Walking on the Moon - 50 years on

Earlier this week there was a full moon. I was alerted to this as I travelled home by train from Newcastle up the Tyne Valley. I noticed how high the river was that afternoon. It was not that it had rained, simply that the tide was unusually high. Then I remembered that there was due to be a partial eclipse of the moon that night. The full moon explained the spring tide. Soon the train passed Wylam which marks the river’s tidal limit. At once the flow reverted to its languid summer self beyond the reach of salt water.   

We’re all thinking about the moon in this week of the 50th anniversary of the day a human being first set foot on it. “That’s one small step for a man” - surely you can just hear that endlessly-discussed indefinite article in those immortal words, a mere breathing but it makes all the difference to the sense - “one giant leap for mankind.” If you were alive fifty years ago, you will never forget what seemed like the most momentous event of our lifetimes.

The Church Times invited me to contribute a piece for a feature celebrating the landing. Here it is.  

I was nineteen in July 1969 when the first men walked on the moon. As I look back, I remember it as if we stood at the threshold of a new era in history. I echoed Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” 

But my clearest memory is not the day of the moon walk itself. We didn’t have a TV so I followed it on the radio and in the papers. (Which made it an oddly aural and literary experience while it was the video footage everyone else was talking about.) What I recall as if it were yesterday is walking along a north London street one evening. The full moon hung in the darkening sky. My companion nudged me and pointed to it. “Isn’t it amazing that we have walked there?” he said. I distinctly remember the pronoun. We, not other people. This was about us. 

I gazed up with a kind of religious awe, experiencing a youthful version of what Freud calls “that vast oceanic feeling”. I echoed the psalmist’s ecstasy at the sight of the starry skies above: “O Lord our Sovereign how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8.1). 

Memory plays tricks. Until writing this I assumed I’d remembered the night of the moon-walk itself but I can’t have been. My 1969 diary tells me that the moon was only in its first quarter. It must have been the following week. Does it matter? 

What did matter was this mystic sense of wonder that took me by surprise. As a student reading maths, I was bound to be moonstruck by equations that laid the foundations for this dazzling achievement of science and technology. But it was more than that. I was gazing at the most familiar object in the night sky, but it looked different. I was connected to it in a new way because we had walked there. That made me a citizen of the cosmos. 

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” asks the psalm. As a recently baptised Christian I was pondering what my life should be for. Among the lights shed on the path I would follow was moonlight. A few months afterwards the age of majority was lowered from 21 to 18 and I became an adult. The moon-walk felt part of growing up, an unforgettable moment in a key rite of passage.

Since 1969, our horizons have been hugely enlarged. I’ve blogged at times (here, here and here) about some of the most inspiring events in astronomy in recent years. In all of them, I’m aware of a theological and spiritual response that echoes what I felt about the moon landing. It’s a cliche to talk about the “wonder” or “beauty” of creation, but that’s what it comes down to, and it’s not restricted to people of faith. If you’ve watched Brian Cox’s TV documentaries (the recent marvellous series on the solar system for example) you’ll recognise the same poetic and mystical response to the cosmos that you find in the creation narratives and the psalms. And he is, I think, a self-confessed atheist. 

What’s so beautiful about the cosmos? Why should the study of astronomy and cosmology not only stimulate our imagination but make us feel we are treading on holy ground?

It’s more than an aesthetic response. Yes, the moon looks beautiful in all its phases, or when it is half hidden by cloud, or eclipsed by the earth’s (ie our own) shadow, or when we admire those famous images of the lunar landscape with blue planet earth hanging serenely in the black sky above. How could we not be moved by the sheer artistry of what lies beyond us and which, fifty years ago, we touched for that brief moment in our story?

But I hinted in the piece I’ve quoted that there’s an intellectual dimension to it too. As a former mathematician, I’ve forgotten most of what I ever learned as an undergraduate. But not the elegance of the deep structures of mathematics, the equations that lie at the heart of how the universe is (and how other universes might be). I remember a charismatic maths teacher at school proving a theorem to us A-level students (I wish I could remember which theorem it was), writing QED with a flourish on the blackboard, stepping back to brush the chalk dust off his gown and acclaiming triumphantly, “That, my dear friends, is poetry in its highest and purest form”. Who’s to say he wasn’t right?

Immanuel Kant wrote about the two things that fill the mind with awe and admiration: “the starry skies above me, and the moral law within me”. The wisdom writers of the Hebrew Bible never tired of pointing out that one of the best incentives to live well is to emulate the pattern and order of the created world. Contemporary physics and cosmology have shown us that the universe is infinitely more mysterious than we could have imagined. Which suggests that “the moral law within” should be informed by a mystical attitude that recognises that the good life, holiness, is as much about what we don’t know as what we do, and the “awe and admiration” that comes from both knowing and unknowing. 

The moon landing fifty years ago was, for me, a gateway to glimpsing this, and finding in these new perceptions what I can only call joy. I like to think that I was taking “one small step” for a young man who wanted then, and still wants late in life, to find his place as a creature of God and a citizen of the cosmos, and learn how to inhabit it wisely. 

“Enlargement”: a Biblical and Theological Case for Equal Marriage

This blog first appeared as an article on the Campaign for Equal Marriage in the Church of England website.

What is the intellectual basis of equal marriage as we campaign for its adoption in the Church of England?

As far as the law is concerned, many people are content to argue for equal marriage on the basis of human rights. Discrimination of any kind subverts the principles of justice, equality and inclusion. So in marriage as in everything else, citizens should be treated in the same way, without distinction. The same goes for civil partnerships. Both should be open to all, regardless of their sexual orientation. And this is the direction of travel across the entire nation, including Northern Ireland following this week’s welcome vote in Parliament to bring marriage law there into line with the rest of the UK.

The exemptions provided under the equal marriage legislation for religious institutions, including the Church of England, are in my view extremely unfortunate. Churches should be beacons of equality and inclusion, not obstacles to it. I do not remember that the Church of England’s governing body, the General Synod, was consulted on this point. But I did hear bishops and others comment as follows. The equal marriage legislation is established purely on secular, rights-based assumptions, not on theology or ethics. Its premise is utilitarian, “the greatest good for the greatest number” rather than any rigorous understanding of what marriage really means. The church should therefore protect the theological principles on which marriage is founded in the Christian tradition. Human rights don’t come into it.

The common idea that a rights-based ethics is sub-theological needs challenging. I want to argue that its origins lie in the Hebrew Bible, whose teaching that we must love our neighbour as ourselves is affirmed by Jesus as the second of the two great commandments. That teaching itself goes back to the equality that belongs to human beings in creation. It is the divine image in humanity that is the theological basis for treating all people equally and affirming that all have the same rights before God and one another. I think there is a good case for claiming that the emphasis in the gospels is on defending other people’s rights rather than my own. That seems to me to be the thrust of the prophets’ call for justice. But it’s telling that the Enlightenment principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, and of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” emerged in Christian civilisations that had been schooled in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. 

If the idea of an “inclusive church” in which equal marriage, the ordination of women and a Christianity that transcends differences of ethnicity, culture, sexuality, education and class flows out of Enlightenment principles, that is theological enough for me. At the same time, it’s important that we should examine the individual aspects of inclusive Christianity so as to understand how they sit in relation to one another and to the tradition as a whole. Let me explore equal marriage in this way. 

Those who oppose equal marriage often do so on the grounds that marriage is heterosexual by definition, the union of a man and woman. This is of course how it has traditionally been understood. The Bible does not know of same-sex marriage (though it does recognise at least one covenanted same-sex relationship, that of David and Jonathan, though the text is reticent as to the exact nature of their friendship). 

But the question of whether heterosexuality is of the essence of marriage can’t be answered by appealing to the history of the institution. It all depends on whether by definition it is intrinsically capable or incapable of being “enlarged” in its scope. At first sight, the Bible appears to rule this out according to the aetiology of marriage in the creation story where the man recognises the woman as “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” and “leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh” (Genesis 2.18-25). 

But what if the point of this story is not to make a statement about gender complementarity so much as about the union of two human beings in a covenant of loyalty and fidelity? In the Hebrew Bible, “flesh of our flesh” is synonymous with the closest of relationships that it is possible to have, whether through kinship or affinity. “It is not good that the man should be alone.” The answer to his loneliness is the companionship of another. And it is to this “other” that the pledge of faithfulness is made. The complementarity of the relationship is, I believe, not, or not only, a matter of gender. It’s about reaching out across the gap that separates every human being from the “other” and recognising in that chosen “other” the deepest possible answer to his or her need of intimacy.  

I’m suggesting that the essence of marriage is the vow of covenanted fidelity. The ceremony, by being contracted before witnesses, affirms the vow and gives it a public character. That makes it the proper business of society. And since modern marriage rites affirm that the primary purpose of marriage is companionate, then enlarging it so as to see it as a union of “others”, whatever their gender, is not at all to compromise its intrinsic nature. On the contrary, it could be argued that equal marriage was always the destiny of this public institution, laying bare its essential character as a companionate publicly covenanted union in which the begetting of children, traditionally its primary purpose, may, but need not necessarily, play a part. 

Christian theology and practice are in fact familiar with this idea of “enlargement”. In the lifetimes of many of us, the Church of England has found it possible to permit the solemnisation of marriages where either or both of the parties is divorced and has a partner still living. If like me you believe that the life-vow is fundamental to the meaning of marriage, then this was actually a very big step for the church to make. This is because the remarriage of divorced people directly raises the status of the vow that lay at the heart of the previous marriage. This isn’t the place to rehearse those difficult arguments. I am simply saying that the church has found a way of acknowledging both that a vow is a vow, and that as facts on the ground, marriages break down and are dissolved. What was unthinkable only a couple of generations ago has happened. The Church of England “enlarged” its understanding of marriage – in some tension with the teaching of St Mark’s Gospel, some might say - so as to allow divorced people to solemnise second or subsequent marriages. And it did this all the while continuing to affirm the sanctity of the marriage vow, including the pledge of lifelong fidelity. 

Equal marriage, then, challenges the church to continue this process of what I’m calling “enlargement”. Indeed, because it does not call into question the character of the lifelong vow of marriage but affirms the fundamental meaning of the covenant, it is to me at least, less problematic than the remarriage of divorcees. Far from subverting the institution, equal marriage strongly affirms it. Which is why I am puzzled that the leadership of the Church of England apparently regards it as subverting marriage rather than, as I see it, placing a massive vote of confidence in it. 

What I am calling “enlargement” is simply one more example of how since earliest times the boundaries of Christian understanding have been stretched both by circumstances and by the inner logic of its own theology. The New Testament debates about circumcision are the template here. One reading of them is to say that the early expansion of the church into the gentile world of the Roman Empire urgently demanded a renegotiation of circumcision as a rite of passage into the covenant community. I conjecture that this force of circumstance came first, this pressure for the inclusion of gentiles into the church. Subsequent theological reflection led to the recognition that this was not only allowable, but required by the logic of a message that proclaimed itself to be good news for all. Where a universal gospel is proclaimed, inclusion is the only possible theological response. 

Which brings me back to where I began, with the love command in the Bible. Universalism and inclusion are ultimately about love: God’s love for all his creatures and for all humanity; and how our love as human beings for one another reflects this. So the tendency of Christian thought and practice to “enlarge” its thought and practice is, I think, a necessary consequence of working out what this truly means in contexts and circumstances so different from those in which the command to love was first given. When difficult (which usually means untested) ethical choices have to be made, situation ethics asks: what is the loving thing to do here? And while the church may often struggle to answer that question well, taking a long time and following many a false trail in the process, it is at least being true to its best self when it recognises where that question comes from. If discernment follows the theological direction of travel enshrined in its charter texts that embody the love command, then we can be hopeful of an outcome that is not only good in itself but has the integrity that comes when a genuine exploration has been undertaken. 

I’d like to think that the Church of England’s current process Living in Love and Faith is a genuine exploration of this kind. Is it capable of contemplating “enlargement” when it comes to same-sex relationships and equal marriage? And if so, will our churches one day not only acknowledge but celebrate what is true for so many of our Christian brothers and sisters, that to love a person of the same sex is to find the “bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh” that Genesis speaks about? And will it not only affirm the goodness of loving same-sex relationships among both laity and clergy, but solemnise them publicly? 

I have no hesitation in saying that that day will come. It would be foolish to imagine that it will happen very soon. The forces of aggressive conservatism in both religion and politics will make sure that this ground continues to be contested for a while yet. Nevertheless, in the arena of personal and social ethics, history is on the side of generosity and inclusion. That is why the Campaign for Equal Marriage in the Church of England will be successful in the end. This blog has, I hope, demonstrated that the campaign is a principled one because its case is built on a solid theological and ethical foundation. Which is why we have every reason for hope. 

Assisted Dying: “Compassion is not a Crime”

Three years ago this month I watched my mother die. It was brutal for her and for me. She had recently been admitted to a care home following a short spell in hospital. A few weeks before, she had still been living at home in her ninety-fourth year, glad to have retained her independence for so long.

It was becoming clear that the end would not be far off. Like any son, my hope for my mother was that it would be quick, dignified and free of pain. But the reality turned out to be none of these things.  When she lost consciousness, the presumption was that death would soon follow. But it didn’t. She clung on to her life for a full two days, contorted by a pain the morphine administered by the medical staff seemed unable to assuage. I sat with her in the darkness through her last night with my memories and my prayers while she cried out in distress. Next day the morphine ran out, so I was dispatched to the hospital pharmacy to get some more. While I was gone, she died. 

The previous week in the hospital, she had asked the young doctor who was looking after her, “why can’t you give me something to help me cross this final threshold?” He replied, gently, “no, I can’t do that, but when the time comes for you to make that journey, we won’t get in the way”. She knew that he had no choice about his answer. She accepted it and didn’t argue the point. She knew that he had her best interests at heart. But she also knew that prolonging her life by not intervening to bring it to an end was not really about living at all. It was simply prolonging her dying. To her and to me, this was heartless.

My mother had long been an advocate of voluntary euthanasia. I found this out by chance one day when I was rummaging around the upper levels of a bookcase in the living room. There I came across a publication that bore the intriguing imprint EXIT. I asked her about it. She told me she believed that there were circumstances in which to choose to die was not only permissible but responsible. What circumstances, I wanted to know? Terminal illness for one thing, she said. Or the loss of your mental or physical faculties. Or any situation where your quality of life would be so diminished that death was preferable. I now think she had the Nazi death-camps in mind, in which members of her family had perished.

I can’t have been more than about twelve when we had that conversation, but I recalled it as I sat by my mother’s death bed. And I wondered what could be said for a law that prevented her from being relieved of her suffering had she chosen in advance, as she assuredly would, that in these desperate circumstances she would want her life to be terminated. I wondered why anyone would think that my mother’s pitiful condition during this ordeal was a good way to die, a dignified and compassionate way to bring a long human life to its close.

I could rehearse the ethical and theological objections to assisted dying and euthanasia, of course. I had (still have) every sympathy with those who argue that reverence for life must underlie all our decisions about palliative care and what we used to call the end of life pathways on which terminally ill patients were set. In all things there must be the imperative to “do no harm”. I understand the risks inherent in changing the law, the abuses that could follow bad legislation, the fear that the right to die could slide into a duty to die on the part of elderly people who could come to feel they had outstayed their welcome on this earth. 

But there’s another side to this. For one thing, at a time when every moment of human life can be, and is, managed by decisions we make for ourselves, including life’s beginnings by planning whether and when to give birth, it seems artificial to exempt life’s ending from this good and wise decision-making. Indeed, we don’t do this - in a case like my mother’s, every aspect of care in the final days and hours is highly managed until the end comes. But not the end itself. Yet in the face of terminal illness and the collapse of our mental or physicality capacity, not to be permitted to make a free and informed decision about bringing our life to a close is to subvert an aspect of our human responsibility to make moral choices. We make decisions about our healthcare throughout our lives, advised by professionals we trust. Why should the ultimate decision, the awesome choice whether to go on living or to die be denied us?

But a pastoral theologian wants to go further. It seems to me that this is fundamentally a matter of loving your neighbour as yourself or, as the Golden Rule has it, to treat others as we would have them treat us. We do not want to see other people suffer. We do not want to suffer ourselves. Contrary to how the Christian tradition is sometimes presented, there is surely no virtue in pain per se, which is why people of faith don’t regard relieving suffering as somehow frustrating the will of God. On the contrary. To alleviate suffering wherever we find it is an act of love and compassion that is motivated by the very same reverence for life that is often invoked against assisted dying. 

This week Parliament has once again been debating assisted dying. This debate will not be concluded any time soon. And it is right not to rush to conclusions, for these are matters literally of life and death. But I’d like to think that the churches’ contribution to it would not be implacable a priori opposition. I believe as a matter of Christian ethics that legislation could be enacted that would allow people - if they chose - to be spared the kind of suffering I watched my mother go through in her final hours. In an important book, Professor Paul Badham* considers the arguments for and against assisted dying in the light of biblical, theological and ethical considerations. He also presents evidence from places (such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, the State of Oregon) where the law permits assisted dying. He concludes that there is a Christian case for it that needs to be taken seriously. Which is why I support the Campaign for Dignity in Dying in pressing for legislation that will permit it in this country. As they say, “compassion is not a crime”. 

Sitting with my mother as she lay dying, while being profoundly aware of my own helplessness was not what brought me to this conviction. I had come to it long before that. But my belief about a principle had now acquired a personal dimension. What she suffered at the end of her life was in no way what she would have wished, in no way what I or anyone else who cared for her could have wanted. We ought to be allowed to be spared such an end. All our pastoral instincts surely point in that direction. It’s often pointed out that we are kinder to our pets when they reach the end of their lives than we are to our fellow human beings. Are we not of (even) more value than they?

It’s true that in all things, l’homme propose, Dieu dispose. We don’t know how we are going to die. But as I grow older I find myself echoing the petition in the Litany that we may be protected from a sudden catastrophic death. How much better to die peacefully, and whatever the poet says, to go gently into that good night. How much better to allow the artistry with which we have tried to shape our lives to help shape our deaths too, to the extent that is possible. This is what assisted dying is about, in the settings I’ve described.

So for myself, I hope to be able to make the decision while I am of sound mind to ask, if I need it, to be helped across that final threshold with dignity and grace, in the presence of those who love me and before my God who I trust will help me to pray, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”.

*Paul Badham, Is There a Christian Case for Assisted Dying? Voluntary Euthanasia Reassessed (SPCK, 2009).

The Next Prime Minister: why character matters

This post is not about Boris Johnson. Well, not directly.

But recent events have posed sharp questions for those who are standing as candidates to become the next prime minister, and for the electors who will decide. Does it matter what kind of person you are, or only what policies you promote? Is your private life relevant to your public role, or should we mind our own business when it comes to salacious headlines about the personal conduct of people in prominent leadership positions?

I have a lot of sympathy with the idea that we have a right to a private life. The intrusion of print and broadcast media into our privacy is in many ways a distasteful thing, fuelled as it often is by a deafening clamour of online voices. I've spent my working life in public roles as an ordained priest in the Church of England. In no way is this comparable to being a politician, though when you are a cathedral dean, you necessarily find yourself the focus of public attention. It’s not always welcome. For example, a few years ago I found myself embroiled in a contentious debate about a local football manager who had (in my and many people's opinion) espoused a version of fascism. I protested that football supplies key role models to the young and fascism ought not to feature among them. I was subjected to shedloads of abuse from people who cared only about their club's footballing success. My personal origins (regarding my German-Jewish mother) were invoked in a stream of abusive forum comments I was foolish enough to look at. It was uncomfortable to say the least even though I had not said or done anything I later regretted.

Yet it seems to me that when you take up a leadership role in public life, you do in an important way renounce the privileges of a private life most people take for granted. Let me speak about the world I know best, the Church of England. At this time of year, men and women are being ordained across the country. I shall be speaking to a group of them in a week's time. The ordination season is always a joyful, but also a solemn, thought-provoking time not only for the candidates themselves but for the whole church. It asks us reflect on the kind of public ministry that is needed in today's and tomorrow's church if it is to flourish and serve the nation and its peoples as well as it can.

In the ordination service the Bishop asks this question of the candidates. Will you endeavour to fashion your own life and that of your household according to the way of Christ, that you may be a pattern and example to Christ's people? To some, that could feel intrusive. What right has the church to ask this? What has my personal life, still more that of my household, got to do with my fitness to lead and serve in the church? Surely that is purely a matter of charism, aptitude and skill?

Well, not entirely. What the ordinal is getting at is the exemplary nature of leadership. As all the textbooks tell us nowadays, good leadership is about much more than strategic aims and smart objectives. It's as much about what you are as what you do and how you perform. It pays equal attention to how you embody and live out the values of your institution to those towards whom you have the responsibility of oversight. Words like virtue and character are used a lot. Some senior leaders in politics and business have said that they keep a copy of The Rule of St Benedict on their desks to remind them what this great book from 1500 years ago teaches about the virtues needed in a good leader such as the abbot of the monastery.

The fact is that people (not just church people) regard clergy as "exemplary" Christians and human beings. To the public, it's not simply what priests and bishops say but what they do that counts. We may balk at that, protest that clergy are ordinary men and women who as fragile and broken as everyone else. The last thing we should do is put them on pedestals. And of course, that's right. Except that it ignores the dynamic that is going on when leaders hold public office. As soon as they step into an official role, they attract projections and transferences that invest them with hopes and expectations that can be almost numinous, invested with a kind of sacred quality.

I preached at an ordination last year on John the Baptist's words "I am not the Messiah" and said I'd have them emblazoned on the robes of every new clergy man or woman! But you can't deal with messianic projections so easily. Unconsciously people want leaders to be their messiah. And as far as clergy are concerned, they certainly want the ordained to be model Christians, "a pattern and example" whom they can emulate. So when clergy fail by catastrophically undermining the gospel values they stand for, it is shocking. Priests who abuse children, for example.

Something like this is going to be true of leaders in every institution - public, private or voluntary. And where an organisation's values feature prominently in its public presentation of itself, its leaders are bound to be subject to particular scrutiny. This is where churches and political parties perhaps have something in common because they are value-driven. Political leaders are looked to as much for their values and personal authenticity as for strategic direction and policy-making. This doesn't mean they won't fall below their party's standards from time to time. But when they do in non-trivial ways, that becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. Is this person all they say they are? Are they as trustworthy in their personal life as in their public role? Is there a consistency of values and behaviour across the whole of their persona?

I can only say that these questions have been central to my self-understanding as a priest in my years of public ministry. I have made mistakes, let people down, disappointed their proper expectations of what a priest should be, fallen short of my own standards for my personal as well as my public life. In some ways, letting myself down is harder than anything else as I look back - not being consistently my best self in that "inner room" as Jesus calls it, the place where people can't see who and what I truly am. I have tried (and am still trying) to learn that in some respects, what goes on in secret really is the business of the people I've been called to serve and lead. I don’t mean we should condone nosiness or prurience: there is a line to be drawn between what it’s appropriate for people to know about my personal or family life and what it isn’t. But if others have a legitimate concern about the consistency of my professional and personal life when measured against values I publicly represent, that isn’t prurience. That’s caring for the church’s welfare - and mine too.

Thinking about the election of the next prime minster, I recently tweeted the seven Nolan Principles of Public Life. This isn't the first time I've mentioned them in my blog. The government website tells us that "the 7 principles of public life apply to anyone who works as a public office-holder. This includes people who are elected or appointed to public office, nationally and locally. The principles also apply to all those in other sectors that deliver public services.They were first set out by Lord Nolan in 1995 and they are included in the Ministerial code".

The Principles (which I think are worth a capital letter even if the website doesn't) are: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. These are the seven standards - maybe we should call them virtues - to which everyone in public life should aspire. They set out what we should properly expect of those who undertake public roles. In public sector organisations leaders are required to sign up to them formally. I wonder why we don't ask church leaders to do the same. Because they describe behaviours as well as aspirations, they seem to me to apply to the personal as well as the professional "character" of leaders. In ancient Greek, a character was literally a text or design that was stamped on wax, thus transmitting the essential quality of the original pattern. It's a good metaphor of the way we are formed (or should be) by the values and virtues of the institutions we belong to and lead.

Which is why it's relevant to ask the candidates for one of the highest offices in the land whether they are committed to these Principles. In an article in today's Observer, Simon Tisdall draws on David Miliband's Fulbright Lecture to ask why world leaders these days can get away with lying with impunity. Do we in the UK not want our own leadership to be free of mendacity, to believe that truth is fundamental to good leadership, not merely truth about facts (though that is important) but truth-seeking and truth-telling as essential personal qualities? That's what's at stake in this election.

And when the dramas of someone's personal life hit the headlines, we need to ask what it means to have signed up to values like integrity, openness and honesty? Electors have a right to know about the character of the candidates who are competing for their votes. They have a right to explore whether their professional and personal ethics are rooted in the same set of values. You shouldn't trumpet "family values" if you are cavalier in the way you treat your own family. Questions at hustings about these things shouldn't be shouted down. We need to be assured that the man who will lead this nation is free of hypocrisy, and displays the qualities that make him worthy of our confidence. He needs to be an exemplary human being whom we can respect, emulate and even admire.

Perhaps integrity is the controlling value of the seven Principles. It has the connotations of completeness where disparate parts are brought together, integrated into a single whole. Beati quorum via integra est says the Latin translation of the opening verse of Psalm 119, "Happy are those whose way is pure". Purity means being "single-pointed", having one focus for life in all its aspects. It's not a matter of being a perfect leader, still less a messianic one. What's required is consistency in anyone who aspires to leadership, to be emotionally intelligent, self-aware enough to be in touch with his own humanity with all its flaws. We need him to be integrated, to be one single person, not two or more depending on the audience.

We need him to be good enough to trust.

Things My Father Never Told Me

How old was I? Eleven or twelve? I can't recall. What I do remember is that I did something that brought my father to tears - the only time in my whole life I saw him cry.

What I did was not very terrible, and I meant no harm. I'd gone to the National Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, then in Somerset House on the Strand, to look up my family's history. A bit precocious, you may say. But it was so easy in those days. You simply turned up there and pulled the relevant registers off the shelves. My mother was German-born, so Somerset House was no help as far as her own family was concerned. Anyway, it was my father's side of the family I wanted to explore to see what I could find out about my surname.

I looked up my father's birth date. To my surprise he had no entry. Someone else called Sadgrove was listed as having been born that day, but not with Christian names I recognised. I should have drawn the obvious conclusion and kept quiet about what I'd seen, but things aren't always obvious to a boy of that age, and I was not gifted with tact. I went home and blurted it all out to my father. I was dismayed at his reaction. He took a while to tell me the story of how he had changed his given name by deed poll on reaching adulthood. It wasn't the name in itself, rather the memories it conjured up of how he had been relentlessly bullied as a youngster. Whenever he heard himself called by name, it brought back the vilification, cruelty and scorn he'd been subject to in school days - this was how he put it. He didn't go into details. Then he turned away and wept. And I stood there silent and numb, helpless before these sluice-gates of memory and emotion that I'd unwittingly opened up. It was a defining experience of my life.

I revisit that scene often, reliving the pain of unintended disclosure. I've thought about it on this Fathers' Day. I don't mean my own discomfort that afternoon, for it was nothing compared to my father's terrible grief. What I glimpsed for the first time was how abuse - which bullying always is - has effects on victims that last a lifetime. My father had climbed clear of his childhood, had worked hard, made a success of his life, married and had children. And now, without intending to, I'd uncovered what had lain undisturbed for decades. I was shaken by the capacity of historic wounds to haunt, and hurt, an adult man so many years later. And by my own part in it, even though I was the occasion not the cause. How could I begin to understand? I'm not sure I understand it even now more than half a century later.

As I look back to my own childhood on this Fathers' Day, my memories are of how happy it was. My father played a big part in that. He enjoyed the company of children - I saw later on in life how good he was as a grandparent to my own children. As a three year old he was taking me for walks among the silver birch trees of Petts Wood, teaching me to ride my tricycle and pointing out the Southern Electric "green trains" that ran beneath a bridge we had to cross on the way while I peered down between the girders. We played together in the sand pit in the garden. He built a layout for my Hornby clockwork "O" gauge model railway. One Christmas when I was seven, my parents gave me an 18 inch pavement bike. It had only one brake which failed at the top of Muswell Hill. I can feel even now the terror of wheels beneath me sliding out of control and gathering speed. The steep hill plunged down before me like a cliff. "Steer into those trees!" my father yelled, and I could hear the panic in his voice; "steer left and into those trees!" I did, and have always believed that he saved my life that day.

Perhaps I'm right to regard that visit to Somerset House as marking the end of childhood, or at any rate as representing an important rite of passage. For it showed me for the first time that my father was a vulnerable human being who had had a troubled past. It wasn't that up to then our relationship had been unalloyed bliss. Mine had been a middle-class upbringing like most others with its ups and downs, the good times and the not so good, the fallings-out and reconciliations that make up normal family life. But never had the raw humanity of either of my parents been exposed in the way it was that day. I saw a wound that I guessed would never fully heal. And I was not ready for it, not yet.

Psychoanalytic theory teaches us how important the moment is when we realise that our parents are flawed human beings like us. It's a real threshold in our growing up, a necessary step towards adulthood to recognise that for all that they have given us, they are not the omnipotent, infallible beings we believed them to be in our infancy. You would have to ask my own children at what point my own brokenness and fallibility became clear to them, when they learned that I could never be the perfect father, though I could still aspire (and hope) to be the "good-enough parent" they would always need me to be. I knew that I did not love my father any the less for what I had found out, indeed, I believed I would respect him for being candid with me about it. I also knew that he would not love me any the less for discovering it. How did I know? Because, I think, the foundations had been laid by a good-enough father that could bear the burden of what subsequently came to light. And when in adolescence, family relationships became more complicated, the memory of that event proved stabilising and strangely reassuring.

I once wrote a book* that explored stories in Genesis and Exodus about sons who were "lost" for various reasons. Abel, for example, who was murdered by his brother, and Ishmael who was banished to the desert by his father; and Isaac who was nearly offered up as a sacrifice, and Joseph who was exiled to Egypt out of envy, and others. Among the characters who populate these stories are all-too-many broken, wayward, self-serving fathers who paint an unlovely picture of humanity at its most compromised. Immersing myself in those texts got me thinking hard about my own personal history as a father to one man and a son to another. (You'll forgive the non-inclusive language, but biblical masculinities were central to the theme of the book.) The controlling narrative throughout was the parable of the Prodigal Son. Pondering that marvellous story made me ask the questions, in what ways have I been the prodigal "lost" son needing to be welcomed home and forgiven, and how in turn could I be that loving father towards my own children?

On Fathers' Day, I want to give thanks for and honour the memory of my father to whom I owe the gift of being alive, and to whose "good-enough" parenting in the critical years of childhood my adult self owes so much. As for the father I have been in turn for more than forty years now, I pay tribute to my four children whose capacity for understanding and forgiveness is one of the miracles of family life. That loving father in the parable is the inspiration for all of us who are lucky enough to be fathers. And all of us in every relationship in which others look to us for protection, kindness and care. For he shows us what God must be like, the Father who loves his creation and every living thing, who longs to welcome us home; and who when we make the journey back from our far country comes running to meet us.

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The image at the top of this blog is a medieval wall-painting in a church in Budapest that shows God the loving Father listening to his Son's prayer of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Fathers' Day seemed a good occasion on which to share it.

*Lost Sons: God's long search for humanity, SPCK 2012.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 14: National Pride and Ambiguous Memory

Friday 7 June
I’m glad of the late flight that gives us this additional day in Budapest. Well, Pest actually. We begin by walking upstream along the promenade. We come to the “shoes” in memory of the Jews who were hurled into the icy Danube in 1944. It hardly needs saying how moving this sight is: boots, shoes, slippers, what looks like a little girl’s dancing shoes. Votive lights with Hebrew texts have been placed among, and even inside, these infinitely forlorn objects, so full of pathos, that speak more eloquently than words ever could about “the heartbreak at the heart of things”. And when I remember that the South Koreans drowned in a Danube within sight of this shrine, it simply adds to the painfulness of this part of the river bank.

As we walk on, the immense Parliament building looms up above us. We go inside the visitor centre and find that there is a place available on an English language tour of the building this afternoon. So I’ll come back to that later. The sun has come out and it’s warming up rapidly. We walk out of the shadow side of the Parliament (nice turn of phrase?) and into the sunshine. The glare from this extraordinary building is almost painful. Soldiers are on guard. The anti-terror barricades are not the crude lumpish blocks you see in London but integrated into the architecture of the square, which is surrounded by fine buildings. Indeed, everywhere in central Budapest the buildings are on a monumental scale. The green spaces are a relief from this surfeit of grandeur whether its imperial, neo-classical, art nouveau or modern. It’s tempting to compare it with Paris (again) but the difference is that Pest has no Notre Dame and no Left Bank to set off the monumental with something more intimate in scale. Buda has those things of course, but once these were separate cities and their respective urban styles architecture seem to tell different stories. Like Newcastle and Gateshead, maybe?

We go inside the Basilica of St Stephen’s. Aggressively neo-classical, vast and imposing, a noble Greek cross that on the outside fully rises to the challenge of the imperial architecture that surrounds it. But the interior feels gloomy and lifeless. Like St Sava in Belgrade, far from bringing me to my knees it leaves me cold. But it’s humanised by a group of young schoolchildren at the front of the nave who are singing their hearts out under the tutelage of their teacher.

But the gloom of the Basilica is more than made up for by our discovering the Church of the Assumption by the river. It’s Pest’s parish church and its oldest. The site is ancient: under glass in the floor we can see extensive remains of the Roman camp that once stood here on the bank of the Danube. There are remains of Romanesque and this provides the highlight of this rebuilt gothic church. Behind the high altar is all that’s left of some wall paintings. The crowning glory is a most beautiful depiction of the Assumption. It’s graceful and delicate, art that is full of love and devotion. But I’m even more moved by a painting to one side. It once showed Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane. Almost all of him is lost, except his hands held together in prayer, just like the famous Dürer drawing. And what’s best of all in this Romanesque Wall painting, surviving intact, is the image of God the Father, listening intently to his Son’s prayer as he hides behind a tree. The association must be to the Garden of Eden - how winsomely it’s done, and how rich theologically!

And so back to the Parliament Building for the guided tour. I won’t describe the architecture: the travel writers can indulge their superlatives and rhapsodise about this amazing edifice. Suffice to say that it’s a cross between the fairy-tale Chateau of Pierrefonds in northern France, and St Pancras Station with, of course, the obvious homage to the British Houses of Parliament (but this is in much better condition). National rhetoric and a (very very) proudly imagined past come into things at every turn - in the symbolism of the architecture, the sculptures of national heroes and the ordinary Volk - artists, craftspeople, scientists, philosophers, engineers. Gold leaf is on display in abundance.

But the clue to this place lies at its geometric centre. Here, underneath the dome (more Florence than Rome or St Paul’s), the crown regalia are kept in a sealed case of toughened glass. Round it is an innocent looking rope - but alarmed. That in turn is guarded by two military officers with guns. Touch the ropes, alarms will sound and the soldiers will as likely as not fire - that’s the message we are given. Oh, and photography, allowed everywhere else on the tour, is not permitted here, again on pain of - well, who knows? The regalia which go back to the eleventh century and Hungary’s king-Saint Stephen I are clearly treated as holy objects, the embodiment of the nation. Is this the real reason photography is forbidden, not any security risk so much as the violation of a sacred space that bears mystical significance?

I walk back via Freedom Square. On the far side is a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who perished in the Holocaust. Most were Jews, but we must never forget the Roma, the political dissidents and the gays who also ended their days in the extermination camps. This memorial shows the eagle of the Third Reich descending on Hungary brandishing a huge and evil claw bearing the year 1944 that’s about to lay hold on and devour the woman below, the personification of Hungary. On the ground is a classical pillar twisted out of shape. It’s powerful but it’s hard not to read this grotesque image as kitsch. There is an inscription in Hebrew and Hungarian, and a date - 19 March 1944. This was the day the German eagle landed on its former ally, its hanging black claw dragging Hungary viciously into the Reich that would last a thousand years. “That’s what the Nazis did to us.”

But that way of telling the story by blaming the Nazis has become extremely politicised. It seems that Viktor Orban had the memorial erected under cover of darkness and without consultation in order to establish once and for all where blame for the Hungarian holocaust belonged. But history does not bear this out. Hungary appeared to welcome the Nazi occupation with the same enthusiasm as Austria did. What’s more, Hungarians were not only complicit with their occupiers but initiated their own outrages against their fellow citizens including the Jews murdered in the river. (There was also a terrible massacre at Novi Sad, then under Hungarian rule. I don’t recall hearing anything about it when we were there.) So those protesting against this memorial, who include liberal politicians, civic leaders, academics and relatives of the victims, have brought memorabilia from 1944 and laid them out at the foot of the monument. They have also displayed images, photographs explanatory texts in all the world’s principal languages. They are challenging the Orban government to take responsibility for what happened in that terrible year and tell the truth about Hungarian involvement in it. This protest memorial has not been swept away - yet. If it were to be, there would be an outcry.

Of all that I’ve seen on this cruise, this memorial will, I think, stay with me longest. The image is meant to be unforgettable and it is - for all the wrong reasons. It encapsulates so many of the dilemmas of Central and Eastern Europe that we’ve been faced with on this journey: how nations tell their stories, how they face up to their past, how they define their identities in the present, what kind of futures they aspire to. To that extent, the rhetoric of the Parliament Building and of this memorial is the same. Am I right to be worried about the nationalism they both represent in this beautiful but paradoxical country? And can its Europeanism save it from all that’s corrupting in the emergence of the politics of the far right?

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And if this is a question for Hungary, what about the other Danube lands from Germany and Austria in the west to Serbia and Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria in the east? And what about the UK? While we’ve been away the results of the European Parliament elections have shown how the postwar politics of our continent are being reframed in ways that couldn’t have been predicted when we were growing up and when the postwar political consensus seemed settled not only for our own lifetimes but those of our children too. Britain is as exposed to these changes as anywhere else in Europe. 

It’s tempting to see history as offering precedents. The rise of right wing populism across the world suggests parallels with the 1930s. I’ve wondered whether visiting Orban’s Budapest in the 2010s is like visiting Berlin in the 1930s - beautiful, seductive but full of portents. I’m sure this is far too facile. “The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies” said the Liberal politician James Bryce quoted in a recent article in the London Review of Books, “Populism and the People” by Jan-Werner Müller. Travelling around central and eastern Europe opens your eyes to the history of our continent but we should be wary of drawing parallels. That may be one of the most important things I’ve learned here. Good Europeanism must be earthed in a proper use of history, not an imagined past.

So if this voyage has taught me anything, it’s made me a better European, to quote the fellow-traveller who shared her thoughts with me as we were drawing into Novi Sad. What does “better” mean? Not so much that I’m more convinced than ever of the importance of the European Project, though I think that’s true. No, I mean that it’s revealed how little I knew my continent, how western my assumptions about had been, how much I need to learn about all those who share our common European home, whether the people next door or those who are further down the street.

And what’s true of the continent I call home is also true of the planet I call home. If travel doesn’t make us citizens of the world, why take ourselves off at some cost to cruise down a far-off river not our own? But it is our own. That’s the point. We are privileged to see what we have seen. It’s been hugely stimulating and enjoyable. But beyond the pleasures of a holiday, the companionship and conversation, stories to tell and memories to share, sightseeing, fresh air, relaxation and rest, what matters for travel, what is ultimately important, is how it changes us, and therefore what we do next. I suppose that's why I've been writing this blog of our voyage - not as a record of things seen and done, but as a way of woolgathering, thinking on the page about how and why it should make a difference.  

But for now it is time to get on the coach that will take us to the airport.

Blue Danube to Black Sea Day 13: Back in Hungary

Thursday 6 June
Our last full day on the ship. We have a leisurely breakfast. I go up on deck to write up this blog. It is overcast but warm. We have been extremely fortunate with the weather on this cruise. Rain and thunderstorms have been forecast, but the rain has fallen when we’ve been tucked up in our cells (sorry, cabins) and apart from the spectacular storm at Belogradchik, which was such a gift photographically, we have dodged them on our walks and visits.

After two weeks, voyagers are talking to one another more readily now, sharing stories and experiences, reminiscing about the sights we have seen, contemplating going home. I find myself conversing with a number of people I haven’t spoken to before about everything from Bird Watching to Bach to Brexit - nothing  especially deep, nothing especially lengthy, but the kind of talk that happens when people feel relaxed with one another. Maybe it’s the knowledge that our life together on this ship is coming to an end in the next few hours, but this has been a pretty comfortable kind of “total community” (to go back to my musings on Day One).

By midday we are back at Budapest where our voyage began. We dock by the Chain Bridge, further upstream than when we were here before. From our cabin we have a marvellous view across the river to Buda with its citadel crowning the Acropolis on the other side of the bridge. Is there a city in the world that has exploited its river so effectively as Budapest has the Danube? It’s a silly question really when you think of Paris or London or New York or Lyon or Newcastle. But here it’s the strongly individual character of the river itself that adds texture to the city. Even when the Danube is not in flood, its surface is never placid here, never truly calm, always turbulent with currents and eddies unlike most other great rivers in the world, at least not by the time they flow through their great cities. And we are all conscious of the tragedy that has happened in the Danube since we were last here, the sudden catastrophic sinking of that pleasure boat only a few hundred metres upstream from where we are moored at this moment. The circumstances are still not entirely clear, but you have to wonder how much the rapidity and capriciousness of the Danube were factors in the deaths of so many people last week.

We board the coach for our last excursion, a panoramic drive around the city. We start with the left bank, Pest. Our guide is fluent and informative, telling us about the succession of great buildings we pass, pointing out their architectural styles and highlighting sites of particular significance in the city’s history. The profusion of Art Nouveau is striking, especially the famous entrance to the Zoo. We drive round the Place of Heroes, and pass the South Korean Embassy where it’s moving to see flowers laid in memory of the Danube’s victims last week.

At the Holocaust Memorial alongside one of Budapest’s central synagogues, we learn about the Jewish community in the city. By no means all its members perished in the Nazi era because unlike in more isolated communities in the countryside where whole communities were sent to the extermination camps, there were simply too many Jews in Budapest for their persecutors to achieve the Final Solution they had set themselves. Nevertheless there horrific stories told about Budapest’s Jews, but the Nazis were not the only perpetrators of terrible cruelty. Once, hundreds of Budapest’s Jews were rounded up on the banks of the Danube, told to take off their shoes, then tipped into the icy river to perish. The Hungarians who committed this outrage were themselves summarily shot minutes later. Budapest still has a significant Jewish presence with a dozen or so synagogues, far fewer than before the war, but these are still a vital part of the city’s religious diversity. Most of them are liberal or reform Jews, rather than orthodox.

Not far away we drive down a street where buildings opposite each other are pockmarked with bullet holes. They preserve a memory of events only eleven years after the end of the Second World War when the abortive Hungarian Uprising was brutally suppressed by Soviet forces. I can just about remember talk of events in Hungary in 1956 when I was a six year old. Looking at Budapest today, with all its vitality, confidence and cosmopolitanism, by all accounts a successful and certainly a truly European city, you would not guess that so much has had to be reconstructed following the events of the 1940s and 1950s.

After Bucharest, I’m wary of making judgments based on very little knowledge. Appearances can be deceptive. I’m aware that the policies of Viktor Orban’s regime, while not questioning Hungary’s commitment to the European Union, are infusing it with right wing, nationalistic ideology that is in real tension with the European ideal. And although this has nothing to do with religion, it’s troubling that Hungary’s Catholic history and identity is being invoked to justify it. The bitter memories of the socialist era doesn’t altogether explain this phenomenon, though similar tendencies are observable in other former Eastern bloc countries as we’ve seen on this journey. Maybe Hungary’s historic identity, rooted in the Magyar migrations from central Asia and the distinctive language they brought to Europe have contributed to a Hungarian exceptionalism that sets it apart from its neighbours whether Germanic and Slav. These are among the seeds sown by what our guide has to say to us today. Plenty of food for thought to take back to Brexit Britain tomorrow.

We cross the Danube by the Chain Bridge, the oldest extant and most venerable of Budapest’s bridges. The magnificent view over the river opens up, including the Parliament Building upstream. There, just below, is our ship. I look down at it fondly. However enjoyable they are to sail in, I don’t find these cruise ships beautiful to look at. They are supposed to look shiny and sleek, but unlike seagoing vessels, their sheer length and lack of draught suggests an oversized floating railway carriage. But it has been our home for two weeks and we have been looked after well by people who care about what they do and do it well.

Over in Buda, we are embroiled in heavy traffic so our guide chats amiably with us about our cruise. How many countries have we visited? Which did we like best? Hungary of course! comes the reply, for people on holiday are always eager to please. No seriously, he insists. There’s no clear answer to this unanswerable question. He goes through them by turn. When we get to Serbia he says, “People often find Serbia difficult. Maybe that’s because of the history and how it has shaped people there. But I think it’s a wonderful country.” This is intriguing. So is this. “Now that you’ve spent time in Serbia and Croatia, you may think you now understand the Balkan wars. If that’s the case, then you need to go to Bosnia-Herzegovina. You’ll realise that you haven’t begun to understand it at all.” Like Brexit, as he quips later on, which is another of those Schleswig-Holstein questions (only ever understood by three people, the first of whom had forgotten, the second had died and the third gone mad).

We get out at the citadel. It was inevitable that the tour would end here at the Fishermen’s Bastion. It is thronged with people. The view is undeniably very fine but I can’t get any decent images for hoards of youngsters taking selfies on the parapets. And the concept of this self-conscious over-visited site feels like a tourist concoction, Budapest-as-cliché, not the authentic Hungarian city we have come to see. The river on the other hand, the city’s star attraction, never falls into trope. Is that because it’s a working river? Discuss.

But what I shall remember from this walk is our guide's parting shot to us. “Remember the Slovenian national anthem” he says. It’s the only one in the world that’s about world peace rather than one nation’s flourishing. Of course I have to look it up on the web. It goes like this:

God's blessing on all nations, Who long for that day When across the whole world No war, no strife holds sway; Who long to see that all are free;
No more shall foes, but neighbours be.

As for the Bastion, there is nothing to detain us here. We walk away from the bustle down steep steps. Suddenly it is quiet again. We come across an intimate pedestrian square created on a terrace surrounded by elegant modern buildings. I notice one of them is an architect’s practice, maybe the one that designed this project. There’s a small cafe there. We sit down and enjoy cool drinks while a little girl no more than two or three years old dances in front of  us. She is oblivious to her audience. She is filled with the unselfconscious joy of being alive. It’s beautiful and touching to watch.

We walk the promenade back towards the Chain Bridge. We are overtaken by cyclists in a hurry, and by trams ancient and modern. Lovers linger by the riverside parapet with eyes only for each other. On board ship, there are rites of passage to mark the end of our voyage. We reminisce with fellow guests over an amiable dinner, then go back to our cabin. Budapest is beautiful by night, and we have a spectacular view of it from our window.  

But for us, the journey is not quite over. We have a late flight tomorrow, so we shall have time to discover more of the city in the morning.