Which Side Is God On? Praying for the Referendum

I suppose it was inevitable that the Daily Mail wouldn't like it. "First the pro-EU campaign drafts in President Obama... Now GOD wants you to vote against Brexit in the referendum." (Shouting capitals are original.) Whoever the subeditor was who wrote that headline, he or she should be disciplined for it.

It concerns the Church of England's new prayer for the referendum, issued yesterday. Before I say any more, here is the text.

God of truth, give us grace to debate the issues in this referendum with honesty and openness. Give generosity to those who seek to form opinion and discernment to those who vote, that our nation may prosper and that with all the peoples of Europe we may work for peace and the common good; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.

I think you will agree that it is scrupulously careful to avoid taking sides. It isn't claiming, as prayers sometimes do especially in times of conflict, that God would really rather prefer one outcome more than the other. It isn't even hinting at that. What it asks for is a debate based on integrity and the willingness to think honestly, openly and carefully. It looks for a generous attitude in this process. This presumably means being generous towards people who differ from us, not impugning their integrity or their intelligence. But in a larger sense, "generosity" also means having in our minds the welfare of everyone involved in this decision, "all the peoples of Europe" as well as our own nation, summed up by the words "peace and the common good".

What's going on when we pray in this kind of way? I think the key word is "discernment". It's a word with a long history in the Jewish and Christian vocabulary. Discernment is what is needed when prophets give you different advice, says the Hebrew Bible. In the Book of Jeremiah there's a classic case of this when the Jewish people are taken into exile in Babylon. Most of the prophets are confident that it will all end very soon because God will never allow his temple to be destroyed - a bit like those who predicted in 1914 that the Great War would be over by Christmas. But Jeremiah, in a famous run-in with one of his opponents (chapter 28), foretells that the Babylonians are here to stay. Exile will be long and difficult. The Jewish community had better adjust and learn what this new situation will call for. How could you know who was right?

Discernment, then, is about testing the evidence, examining the logic, weighing things up, coming to a judgment not on the basis of dogmatic formulae but rather the wisdom borne of the experience of how God is at work in human life. It was a gift much prized by the desert monks early in the Christian era as they developed the arts of spiritual guidance. You will never be a wise soul-friend to other people, they said, without the capacity for deep insight into the complexities of human existence. But it's also a matter not only of what is being tested but who. In other words, who are the mentors we have come to trust? What's their history of being credible and wise? What is their case based on? What kind of company do they keep? In all these ways, the community of faith in both Old and New Testaments tries to distinguish between the conflicting voices that are all claiming to know the truth.

So I'm puzzled that a Tory MP, Peter Bone, sees this prayer as a sign of some sinister hidden agenda. He is quoted as saying it is "outrageous" to suggest that the Almighty would disapprove of Leave supporters. "It is extraordinary that they are doing a prayer. Project Fear has really stepped it up now.... As a churchgoer I am not going to be praying about this." Not going to be praying? As if God isn't interested in our nation's future or the peoples of Europe and the welfare of all human beings? On the contrary. "To prayers! To prayers!" cry the mariners at the opening of The Tempest. As indeed they should, and we should.

In the spirit of the prayer let's be "generous" and say simply that neither Mr Bone nor the Daily Mail seem to have had a good day. As pretty well all people of faith agree, it's not a question of whether it's right or wrong to pray about the big political issues of the day. It's more a question of how. The Church of England has been wise not to use the text of a prayer to lead its members into forming an opinion in a particular way and, in effect, instruct them how to vote. Liturgy should be inclusive, not divisive. We should be able to pray together for the discernment we all need, not only on 23 June but now as the debate is hotting up.

But let me offer an important aside. This is not to say that the Church shouldn't take a view about this or any other matter of public concern. Bishop David Hamid, a suffragan bishop in Europe, is quoted in today's Guardian: "The C of E is a national church and has to serve all people of the nation regardless of their political orientation. The church has to be seen as neutral." The premise is right but not, I think, the conclusion. It's perfectly possible to state a position without binding members to follow it either in the way they vote or the way they pray. The Church of Scotland has done precisely that in affirming that it believes the UK should remain in the EU, a position it has held for many years. Cardinal Vincent Nicholls, the Primus of Scotland, the Archbishop of Wales and other Christian leaders have all publicly spoken in support. But I doubt that any of them are praying that God will triumphantly vindicate Remainers, or confound the politics and frustrate the knavish tricks of those wicked Brexiters (an allusion to a little-sung second verse of the National Anthem in case you wondered).

The Church of England is well-practised at this. It has taken an unambiguous view about the ordination of women but has been at pains for decades not to exclude those who differ. However, in the prayers issued before the relevant votes in General Synod, you will not find that sides were taken. You will find the same language of wisdom and discernment which is the proper register for prayer. So be reassured. We can safely pray together in the run-up to the referendum. Whatever our beliefs about the EU, we can all ask for the same thing with a sincere heart and true faith: that we may be wise and generous in our discernment and hold in our hearts the common good of all our peoples in this nation, Europe and the entire world.

God has given us human beings the capacity to think and make judgments. He has put a conscience within us. We have the tools to nurture intelligence and act out of wisdom. So it's a badly formed question to ask as one Twitter post did today, "Whose side is God on?" It's our call as a nation. We are asked to make a decision in June that will shape the history of our nation and continent for generations to come. It's an awesome responsibility. God will not cast a vote. He trusts us to act out of generosity, for sake of the common good as the prayer asks. That's why we need to pray for discernment within our larger prayer that God's kingdom may come and his will "be done on earth as in heaven".

A Christian Vision for Europe: learning from the past

As background for the EU referendum, I've been reading about the vision for the reconstruction of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War.
 
What's striking is the prominent role of Christian thinkers in the debate. On the European mainland, politicians like Robert Schuman laid out plans advocating a new order in which it would be impossible for European nations to engage in the destructive warfare that had had such a calamitous effect not only for Europe but the entire world. As a courageous fighter in the French resistance, he had seen this at first hand. What is less well-known nowadays is his deep religious faith, informed by his detailed knowledge of, among other Christian philosophers, St Thomas Aquinas. It was Catholic social teaching that motivated his vision for a more peaceable Europe, particularly its emphasis on the quest for justice and the common good. In this he was not alone.
 
The Schuman Declaration was published on 9 May 1950, less than a month after I was born. (That date is now kept as Europe Day, and I hope we shall see the EU flag flying on public buildings then.) The plan advocated as a starting point a single economic market that would bring together Europe's vast coal and steel industries. Common economic goals, would, he believed, would not only greatly reduce the risks of conflict but would lead to other shared endeavours that would transform the economic, social and political face of the continent not least in reconciling its nations and healing centuries-old divisions.

Schumann believed that individual nation states were not best placed to judge what was in the interests of the common good. A nation's priorities would inevitably always be the welfare of its own citizens. There is nothing wrong with self-interest if it is enlightened: Aquinas followed Augustine in discussing very carefully what it meant to command, as Judaism and Christianity do, that we should love our neighbours "as ourselves". But Schuman, along with other Christian democrats, believed that a much larger vision of life together was needed for the safety and flourishing of the continent. Only a supra-national enterprise in which the reconciled peoples of Europe collaborated closely could ever deliver this.

UK church leaders and politicians watched these developments closely. Prominent among the Church of England bishops was George Bell who welcomed Schuman's visionary plan. In a debate in the House of Lords, Bell expressed the hope that Britain would bring to the new Europe the distinctive gifts it had to offer: its long experience of stable democratic government, its global "reach" as a people whose empire extended across the world, and its warm friendship with the United States. Andrew Chandler quotes him in his new biography of Bell: The preservation of national sovereignty as its own end was, he said, "not itself a Christian principle. The partial fusion of sovereignty is in accordance with Christian principles if it is in pursuit of noble ends and justice and peace".  

Those words seem strikingly modern. The idea of "pooled sovereignty" as a way of exercising a nation's power and influence has been much discussed during the EU campaign. During the recent visit of US President Barack Obama we have heard a great deal about Anglo-American friendship, prized by almost everyone on both sides of the debate. But what motivated Bell and those who thought like him was a Christian vision of society, a dream inspired by the gospel for the future of the human race. They were not simply concerned with pragmatic politics.

I am sure he owed this to his close contacts with prophetic German Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller during the terrible years of Nazi rule. He saw a national church fatally embroiled in national self-interest, blindly colluding with tyranny and persecution. What he learned from Bonheoffer and Niemöller was that Christianity is bigger than any nation state. If it is to be true to its Lord, its scope must never be less than humanity itself, for it was the world to which, out of love, God sent his Son. And therefore (he said, aware that he was speaking as a bishop of the Church "of England") the very idea of a "national" church was in an important theological way, a contradiction. Unless a national church saw itself as a vital member of the world church, and led its people to think of their nationality as subsumed under their Christian and human identity, it would deny the universality of the gospel.

We need an historical perspective if we are to debate our EU membership intelligently. As has famously been said, if we ignore the lessons of the past we shall find ourselves committing them all over again. It's especially important that we Christians who engage in the debate understand where we have come from. I'm not sure that the churches are saying nearly enough about the clear Christian motivation of the EU's founding fathers. Indeed, I'm not sure that the churches are saying nearly enough about this entire debate. And that would have greatly puzzled the church leaders of the 1940s and 1950s.

History, like patriotism, is not enough. We need to frame the debate in contemporary terms, not those of a past age. The dilemmas that face the European Union today are different from those of half a century ago, and vastly more complex. But that's why those who speak for religious faith should be more vocal, not less. It's true that bishops and church leaders are not experts in global politics, the economy, trade, security, governance and many of the other matters that are defining the debate. But that was true in 1950 too. Religion should speak about what it knows, and tread tentatively where it lacks technical knowledge. But Christianity knows a great deal about aspiring to a nobler vision of human community, about social justice, solidarity with the poor and needy, seeking the common good, and above all, about being a society that transcends all human limitations and frontiers. It knows about those things because it has lived them for two thousand years.

This is why the church today must heed the lessons of the past, and summon up the courage not only to think itself into a universal frame of mind but to speak about it. Perhaps the church needs to reboot its imagination so that like those visionary Christian prophets of the postwar era, it speaks compellingly once again into the politics of the day in pursuit of a reconciled human family. Its distinctive contribution to the EU referendum could be to remind us of the universal Christian principles that lay behind the founding of the European project. Their propounders, the parents of the European Union, are no longer with us. But "they being dead, yet speak".

Taking Leave of Barset

"What are you doing, now that you're retired?" I'm often asked. Answering that question is a work in progress. It's a big step to take on that R-word. I sometimes answer jokily, "trying to save the UK from leaving the European Union - and when not doing that, watching daytime TV".

I hope no one takes me too seriously. I have a few projects and hope that time will show that they were not just "dreams - ideal dreams". One is to read through the novels of Anthony Trollope. Not all of them, but at least the greatest, starting with the Barsetshire and Pallliser chronicles. Today I reached the end of the Barsetshire set. Having lived in that fictional county each night for the past six months, it was poignant to turn over the final page of the immensely long Last Chronicle of Barset and read the author's touching farewell to a place that has become an essential part of the literary landscape of England, and of my own landscape of the mind.

Clergy have always loved these books: they are a disconcertingly accurate mirror in which we see reflected back to us all that is worst and all that is best in the lives and attitudes of the ordained. Many great novelists have written about the clergy, but none have ever equalled the devotion - some would say obsession - with which Trollope dissects and exposes their characters, their roles and relationships, their inner strengths and contradictions. He knew the Church of England of the 19th century well. Reform was in the air. Then as now, the Church found itself torn between an intellectual recognition of the need for change, and a strong emotional attachment to the old ways that would soon pass into history. 

The Last Chronicle draws together threads from all the earlier books - The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington. We meet almost all our favourite clerical characters once more (the exception being Mr Slope, the Bishop's marvellously drawn and utterly odious chaplain in Barchester Towers). Mr Harding, the sweet-tempered lovable Warden whose death in old age is related in one of the most moving chapters of the Last Chronicle. Theophilus Grantly the energetic, irascible but, you always feel, ultimately admirable Archdeacon (a role model for more than a few senior clergy I have known). Francis Arabin the Dean, not depicted as colourfully as the others but another of Trollope's good, wise and learned clergy (all things that a dean of course must be). Mark Robarts the incumbent of Framley who gets into trouble as a result of his ambition and social climbing amidst the wrong "set", yet is redeemed by the excellent women in his life. And Bishop Proudie whose arrival as one of the new breed of reforming prelates forms the central storyline in Barchester Towers; weak, vacillating, manipulated, unrespected, Trollope nevertheless dares to hope at the end of the chronicles that as a humbled man, better things may be expected of him in the future. 

But the most memorable of them all is Josiah Crawley, the unfortunate Perpetual Curate of Hogglestock. Trollope's portrait of him, sustained at such length in the Last Chronicle, to my mind makes this novel into a masterpiece of characterisation. The story itself is absurdly simply. Crawley, one  of the desperately poor rural clergy, is accused of stealing a £20 cheque. He hasn't the faintest idea how it came to be in his possession. The magistrates refer him to the assizes, and the Bishop sets about depriving him of the living. That's about it. Only after several hundred pages is the truth disclosed. If you haven't read the book, I am not going to give in to the cheap pleasure of a spoiler.

What's so powerful in this portrait is how chronic poverty breaks the spirit or threatens to. Trollope was clearly troubled by the vast inequalities of wealth and privilege among the clergy of his day and the Last Chronicle can be read as a loud protest against clerical poverty. Crawley is a learned man, a student friend of the Dean who has fallen on hard times. He has his scriptures and his beloved classical texts to sustain him (he teaches his daughter to read Greek tragedy, and claims that his Hebrew is a lot better than the Dean's). He is a conscientious parish priest - and with it, eccentric, angular and dogged. But it's his anger at the injustice of his destiny that is so well drawn. The accusation of theft is itself the theft of the last thing he has left to cherish - his own integrity. It acts as a lens that focuses his lifelong resentment which, turned inwards, gives birth to a profound depression that is on the verge of tipping him into a pit of despair. Like Job, he cries out to heaven to be vindicated. But the sky is deaf to his pleas.

Here's where Trollope shows how well he understands the complexity of the human psyche. Maybe his own father inspired the character. What I've realised is that we shouldn't underestimate Trollope as a tragic writer. His prose flows so effortlessly that you're tempted to read too quickly, stay on the glittering surface rather than linger to plumb the depths he reveals within the soul. Yet there is a truly tragic dimension to these novels that reaches its apogee in the Last Chronicle. Who will ever forget Crawley's bitter refusal to accept his old friend the Dean's outstretched hand of kindness? Or his cruelty to his wife and children in their parsonage-hovel while nevertheless loving them with complete devotion? Or the terrible miles of his long winter journey on foot to the Cathedral Close for a fateful encounter with the Bishop in his palace, an event that almost destroys them both? 

Where to stop? This blog mustn't emulate The Last Chronicle of Barset in its length. But how can I have written even a few words about these wonderful Barsetshire novels without so much as mentioning Mrs Proudie? She would never have forgiven me.

Christians for Europe

Yesterday was the first official day of the EU referendum campaign. To mark the occasion, we launched our new website "Christians for Europe". Our aim is to put a Christian case for the United Kingdom to remain within the European Union. You can find us at https://christiansforeurope.org/.

Regular visitors to this blog will recognise a family likeness. Our new site is a descendant of the original campaign Twitter feed @Xians4EU and its Facebook sibling. They have both attracted a lot of interest and support. They have linked followers to news and comment, articles, resources and blogs about the referendum. They have offered their own "take" on developments and interacted with others contributing on social media. We have been noticed by the church media and invited to comment.

However, we have recognised that we need a more permanent presence in cyberspace. Hence this new website. It's a forum where we can post news, comment and opinion about the referendum, invite response and discussion, link to other sites that are relevant to our aims. What we hope is that Christians for Europe will be a place of lively, intelligent debate informed by the insights of faith. We are convinced that Christianity "speaks truth to power". We believe that it has vital wisdom to contribute to our discussions about what kind of nation we aspire to be, and what it means to be the United Kingdom in both a European and a global setting. Whatever we believe about the EU, we must all recognise that in our contemporary world, isolation from the human family is simply not conceivable.

In particular, we believe that Christian theology points us in the direction of integration, not fragmentation. We believe the gospel looks forward to "a single new humanity" in which the human race is reconciled and at peace with itself. All inter-governmental agencies that promote deeper, more wholesome international relations are to be welcomed. The EU is not a perfect expression of this aspiration but we do believe that it represents the best attempt yet to create a lasting neighbourliness in our continent. That can only be good for our world.

We are not utopian about this. The EU is no more an expression of the kingdom of God than any other human institution. It is flawed, and recent challenges from the weakness of the Euro to the refugee crisis have painfully exposed its shortcomings. Those who look for greater transparency in its processes have a point. 

Nevertheless, we are convinced that far from walking away from a project intended to put freedom, humanity and social justice at the heart of our nations' lives, we should embrace the opportunities the EU gives to make a real and lasting contribution not only to the European family of nations but to the world. It is purely self-interest to say "yes" to the benefits of membership. But it becomes enlightened self-interest as we also say "yes" to all that we have to give to the EU as committed leading European players. And as Christians, when we say "yes", we want to say it with confidence, conviction and hope.

You'll have noticed that we've rebranded ourselves. We are now "Christians for Europe", not just "4EU" though that remains the Twitter handle. It's a small but significant change. Of course we are "for" the EU in the sense that we want to urge everyone to vote "yes - let's remain". But that could make it sound as though the EU were an end in itself. Which of course it's not. It's being Europeans that matters most - thinking of ourselves as not simply British but belonging to something bigger, the continent to which we have been so closely connected through trade, politics, culture, scholarship and recreation for so many centuries.

And this is where we need to raise the game when it comes to the referendum. If only we could talk not just about the pluses and minuses of the institution we call the European Union, but about what it is all ultimately for, and why being Europeans ought to be something not to be reticent about but to celebrate. That's our hope at least.

Meanwhile, when you'll visit the site, you'll find an impressive line-up of people in public life who are endorsing Christians for Europe: bishops, politicians of all parties, Christian secular leaders from different traditions and walks of life, theologians and others. We are grateful to the LibDem Christian Forum for hosting and managing the site for us. This is part of its contribution to this all-party effort that is bringing people of faith together in support of the UK's continuing membership of the EU. We are excited and hopeful as we embark on this journey through the coming weeks of the referendum campaign. We hope you'll jump aboard!

Dear Prime Minister: an open letter

Dear Prime Minister

I've sympathised with you during this past week. You've been through the kind of ordeal familiar to most leaders where a cloud no more than the size of a man's hand suddenly becomes a mighty storm. You were right to strike a contrite note in your speech. Yes, it would have been so much better if you had been frank with us from the outset. I believe your instincts are for honesty, and it's such a pity that you seem to have been advised otherwise to begin with. Evasiveness is never a good tactic. But it's never too late to say sorry and you did. Thank you.

However, my overriding concern today is not your own political fortunes but the coming EU Referendum. I'm very much afraid that you may have handed the Leave campaign a gift they could never have expected. "This walks straight into every Eurosceptic’s dream. It may be unfair on David Cameron. But it is very, very dangerous” Matthew Parris has written. Because if the public's view of you has changed (and it's only an if - the coming days will tell) and it's not so inclined to trust you about your personal finances, why should they trust you when it comes to the European Union?

I write as a convinced European who believes like you that this country will be far better off within the EU than outside it. And I don't just mean economically or in terms of defence, security and geopolitics. I mean what the UK has to bring to the EU as one of its leading nations committed to the common good as well as our own. It would be nightmare for me, and many like me, to wake up on 24 June to find that we had walked away from the family of peoples to whom we naturally belong.

Here's where I'm afraid you have unwittingly been the goose that has laid Brexit a golden egg. As today's Observer says, "voters may decide to forget the case for the European Union and engage in the altogether more satisfying activity of kicking out David Cameron." I hope that comment proves wrong. This is absolutely not a vote of confidence in you. But electorates have minds of their own. So now of all times, we need you to be a credible leader who can change hearts and minds not only by the persuasiveness of good argument but by your personal qualities of integrity and trustworthiness. It's not that the case for remaining in the EU has changed in any way. But public perception may have shifted in the past week: perception of your leadership, perception of your political judgment.

In a few days, the official EU Referendum campaign will be launched. How will you play this moment of opportunity?

If I may say this, I think your best bet is to go on presenting yourself to the public as the leader who is humble enough to recognise his mistakes. It was genuinely moving to hear you say to your audience that you could have handled things better and that you would learn for the future. That was courageous. It's a cliché to quote "a sadder and a wiser man" but perhaps it applies. And I believe this may help you win your case (sorry - I mean our case!). You can show that EU membership is not a matter of your own political survival or historic legacy but comes out of a real personal conviction, a deeply rooted human wisdom, a patriotism that is proud of and desires the very best for our country, and a Christian conscience that seeks the common good of all our partner nations.

One final note. I think that the more you can show that you are really listening to our Brexit friends and taking their concerns seriously, the better it will be. I think that like me, you deplore the bad tempered, sometimes abusive, register some parties in this debate have fallen into. I'm sure you value courtesy, intelligence and good faith in the way political choices are presented and discussed. Good listening isn't just for crises. It's an attribute of every wise leader. You will help set the tone.

Maybe recent events have done you a favour though it may be hard to see it that way just yet. They may have forced you to show a side of yourself to the public that we had not seen before - listening, honest, penitent, wanting to learn and do things differently. And maybe all with a bit more feeling, humaneness if you like. Many of us have warmed to that and - whatever our personal political convictions - genuinely wanted to wish you well. These qualities can help you sound an even more convincing note in the coming weeks before the Referendum. I very much hope so for the sake of the nation and for Europe as a whole.

I hope you won't mind my writing in this personal way. This comes with my prayers.

With best wishes
Michael

"Where Do You Come From?" Thoughts on belonging and identity

"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."

George Eliot in Daniel Deronda is talking about childhood, how our earliest "sense of place" helps form our instinct that we belong to the soil we live on, and that we should love it and let it teach us about the great world into which we have been born as its citizens. 

I was brought up in suburban north London. I may have caught the occasional glimpse of Eliot's world when riding my bicycle in Highgate Woods or roaming Hampstead Heath on my way back from school. But it was hard to love the net curtains, manicured privet hedges and creosoted fences of suburbia. To me they all came to symbolise the addiction to privacy that's a peculiarly English trait. We knew few of our neighbours by name and socialised with fewer still though they were kind, decent people. We all kept ourselves to ourselves. We liked it that way. I had a good upbringing there. But it didn't help me to understand the idea of community.

So where do I say I'm "from"? This question has exercised me for some time. My usual answer is "North East England". I've lived here for longer than anywhere else in my life. I've come to love the strong sense of identity here in this region, and the wonderful people we have lived amongst, both in County Durham and Northumberland. I feel I belong here in a way that's more true than any of the many places we've been glad to call "home" up and down the country. When we first came to work in Northumberland in the 1980s, I found a lived understanding of "community" that was new to me. The Cheviot farmers talk about sheep being "hefted" on to their hill, bound to it as their own place. That's how I've come to feel about the North East. I've "gone native" as they say.

But that's only a part of my answer. In the expanding concentric circles of my belonging, my being European has always been important too. I've blogged about this before, how my mother's family were German-Jewish war refugees whom this country took in before it was too late. In my childhood we found ourselves on the periphery of a community of German emigrés in north London, all of them a lot better off than we were. Perhaps the fact that my mother had married "out" (i.e. an Englishman) meant that we weren't altogether kosher. But at social gatherings, we all flipped easily from English to German and back again. Families compared notes about their German homelands: Bavaria, Swabia and my mother's native Westphalia. As children we went to Germany a number of times to sort out my mother's family affairs. I felt at home there, and still do. And that goes for all the other countries in our continent that I've visited, from Ireland via Spain, France and Austria to the Czech Rebgpublic, Slovakia and Hungary.

On my Twitter profile, it says that I am "a European at home in North East England". I thought carefully about how to phrase that. "North East" says that locality is important, George Eliot's sense of a native soil in a particular place. "European" says that our larger networks and associations are important too, our ability to think beyond national boundaries (and not to stop until we think of ourselves as "citizens of the world" which is what George Eliot goes on to speak about). What about "England"? 

I admit that I don't often speak about being "English" (except in France where "je suis Anglais" is the usual answer to "where are you from?"). I'm a British national as it says on my passport. And my sense of nationhood is profoundly important. I don't give it absolute value ("my country right or wrong") and I always want to nuance it by saying that both my smaller and my larger circles of belonging matter just as much. However, I guess that if you are at all moved by Rupert Brooke's poem "The Soldier" and can read it, not as Great War jingoism nor as cloying nostalgic sentimentalism but for what it is, a simple, affecting love poem to his country, you're a patriot at heart. "A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam" is precisely what George Eliot is talking about. For Brooke, it had become "a sweet habit of the blood" to think and - just as important - to feel like this. I think I'm beginning to grasp this as I inhabit the later decades of my life when asking who I have been is vital to understanding who I am now. 

The EU referendum is making us think about these questions, where and how and why we belong. Some people seem to think that the EU is all about creating a superstate that will do away with local, regional and national identities and the human dimensions we associate with homeland and home. But the exact opposite is the case. The European Union has been a staunch defender of regionalism and localism and funds have followed that conviction. We've seen how in our own islands, membership of the United Kingdom has promoted a growth in Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish identities, and the same is true across continental Europe. These are welcome developments. They express the important idea of "subsidiarity" whereby things are not undertaken centrally that are better done nationally or locally. That's usually associated with decision-making. But implicit in it is the more basic concept of belonging. That's why it's to the good when we associate to all the communities we live in - small, large and intermediate. They help us learn that ultimately, our family is nothing less than the whole human race. 

This isn't quite making a "patriotic case" for remaining in the EU. But I hope that at the very least, it begins to show how a patriotic love of our country and a grateful attachment to our locality are not only compatible with our membership of the EU but positively encouraged by it. 

The EU Referendum: why we shouldn't walk away from our promises

Earlier this week, on her wedding day, I walked my daughter up the aisle of the church where I had been Vicar in the 1980s. It was a proud and moving thing to do. She was beautiful in her wedding dress. Well, what bride's father wouldn't say that? It was a lovely service, solemn but joyous. The words and music all felt exactly right. Our hearts reached out to this young couple, so tender and so happy together.

I wasn't (for once) thinking about the European Union that day. But afterwards, I thought about what the preacher had said in his fine homily. He spoke about the marriage vow, and how a few words said in public change everything. I've quoted the philosopher J. L. Austin before in a blog. He wrote a famous book called How To Do Things With Words. He took the marriage vow as an example of a "performative utterance", words that change things, make a significant difference. When the bridal couple process out of church at the end of the marriage ceremony, they have taken on a different status from what they had when they came in. They now have new privileges, duties, responsibilities. It's their promises that effected that change.

What's that got to do with the EU referendum? 

Simply this, that as members of the European Union, we have signed treaties that bind us to this family of peoples. We have given undertakings and made promises to our fellow EU nations. Like marriage, a treaty is a kind of covenant. It commits us to fidelity, to being true to our word. We British take pride in behaving honourably and being trustworthy. It isn't only Englishmen (and women) whose word is their bond. I'd like to think that our neighbours in Europe thought they could safely trust us to honour our undertakings. I'd like to imagine that to them, whatever shortcomings the British may exhibit, unreliability and bad faith were not among them.

Thanks to the referendum, we are now considering walking away from commitments we have freely entered into. I find this deeply disappointing. It's not that any treaty is irrevocable, or that situations may not change so drastically that old undertakings need renegotiating. But to me, the very possibility of Brexit feels like the threat of a divorce. It would be the un-saying of promises that were made in good faith, in an environment of trust that pledged our nations to work together for the common good and our mutual flourishing. It would be the unraveling of the bonds of friendship and loyalty that held our peoples together. It would be, I think, to break our word which our neighbours had come to trust, and on which they thought they could rely. 

Am I making too much about "honour"? Christian wisdom would say not. In the Bible, the vow or promise is sacred, born witness to not only by human beings but by God himself. Covenant-breaking is one of the worst of sins you could commit: maybe this lies behind the gospels' condemnation of Judas for betraying - handing over - Jesus to be crucified. "Let your yes be yes, and your no be no" he teaches: "anything more than this comes from evil". Theologically, pledging our word is to imitate the God who in Jesus, pledges his living Word to humanity and in him utters his final Yes to the world he loves. Honour is a central idea in all religious faiths. A word once given is solemn and binding. 

Like any marriage, our relationship with the EU has had its ups and downs. It has been tested beyond what was originally anticipated. When a marriage is under pressure, it's tempting for one or both partners to walk away. Many do. But marital therapists tell us that to begin with at least, staying in the relationship and facing its difficulties openly and honestly in the hope of achieving a better life together is better than the easy option of escaping. It's not a perfect analogy, but the point is that our relationship with Europe is not an abstract connection with some faceless entity, "the EU", that we're talking about. It's a "marriage" to twenty seven other nations. It is they we would be disappointing and letting down, people to whom we have obligations of neighbourliness and friendship, particularly the most needy among them. 

There isn't anything about this in the Government leaflet on the referendum that will drop on to our doormats in a few days' time. That focuses mainly on whether we are better off in or out, with a postscript on how the EU can achieve things (such as security and climate change) that no nation can do on its own. I don't have any quarrel with its contents. But it doesn't go far enough, doesn't probe the very reasons we belong to the European Union at all, and doesn't ask us whether we think it matters to honour our treaty commitments or not. 

But surely it does matter that we commit to our undertakings and keep our promises. In one of the Psalms (15), the virtuous man or woman is someone who, having made a promise to a neighbour, does not go back on that word, even though it was troublesome and inconvenient. As individuals we want to be trustworthy and thought of us reliable. Fidelity is a value almost everyone shares. So we ought to uphold it as a nation too. And not turn our backs on the very many people of other European nations who are begging us not to walk away. 

The Referendum: in defence of campaigning with conviction

In the 1980s the broadcaster Bernard Levin wrote a booked called Enthusiasms. It gave him an excuse to write about all the things he loved in life: music, landscapes, food, cities, books, friends... In it he writes: "To be passionate in a cause provokes widespread embarrassment...[which is] to set off the squealing and tittering of those whose motto is 'surtout, Messieurs, point de zèle'."

In today's Guardian*, Jackie Ashley laments the lack of passion on the part of those campaigning to keep the UK in the European Union. She accuses them (us) of being lacklustre, taking our cue from a Prime Minister who has famously said that he doesn't "love Brussels". "The repetition of the very vague 'safer in' message isn't cutting through. It's too bland; frankly too boring." 

She is not wholly correct, but right enough. The Remain message has largely fallen into the trap set for it at the Brussels summit (how long ago that seems). The renegotiation of the UK's membership was hailed as a game-changing triumph, but of course its scope was pretty narrow. All along the message of the UK's special status was: "what's best for Britain, what's best for you the voter". That was an invitation to pander to self-interest. And those have largely been the rules of engagement in this campaign: will we be better or worse off as a result of Brexit? will our global trading position, our employment prospects, the security of our borders be disadvantaged one way of the other? The discourse has been largely utilitarian and pragmatic. What's been lacking is real conviction that the EU project could be a Good Thing with ideals that are worth believing in for their own sake. 

This very English (rather than Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish) way of thinking is not altogether unworthy: self-interest is natural enough, and best of all when it is enlightened and not merely self-serving. The PM's issues are important and aren't to be dismissed as of no consequence. We all know that there is a lot wrong with the EU. But a utilitarian politics can lack vision and ambition. Laodicean luke-warmness doesn't touch the imagination or fire the soul; it doesn't stimulate our aspiration to help build a better world. It doesn't have anything to say about the huge challenges that face the human race such as climate change, terrorism, peace-making and the global economy. It doesn't raise questions about governance and democratic participation. And it risks falling at the first hurdle for people of faith which is: how shall we build a more compassionate and socially just world where we ask "who is my neighbour?" - or, as Jesus turns it round in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, "to whom am I required to be a good neighbour?"

Well, I am one of those who wants to campaign for Remain with conviction and, yes, enthusiasm. It's partly a political and cultural conviction that I have. For as long as I've been alive, I've felt European in my bones. I owe a lot of it to my German-born mother and grandmother who had both suffered under the Nazis, and instilled in me a mistrust of thinking merely nationally about my identity. They taught me to love Bach and Rembrandt and Voltaire and Dante as much as Virgil and Shakespeare because they all belonged to my birthright. They encouraged me to learn foreign languages. They helped me travel and see the world. So now, when I am in continental Europe, I feel virtually as at home as I do in my native country. Because that's what it is to me, my native country. I'm proud that my passport has European Union emblazoned on the floppy Burgundy cover. I don't want my European identity to be stolen from me against my will.

But the other side of my conviction about the EU is related to my Christian faith. Religious belief is not just a matter of cognitive assent. The heart matters as much as the head. I am a Christian because I have been touched by something that is bigger than I am, that has transformative, life-changing power. Therefore, what flows out of my Christianity - its intellectual, ethical, social and political consequences - is also a matter of conviction. I believe we should do the right thing, or the best thing, out of loyalty to our faith. And in the case of the EU, that means for me the appeal to our nation to participate for the sake of the common good, take a lead in a community of peoples whose aim is the betterment of life for its members. This includes solidarity with the disempowered, voiceless and needy. It includes our resolve to be part of a family whose achievements in peace-seeking, reconciliation and environmental change have given real hope that together some inroads against these challenges can be made. And it has to be together. To revert to pragmatism, there's no room in today's world for nations to go it alone when the threats we face cross every national frontier. We can't afford to be without the EU and other alliances that will help safeguard us all. 

Our movement "Christians for Europe" believes that the tag #StrongerIn reflects not a depressing preoccupation with self-preservation so much as what the EU as a family of peoples can become, and the contribution our nation can make to the EU. It's heartening to be told by our EU partners that our country is the second most influential member of the Union after Germany. We shouldn't underestimate what our membership means to them, and the possibly catastrophic effects a #Brexit might lead to across the continent, maybe its eventual dissolution. The ill-feeling and resentment would last for decades. But Britain is famed for its fairness, its neighbourliness, its care of those who most need help, its kindness, its breadth of outlook, its tolerance and generosity of spirit. And its perseverance in not walking out on commitments when things get tough. These are virtues we can be proud of because they can and do make a real difference to our friends with whom we share our common European home. I don't think it's a coincidence that the Britain that has nurtured these qualities is an historically Christian nation.

What are the rewards for the UK if we vote #Remain, as I hope we do? I won't rehearse the material or cultural benefits, though I think they are real enough. No, for me, as an IN-thusiast, the best reward will be to think that we are committed to being a leading player in a unique family of nations. It will be the recognition that we have as much to give as to receive. It will be the reassurance that we the British people have once again understood what is required of us as respected players on the world stage. It will be a sense of gratitude that once again, we have found it in ourselves to love our neighbour.

That's my fervent prayer. Hence my determination to do what I can to support #Remain. Yeats sounds a warning note in his poem "The Second Coming": "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are filled with passionate intensity." As to the first, we must raise our game and learn from the best Brexiteers how conviction should play a part in what we are doing. As to the second, we must eschew sloganising, vacuous rhetoric and demonising those who differ from us, and try to cultivate, not passionate intensity but an intelligence and wisdom that is both passionate yet courteous. We need good information and reliable evidence. We need rigorous argument. But let them be undergirded by conviction. Let's not be afraid to campaign not just in prose but in poetry. Brexit doesn't have all the best tunes. We don't have to commit the mortal sin of being boring.

Alors mes amis. Bon courage! Et beaucoup de zèle svp! 

*http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/29/remain-campaign-failing-brexiters-wrong-but-passion

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.

The Rule of St Benedict and the EU Referendum

It's three years to the day since Justin Welby was enthroned as Archbishop,of Canterbury. I was privileged to be at Canterbury Cathedral on 21 March 2013 with my colleagues from Durham where he had been our Bishop. That same week also saw the inauguration of Pope Francis' ministry in Rome. 

To mark both these momentous occasions, the Financial Times published an intriguing article by Tim Smedley, "Church Leaders Bring Fresh Insight". It asked how senior executives in secular organisations could learn from the experience of Christian leaders such as bishops down the centuries. This isn't a blog about leadership so I won't say more about it here. But I was struck by its conclusion. The author quoted some advice for business leaders from Stephen Bampfylde, founder of the well-known firm of head-hunters Saxton Bampfylde: “Arguably the best management and leadership book ever written is The Rule of St Benedict. Every chairman and chief executive should keep a copy on their desk and re-read the chapter on the character of the Abbot every week.”

Maybe there are European Union and UK government leaders who heed that advice. St Benedict is the Patron of Europe, so for all I know, civil servants in Brussels have a cupboard full of copies of his Rule ready to give to EU executives who ask for it. So I want to ask whether Benedict's Rule has anything to say to us about referendum on 23 June when we make a huge decision about whether to say in the European Union or leave it. It's a good day to be asking this, since 21 March marks the anniversary of his death.

Bear with me while I give some background.

Benedict wrote his Rule for Monks early in the 6th century. He was living in the chaotic aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire. All around him he saw the relics of a once-great civilisation that had brought order and shape to his world. Amid the ruins of antiquity, he asked the question: how could human beings recreate structures that would make for stability, flourishing and wisdom? He found his answer in the monasteries that had been established centuries before in the deserts of Egypt. His lasting contribution to civilisation was to organise monastic life by writing a rule that would govern how his monks would live together in community.

I introduced the word "stability" just now. In the fragmented, disordered world of Benedict's time, stability was an ideal to long for and work towards. Benedict placed this goal at the very heart of his vision of a shared common life by requiring his monks to take a vow of stability (along with two others: obedience and conversion of life). In his Rule, it has a clear meaning, which is that monks were not to wander around from one monastery to the next but had to commit to the community in which they were admitted. In contrast to those who were forever roaming round the countryside looking for the perfect community to join, Benedict's monks had to learn that commitment to a single place and its community was an irreplaceable aspect of learning. He believed that the monastery had to be a "school for the Lord's service" where monks learned by living in a community where they studied, worked and prayed together. It was in the struggles and complexities of relationships, where brothers and sisters discovered how to serve God and one another, that true disciples were formed.

What does stability have to say to us today? And why am I writing about it in connection with the UK's membership of the European Union?

Our world is a profoundly uncertain place. No doubt it always has been, but in my own lifetime this period we are living through feels more unstable than any before. In that respect it's not unlike Benedict's time when he knew he was living through the dissolving of so much that had once been clear, certain and trustworthy. So his vow of stability was not simply a way of modelling a kind of God-given safety in an unsafe world, but stood for the resolve to honour commitments, attachments and loyalties. It entailed living with the consequence of decisions and not running away from undertakings once made. It meant living with mistakes and learning from them, always trying to see how to make the best in every given situation, how even misfortune could be rescued and redeemed. It took seriously the idea of promise and covenant. 

You'll see where I'm going with stability. I imagine that you're reading this blog because you're interested in how Christianity brings wisdom to the big life choices we have to make, and in particular, how it might inform our choice about whether or not to stay within the EU. The Rule of St Benedict would, I believe, say to us: your instinct ought to be to stay within the commitments and undertakings you have made, and not run away from them when the going gets tough. Benedict never says that a community will be a perfect place (and might have added, if you find one, don't join it because you'll only spoil it!). Communities are made up of flawed, broken human beings. There is always work to do to make even the best of communities better. 

But this is precisely the possibility that opens up when people covenant together in pursuit of a "steadfast high intent" and live, as it were, by a common discipline or rule. I am a convinced unionist (small "u") who believes that we are always healthier and stronger when our lives are bound together rather than lived in isolation. It's why I was so relieved when Scotland voted to remain within the United Kingdom. And it's why I hope and pray that the United Kingdom votes to stay within the European Union. The logic is exactly the same. Yes, Benedict accepts that there has be some surrender of autonomy, a pooling of sovereignty if you like, if we are to express these ideals of stability and community. He speaks frequently of listening carefully, being subject to one another in the relationships that we commit to, making decisions together that all can own and honour. It's extraordinarily demanding. But he also says that the rewards of stability are immense if only we will stay in the place where God has called us. When we do this, we discover how we flourish and grow into a fuller, richer humanity than perhaps we ever thought possible. 

As I've so often said in these blogs, the EU is far from perfect. There is a lot wrong with it that needs to be reformed. Among its faults are some that Benedict would instantly recognise: failures of transparency and collegiality, misuse of authority and power, exalting the institution and its processes at the expense of the person. Benedict would say exactly the same about his monasteries. But the Rule says: don't get out. Stay in and help make this community one where we can flourish together and (a Christian says) discern God at work. Stability doesn't mean no change. It means changing from the inside, challenging, reforming and renewing within the relationships of collaboration and trust we have carefully, and at real cost to ourselves, invested in and built up. 

Benedict has a warning for his monks. He asks them to examine themselves and understand the motives and intentions that brought them to the point of taking vows. If it was right to decide to enter the community in the first place, he says, then consider very carefully how it can possibly be right to go back on that decision now. To break faith is about the most serious sin we can commit. That's stability. A powerful message for our times, if we have ears to hear. 

The Syrian Refugees and the EU Referendum

Two things have prompted me to write this blog. The first is a series of portraits in today's Guardian by photographer Muhammed Muheisen. They show faces of Syrian refugee children in a makeshift tent camp in the north of Jordan. You never saw such hopelessness written into human eyes. Such faces can no doubt be seen by the thousand in the desperate communities of refugees that are huddled in the eastern borderlands of Europe. 

Human faces are always beautiful, even when disfigured, scarred physically or emotionally by tragedy. The pathos of these portraits somehow added to their beauty. My response to them was complex, hard to put into words. First, a terrible sadness for these forlorn kids. I guessed that these children had done with weeping; probably they were utterly cried-out. For me looking on helplessly, there was not much I could do except try to put myself in their world and say my prayers. 

I've thought about how the photographer has given back to these children their identity. They have names. They have unique faces; each one tells a story. They share their personal thoughts about their homeland in the brief captions. We usually speak about "migrants", "refugees" and "asylum seekers" as collectives. They soon become a crowd - or worse: witness the language of "swarms" used not long ago by someone who should have known better. These are abstractions. The images tell us that they faces belong to persons who are made in the image of God. And if their eyes are filled with blank despair, maybe even God despairs too? That's what I found myself wondering.

The other prompt came in some words I saw quoted in the same paper. A Greek migration officer was commenting on the EU summit that has been trying to address this humanitarian crisis. "My big hope is that Europe will decide to behave like Europeans" he said. There is a common acceptance that Europe's failure so far to respond adequately has been "an insult to our values and civilisation" - this from the EU's top immigration official who was struggling to find the words.

"Behave like Europeans". It's a bitter sarcasm on the virtues we have prized on our continent, among them care, pity (in the best sense of that word), compassion and charity. You could sum these up in the word "humane". One of the founding values of the EU is "solidarity" which means our capacity to see ourselves as part of the human family in its entirety, especially its poor, voiceless, needy and suffering members. This is why Europe's agonised and so far unsuccessful attempts to agree a concerted response to the refugees who arrive on our shores feels so shameful to us who care about being "Europeans". That honoured identity isn't simply a privilege. It comes with a cost, the outward-turned generosity that is necessary if others in our community are to flourish as we do. 

I've constantly pressed in these EU-blogs the absolute priority we must give to loving our neighbour. It's basic to the Judaeo-Christian tradition whose social teaching so inspired the founders of the European project. If ever we were called to do this in practical ways, it's now. I would place a copy of these photographs on the desk of every member of the European Council, the Commission and the Parliament and insist that they contemplated them at the start of every working day. An image speaks more than a thousand words. These tragic faces plead with us not just to feel something but to do something. And that means everyone in affluent Europe. None of us is exempt from making whatever personal response we can even if it can't be more than giving to charities who are supporting refugees. 

As Christian Aid has said pointedly, the European Union has to act together if there is to be any strategic way forward. Now we learn that at the leaders' summit, the EU and Turkey have reached agreement, a "landmark deal". I hope this is good news, but we shall have to wait for the small print to make sure that it is a real breakthrough (and a legal and adequate one), and not simply another cobbled-together compromise. There's been much criticism of the basic idea underlying the proposal, exchanging genuine refugees for those whose asylum applications are turned down and who will be sent back. But even if this is ethical and workable, there still needs to be a bigger plan such as David Miliband has proposed, the opening up of legal routes to bring refugees into Europe without endangering lives through a dangerous sea-voyage and unscrupulous people traffickers. 

Meanwhile, we in Britain who are shortly to vote in the EU referendum are bound to be asking how the migrant crisis will affect both the debate and the outcome. It would be deplorable if a humanitarian catastrophe were used for point-scoring for or against. But at the same time it wold be just as deplorable if our EU debates just sailed on oblivious to this disaster happening on our continent. Not many contributions I've seen on either side have had much to say about the refugees in relation to the referendum. Maybe that's a respectful silence when faced with holy ground. More likely it reflects how difficult it is to know what to say about it. That's forgivable. What would be much worse would be a silence that suggested a shoulder-shrugging attitude that it's not a British problem. After all, didn't the PM remind the summit that the UK has "special status" in the EU? - a statement I have to say I am profoundly uncomfortable with as I've said elsewhere.

My worry is that the terms set for the referendum debate are so circumscribed by "what's good for Britain, what's best for us" that the plight of the needy has been banished out of sight. If so, we should loudly insist that it's brought back into our conversation. A campaign based on self-interest only would be a campaign without a conscience. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been vocal in drawing attention to the refugees, and in this he is in tune with all the churches. I should like to see the referendum debate focus much more on what kind of society we believe the EU could be, and what values we ourselves hold to in the UK. Here's where the migrant crisis is an acid test of our capacity to be human. The referendum is not about abstract issues. It's about people and communities: we who are so privileged, and the many who are not. 

A final thought. Suppose the electorate concluded that the EU's failure to bring its peoples together to act humanely towards its refugees was a conclusive argument for Brexit. Well, I would understand and respect that because it would have been informed in a principled way. It would be a much stronger argument than the (to me) xenophobic fear of "migrant invasion" that tabloid reportage talks up. Similarly, I would find it hard to sympathise with those whose case for Remain is based solely on what's in our own national or personal interests. That wouldn't demonstrate the conscience and compassion we must have when human beings are suffering in our midst. It would fly in the face of what I believe are the best reasons for staying in. I happen to think that when we act together we are in a stronger position to make a difference to desperate human lives. Time will tell if I'm right.

I hope voters are listening out for indicators that humanitarian care is featuring in the way we talk about the referendum and are preparing to vote. We should take the images of those Syrian children with us in our memories when we go into the ballot-box. We must not forget them. If we do, they may never forgive us. 

In Praise of π

It was always going to be irresistible. When my daughter told me that today was a unique Pi Day 2016 (14 March, 3.14.16) I knew I would want to blog about it. Indeed, given the part mathematics has played in my life, I'm surprised I haven't blogged on it before.

I owe a lot to π. Not so much to the number itself, for all its irrational, transcendental qualities (those are technical mathematical terms by the way, not just the blogger's purple prose). But to what it symbolises and represents in the world of thought, in the structure of the universe, and not least in my own life.

For autobiography comes into things today. I can remember that even at a tender age I used to long to make sense of the arcane mathematical symbols that littered the books I pulled off the school library shelves: all those xs and ys and Σ signs and long swirly Ss which I can't do on this keyboard but which I later learned to know as symbols of integration, and dy/dx, and e and most of all, because it seemed to crop up everywhere, π. 

I think I fell in love with maths when I finally got to understand what π stood for. Calculating a circle's circumference and area was where it all began of course. But as I went on to do A level maths, it seemed to me miraculous that this innocent Greek letter could work so hard. It featured in places where I least expected it such as working out the period of a pendulum or the movements of the planets or how the hours of daylight change as we travel through the year. And more and more surprises the deeper I went.

I went on to read maths at university. There I began to penetrate the mysteries of algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, number theory and formal logic. (From this some readers will deduce that my inclinations were very much on the 'pure' side of mathematics. I was never much good at 'applied' maths or statistics, though of course π makes plenty of appearances in those areas too.) I loved what I was studying. I loved mathematics for itself, its elegance and beauty, its endless capacity to model worlds we know about and worlds we can never know. I loved it because it seemed to draw me into the deep structures of the universe itself. Was it an art or a science? I used to wonder. I still do. Maybe it doesn't matter. 

And I loved maths for how it was teaching me to think. There are various theories of what mathematics is in itself. Philosophers differ, for instance, about whether it has some 'eternal' (God-given?) existence outside ourselves, whether it is a product of the human mind and its patterns of thought, or whether it is an elaborate game played according to set rules or axioms that govern how we handle signs and formulae on the screen or page. But all agree that logic lies at the foundation of mathematics. And I was finding that my own habits of thinking and speaking, arguing and debating were being profoundly moulded by a desire at least to try to be rigorous. 

I wish that after I graduated with a (not very distinguished) maths degree, I'd kept up my love of the subject. I never did apart from reading popular books on the subject from time to time - which I still do. However by then my vocation to be a priest was beginning to change the way I was thinking about my future. So I turned to theology and took a second degree in what used to be called 'the queen of sciences'. I loved that too. (Perhaps I'm lucky enough to be one of those insatiably curious people who can love almost anything that is interesting enough.) And I realised, when I started to write my first faltering essays, that I owed a huge amount to my mathematical studies. 

When you study theology, you realise how easy it is to be careless about your assumptions and ways of working. Not all the textbooks were models of clear, disciplined, rigorous argument, I used to feel. As I said, maths taught me something of how to think. And as I now see, thought is so basic to who and what we are as human beings. There's much more to be said about Descartes' famous cogito ergo sum, 'I think, therefore I am'. There's more to human life than simply thinking. But he was on to something pretty important. And I reckon I started to glimpse it when I was studying maths as a schoolboy and a student. In that respect, π changed my life, if you'll allow the figure of speech. 

My daughter is about to marry a high school maths teacher. He loves what he does, both the subject itself, and the art of teaching it and exciting young people in their journey of mathematical discovery. I was fortunate to have teachers who lit up mathematics for me too. It's true: you never forget a good teacher. The shortage of good maths teachers in our schools today is worrying. Mathematical literacy (which is more than simply numeracy) is one of the basic foundations of education. As Einstein put it, the point of education is not to impart facts but to teach us how to think. There's no better discipline than maths for helping us to do that. Maybe Pi Day is a chance not only to celebrate mathematics and mathematicians, but also to think about how we are going to train up the next generation of children for whom π will be as alluring as it once was for me.

Britain, the End of Empire and the EU

I enjoyed a free day in London today. It's my home city but it's only when you move away that you really appreciate all it has to offer. And so much has changed since I left London in 1968 to go to university, never to live there again.

Inevitably my mind is full of the EU referendum at the moment. So I welcomed the prospect of a few hours away from the cyber-campaign I'm involved in through "Christians for the EU". But it's fascinating how you make connections all the time. I hadn't planned them - honest! "They just growed."  I began the day at Tate Britain to see an exhibition that's on at the moment called Artist and Empire. After that, I took a boat down the Thames from Millbank to Greenwich to visit the Royal Naval Hospital. Finally I went to the National Maritime Museum. 

First, the exhibition. If you're British, it's bound to be uncomfortable and challenging to revisit your history like this. I have a son in law who lectures in post-colonial history and he has helped me to look at Britain's past as a former world power in new ways. As I gazed at maps and works of art celebrating the big events of empire, I remembered an occasion years ago when I found I was being questioned in the same way. That was when I walked the Freedom Trail in Boston (which by the way every UK citizen who visits New England should do if they can). The discomfort was increased by the presence of "stolen art" in the exhibition: indigenous artefacts that were chosen precisely to underline the point that the erstwhile trophies of empire once so cherished are nowadays subject to huge debate about who they truly belong to and where they should be held. 

Most of this was a world away from Europe. Europeans featured in the exhibition mainly as fellow-colonialists, all part of this huge, now discredited project, of exerting power across the globe and exporting "western" values to every continent on earth. But Europeans also featured strongly as enemies of the British, especially the French and Spanish. In three different places along the Thames today, I've seen pictures of the death of General James Wolfe who seized Québec from the French in 1759. The exhibition showed how European wars have been acted out all over the world from Tudor times to the 20th century, a vast displacement activity in which millions of people were dragged to their deaths in conflicts that were never their own. 

The demanding but necessary process of bringing an end to empire inevitably puts questions to the United Kingdom of today. What kind of nation are we now, and what are our values as a people? That's the point of an exhibition that has been carefully curated to explore what imperial history means in a post-colonial environment. And all the time I was finding myself framing my own questions about this history, not only as a British citizen but as a European as well. So from an EU point of view, what might we say about the UK's contemporary geopolitical setting and its global role in the 21st century? 

My first and obvious thought was: how hard it is for a world player like imperial Britain to lose an empire and to accept that it has dropped down to being just a middle-ranking power among many others. It calls for real national humility to do this with dignity. It requires an act of grace not to harbour nostalgic longings for an age when so much of the world map was coloured pink, and when Britannia ruled the waves. As I disembarked at Greenwich, I could see up the Blackwall Reach to the original site of the East India Docks. At the exhibition, and again at the Maritime Museum I saw and learned much about the East India Company that became an immensely powerful colonial institution. The grandeur of Wren's Royal Naval Hospital is an eloquent symbol of a navy the like of which the world had never seen and would never see again. The converted warehouses that line the Pool of London, now smart apartments and expensive shops and eating houses, are the visible footprints of a trading power that reached to the ends of the earth. 

The bustling Thames, London's great artery of military and economic power, is a good place to reflect on a proud past. What's left of it all now? you ask yourself. Yet even if the UK is no longer a global power, it still has great global influence. The English language is one example of its reach all over the world. Our financial institutions are another. In the arts, culture, sports and in the academy the UK is a world class player. We can be justly proud of the achievements of the British people down the centuries and today. 

But let's remember that even in global politics we continue to count as heavyweights. Not on our own. That is never going to be possible again, nor should we harbour such ambitions for ourselves. Through our pooled sovereignty in the EU, we are still a force to be reckoned with alongside our continental partners. What's more, other EU nations look to us to take a lead in safeguarding the hard-won peace of Europe. This is one of the reasons why they do not want us to leave. In a world as febrile as ours is now, we can't afford to sit loose to our security. Alliances like the European Union, bound together by treaty, matter more and more today. It may be scaremongering to speculate that the only world leader who would welcome Brexit is Vladimir Putin who could - it's conjectured - take advantage of an EU weakened by the UK's departure. Who can say? I'm not an expert so I'm simply echoing strategists who have written about the new threats Brexit could pose at a time when the Cold War may no longer just be a matter for the history books. 

So here's what I have come away from today thinking. Our imperial past ought to have given us the capacity to think geopolitically about our future. When you've been a world power, you've seen the planet in a different way. Yes, you've exerted power in it, practised domination over it, subdued it, exploited it, stolen from it, all the evils we rightly condemn in the colonial project. The galleries that focus on the Atlantic slave trade at the National Maritime Museum are a sobering reminder of an ineradicable and shameful era. And even where Britain brought culture, language, a legal system, industrialisation and religion, these were far from being unambiguous benefits as historians always point out. History should drive us to our knees - not in gratitude but repentance. 

However, the legacy of empire ought to be that we don't lose sight of the big picture. The Thames is lined with the evidence of Britain's ability to think and imagine beyond its own shoreline. And that is sorely needed now, more than ever. For me, the European Union is one instance of how, today, a modern nation state like ours finds its proper place in a family of peoples who are committed to seeking one another's welfare, what theologians call the common good. To leave the EU would not only expose Europe and ourselves to threats we can't altogether foresee, whether in world trade or security.  It would represent a collapse in our vision of Britain, a narrowing of our horizons, a betrayal of everything that once enabled our islands to play such a disproportionately large role in world affairs. It's a cliché to say that it would probably lead to the cul-de-sac we call Little England. But I fear it would. 

Christianity says that greatness happens as we put others before ourselves and become not masters but servants, becoming one of "the least". That calls for humility, the virtue I drew attention to earlier. I think a good story can be told in this way: that at the end of empire, UK has had to learn how make the transition from domination to something like humility and service. I believe that despite its difficulties, we've done it with grace and integrity, and without loss in of what makes us British. The EU gives us a place to belong where we can not only flourish and be at ease with ourselves, but learn as a nation what it means not to be served but to serve. In that way we can yet make a lasting contribution to humanity. 

You can follow Christians for the EU on FaceBook or on Twitter @Xians4EU. 

So How Would Brexit Affect You?

I've tried in these blogs about the EU referendum to turn the question round, as I believe Christians should. What matters isn't just 'what's in it for us, what's in it for me?' but "what's in it for everyone else in the EU and what do we bring to the Union as our contribution to this family of nations?" It's a corporate implication of the second great commandment of the Torah quoted by Jesus: "love your neighbour as yourself".

But we wouldn't be human if we didn't wonder what our personal lives would be like if Brexit became a fact on 24 June. I won't pretend that it wouldn't be a personal nightmare to wake up and learn that this country had decided to walk away from the European Union. It would be a case of joining the hapless sailors at the start of The Tempest and crying "To prayers! To prayers!" But by then it would be too late to do much about it. 

I can't say how this "tempest" would affect the nation or me personally as far as the economy is concerned. Nobody can, though it doesn't stop a lot of people trying. But there is one thing that would change for me pretty decisively. And that is, that I would lose my European citizenship. I would no longer carry a passport that proclaimed "European Union" as well as "United Kingdom". I would no longer be able to pass through the green EU channel at customs. I wouldn't be able to carry an EHIC health card across Europe. There would be other losses too, real as well a symbolic.

But the loss of citizenship is a really big issue for me. To be an EU citizen has been part of my identity for most of my lifetime. It's a prized part of who I am, born of a German Jewish mother whose own parents were sheltered in Holland during the Nazi era, married to a woman with Irish heritage, owning a property in France. I feel completely at ease in continental Europe. It's my homeland, this dust whom Europe "bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam" (if you'll forgive a rather shameless borrowing of Rupert Brooke's famous poem). It's where I am connected and have always belonged. 

So what happens when, if, my precious European citizenship and the identity it confers is shorn from me? Can it be retrieved in any way other than a landscape of the mind, a land of lost content, a place of yesterday rather than today and tomorrow?

I hope and pray that it doesn't come to this. Because half in my mind is the idea that anything to do with my citizenship is a basic human right which should never involuntarily be removed. So here's my question.

Might it be possible for us dismembered, forcibly exiled Europhiles to be reattached to the EU in some other way? I'm thinking: might other EU member states make provision for British people who do not want to be deprived of their European citizenship? I'm thinking of a special kind of dual citizenship we might call UK Plus whereby we could elect also to become honorary citizens of Germany, France, Ireland (Scotland one day?), any member state that valued its own links with British people and didn't want to sever ties any more than many of us do. And might the European Parliament pass some enabling legislation to make this possible? 

As a European at home in North East England, I don't want to emigrate. I don't want to say farewell to these islands that I love, where my family and friends are, where so much of my life has been lived and where I have been fortunate enough to be happy. Britain has been good to my family and to me. But so has Europe. I don't want, I really do not want to be cast adrift from the mainland, collapse into a complacent island mentality that imagines that it can pretend to a nostalgically imagined, and in the end futile, self-sufficiency. I don't want my grandchildren to grow up on such an island and with such a defensive attitude to the wider world. And it's their future we should be thinking about, not just our own. My children and grandchildren were born as Europeans. It's their birthright. It mustn't be stolen from them.  

I've not seen this question discussed anywhere though I have today written to a national daily paper about it. But I very much want to lay down a marker that once given, it is not acceptable to be deprived of our hard-won citizenship. I shall accept that Brexit is the will of the British, if it turns out that way. The people will have spoken. But minorities have rights too. Their voices need to heard. And I very much doubt that there aren't others who will echo these thoughts and can perhaps suggest where they might be taken for discussion. 

You can follow Christians for EU on FaceBook and on Twitter @Xians4EU. 

Retirement: report from the Third Age front line.

I'll take a short break from writing blogs about the EU. This is the sixth month of my new life in retirement. When I started blogging under this new Woolgathering brand, I promised (threatened) updates from the front line of the Third Age from time to time. So here goes.

When we left Durham Cathedral in early October, it was in the afterglow of a marvellous farewell. You live off these heart-warming events for a long time: they are always with you. It was hard to leave behind such a uniquely beautiful place with its rich spirituality and wonderfully genuine community. But we landed happily across the hill in the South Tyne Valley. Haydon Bridge has proved to be a great village to retire into and become part of. We soon felt at home in a welcoming community, the parish church across the road and the lovely landscapes of Northumberland that we can walk from our own front door.

When you first retire, it's like being on holiday. You're full of expectations, keenly aware of the gift, as it feels to begin with, of lots of time to call your own. To enjoy your family, fresh air, music, books, photography, yes and social media, and not have to feel guilty about it (even if I'm tempted to) still feels like a decidedly odd feature of this new life. But I have also been aware of how tired I have felt and how long it takes to slough it off. I guess that's not surprising after forty years of working life. Others who've trodden this path before me have said it just needs time.

A colleague who came to see us recently asked if I had any "projects" in retirement. I've thought about this a lot. The almost universal advice at first was: don't make grand plans and big commitments early on. Don't make undertakings you might later want to get out of. Think carefully about what you would like to do in retirement. I've tried to do this. It's helped to keep a journal to soliloquise to and try ideas out on. I began it six months before retiring, and intend to keep it going until six months afterwards. It's a great help as I try to retire in a reflective way, and not find myself jolted roughly from one kind of life into another. Going into retirement is like coming up after a deep underwater dive. If you surface too quickly, you risk getting the bends. That as we know is highly risky.

One of the things that's become clear is that while I certainly want to be useful to the church and wider community, I don't want to spend however many years I am granted before I die simply perpetuating my working life by doing more of the same. I want to explore new involvements and learn new things. I'm especially keen to put something back into North East England, the region that has given so much to us over the years. So I'm having conversations around the place to see what possibilities there might be. We shall see. It's a discernment process, as important as it was when I first explored my vocation to ordained ministry. And at times, as unclear and as puzzling. And certainly a matter for prayer.

All this may sound as though these first few months have been placid and uneventful. Far from it. In December, our second grandchild was born, Madeleine, a sister for Isaac. Two days later we were hit by Storm Desmond. The village suffered badly as the normally benign South Tyne became a ferocious torrent tearing through peoples' homes. Our cellar was flooded to a depth of six feet, writing off the new and expensive biomass boiler we had just installed there. Without power and hot water, we were out of the house for nearly a fortnight. Wonderful neighbours who hardly knew us took us in. The support and kindness we found in the village were deeply moving. I won't pretend it didn't feel like a devastating crisis just when we had settled into our new home and were enjoying living in it. We learned then that there's no better way to arrive in a new community than to lay on a disaster. You make friends extraordinarily quickly!

Life has stabilised since then. The rains have subsided and the cellar is dry again. A new boiler is being constructed in the garage. We have got back to a rhythm of life: going across to church for weekday morning prayer, shopping in Hexham and attending evensong in the Abbey each week, frequent walks on the fell above the village, and a little further afield by Hadrian's Wall, listening to Radio 3 for most of the day other than when it's time for The Archers, meeting up with friends we're lucky enough to have nearby, and a lot of reading. (I've been working through Anthony Trollope's Barsetshire novels and loving them; currently well into The Small House at Allington with just The Last Chronicle to go. He is a great novelist and so easy to read - on which I feel another blog coming on soon.)

Meanwhile, the EU referendum has become an all-consuming agenda item. If you follow this blog, you'll know that a short time ago I launched "Christians for the EU" with its Twitter handle @Xians4EU. My hope was to stimulate thought and debate about a Christian case for the UK to stay in the European Union, something that I believe in with all my heart. It's taking up a large amount of time, and the official campaign hasn't even begun yet! But I've learned a great deal by the research I've needed to do, and have been glad that our efforts have been noticed by the national media. I couldn't have done this a year ago when I was still in office, not primarily because it might not have been appropriate to, but for the more pressing reason that I would never have found the time.

It all sounds very pleasant, I hear you say, and yes, it is. But there's this nagging question about what my life is now meant to be for. I blogged a few months ago about the dilemma of how to describe myself when people ask what it is I do. I said I didn't want to be an imperfect man (past continuous: 'I used to be a Cathedral dean'), nor an aorist man (past and done with: 'I practised as a priest in the C of E'). Maybe a perfect man (past tense with present consequences: 'I've been an ordained minister in theological education, parish and cathedrals and here's what I've become now').

But best of all, I'd like to be someone living in the present and even the future tense ('this is what I am, and what I hope to become'). I'm reticent about using the R-word because that seems to be haunted by those past tenses. As Kierkegaard said, life has to be lived forwards and understood backwards. Retirement is certainly time to seek understanding, reflect on the past and draw the threads of a life together. But it's now and tomorrow that I need to keep in view if I am to remain truly alive in any sense that matters. What, who, am I in this new stage of my life? That's the question. A writer? Speaker? Photographer? EU campaigner? Priest? Dilettante? Couch potato?

This, I guess, is an aspect of the spirituality of retirement. I said it was work in progress. But I firmly believe it is opus dei, the work of God. Liminal time at a threshold makes for strange days and mysterious ways. But "God is his own interpreter and he will make it plain".