In the last piece, I wrote about the way our capacity for independent thinking is often compromised by external influences.  We may experience these at any moment of our lives.  This was an idea that I lifted from my reading some twenty years ago of a book, Influence, Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini.  The book was first published in 1984 and has proved to be a classic of social psychology.  It has been very influential among religious students and sales experts alike.  Those who study cults of various kinds also quote it frequently.  The ideas contained within it have stood the test of time well.  Cialdini’s basic idea can be stated very simply.  To persuade or influence another person, you need to apply one or more of six principles of social influence.  These are, using merely the headings, reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.  I do not have the space to explore what each of these principles involves, but to give a flavour of how they work, I can take one topical example.  People, in a pandemic like the current one, are easily persuaded by the rumour that there is a scarcity of loo rolls in the shops.  This rumour then creates its own momentum and the shelves are quickly stripped bare of this commodity.   The sight of empty shelves brings into operation a second principle of influence, social proof.  Everyone else is doing it, so we continue to be convinced that we need to go on hoarding.   In spite of there never having been a real shortage, these two examples of social influence at work have resulted in irrational behaviour (and a shortage of a commodity!) by large numbers of people.

Cialdini’s ideas on influence can be applied in many different situations and contexts.  People want to be liked, to be consistent etc., but we can easily imagine situations where fitting in with others in accordance with one or other of Cialdini’s principles will be competing with ordinary rational judgement.  I have noticed that such a strong attack on our individual decision making may happen when we join a committee.  Most of the time committee consensus-making is a thoroughly normal and healthy process.  We need individuals within the group to shift their opinions so that joint decisions can be made, and agreed action taken.  There is nothing wrong with compromise most of the time and the world cannot go forward without this give and take in people’s opinions.  But the situation can arise when the majority on a committee is in fact wrong.  What happens when a person on a committee, with expert knowledge or access to correct information, is overruled by a majority?  Some of Cialdini’s principles of influence operate extremely powerfully in a committee situation.  The expert, the person who knows what he/she is talking about, can easily be crushed by the weight of contrary opinion, even when it is applied with a smile and the tools of charm.  He/she may continue to fight against the odds.  More likely the outnumbered ‘expert’ will quietly give up on opposition on the grounds that it is uncomfortable, even painful, to be a minority of one.  Social influence principles will normally ensure that the tough dogged independent and feisty person will in the end become the pliant subservient committee member who agrees with the majority view, even when it is wrong.

Cialdini, writing in the 1980s, does not appear to give a lot of attention to the social psychology of group committee work.  He seemed much more interested in the effect of these influences on individuals as consumers or workers.  I intend to suggest what I have noted of his ideas so far applies to some current safeguarding issues within the Church of England.  Speaking about this ‘industry’ in very general terms, I have noted and commented before on the fact that there seems at present to be a deep conflict at the heart of all church safeguarding work.  This is in the fact that the needs and interests of survivors of abuse are pulling in one direction and this is completely at odds with the desire for the Church to preserve material assets and reputation. Ian Elliot wrote about this tension back in 2016 when he said in his report: Emphasis should be placed on ensuring that financial considerations are not given a priority that conflicts with the pastoral aims of the Church when engaging with survivors of abuse.   If someone new with a firm grasp of the psychological needs of survivors and the importance of justice does join a safeguarding committee, what happens?  It is hard to see how they can survive with their original idealism and concern for survivors intact in the face of the group influence which is pulling the opposite direction.  Several of Cialdini’s principles of social influence will be brought to bear on the minority voice.  They then have the choice either to leave or to submit to the overpowering influence of the majority. 

In my conversations with Gilo, he has, on occasion, referred to this process going on.  Hitherto independent individuals have joined the safeguarding establishment of the Church of England.   They then become ‘hoovered up’ (Gilo’s expression) by the committee system at work in this process.  After a period, they reappear as compliant creatures of the established pro-institution perspective.   ‘Big Brother’, however we define that, has made them into his own.  Among the ‘victims’ of this ‘influence’ process are some high-ranking church men and women whom I hesitate to name.  The better informed of my readers can make good guesses at to their identity.  The problem, at its heart, is that safeguarding has not established firm boundaries as to what its priorities are.  Is it about the need of victims or the preservation of the assets and reputation of the established Church?  As long as this fundamental question is not answered, there will always be unresolved and unresolvable conflict within the committees in Church House and among Safeguarding committees throughout the country.  A particular problem arises for the so-called core groups which I understand are set up to deal with individual cases of abuse.  According to my information, these are set up without any representation for the survivors themselves or their representatives.  How they believe that they can resolve these cases justly without listening to the survivors’ voice is beyond me.  All too often the individuals’/survivors’ interests are in this way going to be crushed under the weight of the grinding wheel of institutional interests because that is the easier option for those with the power.

Cialdini’s work demonstrated that all individuals are susceptible to influence of different kinds, making it sometimes impossible to resist.  In the Church we have noted that the desire to preserve and protect power will sometimes be working against justice and compassion for individuals.  Typically these stronger forces seem to prevail.  My understanding of the way social pressure operates, makes me sympathetic towards those who find themselves defeated in committee work.  Their former ideals cannot resist the power of the group that is too strong for them.  What I do find puzzling is that there does not yet seem to be any conversation about ethical issues within the Church’s safeguarding enterprise.  Are there really so few of us who are suggesting that the work of the past five years of safeguarding has been severely compromised in its failure to defend survivors better?  How much longer do we have to wait before somebody at the top of the Church of England realises how self-defeating it is to try to do such incompatible things at the the same time. Until the Church is really clear about its priorities and what it really wants to do in the area of safeguarding, there will always be frustration and failure. We have, sadly, seen a great deal of these over the past five years.

The law of the land wants to believe that everyone over the age of 18 is an adult and thus capable of making rational responsible decisions.  This assumption that all of us are completely rational and able, at all times, to discern and act in our own best interests is of course a dangerous myth.  It is not that we are permanently irrational in our thinking.  The problem is rather that each one of us is potentially, at any one moment, subject to any one of a whole variety of influences, pressures and even threats. For Christians we even find that the precious faculty we call our conscience is capable of being blown off course by external or even internal forces.

As an example of what I am talking about I want to imagine a hypothetical situation in an old peoples’ home. In charge is a power-obsessed woman who is anxious to run the home for as little money as possible.  This will get her into the good books of the owners whose only interest in the residents is that they all pay their fees on time. The power of the manager over her under-appreciated workers who do the day to day caring is total. The atmosphere is tense. The carers are daily aware of the short cuts that are forced on them to enable the extra profits to be made. There is strict control on how much time can be spent with each resident and how much food can be served up at mealtimes. Most of these carers are from overseas and so their immigration status is insecure.  The manager knows that her power over them is such that, if they are sacked by her for any reason, not only will they find it difficult to get another job without references, but their ability to remain in Britain is compromised. Needless to say the carers often have no savings as any excess money has been sent to their home countries.

In such a situation of fear, continuous threat and power abuse, how far can we say that the care worker has the capacity to make decisions or operate in accordance with their conscience?  The carer wants to make sure that the distressed elderly person has the attention they need or the alternative food to replace an indigestible meal.  We would say that such an act was from conscience or internal goodness. But, in performing this act of kindness, they face the wrath of the manager, if they are found out.  This tension between conscience and fear is at the root of real stress and may eventually be the cause of physical or mental breakdown.

It is not just in care-homes that such a scenario is possible.  It could happen in any work situation including an Anglican parish.  Many curates in their first posts live in a permanent state of stress for fear of upsetting their ‘training’ incumbent.  I place the word training in inverted commas, because from what I hear from my limited knowledge of the life of deacons, the period of training for curates is often regarded as a matter of sheer survival. 

In any work situation where managers, vicars or bosses are given the power to fire or wreck the careers of those under them, it should be possible for someone from outside  to come in as an external referee.  What needs to be identified are the dynamics of power in that situation.  Are employees already living and working in an environment of threat, fear or coercion?  If any of these dynamics are identifiable, then safeguards or check and balances should be put in place.  Why should anyone come under a situation of effective tyranny in the workplace?

One of the things available to us today is a far better understanding of the dynamics of power within institutions and even domestic situations.  We can now describe better with the language of various disciplines, including social psychology, what is taking place in a situation of conflict or dispute.  Two words added to a piece of 2015 legislation in the UK have empowered many women trapped in abusive relationships.   Those words, coercion and control, have allowed the law and the powers of the State to have a say when one party in a domestic relationship uses psychological controlling techniques on another.  In the past the only interventions by the legal system that could be made were where when actual physical violence was used against one party.  The new understanding of power in such relationship now extends to the use of psychological violence.  It is not just the sticks and stones that hurt; it is also words, threats and exercise of coercive power that do serious damage.  The law of the land now finally gets it.

This blog often discusses the existence of narcissistic dynamics within the Church and it is gratifying to find that, over the past ten years, the discourse using this terminology has grown enormously.   The value of having toxic narcissism discussed in so many new contexts is that people are faster in their understanding what might be going on when powerful leaders (or mini-tyrants) start to become intoxicated with their power.  The clear description of the process of narcissistic dynamics helps us to get a quick handle on many situations that perhaps baffled us in the past.  Understanding nearly always helps one party to demystify the situation they are faced with and regain some control over it.  Interestingly, one of the tasks that I can usefully do in my retirement, through the medium of this blog, is to talk through with an individual a power situation being described to me.  Then my task is to reframe it with  a fresh set of categories, which may include the language of narcissism.  The threatening Archdeacon can sometimes be interpreted in a way that his exercise of power can be seen to be closer to a childish tantrum than a dispassionate exercise of justice.  I refrain from giving examples here, but the simple act of reframing a situation with a new language can be enormously liberating for the victim.

When any of us encounter power dynamics in the Church, it is all too easy to surrender to that power and allow ourselves to be dis-empowered in the process.  A more subversive approach is to challenge that power, not by facing it head-on, but simply by understanding it better.  The dynamics may seem complex and hard to disentangle but sometimes this process is not as difficult as we think.   To tease out these deeper meanings within actual exercises of power within the Church is one of the things I am learning to do in my retirement.  Light can be shed on the abuses of power.  Understanding them, when they take place in the public arena or in the Church, is what I shall continue to do as long as they occur.  

One of the myths that is being peddled during the present Covid-19 crisis is that we are all in it together.  It is true that every section of UK society has been inconvenienced or worse.  The virus makes no distinction between rich and poor or even, it seems, between young and old.  And yet there is a sense in which the adage ‘we are all in it together’ is a falsehood.  Behind this slogan is a reality too uncomfortable for most of us to face.  What seems to be happening is that some are surviving far better than others.   Large numbers of people without secure housing or income are losing their safety nets of survival and are being threatened with their families by something close to destitution.

In my piece about the post Covid-19 Church, I made the point that it will be the new economic realities that will cause the greatest earthquakes on the life of the church in this country.  While I am no economist, I do read the financial pages of the newspaper with a reasonable amount of attention.  The anticipated falls in industrial output in this and every country make for sombre reading.  The effect on employment may be catastrophic.  It does not take a mathematical genius to see that if you take out, even for a short space of time, a quarter of a nation’s industrial output you destroy massive amounts of personal wealth as well as the tax revenues available to a government.  Much of this revenue in Britain is at present spent on the welfare state (including pensions).  Even if the country gets back to normal in six months, the effect of all that lost output will take a long time to repair.   At present the energy of the country is focused on the need to defeat the virus.  Everything else is on hold, including the planning of how we start to recover economically.  How does a country recover its economy and make it possible for ordinary citizens to continue to feed themselves and pay their bills and mortgages?  Meeting that expense in peace time will put a huge dent in the nation’s future prosperity.  Even if Universal Credit is quickly available for all who need it, will this cover all the necessary outgoings that most families have to meet each month?  Even if landlords are generous to tenants during the crisis period we are in at the moment, who is going to be responsible for those sums in the longer term?  The same question has to be asked about utility bills.  Will the companies be required to write off all debts of customers who cannot pay? 

There are many economic questions to be answered over the next months and years.  But, however those questions are answered, it is clear that many of Teresa May’s JAMs (just about managing) will tip over into real poverty.  I don’t remember the percentage of people who have absolutely no savings, but it is uncomfortably high.  Living from hand to mouth has always been the way of living which has been the only available method for large numbers of people.  They simply cannot afford the catastrophe of widespread unemployment that our country faces as the result of the virus.

If I can indulge in a bit of long distant memory on the topic of poverty, I could claim that when a child my family was poor by the standards of today.  We were poor in the sense that we never bought ‘stuff’ and most things we had were hand-me-downs or second-hand.  In society as a whole there was then in the 50s little in the way of credit to buy luxury items.    Although the expression ‘overdraft’ did enter my consciousness from quite an early age, there was none of the culture of leasing a brand-new car and all the other schemes calculated to keep many families today in the stranglehold of debt.

I have sometimes wondered what would happen if even a small percentage of the leased cars on the road were to be repossessed and returned to the lenders?  Even a ten per cent default will create a massive earthquake in the price of second-hand cars.  The availability of these leasing schemes would decline as the companies offering these schemes find they are losing money.  This would in turn seriously affect the new car market.  The same thing could happen to housing.  Mortgage companies can only afford to give a small holiday before they have to start to repossess homes.  Once again, homes will begin to flood the market and prices will start to drop.  Massive financial dislocation will again follow as some of the wealth accumulated over decades for secure retirements begins to evaporate, even for the wealthier in society.  The economic activity of this country is in some areas built on the precarious and risky roundabout of debt and leverage.  If the roundabout stops then everyone will realise that much of their wealth is based on fantasy. 

This blog piece is a thinking out-loud exercise.  We are facing a severe economic dislocation in society which may plunge many in our society in a terrible place of economic distress.  Some, a few, will have taken measures to protect themselves.  Some may even stand to make huge profits as they bet on the downward march of markets and currencies.  The majority, the vast majority, will be poorer.  Those already poor may know levels of need that will require huge levels of government intervention to enable even bare survival. 

One would like to think that the leadership of our country would help people to understand what could be around the corner for everyone.   I would like to think that those in government are already working out the huge rises in tax that will become necessary to stop the group we call JAMs from experiencing want and actual hunger.  It will require true leadership for a Prime Minister to tell people that, to keep this country going, there will have to be real sacrifice on behalf of all to deal with the future economic shocks that we will be experiencing, as the economic realities of the virus become clearer by the month. 

Where do Christians fit into all this?  I would suggest that we need to hear from the leaders of churches and faiths to help us all face some of the hard truths about the future which I am trying to explore.  The way forward is help all of us  to see that we there has to be a new mood of community awareness.  We all need to pull in the same direction to bring the whole country through the crisis.  During the war, every citizen was required to lend to the government, through the tax system, extra money.  This was to be returned in the form of post-war credits.  Money was eventually returned, but the recipient received only a fraction of the value of what had been lent.  Inflation had destroyed much of its purchasing power in the meantime.  It would be difficult for any government to force wealthier citizens to hand over assets for a national crisis as they did in the 1940s.  But some huge sacrificial effort is going to be needed if we are to overcome the crisis facing so many people in our society.  Things like conspicuous consumption will need to be regarded as anti-social and against the common good.  Sharing, recycling our ‘stuff’ and community activity will again be the new norm.  Acts that show awareness of all those living around us should be encouraged, just as they have begun to appear during the lock-down.  A more caring, more aware society could emerge from the present crisis and be carried into the future.  This future will be one full of economic challenges of the highest order.  We need dynamic and excellent leadership both from Church as well as State to make the radical shifts of attitude that I believe are going to be necessary.  The old Churchillian sentiments about ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ may have to be wheeled out once more.  Perhaps the whole country, in meeting the cost of sacrifice being asked of all, may become just a little bit more like the Kingdom that Jesus came to tell us about. 

It has been a difficult task, this Holy Week, holding together all the realities of the present moment.  In the background is the all-pervading reality of COVID-19 which continues to sweep its way through the homes and institutions of this country and around the world.   Then there are the victims of this pandemic, both those who suffer and those who die as its victims   These deaths often take place in sterile, lonely settings, with loved ones out of reach and human touch.   Somewhere, amid all this pain, we are also remembering Jesus in his suffering.  Although Jesus drew a certain level of comfort when members of his family gathered at the foot of the cross, for most of the time he faced his pain utterly alone.  Can we bring his story into our story?  Can we see something in the Passion story that gives hope and possible new understanding of the pandemic in the light of the Passion of Jesus?

This current blog may turn out to be a somewhat tortuous reflection as the two strands, the Passion of Jesus and the pandemic, whirl together in my mind.  To start this reflection, I should mention two news items which caught my attention over the past week with reference to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In the first report there is an account of a Christian University in the States, called Liberty University, calling back students to campus in the middle of the lock-down period.  The precise details of this story are subject to different versions.  Two reporters who were involved in researching this story have been issued with private arrest warrants by a much enraged Jerry Falwell, the University President.   The original story in the New York Times also suggested that there was an outbreak of the virus on the campus.  This is again disputed.  What is clear is that Falwell is a devoted supporter of Donald Trump.  Thus his public pronouncements on the pandemic have eerily echoed the message that was coming from the White House.  By recalling the students back to campus, Falwell seems to have been making a gesture of open support for Trump’s tendency, until recently, to downplay the effect of the virus as much as possible.

The second narrative in the news media involves certain orthodox Jewish communities of New York (and Israel) and the way that their isolation has made such groups hot spots for the virus.  Many ultra-orthodox Jewish communities give a high priority to preserving their separateness from the rest of the world.  Notions of purity and cleanness are very important to them.  Their self-definition will be found in the degree of success they achieve in creating a pure way of living by following the holy Torah as the pure will of God.  Part of the problem has been that the communities like this simply pay no attention to public announcements over lock downs or social distancing.  The newspapers they don’t read represent the outside world, from which they are trying to escape.  Every piece of information that reaches these groups has been filtered through their trusted rabbis and teachers. 

When we look for parallels between the ultra- Orthodox Jews and the staff and students at Liberty University, we can find a common theme in that both, in different ways, practise the idea of separation and purity.   The way that Christian fundamentalists are constantly opposing modernity and its fruits; liberalism, secularism and sexual plurality, is not so different from the closed Jewish groups who are determined to preserve their Torah purity in the face of secular America.  Many of us would want to argue with the relentless pursuits of purity as being the wrong answer to a very complex issue.  But when we go into the present dilemma faced by both Liberty University and the ultraorthodox Jewish communities in facing COVID-19, we find that it is not purity theology itself that is the problem.  What has created the dangerous situation that both groups (and those like them) find themselves in, are the structures of power and control that have been built up over tens, even hundreds of years.   

The word control describes in outline how any group successfully puts limits on the way its members are allowed to behave.  Any conservative group, whether political or religious, is in danger of being absorbed by the other groups around them.  Because of this threat to their identity, controls and strong prohibitions have to put in place to prevent this happening.  In my own mind I make a clear distinction between the mechanics of control, which are broadly similar across the groups, and the individual ideologies which are being protected.  Cults, religious groups of all kinds and extremist political parties will use very similar techniques to keep members on board.  Such control methods involve the use of power, soft or hard, to preserve the orthodoxy set out by the leadership.  ‘Soft’ power is a shorthand for the techniques of bribery and gentle mental persuasion, while ‘hard’ power may involve threats and even violence.  Leaders, religious or political, learn over time to maintain their power and control through a combination of techniques, both hard and soft.  The ideology that is preserved through this use of power is what is most visible to the outside.  What is really important, to my belief, is the subtle levers of power by which it is done.

A central theme of this blog is that of power and its abuse.  People are sometimes abused by the exercise of power.  In our two examples, I am not attacking the ideology of purity that is found in each of the groups, even though I strongly disagree with it.   What does need to be challenged are the way that religious leaders who, in the name of an ideology, even conclude that they are entitled to place other people in danger.   A shorthand way of describing what is going on at present is to say that some people are being bullied to death.  To bully is probably best defined as the exercise of power where a perpetrator stands to gain something and the victim nothing.  The perpetrator may achieve a momentary sense of importance.  Any need to feel such importance may well be linked to some deprivation in childhood.  Whatever the reason for bullies emerging in religious or political groups, they are sadly extremely common, even if the consequences are rarely fatal.  Power and control is offered to leaders as part of the ‘reward’ for the new responsibility and some use it to indulge a craving for importance as well as nurturing delusions of grandiosity and significance. That is dangerous.

It is against this background of leaders sometimes misusing power that we finally return to Jesus and his Passion.  While we often fail to spot toxic uses of power with our religious structures, we really have excuse for not understanding what Jesus thought about power.     It is not just he said about it – and there is quite a lot – but what he did about power.  The Passion story is a narrative from beginning to end which reveals how Jesus confronted power and bullies of all kinds.  His words to Pilate about power are significant.  ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been granted to you from above.’  Jesus accepts the power structures of Rome because they exist, not because they exemplified any virtue.  Pilate was a creature of the system.  If Pilate had been a free man, rather than one totally defined by his place within the tyrannical hierarchy of Rome, he might have been able to see a deeper power in Jesus, the power of God’s love.  The power of coercion and control was being pitted against this power of divine love.  At one level the bullying coercive power wins.  But the message of Jesus’ story is that there is in his powerlessness a greater unconquerable power.  The Easter message invites all of us to identify, not with the bullying powers that so often seem to win, but with this other power, the one that bursts out of the tomb on Easter Day. 

Jesus lived and died without ever using coercion with any individual.  His power, most clearly seen on the Cross, was one of example, invitation and encouragement.  In responding to that kind of call to discipleship, we should be not only the Easter People but also those who practise his powerlessness, the refusal to compromise with anything that seeks to dominate and control.

By Janet Fife

It was during the General Synod final debate on the Nicene Creed that I had a moment of enlightenment. The debate was notable for other things – I wrote a Mystery Worshipper column on it for Ship of Fools, and Sallie Bassham and I completed the Guardian cryptic crossword – but it was that one realisation that has proved significant in the development of my thinking and my faith over the 20 years since.

It was this:  the Creeds were written to define who was in and who was out.  They derive from periods of conflict in the Church’s history, when there were clashes over different understandings of doctrine.  It was thought necessary to define exactly what was correct and what was incorrect. In effect, the purpose was to exclude. And the result of being on the losing side of such a decision could be serious – excommunication, exile, or even death.  After the Council of Nicea condemned Arian teaching, the Emperor Constantine issued an edict that all of Arius’s writings be burned. Those who were found to have kept the writings were to be condemned to death.

Nothing so dramatic happened at the General Synod debate. We were asked to give final approval to the version of the NIcene (or, more properly, Niceno-Constantinopolitan) which now appears in Common Worship. We spent an unconscionable amount of time on the translation of the Greek preposition ek (flippin’ ek!, as one of my friends said). Another matter for debate was the clause recounting Jesus’ incarnation. The bishops had, ‘and was made man’. Many Synod members preferred ‘and was made human’, arguing that the phrase is a more accurate translation of the Greek and more inclusive of women and children. The bishops refused to budge and the masculinist, exclusive version stayed. The creed remained true to its divisive origins. When the vote came, I was one of only 12 clergy who voted against adopting the creed in this form – a stance of which I’m still proud.

I had always preferred the Apostles’ Creed, which is used in the liturgies for morning and evening prayer. It’s clearer, more concise, and more easily remembered. Until the Parish Communion movement made the eucharist the principal service of most churches every Sunday, it would have been the Apostles’ Creed that most people were familiar with. In Dorothy L. Sayers’ radio play The Man Born to be King, broadcast by the BBC during World War II, Sayers had Pilate’s wife recount the nightmare which resulted in her warning Pilate not to be involved in condemning Jesus:

‘…in all tongues and all voices…even the little children with their mothers….”suffered under Pontius Pilate…sub Pontio Pilatio…crucifie sous Ponce Pilate…gekreuzigt unter Pontius Pilatus”…your name, husband, your name continually – ‘he suffered under Pontius Pilate.’

Sayers could trust that the general audience of the BBC would know that the phrase came from a creed widely used in church services, and its meaning was easily understood. Nowadays, I doubt if even most churchgoing Anglicans would recognise the phrase as coming from the Apostles’ Creed.

We expect people to recite, every week, formulations such as the following:

…eternally begotten of the Father, God from God,

Light from Light, true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father…

Which is neither easily remembered nor easily understood. I wonder how many people, perhaps attending church to hear their banns read, have been put off Christianity by wording like this? How many regular churchgoers have their confidence in their faith dented because these words mean little to them? It’s no wonder people refer to religion as ‘mumbo jumbo’.

The fact that the creeds were developed to resolve theological disputes, rather than as simple statements of faith, has resulted in their omitting things that all Christians agree on:  God is love; Jesus was a good man who fed the hungry and healed people of physical and mental ills; the Holy Spirit is God’s breath within us, and helps us to face death with courage.

It’s significant that the Bible doesn’t present us with creeds. In fact, at key points of salvation history it takes care to give us more than one point of view.  We have two creation accounts; two contrasting approaches to judges and kingship; four gospels; letters of advice written to congregations by at least three apostles who didn’t always agree. It’s okay to believe, for instance, either that kings are divinely appointed or that having kings is a departure from God’s will. Much of the Bible’s teaching is in the form of narratives where we are left to draw our own conclusions. There was a time when I found this frustrating. Why, I wondered, hadn’t God just made a list of things we’re supposed to believe? It would have been so much simpler.

It would seem from reading the Bible that God is rather less interested in what we believe than in how we behave and what our motives and attitudes are. Its most authoritative teaching – the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes – are not a catalogue of dogmas. Rather, they tell us what our priorities should be and what God looks for in our hearts.  In the parable of the sheep and the goats and in Mat. 7:21-23,  among other passages, Jesus shows us that it’s our treatment of other people, rather than our grasp of sound doctrine, which determines whether we are saved or lost. Even those who appear to be close to God and have an effective ministry may never have known God at all or done God’s will.

Though I no longer think that reciting a creed ought to be part of every church service, their occasional and creative use can be helpful in reminding us what we believe. This, by Doug Gay, is especially appropriate as we approach Easter:

We Believe in Life.

We believe in the God of Life

The world maker, the star lighter,

The sun shiner, the beauty maker;

Provoking evolution from nothing but words of love.

We believe in life.

We believe in the risen Jesus,

The cross bearer, the tomb raider,

The hell-harrower, the death defier;

Embracing resurrection as the first-born from death.

We believe in life.

We believe in the Easter Spirit,

The life-giver, the breath bringer,

The body lover, the Church birther,

Enabling communion with Jesus the Living One.

We believe in life.

We believe in the God of Life,

World-maker, cross-bearer, life-giver

Trinity of hope leading creation to its liberation.

We believe in God.

On Friday 3 April the Titus Trust has released a statement following a settlement with three survivors of John Smyth.  The blog has frequently written about the case of John Smyth and his abusive behaviour and this is the subject of a new review by Keith Makin.

I do not propose to go back over all the material about John Smyth as the interested reader can find all the details of the case in earlier blogs on this site and elsewhere.  What I wish to write about is the distorted manner in which the Trustees have presented their perspective on the case.  The full text of their statement and Andrew Graystone’s response can be found on Thinking Anglicans website.  https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/titus-trust-john-smyth-and-jonathan-fletcher/#comments

After a platitudinous expression of regret, the Trustees go on to speak of the ‘emergence of details’ about the abuse by John Smyth and Jonathan Fletcher.  To speak in this generalised way without any date affixed is a misleading fudge.  Some of the Trustees conceivably may not have known about the scandal before 2012 when the first survivor made a formal complaint.  It is absolutely certain that others in the group would have known of Smyth’s activities for decades before that.  The Trustees have always been chosen from a fairly small network of churchmen and women clustered around St Helen’s Bishopsgate, St Ebbe’s Oxford, the Round Church in Cambridge and All Souls Langham Place.  As far as those of us outside this group, now called ReNew Constituency, can tell, information would have flowed freely within this network, particularly among the more senior members.  The original report written about Smyth and published confidentially in 1982, did, we know, circulate among many of the prominent members. The initials of senior figures in the network who led the enquiry were named within the document.  Although we do not now know exactly who knew what and when, large sums of money were raised and spent to keep Smyth in Africa for the 35+ years before his death.  It is hard to see how tens of thousands of pounds were spent without some information being shared among the leaders of what was then the closely entwined Church Society and REFORM.  I am thus forced to conclude that this absence of a date may well be a ploy that is meant to confuse the reader.  It allows him/her to believe that information about John Smyth’s crimes was unknown when in fact for some this was old information that had been circulating around among the leaders of these groups for a very long time.

The second apparent attempt to manipulate the truth is a reference to work done by the Titus Trustees and thirtyone:eight, the independent child protection organisation.  This group has a good reputation for understanding the issues around abuse.  No doubt the training given was valuable to the Trustees.  But what are we to make of the sentence including the words ‘receiving training in pastoral care and supporting survivors of abuse’?  The natural implication of the sentence is that the Titus Trustees went out to search for Smyth victims and offer them support and pastoral care.  My contacts with one or two of these survivors tells me that there is no evidence that this was done.  If pastoral care was not shown to any of these victims, to whom was the pastoral care to be shown?  The recently concluded financial settlement was not undertaken with any pastoral dimension in evidence.  Indeed, the three survivors mentioned in the statement have had to fight over several years.  Titus has ended up spending a fortune on lawyers, far exceeding anything paid to survivors. The evidence for huge expenditure on legal fees is found in their published accounts as a registered charity.

A third area of concern over the Titus statement concerns the reference to an ‘internal cultural review’.    It then impressively refers to a future ‘independent Cultural Review’.  The traditional secrecy of the Titus Trustees over the years, and, before them, the Iwerne Trustees, does not bode well for such a cultural examination.  Are they going to speak to the abused survivors to find what they think of the culture, past and present?  Are they going to subject to examination the highly contentious theology used by John Smyth to justify pain and violence as being part of Christian discipleship?  I have read some of the source documents used by Smyth and frankly they are toxic, especially when used by a sociopathic Christian leader.  A proper ‘cultural review’ would be one that was prepared to challenge this theology used by Smyth.  What is to stop the poison of Smyth’s ideas appearing again unless they are properly understood?  Every part of the network of interconnected groups, churches and individuals that interact and are linked to the Titus Trustees need also to be part of such a process.  The convenient myth that each part of the ReNew constituency is independent of the other parts, works well when wishing to avoid responsibility for dreadful cover-ups over the decades.  The name of Jonathan Fletcher was mentioned in the statement, but his abusive story is being relegated to a quite separate enquiry.  As far as I can determine all the parts of the ReNew network adhere to the same harsh Calvinistic fundamentalism.  Each part has to retain its place in the network by espousing the same ‘sound’ theology that calls itself orthodox Anglicanism.

The statement of the Titus Trustees ends by inviting those who have been part of their camps to comment and contribute to the forthcoming Cultural Review.  What planet are they living on?  Having fought an aggressive legal battle against three Smyth survivors to lessen financial liability, do Titus really expect others to come forward to be part of a safeguarding process run by them?  Everything about this statement, including its timing in the middle of the pandemic, reeks of bad faith.   The interested reader should read the comments by Andrew Graystone which are also to be found on the Thinking Anglicans website.  We looked for clarity and honesty, the prelude to a new beginning.  Instead we find dishonesty, fudge and manipulation of the truth.  With Andrew, I call for the ‘Titus Trust to cease it activities immediately, and to disband.’  This statement is a disgrace and takes us no closer to a position of truth and justice.

This information has been sent to me by an anonymous but trusted source. It reveals further how truth was suppressed and distorted within this network. It points to a further link which I have not made in my piece -the link between Emmanuel Wimbledon, Jonathan Fletcher’s base and the Iwerne network.

For decades the files detailing Smyth’s abuse were stored in Giles Rawlinson’s attic. Giles was a senior lay leader at Emmanuel – effectively Jonathan Fletcher’s right hand man for decades. The man who refused to hand documents over to police until forced to remained a trustee of Titus Trust and was able to influence decisions for years after Iwerne rebranded itself as Titus Trust. His leadership of Cross Links also gave him a wide influence. It is striking that the safe space for hiding evidence about Smyth was felt to be an Emmanuel church attic

I have tried very hard on this blog to keep away from the subject of the coronavirus which is currently playing such a large part in our lives.  But try as I may, the topic seems to creep in everywhere.  We are even beginning to forget the routines we had before the COVID-19 first appeared.  All our plans for the summer are on hold.  In my case I am in the process of cancelling my plans to attend three conferences, a gathering with college friends and a trip to see family in Ireland.  Life has drastically changed.  But, compared to those who are actually sick, stranded on a cruise liner on the other side of the world, in a hostel in India with no money, I feel very fortunate.  I am safely at home with my wife, with other family not far away.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the world will never be the same after this pandemic of 2020.  The ways it will change will be fully charted by historians in the future.  Some of the changes will be social but there will be many consequences emerging from the appalling economic damage that is being inflicted on all the advanced societies of both East and West.  The economic effects of a possible full-blown slump on our society will reach into every aspect of our lives.  With falling stock-markets comes decreased wealth in society as a whole.  Lack of wealth involves less money being spent, less trade and higher unemployment.  All these point to greater poverty in the future.  With poverty comes the possibility of greater destitution and want among the least fortunate.

The Church will be caught up in the negative economic maelstrom like every other institution.  The gloomy part of this blog post foresees tremendous financial problems for the Church in the next ten to twenty years.  Since the beginning of the century, one has felt that the Church of England has been like a ‘zombie’ company.   The income/expenditure balance in the dioceses are very finely tuned.  When a serious economic shock comes along, the zombie company is the one that is revealed to have been trading insolvent for some time.  That is the situation we seem to have with the Church of England.  Many, if not most, of the dioceses have been in, or close to, a deficit situation. The central body managing the considerable resources of the Church Commissioners appears to be relatively healthy, even though its capital assets will have recently shrunk in value as for everyone else.  The Commissioners are however not responsible for paying for the day to day expenses of the dioceses and parishes.  Most of the Commissioners’ money is earmarked for national church bodies, clergy pensions, cathedrals and the bishops. The 44 dioceses raise most of their money from the quota paid by the parishes.  This money is then used to pay the clergy and their housing and pension costs.  In all, the yearly average ‘cost’ of each stipendiary clergyperson is £60 –£65,000.   The problem has been that some parishes around the country for some time have been unwilling/unable to pay the quota that has been requested of them to pay.  In some cases, they are under the impression that if they don’t pay, it will be made up for by central funds.  The best that the Commissioners have been able to do is sometimes to meet diocesan deficits with loans.  In certain cases, dioceses have been reduced to desperate measures like selling capital assets or keeping posts unfilled for long periods.  To summarise, the financial state of many English dioceses has been fragile for a number of years.  It is possible that, that because of the current financial crisis, the entire parish system may be about to fall apart.  The threat of insolvency hanging over many dioceses may be impossible to avert.  When there is no money to pay the clergy, the parish system breaks down completely.  This will not happen overnight, but it could become a reality over a ten to twenty year time frame.   

I have been painting a grim prognosis for the Church of England in view of the current economic shock to our country being caused by the pandemic.  When we move away from falling stock markets and rising unemployment to other aspect of the pandemic, I do see some signs of hope for the Church.  One of the most hopeful aspects of the current shut-down has been the flowering of good neighbourly behaviour in many communities.  Normal British reservation has given way to expressions of genuine neighbourly concern.   Church people have always been at the forefront of Good Neighbour schemes and now that this spirit is active and flourishing throughout society, it could be the future role of church people to keep that flame alive permanently.  It should not take a national crisis to alert people to the need to care for isolated neighbours.  We can however hope that, as a nation, this crisis has made us a little kinder and more considerate to others.

The second cause for hope is being found paradoxically in the midst of the fact that all our church buildings have been temporarily closed.  Social isolation has already created, in society generally, a new readiness to experiment with online communication with others. In my family we are starting to use Skype and Zoom and there is an Apple programme which enables my wife to play board games with our 4 year-old granddaughter in Belfast.   This technology seems to be catching on among Christians as they come to terms with their closed buildings.  A lot of our older church people will protest and say that this technology is not for them, but I can see that streaming church services into the home is something people will become more and more accustomed to and eventually accept. One really positive advantage is that it may have the effect of raising the quality of worship and teaching.  The online congregation have the option to switch off!   Also, there would be needed in a possible post-parish situation, something to supplement this domestic form of worship.  There could be large gatherings in a local town centre, perhaps the same place where people go for a supermarket shop.  I would envisage that this would provide the opportunity to sing together, to pray and to share food with fellow Christians, perhaps monthly.  I know that some people are frightened by large gatherings of Christians and they shrink from what they fear may become revivalist events.  I see no reason for this to be an obstacle.  Those who would be authorised to lead these large gatherings and area worship would need to be sensitive to the variety of spiritual needs that are represented among the people present.  Not everyone wants the culture of Holy Trinity Brompton, particularly in the more rural areas of the country.

In a phone call with a self-isolating clergyman, I learnt that in a multi-parish benefice in the Salisbury diocese, more people had tuned into a virtual service via Zoom than had ever appeared in the flesh for a similar event.  A lot of experimental work will have to be done.  But let us hope that the post-virus, possibly post-parish Church will never need to descend to doom and gloom.  The churches will change.  They may change radically, but somehow I am hopeful that people will find new ways to practise their faith in a way that is economically affordable and spiritually valuable.  This will enable Christians to play a full part and serve a society as it tries to recover from the current economic devastation that threatens all our lives. 

I must have written several times about bizarre events within American life under President Trump.  The most recent example of the current craziness washing over much of American society are the daily outpourings from the White House on the topic of the coronavirus. Trump himself tells the world about the progress of the ‘fight’ against the coronavirus and sometimes what he says appears to be based on fantasy and hope rather than reality. Alongside him, for these briefings, Trump has included an international expert on infectious diseases, Dr Anthony Fauci.  While wanting to have such scientific expertise around him, Trump has also been subtly undermining Fauci’s work by failing to stamp out some outrageous conspiracy theories directed against the doctor.   Fauci apparently once said, in an email, something favourable about Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State under Obama.  This, in the minds of the right-wing conspiracy theorists, who support Trump, renders him a stooge of the Democratic Party bent on destroying Trump politically.  In a single moment, all Dr Fauci’s expertise is devalued and trashed and his motivation for urging the American public to take the virus seriously is called into question.  One person could stop the dangerous onward march of these irrational conspiracy ideas.  That person is the President himself.  He, however, has no apparent desire to see the present coronavirus crisis as anything other than part of a war against his political opponents.  The claims of truth and scientific rationality can be sacrificed if that gives Trump political advantage.

The wild and unsubstantiated claims about the coronavirus that circulate currently in America are not just irritating; they are often profoundly dangerous.  Those who try to direct the country’s policy in helping victims, as well as leading the research to find vaccines and treatment, must be deeply frustrated by all the irrationality and incoherent management that is coming from the top.  The problem about any ideas that originate in irrationality is that they cannot ever be properly debated.    A person who thinks with his ‘gut’ as Trump does, is never going to be amenable to a calm consideration of scientific evidence and factual material.  Reason and unreason have very little to say to each other. 

Where does Trump’s dangerous irrationality come from?  It seems to come from two main sources.  The first source may be attributed to Trump’s own personality.  We have spoken before about the temperament of an individual like Trump who appears to suffer from full blown malignant narcissism.  When somebody suffers from such a pathology, they will have created a world inside their head that will automatically reject all ideas, people and thoughts that challenge their need to satisfy an overwhelming narcissistic hunger.  There is, inside the mind of such a sufferer, an insatiable appetite which demands to receive flattery, soothing and gratification at every opportunity.  So, to understand the lack of rational discourse that afflicts the Trump administration, we can in the first place point to his extraordinarily distorted and corrupted narcissistic thinking.

While an individual like Trump can exist in a delusional bubble completely of his own making, it is easier for him if his fantasy thinking is shared by others around him.  Trump of course has his political allies, especially those who see him as a means to enhance their wealth.  New laws and tax breaks can all be manipulated to favour the business interests of the very wealthy who are close to a compliant President.  Such individuals can always be relied upon to pander to gratify Trump’s narcissistic needs.  But there is a further larger group who remain steadfastly loyal to Trump, the American Christian Right.  Trump has always been able to count on this significant section of the population, white self-styled evangelical Christians.  They see his presidency as furthering their anti-abortion, anti-LGTB priorities.  These play an extraordinarily significant part in their deliberations and rhetoric.  To summarise these priorities, the conservative Christian right hanker after a more Christian ‘biblical’ society after Rushdoony.  They believe that Trump is, by promoting their interests, helping them to achieve this aim.  The way that traditional Christian conservative causes about abortion and LGTB form part of this agenda is not our concern here. These topics are well explored elsewhere.  What concerns us here is the way that irrationality has been allowed to flourish over the coronavirus struggle.  What happens in the States in this area matters to the whole world.  If the world economy and people’s lives are being undermined by crackpot Christian ideas, that matters a great deal.  Christian irrationality should not be allowed to creep into the mainstream of society and politics to threaten us all.

It is not too great a generalisation to say that a large segment of American Protestant Christianity has always had a problem with pure science and the technology that has grown out of it.  In Britain in the 19^th century, we too had fierce resisters to the implications of Darwin’s ideas concerning evolution.  Many Christians defended the strict notion that the world was created in six 24 hour days.  But by the end of the 19^th century most of these ultraconservatives in Britain had retreated to the margins of society and were not generally found in the denominational churches.  Among many American Christians, by contrast, the literal reading of Genesis is a widely held notion.  Typically, this is translated into antipathy and irrational hostility towards science and scientists.   When such hostility is projected on to doctors and scientists working to find a way forward with the coronavirus, such a belief system can be the cause for people dying unnecessarily.  The horror of our world collapsing into an economic depression, such as we witnessed in the 30s, is also too awful to contemplate

Religious irrationalism, whether in the States or elsewhere, has the power to further exacerbate the coronavirus epidemic.  Our first example from the States is to be found in the words of a megachurch leader, Guilermo Maldonaldo, based in Florida.  He called a meeting on March 15 and insisted that all his flock be there in person.  He asked the question.  ‘Do you think that God would bring his people to his house to be contagious (sic) with the virus?  Of course not.’  Guildremo, according to his website, is due to be present in London for a rally in June.  We expect it will be the virus that causes this visit to be postponed.  Even if there was no ban on such a mass gathering as he was planning to hold, we might hope that the Home Office might decide that allowing Guildremo to enter the country was not in the public interest.

A second evangelist Rodney Howard Browne, again based in Florida, has ridiculed members concerned about the virus by calling them ‘pansies’.  As an antidote he has handed out anointed handkerchiefs which he believes will protect them from the disease and the fear that may accompany it.

It is a matter of deep irony that one of the first people to die from coronavirus in Virginia was a Christian pastor, Landon Spradlin. He had described the pandemic as ‘mass hysteria’.  Spradlin had returned prematurely from a preaching trip to New Orleans after becoming ill.  In each of these three examples there is a dangerous juxtaposition between faith and irrationality.   The word dangerous needs to be emphasised again and again.  As long as the Trump government is infiltrated by this kind of irrational thinking promoted by ‘orthodox’ American Christian leaders, the world and its economies are in severe peril. 

Irrationality and faith are unhappy bedfellows.  I have pointed my readers to three examples among Christian Americans but there are many others.  When one believes that faith takes precedence over everything else, even rationality, we have a toxic, dangerous situation.  Like many conservative beliefs, the precedence of faith is a principle which does make some sense within a Christian worldview.  But it needs to be combined with wisdom, with nuance rather than as an all-conquering principle of a Christian attitude.  Above all, faith must never be the prelude to a dangerous irrationality which can swamp the minds of Christian believers as it appears to be doing in America.  No belief system can ever be allowed to endanger, even destroy, others simply because it never exercised the spirit of caution and care.

(Another non-virus story)

In the last blog post I explained how an encounter on a train, travelling across Europe in 1964, created significant changes in my life.  It led to doors opening and enabled study opportunities which went on with some energy until the mid-80s.  From around 1984 my focus for study shifted from my interests in the early Church’s art and liturgy to my current interest in healing and power and the way these dynamics are experienced within church communities.

I described in the previous blog how I received a travelling scholarship to study the Orthodox Church in Greece during the academic year 67/68.  In all, I was away for ten months and the time away included visits to Israel, Bulgaria and Romania.  It may sound like a long holiday but there were times of hardship and considerable stress.  Part of the problem was that Greece was going through a dark period politically with the arrival of the Colonels’ regime in April 1967.  The Orthodox Church was divided over whether or not it should support this ultra-right administration.  The more interesting churchmen and women could see that it was rooted in a bombastic crude nationalism.  The problem for the opposition was that jobs were on the line for those who spoke out.  More threatening than that was the prospect of imprisonment and torture.  Many people were afraid and this fear meant that meeting people was a lot harder for me than it should have been.

My main academic study was done in libraries in Salonika and Athens.  These were two places of large populations and thus the political oppression was all the stronger.  The arrival of spring in March 1968 allowed me the luxury of leaving the cities to travel in the provinces.  After a visit to the extreme north west to visit a small town called Kavalla near the Albanian border, blessed with many painted churches, I set off for Crete.  My expedition to Crete was the first time when I felt the political oppression a lot less keenly.  Crete had managed to keep the Colonels at a certain distance.  It was difficult for the central government to pretend that there was a potential communist conspiracy in Crete as they did in the mainland cities.  Communists had never gained a foothold on the island, even during the war.  Another great asset which helped me along in Crete was the memory of British involvement in the Second War.  Less than twenty-five years before my visit, British officers, supported by parachute drops and gold sovereigns, encouraged an effective resistance movement.  As an Englishman I could draw on the considerable goodwill which still then existed for all citizens of my country.  We were, in those days, not a common sight, especially out of season in the weeks leading up to Easter.

My normal pattern of operation was to call on a local bishop and ask for recommendations for whom I should visit.  I carried a formal letter of introduction from Archbishop Michael Ramsey. This worked well in Crete because no one seemed to be afraid of associating with me, a foreigner.  The bishop I called on in Heraklion recommended two parish priests and a monastery in Western Crete.  I consulted the map to decide on my exact route.  At the extreme west of the island there are two pointed pieces of land pointing north.  One promised to be a good walk so I travelled to the nearest village so that I could find somewhere to stay and attempt to walk north as far as I could along this strip of land.  At some point I visited the local café and chatted with the men there.  Among the locals drinking coffee there was a young man called Nikos Giannakakis, then aged 28.  We talked together and I discovered that his job was as a painter of churches and icons in the neo-Cretan Byzantine style.   After describing his work to me (in spite of his lack of English and my poor Greek) he promised to show me the current church he was working on in Chania. This meeting took place a few days later and I was an instant admirer of his work, both the portable icons and painted church walls.

When I got back to England, I kept up a correspondence with Nikos.  I publicised his work in the magazine Eastern Churches Review, but no one seemed to be interested in commissioning anything from him.  It took me five years before I was able to help him find work beyond the frontiers of Greece.  The background of how I came to find myself in Calabria (the ‘foot’ of Italy), among Greek Catholics of Albanian extraction, needs a word of explanation.

In 1969 the organisation Amnesty International wanted to organise a report on house arrest in Greece under the Colonels.  After some searching they found me.  My command of the language was still weak but after a crash exposure to Amnesty files at their then headquarters in Farringdon, I was sent off to do this piece of field work.  The whole enterprise was probably flawed from the start and I found at the airport that my name was on the card index of banned people.  I had flown in from Rome on a student charter flight and so I was sent back to the same place.*  At the age of 23, I possessed a considerable amount of social cheek, and so, armed with this, I set off to find the Greek College in Rome where I introduced myself (in Greek) to staff and students.  (Modern Greek was compulsory for all students then studying at the college) I am not sure what I expected to happen, but they invited me to stay for a celebration of St Peter (it was June 29^th).  Amnesty had invited me ‘not to hurry home’ and when one of the members of staff suggested I could profitably visit their Greek Catholic diocese in Calabria, I was keen to follow it up.  I visited these dioceses (there is one in Sicily) three times altogether and wrote a couple of articles to explain the peculiarities of Greek Catholicism in rural Italy. This tolerated married clergy, even in the early 70s.  It was one of these villages, Santa Sofia d’Epiro that, in 1973, was looking for an artist to paint their church in the Byzantine style. I knew just the person to recommend, my friend Nikos from Chania in Crete.

Nikos visited Calabria six times in the 70s as one village after another employed his services to decorate and beautify their churches.  He had, initially, considerable difficulty obtaining a passport but eventually the entire family made their home in the villages for the summer months.  Nikos’ two young boys picked up grammatical Italian with great ease, something that was to help them enormously later in their education.  Italian was the language that the local children used to communicate with outsiders and was learnt at school.  At home they would speak a dialect of Albanian.  Both Nikos’s sons ended up becoming medical doctors but trained in Italy.  One now teaches medicine to Italians. Their exposure to proper Italian as children though their father’s work, had equipped them to become part of a larger world than Crete.  I, unknowingly, had played a part in making this possible. 

It was Nikos himself, now 80, who posted the picture of Santa Sofia d’Epiro (above) on Facebook last Sunday and this picture sent a shock through the system.  It was through those two interconnected chance encounters, first with the Toynbee sisters and then with Nikos himself, that new realities were created. First we have two Italian trained doctors, a career opportunity for Nikos and a series of painted churches in Calabria.  It was a shock but a happy shock to be reminded how providence had put me in situations and places that had caused something new to happen both for me and for others.

*A local Italian branch of Amnesty was set up in Rome soon after my abortive visit to Greece. I take no personal credit for this initiative but the founding of the branch was directly connected in a complicated way to my brief time in Rome. Over the decades Amnesty volunteers from Italy have played a full part in helping to promote the cause of political prisoners around the world

At a time when the coronavirus is occupying our attentions, thoughts and prayers, it seems right to turn away completely from the topic.  As a regular blogger, I don’t want to run out of coherent things to say about the present crisis when it perhaps has barely begun.  Much more may need to be said later in the unfolding drama.  Today, for a complete change, I want to share with you a personal story, drawing from my own past. It is deliberately nothing whatever to do with the current crisis. It may, however, remind readers of their own experiences of encounters with strangers which have in some way been blessed.  My story is an interconnecting narrative with two parts.  Each section of the story has a common theme; the narrative depends on a random meeting with complete strangers. My story took place over fifty years ago.  Both of the encounters I describe turned out to have enormous, even life-changing significance in my life.  In the second meeting it was the life of the other person that was changed even more.

The story that I want to recount, begins with my looking at a picture posted on Facebook as recently as last Sunday.  It was a photograph of a church in a small village in a remote area of Southern Italy.  I cannot explain at this juncture why this picture of a church in the Greek Catholic tradition, painted internally by an artist from Crete, should have triggered a powerful reaction in me.  You will have to wait until the end of both my narratives to understand the significance of the picture and what it represents.

The first of my stories of chance encounters took place in May 1964 in the railway station at Calais port.   A boat train had brought me from Victoria station to Folkestone docks.  A boat then transported passengers to Calais to connect with various trains on their way to different European destinations.  I was to catch the train that would take me to Rome.  There I was to stay with a relative by marriage, married to an Italian.   This followed my leaving school three months earlier and after this I had filled some time working as a hospital porter.  My plans for Italy were vague but the aim was to fill up a chunk of time I had before going to Oxford in the October to begin my study of theology.  As I got into the carriage, I was greeted by two ladies in their late sixties.  Both were also travelling to Rome.  As the journey was to take the best part of thirty hours, we swapped life stories.  It turned out that my travelling companions were two very distinguished retired academics who were sisters and who lived in Oxford.   The elder of the two was Jocelyn Toynbee, a retired professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge.   Both the women were going to be staying at the British School of Archaeology in Rome.  They were going to be visiting a number of early Christian sites and I would be welcome to join them if I were able.  I knew then virtually nothing about early Christian archaeology, but with their guidance, it did not take long to become an enthusiast for ancient mosaics, churches and catacombs of which Rome has a wondrous abundance.  The highlight was the opportunity to descend under St Peter to view the simple tomb which encloses what are believed to be St Peter’s bones.  The Toynbee sisters returned home after three weeks but I was later invited to see them for tea at their home, having begun my course at Keble College.  At some point in my second year I discovered that, as part of my final exams, I could take a special paper in early Christian archaeology.  Jocelyn was, of course, there to act as my supervisor.  I sometimes found her style of teaching above me and more suitable for a graduate student. Once I had to protest once that a article in German she had recommended was completely incomprehensible to me.  But the mere fact of doing this somewhat esoteric course opened up doors for a lifetime interest as well as, for a time, the opportunity to travel.

In the first instance, my local education authority, Kent County Council, gave me a grant to make a trip to Italy to view the various ancient sites that were part of my undergraduate study.  I was living in the long-forgotten days when such beneficence still existed.  Thus in 1966 I was able to return to Rome as well as visit places like Ravenna and Grado in northern Italy.  Also, I was, in the following year, able to apply for and receive a scholarship administered by the Church’s Council for Foreign Relations to study and stay in Greece for up to a year.  This turned out to be a 10-month period abroad and I began it soon after my graduation.  The aim of the scholarship was to become familiar with the Greek Orthodox church and its monastic life.  My special focus was to be on Byzantine Christian art and its links with the liturgy.  The studies I undertook in Greece were eventually led to my studying for a second degree, a B. Litt., also at Oxford.   It was then that I was able to pull together my interest in liturgy and reflect on the way that early Christian art and architecture interconnects with the act of worship.  Traces of this interest remain and as recently as 2013 I was invited to give a talk in Crete to a group of contemporary icon painters.

The meeting with two women on a train journey in 1964 thus led to an amazing sequence of events which have greatly enriched my personal life and my ministry.  My interest has not profited the academic world in these areas, since, apart from a number of travel articles, I was only ever able to publish a single paper for an academic journal.  Nevertheless my passion for Orthodox iconography and the way that the entire early Christian and Byzantine art tradition has fed my soul is something that I am extremely grateful for.  In remembering that encounter long ago, I have to ask the question was it somehow meant?  Was there some kind of providence at work?  We cannot answer that question, but I am still moved to ask it.

In the next part of this reflection I shall continue with the explanation of how a small Church in Calabria came to be an important part of my personal story.  It is also part of the story of the artist who decorated it and how our lives intersected long ago in a small village in Crete.  There was a meeting; lives were changed for ever and there are physical monuments in Calabria to celebrate this chance, maybe providential, encounter.

To be continued……..