Wildlife documentaries infringe animals' privacy

I'm sorry but this really did make me inwardly say, 'he just cannot be serious': Wildlife documentaries infringe animals' privacy, says report | Environment | The Guardian: "'We can never really know if animals are giving consent, but they do often engage in forms of behaviour which suggest they'd rather not encounter humans,'"
I think that he should look up the word 'privacy' in a dictionary. I'm pretty certain it can't, by definition apply to natterjack toads, for example. There is a difference between 'privacy' and 'vulnerability'. Why would humans want privacy? Are those concerns that a squirrel could have?

Working class under attack from health paternalism?

Well, it's an intriguing take on the matter: Working class are under attack from health paternalism | Patrick Basham and John Luik | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Working-class culture is under assault by political elites seeking to denormalise a way of life."
I'm very sympathetic to the notion that the nation/state might be stigmatising a set of pleasurable behaviours on the basis that they are associated with a certain class. But I'm not entirely convinced that this particular kite will fly. The main 'evidence based' aspect of it, which should be the clincher is the unjustified and unsupported assertion that (unspecified) assaults on (unspecified) WC pleasures are often based on (unspecified) junk science. I'm left wondering what is being referred to; the only things I can think of that might constitute this "war" on WC pleasures are smoking and cardiovascular health matters (involving promoting exercise, less fat and salt consumption etc). These are not based on junk science.

So, it doesn't stack up. And there are other problems too.
First off: which working class are we being invited to consider here? I know working class households who would not really identify or be happy with the version which I think may be being defended in this article. I'm suspicious of the hegemonic normalising of a particular version of working class and I'm suspicious of the ideology at work in using class warfare motifs in defence of 'lifestyle choices' which are not, arguably, in the best interests of those taking them. In fact, follow the money: who will benefit from people continuing to smoke and eat badly ...

Secondly, doesn't the author recall that culture is a dynamic and evolving thing? The working classes' cultures now are different in various ways to those of, say, 30 years ago. Some of those differences are 'natural' responses to changes in material culture, some of it has been engineered or at least encouraged by advertising. We should remember too the insights of research and study that the 'dis-empowered' are still able to make their pleasures in resistance to and playing off dominant and hegemonic forces. They can and do make up their own minds; they can and do respond to what they perceive as being in their interests or otherwise. 'Denormalise a way of life'? Ways of life are constantly denormalising and renormalising. Why shouldn't the common good, the health of individuals and the insights of research and evidence be fed into the complex dynamical system which is a live (sub)culture?

Thirdly, do we not have a duty-of-care to encourage people to look after their own health? We, as a nation, already do this in terms of various citizenship initiatives at schools (and have done since I were a lad) not to mention all sorts of education campaigns such as (to choose ones that are now relatively well accepted) wearing seat belts in cars and helmets on motor cycles. Not to mention that if certain sections of a community routinely take risks with their health and then the consequences are treated and cost the rest of us money, then do 'we' not have a right and a duty to point out that this is the case and is not fair? Is it not a fair idea to try to save money, time and effort for the benefit of the common good?

Labservative defence of minority government

David Cameron exhibiting a lack of understanding of the issue. Nick Clegg: I could work with Labour, just not Gordon Brown | Politics | The Guardian: "Cameron accused Clegg of wanting PR 'so we have a permanent hung parliament, a permanent coalition, so we never have strong and authoritative and decisive government'"
So, what he's suggesting, by implication; is that we should continue to be governed by a bunch of people who have only gained the confidence of 30-40% of the voters. That it's okay for a government to by absolutely in charge when their share of the vote is potentially around 30% (in theory fptp could give a 'strong government' on, say, 20% of the vote). I call that dictatorship not democracy. A system which often requires parties to work colloboratively works very well in many countries. 'Strong government' is a cipher for letting non-electorally-majority governemnts ride roughshod over the majority of voters. Strong government is usually what is offered by dictatorships ...

I would be happy to see a system that would encourage collaborative government. Not a 'hung parliament', not even a 'balanced parliament' but a collaborative one. I think that's what people want: it's why we are turned off by the mud-slinging and negative campaigning. We want politicians to spend less time picking holes in each other and posturing and more time working for the good, listening and finding common ground. More truly proportional voting is more likely to deliver that as experience in, for example, New Zealand (who in the 90's went over to PR from a fptp system) would seem to indicate. Why the positive experiences of other countries are totally ignored; does Germany have an indecisive government? Not noticibly so yet it is a coalition government and has been since WW2.So let's have less of this apparently ill-informed scaremongering, or worse this well-informed but playing-on-general-ignorance scaremongering.

Facebook 'lets you see where strangers plan to go' | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Looks like you might want NOT to sign up to attending events via Facebook for a while:
Facebook privacy hole 'lets you see where strangers plan to go' | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "Some people report that they are able to see the public 'events' that Facebook users have said they will attend – even if they person is not a 'friend' on the social network."

My MP has definitely lost my vote

I wrote recently to all the candidates in my constituency. As regular readers will know, I think that reform of our voting system is a key component of a raft of needed reforms to make politics more accountable to the people.
Anyway, I wrote thusly:

Dear PPC's,

I live in the Blaydon constituency. I would like to know if you understand the need for real change in this election.

I think that among the most strategic issues in this election, because it affects so many other areas of urgent concern is the following.

According to recent polling, there's a possibility that a party that comes third in terms of share of the vote will actually have the largest number of seats in Parliament.

Whatever your party, I hope you agree that this is grossly unfair to voters and a perversion of democracy. First-past-the-post is increasingly unfair and limits electoral choice. We need and demand change.

As a voter in your constituency, I want you to know that I will only support a candidate who will commit to a referendum on the introduction of a proportional voting system during the next Parliament.

Will you make that commitment? (I should also point you to the research of the electoral reform society that the AV system would be even less proportional).

I got a good reply from the Lib Dem candidate (no surprise there, given their manifesto). I was a more than a little disappointed in the response of the incumbent Labour candidate:

will commit to the issues that are in my Parties manifesto and that means arguing fior a referendum on an AV system.

I understand the demand for change and I feel we in Labour are responding to that demand. But changing to a system that produces leaders like Silvio Berlusconi would not be progressive change.

If he'd just stopped with the party policy ... anyway my reply probably tells you how cross the tone and content of that made me:

Thank you, Dave, for your response.
I understand your reluctance to go beyond your party's manifesto.

However, you should have stopped there; if your argument against considering a more equitable system for voting is Silvio Berlusconi, then I will have to conclude that you do not really understand the issue or are being dismissive. As someone with involvement in teaching, I'd have to say such an answer, especially in its implications, would not pass muster in GCSE citizenship. As Marge Simpson said: "There are so many things wrong with that, I don't know where to begin." I would hope that a professional politician would be able to engage in such a fundamental area of debate in a more knowledgeable way.

If you do decide to go beyond party policy and debate the merits of electoral systems, then please don't make dismissive and cavalier remarks. Ironically, it seems to illustrate the problem of an candidate in a safe seat not having to engage with other perspectives and finding convenient arguments to keep the system pretty much as it is.

I hope I'm wrong on that last point.

As things stand, I am disturbed to find that the 'value' of my vote in this constituency is far less than one and I would hope that my elected representatives would want to do something substantial to restore our democratic rights. (See http://www.voterpower.org.uk/).

In case you're wondering what is wrong with it...
first off, the implication is that a PR system produces corrupt politicians. Well, the facts don't support that -neither in terms of looking at countries with PR systems or in terms of making a direct link between PR and the way that corruption originates and is sustained in that case -reading the news etc it doesn't seem to be down to PR but to more ordinary abuses which could be shared in a fptp system. In fact, it's arguable that Berlusconi is able to act corruptly (assuming the allegation may be correct) because of the kinds of forces in society, media and process that can be paralleled in our own country (and indeed could be magnified by the fptp system).

Then there those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Surely a party system that can impose unpopular decisions having gained a parliamentary majority for 40% of the vote -or less! When we have a system that allows votes to count roughly equally, then we can criticise another country's democratic decisions. Remember which party and which system took this country into Iraq.

And then, it ignores the fact that there does seem, both factually and in terms of logic, to be a link between MPs in safe seats and dodgy practice in terms of expenses. Not universally, but enough to suggest that a system that creates safe seats is a 'rotten borough' system and should be reformed.

Furthermore, I am not advocating we adopt the Italian system, necessarily. But New Zealand and Germany don't seem to do too badly with it, or Japan. If PR is so bad why have we allowed it for EU, London, Scotland, Wales and N.Ireland? Why did the Labour government's own commission recommend a version of it? (Not the one being proposed for plebiscite by Labour now, btw, but rather one rather like Holyrood). Indeed, 'we' with the USA imposed it on Germany as part of the post-war settlement because it's a good democratic system and likely to work against elective dictatorship. Sauce for the goose ... ?

Winston Churchill is meant to have said once that 'democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. Well, that kind of goes for the electoral systems: PR is not perfect, but the alternatives really are worse and of those fptp and AV are the worst of the worst.

Dave Anderson - Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Blaydon, UK, official website

$99 DNA test

Admittedly, it was only a time-limited offer, but the fact that it could be offered seems to indicate that the costs are likely to continue to fall. Today only: $99 DNA test: "oday only, the usually $499 DNA test from 23andMe is only $99."
Of course, it's not yet Gattaca -the Gattaca scenario clearly required a very cheap DNA testing system. However, we should consider the social and ethical ramifications of ever cheaper DNA testing: for example, paternity testing becomes routine and even could be done covertly, without permission (and once that genie was out of the bottle ...), or insurance companies routinely require them, surveillance becomes easier in some respects ....

Voter Power Index results for Blaydon

This is a bit depressing.
Voter Power Index results for Blaydon: "The average UK voter has 1.1x more voting power than voters in Blaydon."
It does show the need for a reform of the electoral reform: my vote should have roughly equal weight to anyone else's, but it doesn't ... And folks, the only way to deal with this issue is to vote in such a way that a balanced parliament is more likely and/or the moral case for reform is more poignant; that's our best chance for proper reform.

Labour's offer of a referendum on AV is actually not going to help; in fact AV would be worse, potentially. What we need, at the very least, is AV+, better still STV in multimember constituencies. Accept no substitute!

Coalition government? Everyone has one.

We have always had them: the major parties have always been coalitions. The Conservatives have most recently been a coalition between one-nation Tories and NeoCons. The Labour governments have been split between various kinds of democratic socialists, co-operativists and social democrats. These pre-electoral coalitions are put together because the first-past-the-post system encourages it. We need a system that allows more nuance to be more accurately voted for, but we haven't got it and that will give very unfair results in a fptp system. We need a proportional system.

What that will do will probably make the coalitions more transparent. The coalitions won't be pre-electoral but post-electoral. People can vote for the things they most value and their elected representatives will then do their best to get those concerns into law or to modify law and policy by arguing and debating and discussing with others.

However, some worry that this may give 'weak' government and the worst case scenarios of coalition-building figure large in some imaginations. So let's recall that many countries do fine with 4 or more main parties. For example:

"a country that operates a Westminster-style parliamentary democracy very much like our own. New Zealand consistently rates at or near the top in international assessments of the effectiveness of its democracy, yet no New Zealand government has enjoyed an overall parliamentary majority since 1996."

Hung parliaments can be effective, too | Bryan Gould | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The article goes on to point out some further advantages of explicitly coalition government:

The real significance of non-majority government is the change that it brings to the process of government. The New Zealand experience has been that government ministers are constantly engaged in a process of negotiation; each piece of legislation, each major policy decision, has to be preceded by discussions to ensure that a parliamentary majority exists to support that particular measure. Curiously, this does not seem to have meant that the government's programme is hopelessly delayed or frustrated. It has meant, at times of course, that legislation cannot be introduced until the necessary deals have been done, but the corollary is that the passage of more thoroughly prepared and carefully drafted legislation – once introduced – is smoother and takes less time. An even bigger plus is that the legislation – appealing as it must to a wider constituency than that represented by just one party – is often more soundly based and widely supported, with more of its contentious rough edges rounded off,

You see the difference and the similarity to Westminster at the moment? At the moment whips do all that work of trading off concerns and strongarming support. And we don't necessarily know or like what we get as a result (remember Iraq? ID cards? ...). In an explicitly coalition situation, that happens more often ahead of time and consensus building is more important than bullying and wheeler-dealing by whips.

If you keep on being disappointed that you vote for, let's say, socialism and only get insipid reform, its because the electoral labelling is shoe-horned into a leftish coalition party: you've been kidded about the brand you're voting for. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that with parties now noting that only 200,000 voters actually 'matter', they're encouraged to seek 'power' rather than a programme and so head more and more towards a middle-England mish mash of policy. The rest of us can go hang. Well, I reckon it'd be better if they went 'hang' -a hung parliament looks like our best bet for important matters of reform to be on the agenda for the next five years: be sure that neither of the normal majority parties is offering anything more than cosmetic and faint response. If you want change, use your vote to get a hung parliament if at all possible; it's our only chance.

Perhaps I've not been as clear about that as I'd like, so how about reading a professional writer saying what I pretty much think.

electoral reform is British politics' most fundamental issue. The politics to which millions of Britons take exception is directly traceable to FPTP, a system that inflates the importance of mere thousands of voters who happen to be resident in a relative handful of (mostly) English constituencies, and tend to hold contradictory opinions that the main parties contortedly try to accommodate. Better public services and less tax? They'll try. All the benefits of mass immigration with none of the pain? Why, of course. Meanwhile, the huge share of Britons whose opinions sit somewhere else are given a few crumbs, but essentially ignored.

Why we should care about social inequality: it's bad for all of us

I've been aware over the last few years of research emerging to indicated this piecemeal. Now it looks like a whole load is all in one place: The Evidence | The Equality Trust: "Great inequality is the scourge of modern societies. We provide the evidence on each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage births, and child well-being. For all eleven of these health and social problems, outcomes are very substantially worse in more unequal societies."

The sexualisation of ... well, everything ...

It is too much not to comment further, after what happened on the train on Thursday ...Too much, too young? Retailers still selling over-sexualised clothing to kids | Society | The Guardian: "Retailers came under increased pressure today to take sexualised clothing for young girls off their shelves,"
I'd have written it off as a grumpy old man moment on my part were it not for my son agreeing with me. Scenario: train carriage with assorted people including a family with kids of around 8. Also present is a hen party. Nothing wrong with that necessarily except this lot are drinking cocktails (also not necessarily a problem) with straws in the shape of erect male members. And my issue with that is that in a public place where children might be, that is not really acceptable. I wouldn't want to be answering the question from an 8 year old, "What's that?".

The pressure towards early sexualisation isn't only the 'nasty promotional' companies. It's adults who think that sexual references in ordinary public places is not a problem. It's a lack of modesty about such things. Modesty is in part about protecting the vulnerable.

Kindle e-reader motivates reading

I wonder whether this could offer a glimpse of the future of literacy? Kindle e-reader motivates less-enthusiastic readers: "The e-reader has features that make the text audible, increase or decrease font size and let readers make notes about the book. 'It's interesting to see the kinds of things these kids have been able to do,' Larson said. She said sometimes they make comments summarizing the plot, therefore reinforcing their understanding of the book. Other times they ponder character development, jotting down things like 'If I were him, I'd say no way!'"
In one sense some of this is what some of us have learned to do with paper books in order to study them. The thing being that we were mostly brought up to 'respect' books and not to deface them. E books invite such 'disrespect' and the interactivity encourages a more constructivist approach to the texts. Worth pondering.

Worth pondering especially when that kind of attitude is brought to the biblical texts. I would argue that in Islam's attitude to the Qur'an we see writ large or intensified the then-cultural reverence for books. An attitude with is more tenuously held in the Christian tradition: the gospels being written down were not the first reflex of the Christian communities; the stories were told first. (To be fair, the Qur'an is supposed to be recital first but was much sooner 'reduced' to writing). I envisage the gospel stories being told against a background of interrogation and rumination and then, when the form that 'tells well' and 'remembers' well is honed, fining that they get written down.

Still pondering ...

A real debate -your part in it?

Check it out:
A real debate: "The party leader TV debates between the leaders of the three main parties appear to be just another exercise in spin. Politicians don't want to risk being made to look stupid so close to the election, so they'll be carefully stage-managing every detail of the events. So we're breaking through the spin, and have teamed up with the Guardian to hold a proper debate between the manifesto writers from the three main parties."

Those nice people at 38 degrees have an online poll to vote for the questions that get put to them. You can vote...

Total depravity, broken Britain and optimism

Many years ago, a Calvinist friend pointed out that the Calvinist, foundational doctrine of total depravity is usually and popularly misunderstood. Now whether or not his apologia and portrayal of the doctrine is fair and right-enough I'm not going to comment on here. What I would like to do is make an observation based on said friend's characterisation of the doctrine: that it isn't saying that absolutely everything is depraved, rather it is saying that there is nothing about being human that is not touched by fallenness (an important corrective to the optimism of Enlightenment rationality which seemed to assume that Reason was unfallen -interestingly, post modern chritiques seem to agree).

What this means for the kind of political posture mentioned in this article: Why Cameron ditched 'broken Britain' | Madeleine Bunting | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk is that we need to recognise the obverse: everything that is fallen ('broken') is grounded on a basic goodness. So, "on balance people are wealthier, have more choice and are better educated than 15 years ago. Along with this progress have come some drawbacks – increased access to cheap alchohol – but you can't tease them apart from the benefits. Britain may have a louder, more excessive night-time economy than some European countries, but that is part and parcel of a vibrant, irreverent culture which is innovative and widely admired in many parts of the world where a higher premium is put on a narrower social conformity."
'Broken Britain' is also Britain where some things work well-enough, where there are som good things which break or can be exploited for ill. There is no getting away from this double-sided nature of human reality: what is good is capable of carrying bad stuff, what is bad is rooted in the good and is often redeemable or capable of being called back to its good purposes. Our struggle will ever be to discern what needs to be addressed when and how. It can never simply be a 'war on ...' because that makes the mistake of assuming that something is totally bad, irredeemable. Only by engaging with the goods in a situation can we hope to work for the common good.

We Christians have to make the discovery, now that we have thoroughly taken on board the doctrines of Fall and Depravity, of how to hold that in tension with the original goodness which yet peaks out and underlies all human endeavour, however distorted.

And so, the old justification for Christian Conservatism needs questioning, that it is a philosophy that takes seriously the fall and seeks to use it. We need also to take seriously the human capacity for good, however limited or imperfect.... So it is interesting to see that Cameroonians have sidelined the Broken Britain slogan.

Join Cameron's government of Toy Town? Perhaps not

I read this and found it articulating many of the worries about and responses I have to the Conservative rhetoric. I have to say the slogans are very appealing but then I start to think the same sort of things that Hilary Wainwright clearly does (and if you were bored enough to search through this blog on 'economics' or 'justice' you'd probably find I've often said similar things in general (that is not specifically addressing the Tory manifesto but the way of thinking that lies behind it):Cameron's 'big society' is a toy town | Hilary Wainwright | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
In sum it seems to come down to this: "In other words, without economic democracy – and the constitutional reforms needed to enable the people to control executive power – Cameron's invitation to join the government conjures up a toy-town democracy, a patronising attempt to divert our anger from the real centres of power."
It all talks big but really comes down to side shows that leave the real issues untouched and the way clear for elites to continue being elites without being challenged by the people they are supposed to represent, work for and are given licence to, supposedly, create wealth and jobs for.

As scripture saith ....

'What book in the New Testament?' 'The book of Parables.'
Huh?
And so begins a riff on biblical quotations which succeeds in making one smile by the way that out-of-context phrases can end up saying something different, in effect, to what they seemed to mean in their original context. I'd come across this a number of years ago under the title 'A Southern Baptist Sermon' and I particularly remember this bunch of quotes offering a real feast of humourous intertextuality:
"and he saw Queen Jezebel sitting high up in a window. When she saw him she laughed. And he said, "Throw her down out of there," and they threw her down. And he said, "Throw her down again," and they threw her down seventy times seven times, and of the fragments they then picked up twelve baskets full."
Try to hear it, as I tend to in my mind's ear, with a southern USAmerican accent ...
Interview of Candidate for Church Membership

Of course, anything like this tends to get partially memorised and then embroidered and reconstructed and sometimes even improved. So here, we find another variant, not very different but a few refinements.

Praying The Pattern ebook hits 35000

It's encouraging to see that the book has had this many hits. I'll have to find out if someone is promoting it ...
Myebook - Praying The Pattern

Nurse loses battle to wear crucifix at work

I think that it was always going to end like this, when all was said and done -and I am wondering about the advice she may have been receiving. I have a great respect for Shirley Chaplin, but I suspect that she may have been misadvised and drawn into a battle that while helpful for deciding how the rules do or don't apply, probably doesn't advance the Christian cause very greatly. The final judgement was always going to contain a phrase like this: "and noted that wearing a crucifix was not a requirement of the Christian faith." and rule against her on this basis. There is no doubt that there are other issues involved in this case which need considering: the citing of health and safety to argue against her by the HA does sit ill with some of some of the allowed manifestations, for example. However, this is all trumped by the 'requirement of religion' issue. Wearing a crucifix is not a requirement of Christian faith; it's a choice, one that sometimes has very deep personal significance, but it's a choice not a requirement.

The price we Christians pay for a faith that has a great deal of cultural adaptability is that we have few equivalents to Muslim, Sikh or Hindu signs and symbols. Praying is part of our faith but it is not legislated as a sine qua non of faithfulness exactly how or when; we are left to make grown-up decisions about how to organise it. We are enjoined to share our faith but we have no particular dress codes (except whatever is appropriate and modest) or particular items of clothing to mark us out. Do we really wish to submit to commands and regulations of humans ...? (see Paul in Galatians)

The problem for Christian fans, is that they want to display their faith and not cede the public display to faiths which do require these things. Actually, I have a great sympathy, actually, for the desire to have ones faith recognised in the workplace in a way analogous to Muslims or Sikhs, say. However, we have to confront the fact that because we don't have dress or behaviour codes that impact the workplace in that kind of way, we have to recognise that we can't 'go and do likewise'. What's more, these kinds of attempts to do so run the risk of bringing Christian faith into disrepute because they do smack of 'me too'-ism. Can't we celebrate the freedom our faith has rather than seek strictures and markers to make us like other nations -sorry- religions?

What we could, perhaps, argue is that workplaces should make access to Christian chaplains or somesuch possible because the flexibility of Christian faith means that Christians need to consider more carefully the way that they integrate their faith and their work ... but I'm not sure that really works. It is probably the only kind of approach that has any chance of sitting with the 'essential to faith' clause in equality and diversity legislation. The difficulty would be that this is probably something that other faiths would also wish to argue: on tap advice on how shariah applies, or what might be kosher ... And would we really want to outsource Christian theological reflection to 'experts'? Don't we want to develop Christian reflective practice in the whole of life? Only if chaplains would encourage 'self-theologising' on the part of workplace Christians can they be justified in Christian terms.

It ought to be our concern for the welfare of our co-workers and for justice, peace and right-doing that marks us out, not the ability to make demands of our employers or be paid up members of the awkward squad. That way, when something important comes up, we aren't simply dismissed but have a reservoir of respect and good will to draw on.
Christian nurse loses battle to wear crucifix at work | UK news | guardian.co.uk:

Collecting forgiveness

I've been trying to get time to write about forgiveness. As a prelimanary, I've collected together blog post on the theme. For my own convenience, I'm posting the collection here. If you're interested do read, I'd be interested in comments. By all means do trace back to the original posts and leave comments there.

Feb 25 2004

Forgiveness is something that I constantly find eludes my grasp in understanding. I think that some of that is because people seem to mean different things by it and not all of them seem to 'fit' easily with God's forgiveness which is what I hope to appreciate better by doing this.

My own experience of forgiveness is of the utter sense of not being able to change something bad that I have done and the only hope for a restoration of relationship is the mercy of the other person. Of Forgiving I remember most prominently that in my teens, becoming a follower of Christ asn realising that I was called to forgive others and realising that I had a 'hit list' of people I would like to pay back for hurts inflicted on me [bullies mostly] and finding that mentally I was able to tear up that list -I can't now even remeber most of the people on it or what the hurts were.

I think I need to tryto process these things [and no doubt others that will be triggered by the reflections here] alongside the stories of others and then the theology.

27 February 2004

Paramilitary forgiveness

I note that his own actions were fuelled by anger -at least that is how it reads with regard to the desire to retaliate. There is something of right in this it seems to me: it is not good to simply acquiesce in wrong done as if giving it a blessing; simply forgetting it is not to care, really that a wrong has been done. Anger shows we care about the wrongs done to others, anger is the flip side of love, even.

The interesting thig is that the reaction tends to produce an equal and opposite reaction. Opposite not in the sense of non-violence being meeting violence but of violence pushed in the opposite direction -towards the original perpetrator [or representatives of them or their community]. Perhaps our sense of justice is about wrongs rebounding on the offender and that it would be fitting if *we* did that in the absence of a more automatic nemesis.

Alistair says: "My experience is that people easily turn to violence when their voices aren’t being heard, or when they feel under threat". The wrong of being ignored [accounted nothing] or being [unjustly?] threatened results in feelings that there is a balance to be reweighted or a return to be made.

He writes further; " came to realise that people who use violence – myself included – see things only from one angle only. They don’t see that if you use violence yourself, you encourage revenge and hatred in others. You end up with a never-ending circle of violence. "

The attempt to re-weight the balance or to push back to the perpetrator the wrong thay have done is itself perceived as a wrong and so the cycle kicks off. It is interesting that seeing the wider picture and acknowledging that there may be reason for the other side to have behaved as they did and do can help break the cylce by revealing the cycle to be based on a partial truth. At least that's how I think it goes.

Alistair further says: " But I don’t think I have a right to ask for forgiveness. .... asking for forgiveness is more about the needs of the perpetrator than the needs of the victim, or of the family who have lost a loved one."

Certainly when I think about my own wanting forgiveness from someone, when it has been from a position of recognising [as with Alistair] the utter wrongness of something I've done and the fact that I cannot un-do it and that there's nothing that can actually make it right again, there is a done-ness to it; an un-call-backableness of it that means that there really is no "right" to ask for forgiveness. It seems to me that the point of real forgiveness is precisely this: it gratuitous nature; it cannot be forced or bought or levered; it is a gracious reponse. If we will only ask for forgivenss if we feel we have a right to it then we won't ask: we'll never have the right; we only ever have a desire and can only ever throw ourselves on the mercy and perhaps, to some extent, the understanding and common humanity of the person we are asking forgiveness from. There is a strong thread of it being about the needs of the perpetrator rather than the victims. The victims have no 'need' to forgive, there is no claim on them save perhaps that of not storing up bitterness for themselves.

Inb fact Alistair in the midst of the piece I have just quoted says that asking forgiveness " places yet another burden upon relatives and family members." It could have the potential to do this. I'm not sure that it would fell to be that unless the family and frineds felt there was some kind of moral obligation to forgive, but if they did then it is probably the case that the asking would be no greater a burden than they already felt ... maybe .... I can see in these words -perhaps- a projection of feeling the lack of anything to 'enforce' a claim on forgiveness onto those who might do the forgiving; a senseo fo the gratuity of what is being asked. And that sense is important because it comes from a real sense that forgiveness is going to cost the forgiver something, and that I find interesting; that forgiveness costs the forgiving party or else it is not forgiveness. [discuss?].

01 March 2004

From Chechnya to UK

This story involves violations that I can only imagine and shudder at and so I am wary. To rework a stock phrase, "tread carefully for you tread on my hurt". Nevertheless I have set myself the task of learning from such experiences and as a no-longer young adult my learning is most effectively done by matching it up with my own learning so far and so my own questions, experience and observations.

Camilla writes: " I will never forgive the act, yet I can forgive the man who raped me" and I find this intriguing and suggestive. Intriguing because it raises for me the question of what we mean by forgiveness. It alerts me to the fact that we seem to operate with a number of definitions not all of which seem helpful or even truly about forgiveness when they are thought through further. What is the difference between forgiving and act and forgiving a person? Apart form grammatical considerations about verbal transitivity! I shall hazard a guess: forgiving an act is about either or both of forgetting it and/or discounting it. Forgiving a person for Camilla seems to be about excusing and understanding and so being able to [re-]create a bond of affirming relationship with the perpetrator [an echo of the idea that to understand all is to forgive all?] -to make reconciliation possible.

And/but for her, clearly forgiveness has a dimension which is about the forgiver finding a sense of inner peace: "I believe forgiveness begins with understanding, but you have to work through layers to obtain it. First you have to deal with anger, then with tears, and only once you reach the tears are you on the road to finding peace of mind.".
I value this because it chimes with my own experience that forgiving is a journey/process of understanding the hurt, the magnitude of the hurt the injustice, the anger ... I wonder whether this needs to be the case because only if we understand what needs to be 'let go' can we actually let go and forgive.

Jon writes: "Like Camilla I’ve come to an understanding of where our captors, and where her violator, were coming from. Not many people in this world do stuff out of pure maliciousness." This 'understanding' is important; I'm still wondering whether it is forgiveness or excusing -in the case of forgivness there is arecognition that a wrong has been committed whereas in excusing we recognise that while something nasty has happened, there is no blame. At a simple level excusing would be letting someone off a blow to the head because you recognised that they did it because they had tripped up and put out their hand to steady themself and it had connected with your head quite simply by accident not design. Forgiving would be letting them off because they did it by design perhaps out of anger or even because they wanted to hurt you.

But this latter scenario maybe helps to connect with Jon's thought for deeply: it is easier, in my experience to forgive when we can understand why something was done and when we understand that it wasn't done with malice than when we understand [rightly or wrongly] that it was done with malice. The malice or lack of care is the hardest to forgive; it is personal. The former is somewhat akin to excusing in that we gain an understanding and we don't take it personally. Perhaps there is a continuum: excusing-understanding-forgiving.

01 March 2004

From Chechnya to UK

This story involves violations that I can only imagine and shudder at and so I am wary. To rework a stock phrase, "tread carefully for you tread on my hurt". Nevertheless I have set myself the task of learning from such experiences and as a no-longer young adult my learning is most effectively done by matching it up with my own learning so far and so my own questions, experience and observations.

Camilla writes: " I will never forgive the act, yet I can forgive the man who raped me" and I find this intriguing and suggestive. Intriguing because it raises for me the question of what we mean by forgiveness. It alerts me to the fact that we seem to operate with a number of definitions not all of which seem helpful or even truly about forgiveness when they are thought through further. What is the difference between forgiving and act and forgiving a person? Apart form grammatical considerations about verbal transitivity! I shall hazard a guess: forgiving an act is about either or both of forgetting it and/or discounting it. Forgiving a person for Camilla seems to be about excusing and understanding and so being able to [re-]create a bond of affirming relationship with the perpetrator [an echo of the idea that to understand all is to forgive all?] -to make reconciliation possible.

And/but for her, clearly forgiveness has a dimension which is about the forgiver finding a sense of inner peace: "I believe forgiveness begins with understanding, but you have to work through layers to obtain it. First you have to deal with anger, then with tears, and only once you reach the tears are you on the road to finding peace of mind.".
I value this because it chimes with my own experience that forgiving is a journey/process of understanding the hurt, the magnitude of the hurt the injustice, the anger ... I wonder whether this needs to be the case because only if we understand what needs to be 'let go' can we actually let go and forgive.

Jon writes: "Like Camilla I’ve come to an understanding of where our captors, and where her violator, were coming from. Not many people in this world do stuff out of pure maliciousness." This 'understanding' is important; I'm still wondering whether it is forgiveness or excusing -in the case of forgivness there is arecognition that a wrong has been committed whereas in excusing we recognise that while something nasty has happened, there is no blame. At a simple level excusing would be letting someone off a blow to the head because you recognised that they did it because they had tripped up and put out their hand to steady themself and it had connected with your head quite simply by accident not design. Forgiving would be letting them off because they did it by design perhaps out of anger or even because they wanted to hurt you.

But this latter scenario maybe helps to connect with Jon's thought for deeply: it is easier, in my experience to forgive when we can understand why something was done and when we understand that it wasn't done with malice than when we understand [rightly or wrongly] that it was done with malice. The malice or lack of care is the hardest to forgive; it is personal. The former is somewhat akin to excusing in that we gain an understanding and we don't take it personally. Perhaps there is a continuum: excusing-understanding-forgiving.

03 March 2004

Forgiving misdiagnosis

This seems to be an instance of forgiving because not doing so would add to the sum of ill in the world and would have been kind of self-defeating by making it harder for people to practice medicine. It was a recoil from being vindictive. Here it seems to be that forgiveness is about putting the past behind because it would get in the way of a better future. Then there is also something about recognising that it was a mistake [rather a series of mistakes] so a lot of it falls at the excused end of the scale [see last entry]. Has anything been done with malice, it may have been harder to simply lay things to rest and make a positive out of it?

The issue that this couple wrestle with seems to be somewhere in the middle of individual vs corporate responsibility. It would likely have been the the NHS thhat was sued had they done so yet it would have been the individuals concerned who would have been responsible. The difficulty here is how far the corporate is responsible and how far the individuals. Is it easier to forgive individuals who are part of a system that is bigger than they are and in whose name they operate? If so, is this because we actually acknowledge that coporate bodies involve some kind of 'pooling of sovereignty'? And if so, what of the Geneva convention?

06 March 2004

After Alder Hey

It's the last two paragraphs that interest me most in this account.
"There was a lot of anger among the Alder Hey families, because no one was prosecuted. Justice hadn’t been done, and people felt betrayed and let down." I find myself reflecting on the relationship between justice, anger and forgiveness. Ange here because justice has not been done. Implying that had justice been done, then the anger would not be there [though of course there are cases when justice may be done and it isn't felt to be justice in which case the anger remains]. Doing justice appeases anger and brings forgiveness, though is it really forgiveness if it is the meeting of the claims of justice? I think I ask this question because I think I was starting to believe that forgiveness is most fully about relinquishing a claim upon another for 'justice'? So is this another candidate for the continuum of forgiveness? -Excusing-justice- understanding-forgiving. Justice acknowledges a wrong and so is not excusing. But there is not necessarily a dimension of understanding that is of making a connection on the grounds of human compassion.

And this leads me to wonder whether there is not a need for 'letting off' in there somewhere? -Letting off acknowledges a wrong and decides not to hold onto the wrongedness, yet it also implies that the letting off has come about because either the wrong is not important or because the wrongdoer is not important enough to the one wronged.

"Forgiveness was a not a word I used at first, but hearing the bitterness and anger I knew I didn’t want to go down that road. So I prayed to be able to forgive. In the end I came to forgive the surgeon who did the illegal stripping, and the hospital management. I chose forgiveness because I did not want to be destroyed by bitterness. What happened was out of my control, but how I respond is within my control."

Clearly here 'forgivness' is antonym for '[holding on to] bitterness'; so whatever else it is for this writer, it is something about having potential for relationship with the wrongdoer that is not based on bitterness, that is on a desire for retribution or on hatred or wvwn perhaps on a claim for justice [which may be the same as retribution?].

I'm also interested that forgivness is a process that one can pray to be able to undertake...

10 March 2004

Forgiving his torturer

I have never been physically tortured and I have never sufferd sustained mental cruelty; those little instances of cruelty and pain I have suffered mean that my imagination can take me into some pretty unpleasant places especially when helped by descriptions of things such as the interrogation chambers of Saddam Hussein's regime. The combination of pain -both as mental anguish and physical abuse- and hopelesssness in the face of apparent malice and lack of common humanity must be so hard to process afterwards. And indeed the story here gives some insight into that.

Eric writes: "My turning point came in 1987 when I came across The Medical Foundation for Victims of Torture. For the first time I was able to unload the hate that had become my prison."

This picks up the Desmond Tutu contribution about forgiveness tying us to perpetrators and forgiveness as a becoming free. I wonder too whether here we are seeing something of the process of naming and 'owning' the hurt?

In the next bit I actually had tears in my eyes as I read it, as Eric finally comes face to face some forty-odd years later with his former torturer whom he had fantasises about killing after giving him a taste of what he had inflicted ... "He was trembling and crying, and he said over and over again: “I am so sorry, so very sorry.” I had come with no sympathy for this man, and yet Nagase, through his complete humility, turned this around. In the days that followed we spent a lot of time together, talking and laughing. It transpired that we had much in common. We promised to keep in touch and have remained friends ever since."

I think that there is something here about having a sense of compassion and shared humanity which helps us to forgive; when we see the other as a fellow human being, as not malicious towards us, as repentant perhsp even deserving our pity [?], then we are more able to consent to absorb the hurt ourselves rather than to attempt to discharge it onto the other

13 March 2004

and restorative justice

For me the final paragraph has the most to reflect on:
" haven’t forgiven anyone, because I have no one to forgive. No one was charged with this crime, and so for me forgiveness is still an abstract concept. But if I knew that the people who sent my bomb were now prisoners in themselves, then I’d happily unlock the gates – although I’d like to know that they weren’t going to make any more bombs."
There is clearly something here about the need to feel that some kind of repentance has taken place, that there is an admission of wrongdoing and that in so doing there is some kind of commitment to not repeating the wrong. I'm not sure from this how conditional Fr Michael is being in his feeling towards forgiveness and I'm not saying that it would necessarily be wrong to be conditional since this is partly what I'm trying to get my head and my guts around ... I know that I have felt similarly about wrongs done to me in the past: that I find it easier to forgive if I know that there is repentance of some kind; now why is that? I guess some of it may be that unrepentance would seem malicious; the refusal to recognise that harm had been caused and damage done or the justification of it in the name of a supposed greater-good that I do not acknowledge to be a greater good or even if I did to cause me to sacrifice without my consent. All of those seem wrong and to forgive might seem to condone or to agree with the wrongdoing. I certainly know people who have refused to forgive where they believed that in so doing their hurt would go unrecognised and the wrong would be condoned in some way....

Michael goes on to say: " I believe in restorative justice and I believe in reparation. So my attitude to the perpetrator is this: I’ll forgive you, but since I’ll never get my hands back, and will therefore always need someone to help me, you should pay that person’s wages. Not as a condition of forgiveness, but as part of reparation and restitution."
There's some interesting question her about forgiveness and justice. SOme versions of forgiveness would surely be about not seeking reparation but simply letting the offender go free, so to speak. I think I need to think more about the relationship between forgiveness and reparation. I am very warm to the ideas of restorative justice. Perhaps my unease at this part of what Michael says is that is seems to make forgiveness dependent on performance and so keeping the offended person potentially in thrall to the perpetrator's lack of response for as long as they don't make reparation. But we need to be able to move on. I suspect he isn't actually proposing that, given what he says in the first part of his piece about becoming a victor not just a survivor. But it is easy to see how the conditional forgiveness couold creep in -which is not forgiveness in the sense that it is a seeking of some kind of revenge?

31 March 2004

CS Lewis on forgiveness

It's been a week since I last blogged on forgiveness though in between I had a conversation in which I was sharing what I've been learning with a friend. I also felt that I really wanted to engage now with some thinking about forgiveness rather than the case studies -perhaps with a view to looking at some more case-studies after some reflection.

So here we look at CS Lewis. He links forgiving with loving ones enemy. I think it is Lewis' deistinction between loving the sinner and hating the sin that has stuck with me and lies behind somewhere the way that I have reacted to the stories of forgiveness I have been looking at. He applies the notions to forgiveness so that it becomes clear that forgiving someone does not mean we have to agree with what they did [or do] and it does not mean that we have to like them. In this piece we close on the words "Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again."

And I certainly feel that the themes that come in the article here have been seen in the stories we have looked at so far: forgiveness doesn't mean calling what is bad good nor pretending that we like it. It is about humanity and finding or refinding humanity.

11 April 2004

Forgiveness for a part in genocide

"when he wrote up the story 20 years later, he [Simon Wiesenthal] sent it to the brightest ethical minds he knew - Jew, Gentile, Catholic, Protestant, and irreligious. "What would you have done in my place?" he asked. "Did I do right?"

Of the 32 men and women who responded, only 6 said he had done wrong in not forgiving the German. Most thought he had done right. "What moral or legal authority did he have to forgive injuries done to someone else?" they asked. Some questioned the whole concept of forgiveness."

The incident that caused this questioning was being asked by a German soldier for forgiveness for the part he had played in killing Jews in Russia. There is a theological aspect to this also: how can God forgive wrongs done to others? -I don't fully know how to answer that one but I think it is important to pose it. I suspect that part of the response to it is to note that God is close to and values each human [well each part of creation in fact] and takes a personal interest in each and every. Like when we love someone who is hurt -it hurts us too. Though that doesn't tie it all up it does lay the basis for establishing a link between wronging other people and that being a sin in relation to God which needs God's forgiveness...

13 April 2004

What forgiveness is not

This a brief but helpful guide to some distinctions that seem to be important in forgiving. The differentiation from excusing is one that I have already touched on in my own comments and I think does come from CS Lewis, for me. I think that distinguishing it from forgetting is important too; for some people I have dealt with, the idea that forgiving means that we forget has been a big barrier to progress. I think that "avoidnace" is perhaps misleading -it certainly was to me but I agree with the content of that section -minimising or making out that something is not important is not forgiving. And again, in pastoral ministy, I have had to disabuse people of the notion that somehow forgiving means to think that the hurt is not important.

To me the point of forgiving is precisely that there has been a hurt caused -if it's not important then there's nothing [or little] to forgive. It relates to the important consideration that forgiveness is about forgiving wrongs done. Minimising seeks to avoid the whole idea of forgiving by turning the wrong into something less wrong or even heading towards excusing. That's not to say that we shouldn't make appropriate allowances for circumstances and accidents etc. It is often important for people to recognise that a wrong has been done in order to retain a sense of their own integrity and to maintain right beliefs about right and wrong. Minimising the wrongs can be failing to recognise the wrongs and undercut justice and love. Properly to forgive means to look the real wrong in the face, square on, acknowledge its wrongness and to move on. In that way we continue to affirm the truth and the good and don't write them off as somehow irrelevant or not quite right, somehow.

14 April 2004

Forgiveness as openness to relating

I warmed to this page because it pretty much gives a definition of forgiveness that I had come to a few years back when wrestling with the issues raised by what forgiveness would be in relation to situations faced by parishioners: "It means being willing to take the initiative in dealing with any barriers that I may be raising towards a restored relationship. It means that I am willing to have a relationship with the other party that is based on Christian love and not on what has happened in the past, if the response of the other person makes that possible."

I felt [and feel] that forgiveness is a point in a journey to reconciliation -but since reconciliation is two-way, then forgiveness may be as far as we can get. I seem to recall some fo the issue for me was reflecting on God's forgiveness of us human beings: it's not the whole story; we need to be prepared to be reconciled by, firstly, accepting that forgiveness. However, for us as opposed to God, it is important to be able to lay aside the un-wholeness that lack of forgiveness brings into our lives. I'm not sure how far that could apply to God, if at all. Though it may be interesting to linger with that isssue a while longer.

Of course even desiring to make a relationship possible may be hard to face, and that seems to me to be the value in those things that have been mentioned in some of the previous blogs in this series: finding a common humanity, empathy, excusing and so on. They all make it easier to make the possibilty of reconciliation [of some kind] envisionable and even desirable.

But of course -it takes two and we are not the only ones in the equation. We may have to live with the impossibility of relating positively because of death or other incapacity on the part of our 'enemy'.

20 April 2004

10 guidelines for forgiveness

I'm not normally one for '7 steps to ...' or similar programmatic approaches to things. However, this is not so much a programme as a set of hints and I'm pretty impressed. I like what it included in this page especially the ideas of educating yourself, spending time each day 'clearing out' your thinking and weeding out the 'shoulds'.

In particular: this set of definitions of what forgiveness is not -most of them we've already seen over the last couple of months on this blog:

"Forgetting. If the hurt wounded you enough to require forgiveness, you may always have a memory of it.
Excusing or condoning. The wrong should not be denied, minimized, or justified.
Reconciling. You can forgive the offender and still choose not to reestablish the relationship.
Weakness. You do not become a doormat or oblivious to cruelty"

The one that hasn't been picked up before, at least in this kind of way is the last of them about weakness -not becoming a doormat to cruelty. It is part of the whole issue about forgiveness needing not to condone wrongdoing and applies it to oneself. I know some people shy away from forgiveness because they -rightly- shyy away from allowing evil/wrongdoing to continue and for that continuance to be given permission by their forgiveness.

Also the idea of spending time each day identifying and releasing wrongs seems eminently sensible -it would be part of everyone's life who prayed the Lord's prayer daily and thoughtfully: "forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us".

I haven't seen anywhwere else on the subject of forgiving the idea of challenging the shoulds in our thinking. This is important as it gets to the roots of why we get cross with others and move on to resentment and/or grudge-bearing: we have views about how we and others should act/think. When others violate those unspoken standards our sense of righ/wrong is violated. SOmetimes [as we have discussed already] those standards are fair enough; sometimes, however, they are inappropriate and we need to recognise that fact and 'debug' our thinking. In that way we can remove, over time, some of the occasions that can generate lack of forgiveness in us.

Definitely a bookmarkable page.

06 July 2004

Reflections: On Enemies [- Christianity Today Magazine]

We too often have difficulty in loving our enemies precisely because we are afraid they might repent. Such was Jonah's problem . …Jonah is unable to cope with the loss of his enemies . …He would rather die than face a gracious God and the Ninevites as potential friends.

Gregory Jones, Embodying Forgiveness

This links with earlier reflections on forgiveness. Our anger wants to blame the other, their repentance exposes our unwillingness to forgive. We then need to understand our reasons to hold on to anger and unforgiveness. Or do we? In the Jonah story, God confronts Jonah with a bigger picture of mercifulness and invites repentance rather than introspection. Perhaps this is more a life coaching model than a counselling model for spiritual direction?

08 March 2006

Vicar who cannot forgive tube bombers quits pulpit

I think that this is very interesting when we think about forgiveness; it brings home the cost of forgiving and healing.

The Rev Julie Nicholson, 52, has felt unable to celebrate communion for her parishioners since her daughter, Jenny, was killed at Edgware Road on July 7 last year. Unwilling to be a hypocrite, she has resigned from the parish of St Aidan with St George in Bristol.
"It's very difficult for me to stand behind an altar and celebrate the Eucharist, the Communion, and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness when I feel very far from that myself, So for the time being, that wound in me is having to heal. In terms of my ministry, a colleague and a friend recently said priesthood begins in the world, not in the church, and I was very relieved to hear that; because what I am trying to do now is redefine my priesthood. I am looking for a way in which I can still have priestly ministry when there are some things I can no longer practise, or I can't currently practise, and for me that's about integrity."

It's important that she is clearly not saying that she will not forgive, rather that she "can't currently". Forgiveness means we have to pay a price: we have to forego revenge, we have to empathise to some degree with the perpetrator or at least be able to assert a common humanity and understand in some way, we have to learn to love the sinner while hating the sin. And none of that is easy when the hurt goes deep. It is harder too when the act was committed or is perceived to have been committed with malice aforethought. To forgive we have to bear the pain rather than inflict it on another. We have to move beyond retribution to restoration and that costs.

I am currently, still, thinking about the cross as an icon of God's pain to forgive us ...

10 April 2006

Bereaved vicar struggles with forgiveness

I saw Mrs Nicholson on Breakfast news this morning. She is the clergyperson whose daughter was killed in the London bombings. In her interview she said something like:

I can't forgive the killers for my daughter's death. I can forgive for my own pain and loss...

I may not have a very word-accurate recollection but the impression I came away with was that she seemed to be hesitating to forgive the actual death of her daughter. The damage to herself seemed to be forgiven or on the way but it seemed like she was saying that she did not have the right to forgive on behalf of her daughter. And in a sense, I think she's right. The sins against others, those others have to forgive for themselves. However, I also wondered whether she was getting at the issue of what such a forgiveness might seem to say. That is, she could not forgive the actual death of Jennifer because if she did so it might seem to condone or too lightly accept the wrongness of that death. She needs to have the perpetrators acknowledge that what happened was a wrong, an evil. Without that acknowledgement, to simply 'give up' her daughthers death would violate a sense of right and wrong; it would feel tantamount to saying that it was alright for Jennifer to die.

I don't believe that it is wrong to insist the death was wrong and that those who engineered that death were evildoers. Forgiveness here must not condone the wrong. It must, however, enable those left behind who are mourning the death to move on without bitterness polluting their lives and to build the possibility of understanding any mitigations and were it possible in this life, to hear and to begin accept the sincere repentance of the wrongdoers. She may not be there yet, but I do hope and pray that she is making progress towards the latter things.

And I wonder; does this give us an insight into the meaning of forgiveness for God? That God cannot forgive unless it's personal. That's the point about incarnation and cross. If God just 'forgave', without having God's own hurt, grief and pain to forgive, it would just be without any real meaning. We can 'forgive' all manner of things if they do not touch us personally. But for it to be real forgiveness, we must be personally involved; we must have a hurt to put to one side, a pain to refuse to impose back onto the perpetrator, the possibility of forgoing revenge, the acceptance and determination that for us love, grace and mercy trump strict justice.

So as we view Christ accepting to be harmed, vilified, mistried, misunderstood, betrayed and killed, we are seeing God personally imaging the cost of forgiveness; playing out in spacetime the personal price of forgiveness. This is not so much the price of our sins, first and foremost, but bearing the pain of forgiving of not passing on the hurt or passing back the wrong to the perpetrators. It is living out the prayer to 'forgive them for they do not know what they are doing'.

And more than living out. It is the event where it actually happens. It is not illustrative but performative. God accepts to be harmed by humanity so that forgiveness is actually personal. God is not condoning wrong but putting God's own being in the way of harm so that God may work through the hard task of forgiving in God's own person not as some kind of blithe and untouched benevolence making easy pronouncements of forgiveness because the hurt is not personal.

Without the cross we only have karma: an impersonal principle of Justice. The cross tells us that there is something about ultimate reality that is personal, that personal love [and therefore apathy and malevolence] do matter in the grand scheme of things; that forgiveness is the way to life where strict justice will lead to death.

11 October 2006

forgiving sin is not the same as dealing with it

While there may be some question on the part of some people about whether forgiveness really should include reconciliation, the referenced post argues that it does.

Real forgiveness is not pretending that there is no sin, it is not pretending that everyone is okay and that no one got hurt. Jesus knows, God knows, and we know, that every action has consequences. Reconciliation is not about covering up sin, it is about dealing with it so that the person affected is healed as much as possible – and that the person who did it can try to make amends, and then deal with it so that (to the best of our ability) it does not happen again.
He is in the business of reconciliation. That means he is the business of getting people on good terms with each other. Reconciliation is the goal, the end product, of forgiveness.

I think I tend to agree.

06 January 2008

Forgive: improve Well-Being -and Atonement?

A brief reminder of the tangible health benefits of forgiving. And, happily, a good brief definition of forgiving which covers some of the pitfalls commonly made by people thinking about forgiving. "Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting, condoning or excusing whatever happened. It’s acknowledging hurt and then letting it go, along with the burden of anger and resentment."
There's also a nice four-step guide to forgiving that we could do well to make use of.

four steps that are included in most approaches to learning forgiveness.
* Acknowledge the pain and anger felt as a result of someone else’s actions. For forgiveness to occur, the situation needs to be looked at honestly.
* Recognize that healing requires change.
* Find a new way to think about the person who caused the pain. What was happening in that person’s life when the hurt occurred? Sometimes, the motivation or causes for the incident have little to do with those most affected. For some people, this step includes saying, “I forgive you.”
* Begin to experience the emotional relief that comes with forgiveness. It may include increased compassion for others who have experienced similar hurt.

Now, to confess my further interest; what happens if we consider that these processes also may apply to God in some way? What if these are what is taking place on the cross. Is this a forgiveness model of the atonement emerging?
I think so, and I've been mulling it over, hoping to find some time to write more ...

29 November 2008

Historicisation of God's being

I've just recently come across this article (and it's worth noting that this site makes a number of academic articles available in full). It is an examination of Some of Karl Barth's thought in relation to resurrection and God's eternity. I was drawn to it because the title "The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Karl Barth and the Historicization of God's Being" seemed to offer some help with my own project of interpreting the atonement as a historicising of God's being -those weren't the words I had been using to describe the insight I was trying to develop, but there was a sense of recognition when I saw it.
Here's a quote from Barth which seems to go to the heart of the matter:

in the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have to do with a movement and action which took place not merely in human history but first and foremost in God Himself, a movement and action in which Jesus Christ as the Son of God . . . [is] a pure object and recipient of God [the Father's] . . . free and pure grace which as such can only be received, and the historical fulfilment of which is the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

and

'the resurrection . . . took place . . . not merely in human history but first and foremost in God himself'

Now that is very helpful in making a case for events in the history of the Christ being out-showings of God's 'inner' being. What I want to do, I think, is a bit harder: that the cross is an out-showing of God's forgiving. This may be harder because it is something that is more fully dependent on contingent being; fallen humanity needing forgiveness.

I think that my approach will be to start with the human experience of forgiveness, practical theology style; to analyse some of the more important aspects of forgiving and to relate those to divine forgiveness (including, wrath, love, mercy, compassion and pain-bearing). The end to which I am heading in this thinking is, in effect, to say that the cross is the space time eikon of God's forgiveness. I think I mean eikon rather than 'icon' in the sense that I'm drawing on what I understand to be the Eastern understanding of a quasi-sacramental thing: an outcrop into ordinary spacetime of divine or spiritual reality such that our interaction with is is a real spiritual interaction.

Obviously, there are a lot of gaps to be filled in on this, but I think it could be sound. And finding out Barth was saying this stuff, really helps.

21 January 2009

Words of forgiveness

An article in last week's Church Times (I think that means the link under the title of this post won't 'deliver' to non-subscribers for another week or 10 days) with lots of perspectives on forgiving, a lot based on the work of Liz Gulliford (whose book on the topic has gone out of print and is now at horrific prices -if you can find a cheaper copy -say less than £20- let me know).
There are a few helpful and significant quotes I'd like to draw to your and my future attention.

“For most, though, forgiveness is a hard-won process, and in that process it is not unusual to feel mixed emo­tions. Everyone who goes on a journey of forgiveness will have times when forgiving is hard to hold on to.
“As Christians, we do not have to forgive from our own strength. The commitment to forgive may be all that we can put on the table, and hope and pray that it will be deep­ened. We pray that God will help us.”

That certainly chimes with pastoral and personal experience. It is useful to understand forgiveness as a process.
And when we deal with the issue of forgiveness, we have to be careful because there are lots of misunderstanding which have the effect of short-circuiting the process. One of those seems to be that forgiveness amounts to saying that the wrong is actually 'okay'. As Gulliford says,

Understanding the motive of the person who has injured you will only take you so far — forgiveness is not about condoning

And further down in the article Desmond Tutu is quoted as saying;

“Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what has hap­pened seriously and not minimising it; drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens to poison our entire existence. In the telling of stories like these [in the Forgiveness Project website] there is real healing.”

I find this sentence by Gee Walker to be a good framing perspective:

Forgiveness is my sur­vival tool. If I hadn’t, it would have brought anger and resentment into my soul, and I hadn’t got room for that. Forgiveness frees me up to love; it brings me peace and helps me today.

It helps us to understand that not forgiving is giving house-room to a set of attitudes and emotional baggage that may cripple us and that the decision to (learn to) forgive is a decision to make room for love and peace (and, I think, joy).

And a clear example of how what we think forgiveness is affects how we approach things comes in the quote relating to Julie Nicholson who resigned as active clergy following her daughter's murder as part of the London bombings in July 2007 because she didn't feel able to forgive and felt she was in a contradictory place to the ministry she was supposed to exercise.

Her definition of true forgiveness involves establishing a rela­tion­ship between the injured party and the attacker — a relationship that she found impossible to have.

. This alerts us to different dimensions of the term. I think that when we are talking about God forgiving us, then Julie's definition is very important. However, God is always present but in human affairs death, geography or sheer weight of emotional work mean that relationship may not be possible. However, letting go of bitterness, coming to a position where a relationship might begin to be possible in appropriate circumstances, may be. And I wonder whether the issue of condoning lurks here too in Julie's words,

I think I will be angry for the rest of my life for what happened. [But] when a life is cut down, then you should be angry.

. I think she is right. And I suspect that at the heart of forgiving lies the acts of recognising that anger, discerning what 'belongs' with the perpetrator and what doesn't and then forbearing to direct that anger to the perpetrator in punitive fashion, but rather to bear the pain ourselves. Make no mistake, to forbear punitive reaction is painful because it is not condoning or excusing or making light of a misdeed and/or an injustice. It is recognising the wrong, recognising that it deserves a reaction but choosing to forego that reaction. Obviously that is easier to do if there is love, respect, understanding and a sense of common humanity. It is very hard to do when those things are not present in the first place and a stranger is the mis-doer. It is often (but not always) easier to forgive someone we love. Though sometimes a sense of betrayal makes it even harder. Harder too to forgive an act done in malevolence than one out of ignorance or weakness. Perhaps it is the malevolent acts that are those that particularly invoke the need for personal relationship reconciliation?

I'm inching towards a fuller understanding of forgiveness, with the awareness that a lot of the theological debate about atonement is probably too detached from the realities of forgivness. I have a suspicion we would do better to start with forgiveness and reflect on that as a way to theologise about God's forgiveness. I'm still captivated by the idea that the cross is an eikon of the pain that God bears to forgive.

30 January 2010

How she forgave her daughter's killer

Some readers may suspect that my interest in forgiveness in these extreme circumstances has roots in our life and a road traffic incident two years ago which deprived our daughter of one of her legs. Surprisingly, perhaps, (as a search through this blog for 'forgiveness' with attention to dates, will show). That's not to say that I don't find connections. A lot goes back to a sense that we talk a lot about forgiveness but we often don't think that clearly about what's involved. My interest comes more from trying to wrestle pastorally with the issues presented by grieving families and the rough-and-tumble of everyday miscomprehension, unthinking uncare and/or malice.

So it's good to see the topic aired here: How I forgave my daughter's killer | Life and style | The Guardian: I still find the writer focuses on isses which flit the surface; the presenting issues of anger and pain without examining the relationship between those things and love and feelings around justice, punishment, revenge and counter-transference of such things. It is also a bit short on just what is forgiveness and what excusing and then what the costs are.

Let me, however, pick out of the article the things that I think are really important for helping us to learn forgiveness.

'When Charlotte was murdered, �forgiveness did not enter my mind. For a long time, I wanted to know, who is this wicked girl that took my daughter? Who did this evil? My baby was gone. I was just coming to terms with the loss. I had to weigh things up, to really allow my emotions to take their course.' ... I kept ­staring over at her. I wanted her to look at me, to look at the pain she had caused me, for her to see that Charlotte had a mum who loved her. I wanted her to show me how sorry she was. ... I wanted her to feel a bit of my pain at losing my daughter. ... Mary came to understand more of Beatriz's background. "I learned about all the bullying and intimidation she had ­received, about all the things that had happened to her at home and at school.
"So I wrote back to her and said, 'I forgive you, I believe you didn't mean to do it, although there is a price to pay for the choice you made.' ... ­Certainly she wishes her "an ­emotionally stable life, a good life. I hope she turns out to be a ­wonderful mother. I don't wish her any evil. I don't wish her to lose a child. I would not wish that on anyone."

I think all the elements that I have come to recognise as necessary are there. The one issue that isn't clear in this account is the relationship between excusing (which is recognising where there are factors that relieve the perpetrator of culpability) and forgiving (which is foregoing vengeance or 'counter-transference' whilst recognising the genuine culpability of the perpetrator). In this telling most of the weight falls to excusing -and that is right and proper and can make forgiving easier. The account as we have it here doesn't help us to understand how she did the harder work of letting go of the 'residual' culpable wrongdoing and its entails. That's a shame because that's where most of us need the most help and support: to forego just anger and its successor events and to re-open the possibility of a positive relationship with the perpetrator.

Deacons, priests and bishops, oh My!

Sat in Durham cathedral this morning and we'd just started the bit of the liturgy leading into renewal of ordination vows. I look ahead, over the page, to see that the directions invite the deacons to stand to hear and respond, then ask the deacons to sit and the priests to stand for their bit. I was a bit dischuffed: as far as I understand it I am both deacon and priest. The bishop didn't apply a spiritual vacuum cleaner to remove the grace of diaconal orders when he applied hands to ordain me into presbyteral orders. And yet the staging of the liturgy seems to imply that state of affairs. Now, if were were British Methodists the liturgy we performed at that point would have been accurate: British Methodism has diaconal and presbyteral orders but in parallel; one is either one or the other. However, catholic order, which Anglicans preserve, 'stacks' the orders one on the other.

Probably the reason for my dischuffment lies in part with my own valuing of my diaconal calling and ordination. For me it is important both theologically and symbolically that presbyteral orders are conferred within, so to speak, the context or frame of diaconal ordination. It echoes my own struggle to make sense of both my reading of the NT and my sense of calling to ordination: fundamentally the call to serve the people of God is the prior and controlling call. We can only lead /elder if we first serve; our eldership is modelled after the servant King.

So I was unhappy to be implicitly asked to rank my presbyteral ordination higher than my diaconal. So, in common with half a dozen that I could see (my wife among them), I stood to affirm my diaconal commitment and did not then sit down but remained standing to affirm my presbyteral undertaking.

I do think that it is important that we who are in priestly orders should not be allowed to forget that we remain deacons and so liturgies like this should not be constructed to let that happen.

Now I recognise that the positive side of what was attempted was probably to affirm the ministry of deacons who are not ordained priest. And that is good and right; particularly if we are to encourage a permanent diaconate which we say we are committed to. However, we need to do that differently. Of course, there is the question about the way that the service arguably reinforces a hierarchical valuing of the ministries; the diaconal vows are treated as if belonging to a distinct ministry, yet in reality it seemed that all those reaffirming those words were either presbyters or hoping soon to be. Do we want that? If we are to create a permanent diaconate, is that really the way to do it? But perhaps I'm being a bit oversensitive about that.

Anyway, how should we restructure the liturgy to encourage all those in deacons' orders, including Bishops and priests, to stand in solidarity of ministry and yet allow those who are deacons alone to have a dignity of their own?

Well the former could be met by having all the ordained stood at the beginning and each order sitting down as their particular commitments were concluded (ie the deacons sit before the priestly undertaking was read, and the priests sit before the episcopal commitment is re-affirmed). However, that wouldn't seem to give a particular dignity to the deacons-alone, though it would be a better solution than what I saw today.

Perhaps it might work to add to the above suggestion that a lay person ask the first question of all the ordained, the non-presbyteral-deacons would then ask the presbyters the priestly question, and the presbyters ask the bishops their question.
Could that work?

PS; a note to my students from Leading Worship: the above is something of a (partial) reflection on an act of worship bringing some theological concerns to bear on a moment of liturgy and considering both the sign-value of the act as it happened and using the theological considerations to try to re-envisage that liturgical moment to address the theological and practical issues raised.