Order and Orders.

I wrote this in a comment over at The Church Mouse Blog, but I think it's worth repeating here.

Mouse writes that both Ruth Gledhill, who writes for the Times, Michael Perham, Bishop of Gloucester, have essentially stated that the debate around sexuality and ordination is essentially a second order issue. I have to admit I have some sympathy for this viewpoint. I get tired of all the debate, all the wrangling. I feel something like I do about discussions about the Anglican Communion: all this dithering is fine if you have the time and the money for it, but I've said before and I'll say again that the rest of us have work to do. It's very easy to jump from that to "this is not a first order issue."

It's not a first order issue for anyone who has been ordained or consecrated without controversy and has never had to worry about whether someone else will question their ministry because of their sexuality.

It's not a first order issue for anyone employed by the church who doesn't feel they have to hide or disguise or even break off a close relationship (not necessarily a sexual one) because of what others in the church might think and the effect on their livelihood.

It's not a first order issue for those who don't have to question whether their time and gifts as volunteers will be accepted and appreciated, those who don't have to "come out" to anyone, those who don't have to constantly answer questions from their friends about why they are religious if their religion (or at least its bureaucratic structure) is so anti-queer.

This is not a first order issue for those who have the privilege to ignore it.

I cannot tell my brilliantly gifted organist friend, made unwelcome for not fitting into a heteronormative mould after being a church musician since the age of six, that her pain at such a cruel rejection is not a first order issue. I cannot tell my spiritually astute friend who is not pursuing a vocation to ordained ministry because he is bisexual and feels the barriers would be insurmountable that this denial of his gifts is not a first order issue. I cannot tell my friend who would love to get involved in all sorts of outreach work, faith-based or not, that it is not a first order issue that the C of E is not a safe space for her. I cannot tell my friends that it is somehow okay for the church to behave this way as long as it does some other good in the world, or that I am not afraid for my own livelihood should I be deemed unacceptable in some way unrelated to my ability to do my work. I'm quite serious about that last point: I live with a man who is not my husband, I'm quite open about it, and I'm well aware that a number of years ago that would have meant I'd be considered completely unsuitable as organist/choirmaster. As long there is not full inclusion, we are in the tricky business of drawing lines in the sand, and it is only by God's grace that I am currently on the "acceptable" side of the line.

That doesn't mean I think the other work of the church is unimportant. That doesn't mean I think we should not be striving to heal the sick, comfort the mourning, bind up the brokehnhearted and proclaim liberty to those who are captive. Of course we must do these things, we must care for the widow and the orphan, we must alleviate poverty. But excluding people from any level of ministry based on their gender or sexuality seems to me to be at direct odds with that.

The basic underlying message of Christianity, as far as I can tell, is that God is loving and God is merciful; it will always be a first order issue when the church fails to act like it.

Going Forward

A friend of mine in another community writes:

Sigh

We have let the angry right dominate the news and comment agenda for too long. It is time for us to point out the small-mindedness of nationalism, to make the case that the French and Germans are our friends, that the EU may be flawed but is not some devious conspiracy trying to trick us out of our fish, that we owe it to the new member states to make it work, that we owe it to the rest of the world to make restitution for colonialism, that people are people, wherever they or their great-grandparents happened to be born, to state the vision of a world where immigration controls are not needed, because the entire world is rich.

I have to say I agree. And though this is prompted by a political event of sadness in the UK, I think much of it is applicable everywhere.

How do we go about doing this?

I think it means we must seriously treat others as human beings--yes, even when that's inconvenient or uncomfortable. I think it means we must seriously consider how our choices affect others--and not just our choices at the polling stations. I think it means we must create a culture of community and mutual appreciation and (dare I say it?) love, a world where people build one another up rather than tear one another down, a world where people help and care for one another, a world where we heal one another's hurts instead of inflicting more.

Yes, we must state this vision in words. But we must also state it in our actions.

What do your actions say?

Schism or get off the pot.

A woman turns up at the crematorium for the committal of her deceased parishioner. Nobody else is there, but she says the words anyway, and works out the details later.

A man searches for a job where his inclusive and liberal attitude will be welcome. Meanwhile he makes time and space for an online community where the marginalised are accepted as they are, right down to getting told off if they behave badly toward one another.

A woman, childless and recently bereaved, wonders what to say in a sermon on Mother's Day. She isn't worried about what people will think of her, but about how best to nurture and support those in her care.

A man struggles with administrative barriers to ordination. He keeps preaching the Gospel anyway.

A woman relives the violent, horrible abuse of her past and tries to figure out how best to go forward in this life.

A man pays a month of rent for a friend who has been ill and won't be able to ever pay it back. He's unemployed himself.

A woman dealing with a serious health scare and a gruelling search for right employment spares a kind word and points at a useful resource for an online acquaintance feeling nervous about far less serious problems.

A man bends, then breaks, institutional rules in order to make sure a disabled student gets the support she needs.

A woman spends the day on the phone asking for funds to pay the debt of a stranger she has never met.

A man directs a choir singing Evensong; despite having been informed by the police during the preceding week that his son has been found dead, he offers what he can.

A woman organises and leads ten days of prayer for a friend undergoing heart surgery.

A man tracks down the family of a formerly homeless person who has lost touch with all kin. A reunion looks possible.

A teacher wonders how best to support a family running low on cash and hope.

A child offers an apple to a friend who didn't get enough for breakfast.

A woman sings and prays, because there doesn't seem to be any other sane response to the world.

If you must, go ahead and waste your time and energy and money trying to legislate who is a member of your church and who is not.

Dither away. The rest of us have work to do.

Placeholder post

Too many things to think about, let alone to post about! My brain, at the moment, is all about big ideas, general concepts, broad careless strokes of a chunky brush dipped in searingly bright colours. It's in my practising, my teaching, even composing (such as it is) is coming at me in big forms and harmonic structure rather than melodic line and fine nuance.

Typical, then, that this week in my academic work I need to write a report on Big Project, a meticulously detailed report of what I learned and how I learned it, complete with appendices, tables and charts. As someone who normally does that sort of learning in a more organic and intuitive way, I'm struggling a little to identify these things, but as a teacher and a musician I can do self-scrutiny well enough; as someone who thinks the structure of the assignment is not actually that helpful to the learning process I'm resentful of having to jump through the hoop. But the biggest problem is really that I keep getting distracted by big ideas.

The way I usually work through ideas is to talk about them or write about them.

Things I would like to write about, right here and right now, but for which I really haven't got the spare brain cycles:

-How my spirituality/beliefs relate to teaching music; how I can be more generally supportive of the families I work with, through music teaching and not in any overtly religious framework; how to pray about teaching
-I've touched on it a bit before, but more on music performance and spirituality and my current understanding of the relationship between the two
-Chronic pain and how I deal with that and various other physical and mental health difficulties. I'm not actually sure I can do this without turning it into a whinge-fest or completely destroying the fragile anonymity I'm trying to maintain here.
-Words and meaning; images and meaning; sounds and meaning. In the beginning there was the Word, we're told--but do we mean the word, or do we mean meaning itself? And how does this relate to our being made in God's image, and being creators of meaning ourselves?
-Psalmody and how/why it seems to work so much better for me when chanted or sung; the line between speaking and chanting, and between chanting and singing. I'd quite like to do lots of research into chanted/sung psalmody in the Jewish tradition and how that relates to the worship patterns of the early Church. And I'd like to get to know it all so much better, and find or help create an authentic, aesthetic and accessible sung/chanted Psalmody for English translations. Yes, lots of work is being done on this already; I'm essentially playing catch-up, in an academic sense. Meanwhile I keep singing them in Morning Prayer, and one day indeed pours out its song to another as in Psalm 19 this morning.
-Material poverty (of others) and asceticism (the temptation to it in myself, and a certain pointlessness). I really haven't ironed out my thoughts on this.
-FaceBook, Twitter, blogging, other ways of keeping in touch and building communities online and how I see (and how I use) these various tools.
-Food and prayer and (especially shared) meals, and an assortment of thoughts I've been having on these recently; Eucharist and sacrament within and without standard liturgy; this also relates to creating a welcoming home, and to being spiritual/religious in a pluralist/secular society, creating rituals that can be shared and meaningful without excluding anyone or making them feel uncomfortable.

The assignment will have to come first, I'm afraid. And I've got a busy week in other terms as well, so need to be careful not to commit to too much yet. But I might be able to write about one of these by Saturday-ish. Which would you like to read?

miscellany; and a prayer for the clergy

Today has felt better than yesterday did. I got some work done in the morning, not as much as I should have done but more than yesterday! I saw a friend for lunch and another for an afternoon walk. I haven't had to take any painkillers.

Went to Leafy Suburb Church this evening.

There was no choir or choir director as it's a weekday. For someone who sings all the good bits of worship and sings all the bits that feel awkward, having an almost entirely spoken service was really very odd and rather hard work. But there was still a resonance to it that I can't explain.

The Eucharist seems strange and familiar to me, at the same time. The blessings over the bread and wine are near word-for-word translations of the equivalent Jewish brachot and I found that comforting for some reason. I keep coming back to what The Ostrich said about Eucharist and it sort of makes sense in a way I can't quite articulate. Maybe I'll get it eventually, maybe I'll even take communion at some point. But going up for a blessing seemed right, this evening.

I love having the Summary of the Law as part of worship. I think maybe I just need to print it out and stick it in my small prayer book and start saying it along with my other prayers.

The Peace, always a favourite part of childhood services, remains a favourite, and I was struck again by how welcoming the congregation there is.

I spoke to the Vicar briefly about the Sekr1t Pr0ject. I'll e-mail her, next week after everything is a bit calmer. Can't say more without risking giving the secret away--mentioning it at all is a bit dodgy in fact.

I find myself praying tonight for clergy. Deacon Friend has a lot to deal with and Holy Week is in some ways the worst time to deal with it, and in other ways perhaps the best. Various other clergy I know, online or in person, well or as acquaintances, are struggling with various things right now. And it's a tough week, a lot of hard work, trying to enable or facilitate or lead meaningful worship for others without losing sight of the important things themselves, trying to move Heaven and Earth and also trying to hold them together. I pray that the clergy I know and the clergy I don't know are granted the stamina and courage to get through this week. I pray that they will be offered help and support wherever it is needed, and be able to accept it. I pray that they are able to draw comfort and strength from the message of resurrection, unconditional love and eternal life that they are called to preach. I'm just a confused monotheist, but I care and I pray.

Halfway through the week already!

Exam today was okay. Not amazing, but it could have been worse.

I've regained some perspective about some of the administrative stress from earlier in the week. I'm not necessarily happy about it but I've accepted that the Big Project I've been working on is not going to go as I'd hoped it would. This doesn't make it a failure, just something to learn from. Even if what I learned is "no, projects on that scale are not a good idea while in the final year of a degree."

Choralgirl writes of the Charter for Compassion, a project of Karen Armstrong financed by the TED Prize. I'm curious about how this will turn out. Compassion does seem to be increasingly important to my own understanding of faith and life.

That in turn relates back to Loving Your Enemy.

I find it very difficult to love or find compassion for people who are in a position where they can hurt me, in situations where an imbalance of power leaves me feeling vulnerable and afraid.

That doesn't mean I need to wrest power from others and try to take control of situations. Oh, sometimes that is probably the right thing to do. But many times dealing with these situations in a loving manner means figuring out why I am afraid, thinking about what a loving response would actually be and how to do that, and then taking the risk.

That's not an easy task, but it gets a whole lot easier when I feel loved, myself. I can talk about therapy and medication and how much those helped me to recover (to an extent) from depression. I can talk about the physio exercises I do most days for my joint problems, to keep me mobile and relatively free from pain. But I know that none of that would even have been possible without the care, concern, compassion and love that others showed me.

That love transformed my life. It taught me that I want to love others.

Maybe it can also teach me how to do so.

419

I'm really upset by the Church of Nigeria's support for anti-gay legislation. Come on, people. Humans can do better than this. We can love better than this, we can live better than this, we don't have to be so afraid of one another that we would imprison those who are different from ourselves.

All theological or doctrinal issues aside (and I've got a few of those), how can I even consider joining a Church which is in communion with people who support such hate and violence? I do not expect perfection, I expect there will be diversity and disagreement. I expect people to make mistakes, and I expect it to take time for those mistakes to be rectified. I expect I make a fair few mistakes myself, the sort that frustrate others. But I don't see how this kind of hate-mongering is ethically acceptable. I certainly don't see how it follows Jesus Christ, who (as I understand it) preached love and forgiveness a lot more than judgement and punishment.

It's one thing when your child gets caught shoplifting, age 13, and you take him back home and have a Serious Talk about why that sort of thing is Not Okay, and also seriously examine your own parenting skills. It's quite another thing when that same 'child' is 25 years old and has moved on to armed robbery and is still living in your home. At what point does supporting a person condone their actions? At what point is that support collusion rather than just tacit approval? And yet, and yet. People have to make their own choices. Turfing out that 13-year-old would be considered too harsh. Turfing out the 25-year-old would be, well, it would be too little too late. And where did that 25-year-old learn that armed robbery is an acceptable strategy for success, anyway?

As far as I can tell, as long as the Anglican Communion accepts this sort of thing, it is aiding and abetting some pretty vile discrimination. I don't know how to respond to that, or to the discrimination--less violent, but still marked--within the Communion in supposedly more 'civilised' countries. But joining up doesn't seem like a very good idea.

Whatever you do unto the least of these, you do unto me.

Lord, have mercy on these people who re-crucify You, two thousand years later. Apparently Your forgiveness is infinite. Alas, mine isn't. I can't even forgive the sins of my own insignificant life without Your help. I'm pretty sure I don't even perceive all of the ways I nail You to the cross every day. I cannot comprehend mercy on this scale.

(In other news: the essay is going to be a day late. I'll take a 10% docking of marks for it. I'm annoyed but resigned: I can't do everything. Still.)

One Camel Has Fallen Behind

I'm a little overwhelmed with academic work at the moment so not reading as much here as I'd like.

Why did I think it would be a good idea to start a new blog in the last few months of a performance degree? Was this really a good time to start a new project? But oh, yes, I think it was the right thing to do, even if it doesn't seem sensible and even if I can't keep up as I'd like to, because you all remind me of the interconnectedness of the world in a way that I didn't expect.

I don't have much to say today.

Yesterday during one of many procrastination breaks I was looking for churches in an area of London I'm looking at moving to. Even a few months ago I wouldn't have been thinking about. Yesterday I found out that Forward in Faith have a website (I'm not linking to them) and a list of their churches. How kind of them to provide such a tool, so that I know in advance which churches and clergy to avoid! Though maybe as Margaret said a week or so ago there is something to be said for going and converting the unbelievers I find there... but I have so many questions, so many confusions, and I think I will do better at first to associate with more open-minded folk. I do struggle with how to include those who are not themselves inclusive. I think I need to engage with that more. But I also need somewhere relatively safe as a starting point, and some of my history and some aspects of who I am may challenge even more liberal congregations. [EDITED TO ADD]: I'm hoping it's not until summer that I'll be moving, when things will be a bit less hectic. But finding the right community is still very important.[END OF EDIT]

Though I had only just started following his Twitter updates and website I'm saddened by the loss suffered by Bosco Peters and his family at the death of Catherine. Again with the interconnectedness.

Have a poem, also about that interconnectedness:

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands even at the height
of their arc of anger
because we have finally realized there is just one flesh to wound
and it is His - the Christ's, our
Beloved's.

I have come into this world to see this: all creatures hold hands as
we pass through this miraculous existence we share on the way
to even a greater being of soul,
a being of just ecstatic light, forever entwined and at play
with Him.

I have come into this world to hear this:
every song the earth has sung since it was conceived in
the Divine's womb and began spinning from
His wish,

every song by wing and fin and hoof,
every song by hill and field and tree and woman and child,
every song of stream and rock,

every song of tool and lyre and flute,
every song of gold and emerald
and fire,

every song the heart should cry with magnificent dignity
to know itself as
God:
for all other knowledge will leave us again in want and aching -
only imbibing the glorious Sun
will complete us.

I have come into this world to experience this:
men so true to love
they would rather die before speaking
an unkind
word,
men so true their lives are His covenant -
the promise of
hope.

I have come into this world to see this:
the sword drop from men's hands
even at the height of
their arc of
rage
because we have finally realized
there is just one flesh
we can wound.

-Hafiz