As I began to read, I found I was struggling somewhat. Not with Newman’s limpid writing (he was an acknowledged master of English prose). It was his intellectual and spiritual thought-world. I almost said sound-world, an interesting comment on the almost aural effect of reading him. It was so different from, even alien to, what I was used to. This was a different kind of journey, or at least a differently described quest for holiness from what was familiar to me. We didn’t use the tiresome language of comfort-zones (being out of) in those innocent days, but this was where I was finding myself. Thank God for discomfort!

What changed everything were three insights in particular. The first was the realisation that Christian belief and the church's experience walk hand in hand. What we call “the tradition” isn’t a fixed immutable body of biblical texts or formal dogma so much as a living memory of how the church has reflected on its faith across the centuries. This is what Newman had come to call “the development of doctrine”. It echoed a saying of one of the Scottish Covenanters that I’d come to love: “God has more light and truth to shine out from his holy word”. I glimpsed how the formulation of Christian thought - any thought - was a dynamic process. Tradition means that which is “ handed on”. Newman’s reverence for tradition as a process recognised how each generation cherishes what it has received in order to pass it on to the next. It shouldn’t have been a startling discovery (not if I’d been paying attention to St Paul in 1 Corinthians).  But for me, a light had been switched on.

The second insight from the Apologia was about the place of conscience. For Newman, conscience was crucial in the forming of Christian mind and character. The externals of belief could never stand on their own, disconnected from their inner reception and embrace by the believer’s conscience. That’s about integrity and honour, "truth in the inward parts" as the Prayer Book version of Psalm 51 puts it, the very qualities Kingsley had accused Newman of lacking. And quite suddenly I realised that this was a personal dilemma for me too. It dawned on me that my evangelicalism was not going to survive this Tractarian scrutiny unchanged. And that would mean a serious renegotiation of my faith and my relationship with what I was coming to speak about as my own tradition. Again, I won’t dramatise by speaking of a “Here I stand” moment. But this profoundly disturbing yet liberating discovery of the role of conscience did, I think, prove life-changing.

Newman’s final gift to me was the spirituality with which his writing was imbued. Quite simply, I found it irresistible. Possibly for aesthetic reasons that bear closer  examination (how easy it is to be seduced by Newman!) I was becoming catholic not only in my thinking but also in my praying and feeling. I found myself increasingly at odds with evangelical worship, especially its relentless stream of words, its extraverted busyness and its lack of feeling for the numinous. I can see that this probably sounds like a caricature, but it’s what I was experiencing at the time. No doubt personality type, temperament, comes into liturgy and spirituality. If so, I owe to Newman the instinct to take it more seriously. Eventually I came to serve as a curate in what we would now call an affirming catholic parish where they wore eucharistic vestments, swung the censer from time to time, preached a socially inclusive intelligent Christianity and reserved the sacrament. How much I learned there! It set the direction of my entire ministry.

So it seemed fitting to include a hymn by Newman in our marriage service, “Praise to the Holiest in the height”. A year later my wife sang Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius with the local choral society and I heard that great work for the first time. Newman’s poem, from which the hymn is drawn, is not without its flaws. But somehow that performance in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre set the seal on a personal journey I knew would be lifelong.

Decades later I found myself in the company of - well, I won’t name him because he is a well-known church leader. Without any preamble, as if he’d been saving up for this moment, he looked me in the eye: “Michael, back in the seventies we were looking to you as a future leader of evangelicals in the Church of England. It all looked so promising. What happened to you?” It was hardly the question I’d been expecting as we sat over a cup of tea enjoying Belgian biscuits. But I didn’t hesitate with my answer. “I read John Henry Newman” I replied. “That’s all.” “Ah. I see now” he said and smiled. And changed the subject.

After all these years, how better to acknowledge the debt than to echo Newman’s own praise to his Creator and Redeemer, the Holiest in the height: “in all his words most wonderful, most sure in all his ways!”

** There are many Newmans. Like all great men and women, he encounters us in different ways. Here's another blog about him on the Laudable Practice website. It's a somewhat different take on him, but well worth reading. This week's edition of The Tablet also has a number of thought-provoking articles.

Northumbrians: a personal take on a new book

On 5 May 1973 my wife and I became engaged. That was the day Sunderland won the Cup Final. My wife's parents were ardent Black Cat supporters. We figured that if Sunderland were to win, her father would say yes to anything, and if they lost he'd be past caring. 

Reader, I married her. And married into her North East family. Her father was from Consett, her mother from Wearside. They hadn't lived in the North East since the war. When I arrived on the scene, they had retired to the Yorkshire Dales. But the region was in their blood. My initiation into North East culture included being presented to the family matriarch who lived in Sunderland and of whom everyone seemed in awe, and an evening drinking in a well-known watering hole just down the road where the only females to be seen were serving behind the bar. (Brown ale, you ask? I'm not saying. It would be a cliché too far.)

To a young Londoner it was all very strange, even exotic. I'd only visited the North East once before, as a schoolboy applying to Durham University to read maths. I've never forgotten the November afternoon I got out of the train at Durham station. It was bleak and grey, the kind of day the North East does so well. Above the rooftops huddled below I took in the apparition of the Castle and Cathedral not, it seemed as the light began to fade, anchored to the bedrock of their acropolis but floating ethereally above. I walked through the darkening streets up to the Castle where I was to spend the night before my interview. I wondered how I had come to be so far from home. Did it cross my mind that one day this would be my home? Not for a moment. I didn't go to Durham University in the end. But the seed of my fascination with northernness had been sown.

A decade later, we were living in rural north Northumberland. That repeated north I found to be both romantic and unsettling. I'd become Vicar of Alnwick. It was my first incumbency. I came to love the place and its people, and to cherish the memory of the ancient Christianity that flourished in Saxon times thanks to the Northumbrian saints like Oswald and Aidan, Cuthbert and Hild. But I won't deny that living and working in a northern country market town posed challenges to a young vicar brought up in the metropolitan suburbs of north London. Was this because any small town was inevitably a more self-contained world? The empty landscapes were sublimely beautiful, but their silence and remoteness could feel unnerving at times. Or was the discomfort due to its northernness, a culture shock that would wear off in time? (It took three decades, I was told, even to begin to belong up here near the Scottish border.)

We went away, but the pull of Northumbria was in my blood. In time we found our way back like returning exiles. "It's marvellous to be back in the North East" I heard myself say at my installation as Dean in Durham Cathedral. I wrote many blogs during my thirteen years in Durham, so I won't say more here. Except to recall one conversation I had with a college principal during my first year as Dean. "Michael" he said, "you'll never understand this Cathedral or the North East until you've been to your first Miners' Gala". So it proved. I began to feel (not just observe) something of the bonds of loyalty and solidarity felt among the North East's mining communities, forged by the shared perils of mining, the common experience of disaster, the loss of livelihood and dignity when the pits closed and the frustration that their people had been all but forgotten about in London where power lay and decisions were taken. I also learned how old wounds ran deep, such as the bitter memories of the miners' strike of 1984 that so divided workers and their families.

Finally (to bring the story up to date) we retired four years ago back to rural Northumberland. We live in what was once a pit manager's house, named after a Tyneside collier ship that went down in the 1880s. It’s right by the railway, Britain’s earliest east-west route that was open when Queen Victoria came to the throne. The River South Tyne tumbles down from the North Pennines a hundred yards away. How very North Eastern. St Cuthbert was here too, once upon a time: the medieval church up on the hill is dedicated to him. It was probably built to commemorate one of the halts made by his community as they travelled the North in the ninth century with the remains of their saints and the Lindisfarne Gospels looking for a permanent resting-place. But an even more ancient story is told here by the Roman Wall as it strides through our parish on the crest of the Whin Sill. There's nothing like the presence of antiquity to put things (like Brexit) into perspective, especially when you find you have what looks plausibly like a substantial Roman stone mortared into your garden wall. Who are we and where have we come from, it seems to ask as I gaze out at it out from the kitchen window. I want to reciprocate with the same question. If only stones could talk!

********

These memories have been stirred by reading Dan Jackson's enjoyable new book The Northumbrians: North-East England and Its People - A New History. (Point of order: do you hyphenate North East or not? When I published my own book on the Christian heritage of the region, Landscapes of Faith, my publisher decided that we wouldn't. So out of habit, I don't. The cover of Northumbrians hyphenates but Dan Jackson's text doesn't. Read what you like into that.)

I've loved this book. Perhaps I've read it too quickly because it is so readable. Its take on the North East is refreshingly different from so much other writing on the region. For all that it's called A New History, it doesn't follow any kind of timeline. Nor does it linger especially on landscape, architecture, literature and art as ends in themselves, rather, for what they tell us about the people whose land this is. For the book is a study of people and communities: at work and leisure, in war and peace, in learning and politics, public life and industry, and not least, in the ordinary days where life is lived in home and countryside, city, town and village.

Dan Jackson can write about these things so well, not only because he is a good historian but, much more importantly, because he is a native Northumbrian himself. He writes as a local from inside the experience of North Easternness - you can smell it in his prose and sense that he knows what he's talking about. He is ready to share his own experience of what it is like to grow up and live in the region - inhabit it, I mean, in a way no incomer like me ever can. So this is a very personal book. It's clear that he loves the North East and is proud to be a Northumbrian. But he doesn't rhapsodise as some literature is prone to do. He knows it too well, is too alive to its paradoxes, struggles and real pain, not least due to the steep decline in heavy industry that once made it the power-house of the nation. The book is all the better for having been written from the perspective of a critical friend.

If I had to recommend a book to someone moving to the North East for the first time to help them orientate themselves in a strange but beguiling land, this would be it. I could have done with it forty years ago. I might suggest that they begin by reading the first and last chapters. The opening chapter sets the scene and explores what and who we mean by the idea of "Northumbrian". The closing chapter ponders what the North East is becoming in the twenty-first century, what we should celebrate in the region, and what could be different and better. You'd expect me to say that I was particularly interested in the discussion about why our region voted so decisively for Brexit in 2016 (and before that, against the setting-up of a regional assembly in 2004). What's so helpful here is to begin to understand how the wider context of North East history, politics and culture have all played a part in shaping its assumptions.

For me, blown into the North East as a migrant from the south (and not properly "English" at that, having a German parent), Dan Jackson raises important questions about place, identity and belonging. I suppose I am one of Theresa May's "citizens of everywhere" who has called lots of places "home". She disparagingly went on to say that this made us "citizens of nowhere". But that's a non sequitur. It's true that part of me would love to apply the epithet Northumbrian to myself. I've lived and worked in the North East, retired here and God willing, expect to die here. So I envy Dan Jackson his authentic Northumbrian identity and the sense of place and belonging that come with it. But I know that it can never quite be mine, any more than I can still call myself a Londoner, except as identifying my place of origin. His book has helped me to see that.

My own relationship with the North East is more complex, perhaps because it's also coloured by an ever more insistent awareness that I am not simply British but European. But I can say that there is no other part of England where I would rather find myself at this late stage of life. There's nowhere alse that the bonds of affection and adoptive loyalty have ever run so deep. Which is why I've found so much to treasure in this book.