A Birthday Appeal

It’s my birthday soon, my seventieth. It will fall just inside* the Easter season, so modest rejoicing will be permitted (but no partying), alongside the inevitable reflection on attaining this personal milestone. 

Cue introspection? Not now: this blog isn’t about me. I’m writing because this special birthday falls right in the middle of this terrible Coronavirus emergency as it’s hitting us here in the UK. We are holding so many people in our hearts during this crisis: the sick, the dying, the dead, the bereaved, all who are caring for others in these times, our leaders, those who maintain the fabric of our society. 

But we also know that this pandemic is global. Many communities are exposed to very great risks in places where healthcare is so much less developed than here in the UK. So to mark my three score years and ten, I’d like to ask you to join me in helping Oxfam respond to Covid19 across the world. 

Oxfam is deeply involved in helping to contain the spread of the virus worldwide, and in supporting victims and communities that have been badly hit by it. As many of you know, I volunteer each week in the Oxfam bookshop in Hexham here in North East England. I love this involvement for so many reasons, but the principal one is that it helps Oxfam make a difference to some of the neediest people in the world. So perhaps I can appeal particularly to people who support the charity by visiting Oxfam shops and who are missing them (as I am) during this lockdown? If I single out book-lovers especially, well, you’ll understand why as one of them myself.

We all share anxieties about how Covid19 is affecting everyone whether they are far away, closer to home or among our own families and friends. The impact is being felt across the world, especially where people are living through conflict, disaster and poverty. What could happen once the virus takes hold in less developed countries hardly bears thinking about. Bangladesh, for instance, about which I saw a report recently, where critical population densities in towns and cities make any prospect of social distancing, let alone isolation, impossible. In time there will be antiviral drugs and wholesale testing. But by then it will be far too late for many, many people.

Oxfam’s humanitarian staff and partners are working hard to help stop the spread of Covid19 by providing vital support like handwashing facilities, clean water, toilets and soap in many of the world’s most vulnerable communities.Work like this has helped contain deadly disease outbreaks in the past such as Ebola and cholera. It will help protect people against this virus too. 

Oxfam is also able to provide vital equipment in some places to healthcare facilities and hospitals that urgently need support. And it’s helping people who are losing income or at greater risk of domestic abuse because of restrictions on movement. Supporting the world's poorest communities is more important than ever right now.

You don’t need me to explain all this. One of the good things to come out of this emergency is that it’s heightening our awareness that we are one human family. Locally, we are learning how to look after one another better, love our sick, elderly or vulnerable neighbour in practical ways that make a difference. 

But my neighbour is every man, woman and child in every part of God’s world. At times of crisis when it’s tempting to look inwards, I need to make a conscious effort to think about people far away who are facing threats I can barely imagine. Each of them is my neighbour too. I know that in theory. But loving my neighbour isn’t a matter of theory but of developing a feeling for humanity that’s summed up in words like sympathy and compassion. They both have at their core the idea of suffering-with. In my last two blogs I explored what this might mean in this season of the year when we reflect on the Passion and cross of Jesus. For me, the thought that he continues to suffer in every suffering human child is at the heart of what Holy Week and Good Friday mean.

Which is why I’m asking if you’d be willing to join me in being part of this great effort if you can. I’ve made Oxfam’s Coronavirus appeal my birthday fundraiser on Facebook. You can give via my Facebook page. Please use this if possible. The post is public so you don’t have to be a member. But if you prefer, you can give directly to Oxfam though it won’t be included in the total raised by my personal appeal. You can find Oxfam’s Coronavirus giving page here.

Thank you. Stay safe and well. I hope and pray that this season of Holy Week and Easter brings health, peace and blessing. 

*To clarify, because some have speculated, my birthday falls on the Ides of April.

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.

********

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! 

A Sermon in Stone: on being back in Coventry Cathedral

We spent last weekend in Coventry. I'd been invited to speak at the Cathedral on Sunday morning and at Warwick Parish Church in the evening. The Midlands are at their best in spring. The roads were lined with blackthorn. There was a profusion of magnolia in parks and gardens, and dandelions on every lawn.

April 1 was 30 years to the day since we moved to Coventry from Northumberland. I can be certain of that since the date we left Alnwick is recorded on a sampler we have on the kitchen wall. I remember thinking how lovely Shakespeare's county looked that spring. A few weeks later I was installed as a canon of the Cathedral. The abundant cherry blossom was breathtaking seen against the pink sandstones of the city and its churches in the clean washed light of spring. It was the weekend Coventry City won the Cup Final, so there was Sky Blue on every building too.

Last Sunday, then, I preached a sermon at the sung eucharist. The text was the raising of Lazarus in St John's Gospel (11.1-45). Looking back through my sermon archive, I was amazed to discover that I had never preached on this famous story - how could that be in 42 years of ordained ministry? So I welcomed the opportunity to put it right. (It's never too late to learn.)

I was struck by a coincidence of two texts. One was from the story itself: “This illness does not lead to death, rather it is for God’s glory.” The other was inscribed into the fabric of the Cathedral itself, in uneven letters just by the glass wall at the west end, “To the glory of God this Cathedral burnt". They were of course linked by the word glory which is what leapt out of the page as I imagined myself speaking from the Cathedral pulpit. But I was intrigued by an apparent connection of meaning in elliptical nature of both statements. How could you find  glory in either a mortal sickness, or in a mortally destructive act of violence?  

You can read the sermon to find out what sense I made of this intriguing alignment of texts. But I was also aware that it was Passion Sunday. So the placing of the story of Lazarus just before the events of Holy Week in St John is clearly reflected in the lectionary's placing of it on this Sunday of the year, a week before Palm Sunday. So this sermon would need to point forward to the events of Holy Week, the passion, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.



And of that, both Lazarus and the Cathedral itself are powerful images. Let me speak about the Cathedral. The obvious conception of it is as the new rising, phoenix-like, out of the old. Provost John Petty always said that to walk from the ruins into the new Cathedral is to make the journey from Good Friday into Easter. I don't dispute that. But I think a deeper reading invites us to see how old-and-new belong together inextricably. Physically, this is represented by the way the architect, Basil Spence, linked the new Cathedral to the ruins of the old by an immense porch whose canopy overtops and embraces the north wall of the shattered medieval church. It's a mighty statement of how death-and-resurrection are a single redemptive event as Christian theology understands it.

And when you look out from the west end of the new Cathedral, what you see is the place of ruination and destruction: the bombed out medieval St Michael's of which all that survives are the tower and the walls. You feel a palpable sense of what Wilfred Owen called the pity of war. For Spence, it symbolised the idea of sacrifice. But that isn't all. Above is the great sky, like a huge crack in the fabric running from end to end. When I used to preside at acts of worship out there, I felt I was standing in some kind of vast empty tomb. This was especially true when we would stand before the Charred Cross, a symbol of Golgotha if ever there was one, and pray the words inscribed on the wall behind it, Father, forgive. That ruined sanctuary spoke as much about resurrection as it did about the passion.

Which is why it isn't strictly correct to talk about the old Cathedral and the new. They are one Cathedral whose message is: reconciliation happens when we enter into the paschal movement of God's love which Holy Week proclaims to us. The ruins are still a unified sacred space. Perhaps there's an analogy with the eucharist. In bread and wine, we rehearse and celebrate the whole work of God in Jesus, especially his death and resurrection. It's a feast of the cross but also of the resurrection, the memory of the Last Supper on the night before Jesus died, but also of the Supper at Emmaus on the evening of Easter Day, and of the breakfast by the lakeside a few days later.

In the same way, Coventry Cathedral is a truly paschal cathedral. The whole of it proclaims the three tenses of Christian faith. Love's work has been accomplished in Jesus' death-and-resurrection. It continues to be accomplished in the present as the risen Christ is among us to transform our ordinary days. It will be finally accomplished when "all things are put in subjection under his feet" and his kingdom is finally realised. Every eucharist at the high altar, beneath Graham Sutherland's tapestry of Christ in Glory looks forward to that consummation.

I love Coventry Cathedral for many reasons. But best of all is its capacity to be a sermon in stone about death-and-resurrection, a sermon for these solemn "days of awe" we are about to enter. It's a place where you glimpse the glory of suffering that is healed and transfigured. I think Lazarus would feel at home here.

Holy Week 2016: a reflection on pain and mercy

It's a strange Holy Week, this first one in retirement. How I miss the great liturgies and profound music of Durham Cathedral. By contrast, this year feels like "Holy Week lite": no services to preside at, no sermons to write. Here in the village the liturgy is simpler and sparser though the pattern is the same. The Vicar is introducing an early morning Easter Vigil and eucharist up at the Old Church, not quite at dawn though with the clocks going forward it will feel like it. So we shall have kept the Sacred Triduum "properly", and that's good.

What's different this year is that I have a lot of time to think and reflect, to read, pray and gather wool. (And write, I hear you sigh, but no-one's forcing you to read this....) But it's not idleness, at least it doesn't feel like it. It's "work" too - spiritual work. Let me try and say where my thoughts have been leading me.

First, there's how much this week means to me, how it lies at the very centre of my Christian faith. I've written many times before about this but it's reassuring in an odd way to find that even though I am living as a lay person under the ministry of others, it hasn't in the least taken away the profound sense that without faith in Jesus' cross and resurrection, Christianity is nothing. I come back constantly to one of the greatest verses in the whole Bible, St Paul in Galatians (2.20-21): "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." You could feed off that magnificent affirmation for a lifetime. 

There are the familiar personal rituals of this season, chiefly to listen to both the Bach Passions at least once each during Holy Week. Like Galatians, they are inexhaustibly rich, so full of pain and pathos, yet charged with an exquisite confidence in tender mercy and undying love. This morning Angela Tilby spoke on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day about the final bar of the St Matthew Passion where Bach lingers on a dissonant passing note before resolving it into the last chord of this monumental work. There is a whole theology in that bar, she said. She is right: all of this week comes down to a painful dissonance and its ultimate resolution. Today I listened to the St John, a work I've written about in previous blogs. The same is true there, except that the conclusion is less tentative, less inclined to linger on the pain, more confident, even rapturous - precisely the difference between the two evangelists that Bach, one of the greatest theologians of the western church, understood so well.

But to go back to that dissonance: this has been a shocking Holy Week as we know. The atrocity in Brussels has left in its wake so many wrecked human lives: deaths, terrible injuries, trauma, loss and bewilderment. How self-professed adherents of a noble world faith, Islam, could carry out such destructiveness in God's name is just beyond comprehension. Elie Wiesel once said of the Nazi Holocaust, maybe even God himself doesn't understand it, let alone we humans. How to speak of such events with integrity without resorting to clichés and conventional expressions of sympathy, is hard. Like Job's friends, we would be better to remain silent like the mourners standing alongside one another in the Place de la Bourse. I think there must be silence in heaven in the face of such suffering and grief. What is there for God to say?

For me as a person of faith, this is where Holy Week comes in. The Passion Narrative echoes so many of the themes we are so familiar with. Fear, betrayal, cowardice, political compromise, the power of the mob, the oppression of the innocent are all sharply-etched on the page and in the music. Most of all the suffering of the victim.  In the St Matthew Passion he is not the obedient martyr of St Luke nor the victorious king of St John. In Matthew (and Mark) he is the lonely, agonised victim who cries out in agony "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" How true to experience. And like so many who are plunged inexplicably into terrible suffering, he gets no reply. He is alone in this long and terrible darkness. Hearing Bach this week, it couldn't fail to echo Brussels and Srebrenica and Istanbul, Syria and Iraq, the continuing refugee crisis and so many other horrors past and present we have heard about in recent days. That question comes back: what is there for God to say? What is there for us to say?

But faith wants to respond: God has not been silent, even though we didn't realise it at once. He is speaking out of the very heart of suffering to all the world, especially to those whom events have led directly into the reality of crucifixion. The broken Man of Golgotha is that Word of truth, mercy and the love that loves, as St John says, "to the end". Here's how one of the best modern hymns puts it.

And when human hearts are breaking

Under sorrow's iron rod,

Then they find that self-same aching

Deep within the heart of God.

It's the good news that is old and familiar and well-tried, but forever fresh and new in its capacity to bring strength and courage to face the days ahead. Once again it's St Paul's "faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me". This Holy Week I wonder like everybody else what ordeals the coming days and weeks will bring for our world and for each of us. But what we need to do is to hold the passion and resurrection in our hearts as the truth to live and die by. These "days of awe" from Maundy Thursday to Easter will strengthen us as we tell the story that lies at the very foundation of our faith. And point to the eventual resolution of all our sorrow and dissonance, and give us back our hope.

Andy Walton, writing in Christianity Today, quotes Coptic Bishop Angaelos whose church members have encountered fierce suffering in recent years in Egypt: "The darkness we encounter daily makes us not only realise the value of the Light, but pursue and hold onto It as our only hope and strength." His faith is a true inspiration. In that spirit I wish you a holy festival, and when it comes, a happy light-filled Easter, and "even at the grave", joyful alleluias.

Believing or Beleaving? On being an In-thusiast for the EU

A week is a long time in a political campaign. It was only last Saturday that David Cameron stepped off the plane (so to speak) waving his hard-won EU summit agreement in front of a waiting nation.

So with the starting fun now fired, how is the debate about the European Union taking shape? It's too early to tell, of course. But already it's becoming clear that battle lines are being drawn up along familiar fronts. Will Britain be better or worse off staying in the EU or leaving? Will the pound and the FTSE strengthen or weaken if we leave? Will Brexit encourage large and transnational organisations to decouple from the UK or not? Will our overseas trading relationships be helped or hindered? Will we be better or worse placed to face international crises? Will our country be more at risk from terror attacks in or out? Do the EU's governance shortcomings in its democratic transparency and accountability pose a fatal risk to the UK's sovereignty or not? And so on. Of the making of many arguments there is no end.

I am learning a lot by following news feeds and commentary about the referendum from all over the world and from many different perspectives. When it comes to the themes I've just listed, I am no expert. It all depends on whom you listen to, I suppose, or whom you listened to last, and of course whom you trust. I've said before that serious listening comes into things right now. It's important, when we don't know (or even when we think we do) that we pay attention and don't come to premature conclusions about arguments that have a long way to run. 

However, the rules of engagement have been set in utilitarian, pragmatic terms that largely focus on the matters I've mentioned. These are all important but on their own they limit the discourse of the debate. The functional tone was set by the PM when he went into the summit. 'I'm going in to demand, and to get, what's best for Britain' - or words to that effect. Was I the only one who felt depressed, even dismayed, by that kind of talk? It sounded self-serving to me, lacking inspiration, falling short of the big idea. David Cameron famously said that he is not in love with Brussels. But what if we began at a different starting-point altogether, one that took us back to why the European Union was created in the first place, and why it might still be worth belonging to?

I've argued in my blogs that a Judaeo-Christian perspective on politics, public life and social ethics begins with the great commandments of the Torah, especially the second: to love your neighbour as yourself. This, to me, is the fundamental reason for believing in the EU as a family of peoples who, without sacrificing their own national identity and integrity, covenant together for the sake of one another's wellbeing and flourishing, what Catholic social theology calls 'the common good'. So we need to celebrate the signal achievements of the EU in safeguarding the peace of Europe since the War, bringing a degree of prosperity to its peoples undreamed of before, and beginning to get collective purchase on global threats that no nation can tackle on its own, such as terrorism and climate change. Whatever its failures to live up to its high ideals (and they are many), the vision, the purpose and the achievements still matter. And not to be talking up a noble ideal seems to me to lack real belief in the European project, the conviction that it could still be a force for immense good in the world and that Britain should be taking a leading role at the very heart of it.

You may say: this is the passion of the Europhile preacher speaking to emotions and soul rather than the hard-headed realist addressing the mind. Well, I am a preacher by trade and believe in the power of good rhetoric to change both minds and hearts. Heart speaks to heart and my heart is unequivocally in this. And believe me, it's precisely this 'heart-work' that we need to do: for if we believe that the EU matters to an entire continent and indeed to the world, then it should certainly matter to us as one of its member states and to each of us as UK citizens. But a lot of what I've read and heard from our leaders seems to be along the lines of: the best that can be said for the EU is that because our membership is the status quo, and because we are persuaded that we'll be no worse off by leaving it, we may as well stay and make the best of it we can. Some of the campaigning seems to be striking that rather grudging note as if to say, we'd really rather not be bothered with all this but since we are where we are, let's try to sound convincing. 

When it comes to passion, Brexit Beleavers may well be more prepared to own up to it than we who are EU-Believers. After all, it's so un-British to talk up the EU - isn't it? (Though it's also true that the spirit in the pro-EU organisations out on the streets is becoming energised and excited by the campaign, and that's how it should be. If we aren't afraid of speaking to the heart, there's a chance that people in the UK could become as engaged in the referendum debate as the Scots were over the independence vote in 2014. Indeed the two issues are not so very different as I'll try to argue in a future blog.)

So I want to urge us as Christians for the EU to speak up as those who are proud to belong to a body with such an enlightened view of how human beings can grow together. Because as Ben Ryan has said in his recent Theos report A Soul For The Union, the challenge is far bigger than securing assent to some abstract organisational idea called the EU. We need to become Europeans, and persuade others across our continent and in the UK to think of themselves as having that sense of both identity and belonging. It's similar to the difference between assenting to Christianity and being Christians, or as we might say, 'believing that' as distinct from 'believing in'. If Latin cuts more ice than English, it's fiducia that we need, not just fides. 

That's my pitch: that it's belief in that we badly need to foster in this campaign. Not naïvely, not uncritically, not without asking the hard questions of governance structures and processes that everyone acknowledges need reforming and renewing. (If only the PM had focused on those things at the summit!) But let's reawaken the vision of the EU's founding fathers and mothers. Let's rekindle their first fine (though not careless) rapture. And yes, let's be passionate about what we believe - in politics as much as religious faith, and urge our leaders to be as excited as we are by our future in the EU with all the possibilities that lie open before us. 

You can follow Christians for the EU on Twitter @Xians4EU, and on our FaceBook page. 

After Paris

Terror in Paris is not more of an atrocity than it is in Beirut, Baghdad, Bali or anywhere else in the world. It's simply that it's so near home, so familiar. The massacre of innocents is awful because everyone's death 'diminishes me' as John Donne famously said. It diminishes us all. When anyone is a victim of another person's cruelty, the human family is that bit more broken. At times like this, all we can do to begin with is to be silent, shed our tears for the dead, remember, say our prayers, and if we are in a position to, comfort those who mourn. And allow ourselves to feel what we feel: sadness, compassion, bewilderment, and surely a fierce burning anger.

But after the shock the time comes again to speak, pick up threads, search for words that will help. If nothing else, our attempts to order our thoughts and articulate them may help to stabilise us somewhat. It's important to try to grasp what is ultimately without any sense, or begin to. On this third day of national mourning in France, I'm trying in a piecemeal way to absorb the images from Paris, so many of them beyond words, unbearably poignant. I want to learn from the news coverage and pay attention to the best informed commentary and interpretation that has been offered since Friday night.

Here, for what it's worth, is where I have got to.

1. I believe we need to be emotionally honest about these terrible events. It's no use pretending that I am not profoundly shaken by them, or that I am not afraid of what may follow. Afraid of yet more outrages against innocence, against all that is precious in human life. Afraid for our world, for our European home, for France, and for London my home city where many of my family and friends live and work. And yes, afraid for myself, wondering if it is safe to walk the streets of our cities, travel by bus or train, go to the cinema or the concert hall.... I fervently believe that life must go on, but I don't quite buy the defiant 'as normal' that usually follows that phrase. There is no 'normal' in the aftermath of terror. It is more a case of 'face the fear and do it anyway'. But unacknowledged fear feeds off itself and through its tyranny paralyses us. This is what terrorists want. We need to recognise that we are frightened if we are to keep calm and carry on, if we are to reawaken hope.

2. There are, I think, theological and spiritual consequences of any atrocity that we need to face without unflinching. However simplistic the dogmas promoted by the radicalised religion of these young jihadists, we can't allow our religious response to it to be shaped on their black-and-white terms. Suffering is always a big challenge to religious faith, and we wouldn't be true to the nature of faith if Paris didn't pose deep questions to us about where God is in all this. It's not a problem for jihadists who shout Allahu Akbar as they slaughter their victims; but it is very much a problem for the adherents of mainstream Islam, Judaism and Christianity. The scriptures give us plentiful texts to help us reflect on this baffling fact of human life such as Job, Jeremiah, the Psalms of lament and the Passion Narratives. Perhaps the godforsakenness of Jesus on the cross ('My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?') is the place to start. A questioning faith that acknowledges our bafflement and has room for our doubt and our outrage will help us a lot more than the tired formulae and futile easy speeches that rehearse utterly discredited answers. 

3. Among the pieces I have read since Friday have been some that persuade me that I need to understand radicalised Islam far better than I do. (Indeed, I need to understand Islam itself far better, especially the millennenarian Caliphate aspirations of radical Sunnis.)  What is it that motivates the jihadists of Daesh? What do they want to achieve? The rhetoric of 'death-cult', 'holy war', 'nihilism' and 'psychopathy' is understandable, but it doesn't explain what we're facing. If we are going to tackle Daesh, we need to know our enemy and I'm not persuaded that enough of us do know our foe accurately. I'm particularly worried that western leaders, schooled in liberal secularism, don't have the necessary background to understand the dynamics of degraded religion and its motivation to destructiveness. The strategy has to rest on a proper intellectual consensus, something that has been lacking ever since 9/11 shocked us into facing up to how our world order had changed and we found ourselves precipitated into the ill-conceived 'war on terror'. (I recommend a penetrating and chilling piece by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic, 'What ISIS Really Wants' which you can find online at www.theatlantic.com.) 

4. This hardly needs saying, at least to people who are likely to read this blog, but I'll say it anyway if only to remind myself how important it is. We absolutely must not hurry to throw blame around in the aftermath of an act of terror. If we are white Christian Europeans, I'm particularly thinking of those with different ethnicities and faith allegiances from ours. Some of the less responsible media are already linking the jihadists with Syrian refugees recently arrived in Europe. 'It is very important that we do not close our hearts and start equating the issue of refugees with terrorism' Barack Obama has said. Friday's massacres in Paris are bound to fan the flames of hysterical anti-immigrant feeling on the far right (I have real anxiety about the imminent regional elections in France where we have already seen worrying signs of a sharp shift of opinion towards the 'Front National'). If ever there was a time when we needed to care for the stranger in our midst and to love our neighbour as ourselves it is now. As for our own fellow citizens, our Muslim brothers and sisters are feeling especially vulnerable in these times. We must reach out to them in friendship and stand with them to affirm the shared values of our two Abrahamic faiths. 

And of course, we must go on expressing our complete solidarity with the victims themselves, with the people of France, and with all who suffer at the hands of the wicked. I'm touched by the worldwide displays of the Tricolore on public buildings and FaceBook profiles. To see my own Durham Cathedral lit up in this way was especially moving for me. It may be a small enough gesture, but a little is better than nothing. The blue, white and red of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité originated in the days of Enlightenment and Revolution. But at heart they are Christian and humane aspirations the vast majority of us hold dear in our democracies. They are hard won. We must defend them and pray for our enemies who hate us and all who stand for these noble values. 

But we need to do it intelligently. Faith needs to seek understanding. It's how to be wise at times like this that I'm reflecting on in the aftermath of such sickening awfulness and pain. And the Archbishop of Canterbury is right. If we want to change the world, prayer is where it begins.