As I transition to a new job after 15 years in the same organisation, it's good to reflect on key moments. One such moment was a cup of coffee with a police officer. It was a very long cuppa.
I had been presenting on soft systems methodology to a group of local authority and health staff. Their job was to establish the health needs of the communities around Northampton in a Joint Needs evaluation. They were animatedly discussing the implications of the data that they had to hand. My presentation was, in essence, that the data was potentially junk, out of date and inaccurate, and to gain a real understanding of the needs of the population, one needed to 'ground truth' the data, by checking that the data matched the reality on the ground. Let's say, my message didn't go down well, and I wasn't invited back to do more work. But, in the room was a senior police officer, and after the meeting he asked to have a cup of coffee with me. I was more than happy, and it was amusing to meet him a few days later on campus and accompany him to the restaurant which all the students side-eying a police officer in full fig. He was Superintendent Richard James, it was sometime in 2010, and what I relay now is my recollection of how things panned out. I am sure he will be graceful if I have missed out vital elements in my story. Richard was a senior police officer with command of a substantial patch of Northamptonshire Police's territory. It was a couple of years after the major economic crash and austerity economics was trashing the public sector. Richard was being tasked to reduce his workforce by 20% whilst improving his performance outcomes. He also had a few community issues on his hands, and his initial ask was simple 'how do we do community engagement better'? We agreed to collaborate for a bit, and I conducted a rapid evaluation of one neighbourhood team. I interviewed a slice of the team, from the Inspector down through sergeants, to police officers, to Police and Community Support Officers (PCSOs) and members of the neighbourhood. It was very clear that what Inspectors understood to be the case was very different from what PCSOs and community members experienced. It was the difference between statistics and the lived experience. Across the whole force, resourcing and strategic decisions were being made on the basis of very sparse and biased data sets, and did not match up with the operating conditions on the street. This is very common, and reminds me of my environmental management consulting days where pollution was occurring because management thought one thing was happening and operators knew that what they were doing was the wrong thing. In a 'one, two, skip a few' style, I have to miss out tonnes of detail, but 13 years later, one Masters degree, a PhD and over 14 projects together, Richard and I are still offering each other cups of coffee, and are good friends, despite his love of 80s hair rock. I was teaching on the BA in Social & Community Development, and one of my students joined me on the project for work experience. We worked with PCSOs and police officers to explore what PCSOs were doing really well in reducing crime in their neighbourhoods, what went wrong, and what was preventing them doing their jobs. We didn't use any management consulting tools, we just worked with them to help them explain what their lived experience was like. We then devised a training programme with them, and wrote a little handbook called Locally Identified Solutions and Practices (LISP), which was then rolled out to all the neighbourhood teams. They were just told, here's a process, find something to practice on, a problem that you have found challenging, and use this book, Richard and myself, to try and do something different. Amy, the student, went on after graduation to a high powered fast track NHS career). We let the PCSOs get on with their day job, and then researched with them how the implementation went. We didn't interfere or create the usual implementation communication fuss. We were just interested in how they would cope with the new way of doing part of their day job. They did marvellously, and where appropriate found some interesting situations in which a new way of doing neighbourhood policing could be done. Their biggest problem was not being allowed to stick with an engagement long enough. The short-term policing time frame meant that if crime figures dipped very slightly, it was deemed a success, and they were abstracted to another locality. Soon enough, the crime reports bounced back. The whole initiative got snarled up in a major centrally funded transformation project that was focused on big structural changes, so it didn’t really gain momentum. I met a PCSO from that time the other day and she said that she is still using the techniques we developed, but just doesn’t call it LISP. Richard left that force, and we did a number of projects as pilots in that other force, bruising our knees on the pavement, and getting frustrated at the challenges of small scale organisational change. The whole infrastructure and culture of policing was not really fit for nuanced and detailed work at the street level, and progress founder every time there was a change of personnel. In all of the projects we did at that time, we did not complete a 40 week cycle with the same people that we started a project with. Nevertheless, we, and our implementation coaches (including Brendan O’Brien, Dave Spencer, Paul Halstead and Steve Carr) achieved some amazing work, helping the police force to really embed the needs, aspirations and energy of the community into neighbourhood policing. Incidentally, Steve travelled from Cardiff to west Yorkshire to join in with one of our projects. He loved it so much, he brought his police transformation expertise to the team!). Richard and I have both completed high level research degrees with this work, and we are pretty certain that we know what works and why. Richard runs his own business on the back of that experience, and I have moved out of the teaching side of academia into a social enterprise that does management consulting. It’s been huge fun, we have met some mazing people, we have moaned at each other over cups of coffee in random places around the UK. Above all, we have done a good thing.
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Today is my last day with the University of Northampton 05 October 2023.
When I arrived in May 2008, I was sheltering from a storm. The economic crash that had been building since 2006 peaked in the summer of 2008, just as I was selling two houses in Scotland and moving the whole family to England. I has been applying for a number of jobs, but when I went for interview at the University of Northampton, my biggest question for my interview panel was to be ‘why does UON want a senior lecturer in social enterprise?’. As I walked into the interview room, the question was already answered in the form of Wray Irwin, formerly head of Social Enterprise East Midlands, with whom I had already worked for over 4 years! I found myself immediately on a steep learning curve of developing degree validation paperwork, as I developed and saw undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in social entrepreneurship through to fruition. All that was needed was to tell the world that we had a handful of new degrees to sell. But the marketing of the university was generic, and most people had not heard of social entrepreneurship as a subject, let alone a potential future career. I also soon found myself in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, a place that had been no more than a fuzzy picture on the TV as single protestor faced down the tanks of the mighty state. As I stood there, I was expected to find out about the wonderful new movement of social enterprises in China. My visit showed me that China had already its own long history of social enterprises, that worked as ‘total economies’ educating the workers families, feeding them, providing health care and long term employment. My ‘danwei’ paper was not as enthusiastically received by the Uni as I had hoped, but echoed my earlier paper from working at Oxford Uni on how grit (i.e trouble and failure) makes a pearl in social innovation terms. Without anyone studying BA Social Enterprise, I made myself useful by teaching a class on social entrepreneurship to entrepreneurship students, and also a business ethics class to management students. I secured a little prize money from the millennium charity Unltd, for the best social innovation ideas, and this turned into quite a lot of money. Amongst some amazing ideas, Gill Gourlay and I helped students launch ‘Bag in Bag’ a simple retail social enterprise to give entrepreneurship students real world experiences of the end-to-end of small business creation and operation. We were told that we had to have a permit to trade on campus, but there wasn’t an application form to get that permission! The university wanted social entrepreneurs, but wasn’t acting as a social enterprise, or an incubator. The new vice chancellor arrived. He was hungry for a new identity for the University, something that it would be internationally known for. He realised that there was a lot of social enterprise activities going on and decided that we should be ‘No 1 for social enterprise’. The problem was, there wasn’t a ranking system for this, and nobody else was competing to be number 1. I pitched to him that there was only one organisation that could validate what we did, and that was to apply to become a AshokaU Changemaker Campus. This was a venture created by students I had met at Oxford, and they had launched a global federation of campus wholly committed to creating the conditions for students to become social change agents over their lives. Wray and I led the discovery process, convening a ‘core group’ that represented every activity on campus. A year later we found ourselves in San Diego being interview by AshokaU and become the first and only Changemaker Campus in England. This process led to the University of Northampton rediscovering its foundational purpose ‘to transform lives and inspire change’. This became the University strategy, and Changemaker Campus accreditation showed that we meant it. Any and all activities, programmes and initiatives on campus were filtered through the lense of ‘do this make the world a better place for ourselves, improving their ability to act?’. During this time, I also met Chris Durkin and Sue Kennedy in the School of Health, whom I worked with the redevelop a Social Welfare degree into a BA in Social & Community Development. We introduced social entrepreneurship and innovation modules from first to third year, as well as community development and community organising modules. We also doubled the ‘good degrees’ received by these students, at the same time as doubling the student numbers. I created a ‘Changemaker Handbook’ with students, to be taught by third year students in a second year class. This co-written handbook had some assessment criteria in the back, which I had developed from ‘21st century skills’ rubrics from American Universities. This was picked up by Rachel Maxwell and turned into the Changemaker Learning Outcomes resource. Wray has moved from being a Social Entrepreneur in Residence to head of the Employability service, as well as a range of other student directed services. At this time, students were becoming the primary customer, as funding shifted from block grants to student loans for fees. This put increasing pressure on programmes to show that they created high levels of employability. The students who were getting good results in the BA Social & Community Development generally didn’t want high powered graduate jobs, they wanted to better inform their existing community and health work. They wanted to, and did, start new charities and social enterprises or go back and volunteer in improving charities in their own communities. But, because of ‘poor employment outcomes’, the degree was removed from offer. I was instead poached by Vicki Dean, who had been given the task of getting the Foundation studies offer to work properly. I came in to run one module for all the students, in which I buried research and investigation skills, but oriented towards a social innovation skillset, demonstrating that all degrees involved could contribute to improved capability for students in solving the worlds problems. Working across 150 students in 70+ degree programmes required a certain amount of consolidation, so over three years, all the students, whether artists or engineers, applied their research skills to their own experience, that of student food poverty. This job morphed into revalidating the whole of the Foundation programme into a single year, embedding the social innovation skill set across the whole curriculum. This led to me stepping up as programme leader and line management of the team, having dodged that bullet for 13 years. I finish at UON as a deputy subject lead and Associate Professor with a PhD in social innovation. I came into the higher education sector with a yearning to figure out to get corporations to better care for the environment and communities they operate in. I have developed part of the answer, and have been surrounded by an inspiring group of people, from those in the Manchester Critical Group of UK academics, to the Changemaker Campus academics around the world, to close colleagues and curious students. A lot of people will remember the Changemaker brand, with good and frustrated memories, but beyond that has been a much more constant commitment to take the purpose of ‘transforming lives’ seriously. July, in my job, is a moment of weightlessness, a liminal space and time of anti-gravity, while the existing students have not yet entirely left us, some grades outstanding, and the new students are just statistics in a spreadsheet, waiting to be met as vibrant and anxious individuals. It is this time of year where colleagues are on leave, and threads of some work are left undone, and new threads of others sit waiting to be dealt with. In these moments, bursts of creativity have allowed two journal papers to be written for the special edition of a new journal called Novation, dedicated to the field of innovation, of which social innovation is a Venn diagram segment. Two years ago, at this time, I completed by PhD and passed my viva, last year I was awarded my PhD and this year I was made an Associate Professor. It is a time for reflection, and writing, of considering who I am and how I want to be. July is a special month.
Whilst I was browsing LinkedIn and noticed that the academic Systems Thinking Interest Group have influenced the UK civil service with a handbook on systems analysis, my thoughts turned to what tribe I belong to. I have been developing my skills in systems thinking since the early 2000s but am mostly associated with the emerging field of social innovation, within which I have been exploring the critical question of what the ‘social’ is in social innovation. I trained in the early 90s as a geographer at a time when social geography was also asking itself a similar question. Doing geographies of society means to investigate how humans, as individuals, live, work and have their being together, in lumps of humanity. The spaces and places in which social relations are expressed form the backdrop, as well as structure, perform and, in turn, is structured by their relations. Space is made into place by social relations. In writing my biography for the Associate Professor post, I had to cram 30 years of practice into three pages. This highlighted to me the multiple tribes of thought which I inhabit. My PhD is an investigation into social innovation in public safety, so there is a lot of sociology and criminology in it especially focused on how humans relate (often negatively) to the built and performed environments of neighbourhood. It draws on my experience and the literature on community development, as well as a therapeutic technique called Motivational Interviewing, two threads of work that are expressed in my religious community and pastoral volunteering as well as in my approach to teaching in higher education. I have been involved in environmental issues, most importantly interested in sustainable development, which is how societies and organisations of humans relate to their ecological environment. I also use Systems Thinking as a way of structuring my thinking about how humans gather together into communities and organisations, how they as thinking, feeling and emoting actors relate to, structures and are structured by inanimate objects, as the new materialists have it, as well as the transcendental aspects of their being, as expressed in critical realism. Social innovation is, it seems to me, to be an investigation into how social relations are formed, reformed, and structured by agents acting within other social relations and the objects that form a part of that environment. Social innovators reconfigure social relations through reconfiguring resources and meanings associated with those objects. Whether these reconfigurations are positive or negative, or to whom they are most positive is a separate question. Social innovation reconfigures socially structured agency. This thinking brings me back to thinking about my tribes. I am at the same time an expert in social innovation, using soft systems methodology, as well as involved in sustainable development, and community development. I am interested in the spaces and places in which those social relations are made and remade. Ultimately, am I a Professor of Social Geography? 15/01/1990
Is that it? hopes and fears sweat and tears Is that all there is? Years of larning years of toil years of burning the midnight oil Hundreds of us read thousands of books some comprehending mostly vacant looks Some found it hard others did not a few retired with what they’d got The rest carried on to the ultimate end a degree to don a certificate to send Our teachers, they struggled in their thankless task through intellectual rubble to reveal the farce Because that is it Just hopes and fears just sweat and tears that is all there is Boris Johnson emerged from 10 Downing Street yesterday (28 April) looking like had been duffed up. Leaning heavily on his podium outside the black painted door of Number 10 he proceeded to tell congratulate us, the NHS and the economy for surviving the first round of an unexpected mugging by a thug. But of course, this wasn’t unexpected, the government watched for weeks while China, and then Italy dealt with their outbreaks of the virus, and scientific, and indeed political, advice on planning for pandemics had been developed in 2006, 2011 and 2014. But Boris’ language, and that of the cabinet who have been keeping his government staggering along for the last couple of weeks, reeling under the onslaught of this thuggish mugging, is that of a sudden and unexpected attack, a blindsided mugging.
This is the language of white male privilege. The language of a man who doesn’t need to plan, who wanders into unsafe parts of a strange tourist town, slightly tipsy on the local booze, overconfident and brimming with machismo. He isn’t afraid, he owns the streets, and doesn’t expect to be mugged. He is the most powerful and privileged person he encounters as he stumbles around the cobbled back alleys, until he meets a local. I am a white privileged male, and it has taken me decades to even begin to become aware of my privilege. It is so natural to me, it is even less obvious to me than the air around me. Wherever I go, I meet people of equal power who look like me, speak like me and act like me. When I walk into a meeting, correction, when I drop into an online meeting, the person chairing that meeting is most likely to look like me, speak like me, or even be me. If I’m allowed out for a walk I can walk around the streets with little to no fear of assault, even hidden behind my new ‘surgical burka’ I represent no threat to other white men like me, but other men who are not like me, who have different colour skin and eyes to me, who can’t access a surgical mask and have to wear a black scarf, they frighten me. I’m not female, so all the public spaces are open to me without fear of physical, verbal or sexual violence. If I were to be mugged, I would be surprised. In the district I live, a multi-cultural, high crime, high violence part of town, it’s not unusual for men of colour to be involved in crime, violent altercations with one another. There are prostitutes and drug-dealers, but I’m white and privileged so I don’t really get to know about what happens to them at 3am in the park. There are women whose lives are hidden behind curtains and behind the veil, by choice and by oppression. When these people get mugged, and it happens very frequently, they are not surprised. The language of war, thuggery and mugging may make sense of white privileged males in Cabinet office. It may give them a sense of machismo purpose, but it’s self-defeating because they are still essentially taming a incredibly complex problem. Over-simplifying a problem may make it easy to communicate to the public, but also betrays a lack of understanding. So far, only Jim Dickinson of WonkHE writing about the responses of the University sector to Covid-19 has managed to understand that this pandemic is what Russel Ackoff, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber identified in the 1970s as a ‘wicked problem’. This isn’t an isolated, unexpected mugging by a solitary thug in a back alley of a white privileged male who should have known better, but a socio-political situation that is affecting the most vulnerable in society the worst. It requires the skills and experiences of not just epidemiologists and mathematical models, but whole communities of social innovators. This parable works like all parables. It’s for you to read into it what you think the author is saying. Comments below should focus on what you think is being said. ‘Let those with ears, hear’.
Eating Marmite is a disgusting behaviour. Imagine a world where this beastly substance, brewed from something that for hundreds of years was considered gross industrial waste, is banned. But you like it. No matter what others do to change your mind, you still like the taste of its sweet black bitterness. Friends turn themselves away from you in disgust. Family members try to dissuade you from finding small amounts of it to put on your toast. Close friends try aversion therapy by making your eat large amounts of it. They tempt you away by force feeding you a diet of brussel sprouts. You eat brussel sprouts, but don’t enjoy them. You need to eat them with roast potatoes, but you really would rather leave them on the side of the plate. And then you discover that other people also like marmite, no matter how shunned they are by the rest of polite society. Some never eat it, fearing the harsh judgement of the people around them. Some try a little occasionally, opening a pot of it to smell it, or hiding it in their lentil chilli. Some go off the rails and gorge themselves on it secretly, ridden with guilt and shame. Others revel in the controversy of eating handfuls in public, the shock of their behaviour being a greater delight than even the marmite. Over time, however, the social disgust of marmite wanes. A social movement grows to tackle the discrimination and hatred that marmite lovers experience. It gets to the point that marmite is even available in the shops, albeit on top shelves and on request. But a new shift in social values means that brussels sprouts becomes the new disgusting taste. Suddenly, brussel sprouts are left rotting in the street as shops throw out their excess stock. You find yourself liking brussel sprouts too. You didn’t before, but somehow, over the years you like marmite a little less, and brussel sprouts more. You are the same person, but the flavours that you can stomach have changed. You don’t like to eat all brussel sprouts, though. Those excessively boiled until they have a bitter metallic aftertaste still make you want to be sick. But you find that new brussels, stripped of their leaves, the white core discarded, lightly fried with bacon is just delicious. A dab of marmite in it just sends you into paroxysms of delight. But roast parsnips are still the most disgusting and offensive thing ever invented. There is an increasing, and welcome, focus on the wellbing of students at university although a lot of it is focused on mindfulness practice. This comes in the form of yoga classes, mindfulness colour books, pet therapy and classical religious prayer. A whole industry of wellbeing has been created. Mindfulness works, but only some of the time. Those who spent centuries developing and practicing meditation and contemplation, long before the mental wellbeing benefits were recognized, did not merely use mindfulness techniques on their own. They did not put aside the cares of the world and just be mindful and nothing else. Indeed, the guidance was to only meditate for a maximum of 1/3rd of your life, 1/3rd being spent working and the remaining 1/3rd asleep! So, what really makes these mindfulness techniques work? They don’t work on their own, that is the challenge. They only yield their wellbeing benefits when the whole of one’s day is ‘sorted’. Trying to ‘mindfulness’ your way out of a stressful situation only digs you deeper into the stress. Mindfulness colouring books are no better than sticking your head in the sand.
How does mindfulness work? Mindfulness practice, meditation, prayer, whatever you wish to call it, is ‘rising above’ the confusion, chaos and stress of every minute of the day in order to get some perspective. You get to see the individual challenges of the day for what they are and develop a calm temperament towards them. But the coloring book, or 20mins of deep breathing, and other such moments of contemplation are only escapism is you are not also taking control of the rest of your life and making clear and positive choices about everything else. When you are positively acting on organizing the rest of your day, then the mindfulness practices become powerfully effective. Diarise. It’s lovely feeling like you can stick it to the man by having no diary, no plan for the day. After years of living in 35 minute chunks at school, broken up by the bell, the liberation of having no plan is uplifting. To a point. After a while, that freedom, that lack of structure becomes a problem known to those who devised mindfulness practice as ‘the demon of the noon-day’. Your mental health plummets badly because there is no structure. So, get a diary on your phone. Make appointments with your learning, and don’t let anything else replace that. If you have nothing in your diary, everyday activities and cares grow to fill that up. Lunch takes hours, shopping trips entire days. Don’t book in meetings with landlords or doctors when they tell you. Look at your diary, full of lectures and study sessions, and find a gap in your already full schedule. When your diary looks full, then pencil in your social life and mindfulness practice. • Use a diary app on your phone, so it’s always in your hands. • Have a motto; if its not in the diary, it doesn’t happen • Treat all classes and lectures as if they are as important as a doctors appointment Start a module at the end. In the first couple of weeks of a module, get the deadlines in the diary. Work backwards from there. Have a close look at what the assignment is. Have you completed this type of assignment before? If you have, estimate how much time you need- to research, to understand, to discuss, to write. Get that time blocked out in your diary. If you haven’t attempted this type of assessment before, double the amount of calendar space that you set aside. You will be expected to work with other students, so quickly get time in your diary where you agree to meet each other. Don’t cancel that time; there is a huge amount of learning to be gained from each other, even if it is just listening over a cup of coffee. • Start a module by finding out how it ends. • Keep notes on everything you do in the first few weeks, you don’t yet know what is relevant or not • Work backwards from the assignment deadline and plan out which days you will work on which assignment Family & friends’ crises The transition from home to an independent life at university, or even balancing family responsibilities with university study is stressful, but not the most challenging thing you will do in your life. Remember that thousands of other students are dealing with pretty much the same workload as you are. But family events and crises loom large in the mind of students. When there is nothing in your diary, and everything seems to be optional, a family crisis seems to be the most important thing in your life. It may be that you are only just becoming aware of the number of times a family has a crisis. Being able to continue your investment in your university studies and work around family events will be easier if you have already penciled in all the work you have to do. There is always a temptation, or even pressure from your family, to drop everything (because it’s not important) and rush home. With everything in your diary, and deadlines written in red, you will better able to make the decision for yourself whether that life event has to be dealt with immediately, or whether a bit of time and space will help everyone to see that event in its true perspective. • If a family crisis occurs, give it some time before you react. • Friends will always expect more of you than you can offer. Regular and boring Having no plan is exciting, exhilarating. But it’s also much more stressful than you imagine. Boring is good. Boring and regular activities help us to cope with the complexities of life. Doing things without having to think about them helps to free up our mind for more complex tasks. So knowing a piece of text off by heart (remember trying to learn your times tables?) means that we are better able to understand more difficult texts. Doing the same things at the same time everyday means that we are spending less of our precious mental energy on ordinary events, giving us more ‘headspace’ for the difficult stuff. Get up at the same time every day. Don’t think about getting up, just get up. Have a morning routine that you repeat every day, so you don’t have to think about what you have done, or what you have forgotten. Do the washing up, empty the bins, every day. Go to uni or to a place in your house set aside for study, every day, even if you don’t have classes. It’s boring, but it works. Schedule your mindfulness practice, whatever it is, every day. At the same times every day. Don’t skip them. • Write a list of all the daily tasks that you put off doing. Choose 5 to implement and put a poster up in your room with those tasks on • Don’t debate with yourself about whether to complete them more or not. If it’s on the poster, do it. Work it! The less exercise you get the more your body seizes up, becomes lethargic and painful. Those who developed mindfulness practices in past centuries always includes some form of physical movement into their routine. This didn’t just sit around staring at a candle for days on end. They designed hard physical labour or exercise into their day. Do something each day that involves being out of breath for 15 minutes. It doesn’t matter how unfit you are. If you are unfit, you won’t need to work very hard to be out of breath. If you are fit, then you will work harder at being out of breath. Just 15mins of breathlessness, whether that’s busting moves in a night club, walking briskly around campus or running for the bus. Get out of breath so that your blood is pumping around your body warming up all your muscles. That activity will help your studies, but also your mindfulness practice. • Choose 5 different activities that will get you out of breath for 15mins each day; the sillier the better! • Cycle through them, a different activity each day. • Choose to walk instead of getting a bus. Climb the stairs rather than get in a lift. Eat and fast, don’t eat fast. Yeah, we all eat, but students are not a ‘carbon based life form’, they are a ‘carb-based life form’. It’s cheap and easy to eat pasta. Pizza is quick. Bottled water is more convenient than tap. Making your diet more varied and inclusive of fruit and veg is well known. But those who developed mindfulness practices also knew about when to starve the body, and for how long. We have a tendency to graze nowadays because food is always nearby. We also eat when the sugars in our body wear off, and we think we are hungry. Choose a couple of days each week where you will eat as little and as simply as you possibly can. Make it a regular part of your diary. On those days, when you do eat; eat slowly and carefully. Think about the food, and where it has come from. When you turn on the tap, think about how marvelous it is that water is so clean and readily available. • Change your eating habits for two days a week. • Eat as little as you can, but don’t starve yourself • Eat simply, no processed food, drink only water. Putting this together. Mindfulness practice has to be the foundation of your mental health, not added on top of a chaotic and stressful time. When you have a diary, with all the important things noted down, you don’t need to try and remember them- all you have to do is remember to consult your diary. Doing basic things regularly, even if you don’t want to do them, puts those daily events in their true perspective. Family and friends will always demand more of your attention than you can give them. Put crises and traumatic events into perspective by not responding instantly and every time. A little time of waiting and thinking before you respond will help you help your family and friends better. Care for yourself by making your body do things like exercise and eat mindfully. When you have these sorted, pick up that mindfulness colouring book. and know that everything is in its rightful place. Then the mindfulness practice will have the benefits on your mental health that you expect. Your colouring-in might be better as well! • When the basic structure of your daily life is settled, then mindfulness practice becomes more effective • Try and make yourself physically tired, not just mentally tired • If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail The BBC short series Broken has dominated the thoughts of British Christians over the last month. It is very rare for such an accurate depiction of Christianity to be shown on prime time TV, and even rare to be invited to peek into the interior life of a priest questioning his ministry, rather than his faith. I’m preparing to be chaplain to a Christian conference over the weekend, in which we will be looking at the idea of ‘sorrow to joy’, and a group of people known as the ‘Fathers of the Church’. The programme, by screenwriter Jimmy McGovern, of Brookside fame, has caused me to reflect on the sorrow and joy of ‘being a father’ to a community.
Sean Bean’s character, the Catholic priest Michael, is a father to his community. He rarely uses the term ‘Father Michael’, and many of the characters treat him as he should be, as a real human being rather than a saint. His character is richly drawn and well informed, focussing on his struggle to be a whole human being, on caring for all the people in his neighbourhood whether they like him or not. His struggle with faith is not a struggle with God, or a belief in God, but a struggle with himself. He doubts. He doubts himself, he doubts that he cares. He struggles with an upbringing quite common to a Catholic in his 50s, the memories of his childhood coming to mind at the most important and profound parts of the mass, distracting him and distressing him. He fears being found out. He isn’t experiencing ‘imposter syndrome’, instead he truly is unworthy of his exalted position as a priest. He truly is unworthy, and yet he is deemed worthy because he doesn’t understand his own holiness. That is a paradox that is so often lost in public discussions of religion. Religious people are expected to be perfect, to know what is good and bad, and to stick to it. And yet they fail, again and again, they fail. Fr Michael doesn’t do bad things, but he fails everyone, with his own doubt and inability to say and do the right things. Several times I found myself shouting at the screen ‘you should have said this’, or ‘act man, stand up for yourself’, before sinking back and realising that I too would have said and some similar things. Indeed, as a priest, and academic, I have found myself in this position many times, and failed to meet expectations. But being a ‘Father’ to a community isn’t about meeting expectations or being perfect. Being a ‘Father’, and this isn’t a gendered role really, is to be like Michael in this programme- to care, to struggle with one’s own failings, and yet to be on the fringes of the lives whom he cares for. Fr Michael isn’t a parent, he cannot make his parishioners do what he wants them to. He can’t bring them up the way he wants. Indeed, he can barely influence their decisions at all. But he is there, separate but profoundly there for them. He fails them, he fails himself, and yet he is a wonderful priest and father, offering up his brokenness to the true God and Father. The Fathers of the Church are a group of leaders of a global family of the Orthodox Christian Church. Their influence on the church is most often understood as dogmatic. They made decisions of doctrine through meetings known as the ‘Ecumenical Councils’, from the Greek term ‘ecumene’, which means ‘household’. They ensured that we today are able to say that a Christian is a person who must assent to the idea that Jesus of Nazareth is human and God, not just a prophet or a nice rabbi who heals people. But, we most often think of the Fathers of the Church in terms of their doctrine, their theology, rather than their fatherhood. They are not known as ‘teachers’ or ‘lawyers’ of the church, but Fathers. Before anything, before we are willing to listen to them. Before we are able to assent to their doctrines, they must be fathers to us. They must have been fathers to their communities. In reality, they must have been Father Michael’s to the communities that they served. They must have taken the wrong steps, they must have failed to speak or act at the right time, hundreds of times. They must have doubted their worthiness as pastors. If they hadn’t, they would not have earned the love and respect of their parishes and dioceses. Their words, once published, would have echoed through those communities with the emptiness of arrogance, and been ignored. Representing Christianity in the arts is a difficult thing to do, and Jimmy McGovern did a rare job. Mostly God gets to be misrepresented as something it has never been in Christianity. As the former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said at a conference recently ‘Mostly God gets depicted as a strange ‘thing’ in this universe’. Need I mention the funny but wholly inaccurate America Gods, in which multiple Jesuses appear with the goddess Eostre and bicker over whose Easter is most popular or Preacher, in which God goes missing on earth, somewhere in a jazz club in New Orleans’ French Quarter? It’s easy then to dismiss God as an improbable all-powerful demi-god that just doesn’t match up to logic or empirical science. God rarely gets communicated as beyond space/time, or as humility. Father Michael, in Broken, reminds us that the public discourse about religion has to be about brokenness, not perfect morality. He reminds us that it should be about humility, not arrogance that we religious people have all the right answers but none of the right actions. Only when we are truly aware of our brokenness, will we be able to turn sorrow into joy. Fr Timothy Curtis, 14th July 2017 . A weekend of high drama is over and I have a headache. I have spent the morning reading through the 50 pages of the agreed texts of the Great and Holy Council of Crete, 2016, or the ‘rump council’ as the naysayers and separatists are calling it already. Whilst the UK is reeling from the effects of the EU referendum, academics are mulling over the implications of a ‘post-factual’ society. My writing is primarily about the intersection of religion and society. It’s what I teach. It’s what I’m paid for, as I volunteer as a priest. I have sought to reflect in the act, as the Council progressed over last week, capturing snippets of news and gossip remotely, and this is an attempt to reflect after the fact. There is much more to investigate. The documents in their final version will have to be compared to their earlier drafts, to find out what was lost or changed. There will be, one hopes, minutes of all the sessions of the Council. There have been calls for the audio or video of the sessions to be released. If they are, there will be much to receive and contemplate.
There has, of course, been a vocal group on social media who had dismissed the idea of the Council before it had already convened either as an ‘Orthodox Vatican 2’ or just not Pan-Orthodox enough. By ‘Vatican 2’ there are clearly projecting their anti-Catholic anxieties and outright rejection of any form of dialogue with non-Orthodox Christians. Their demand with respect to Orthodox representation- that all bishops should be invited and all should negotiate all of the texts, and vote on all of the amendments by a process of unanimity and veto was clearly an attempt to turn the church into the worst sort of democracy. In the end, getting over 300 bishops (about the same amount as previous Councils, both Ecumenical and not) meeting together to agree a common view on complex issues in less than a week, has been quite remarkable. The catastrophes that were expected did not happen. We did not get forced into communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Fasting was not abolished. There was no agreement to make the Ecumenical Patriarchate more powerful than the Pope. Indeed, the documents and amendments were unsurprising, moderate and modest. In fact, conciliarity was the most important new point to arise from the whole Council. I wrote last week that there is no agreed procedure by which a Council of the Church is agreed to be ‘Ecumenical’, both pertaining to the whole world, and binding on all Christians. This caused much confusion because there were claims and counter claims preceding the Council (which was only ever called a ‘Great and Holy Council’) about whether it was going to be an Ecumenical one, i.e. universally binding or whether it was going to declare any other ‘Great and Holy Councils’ to be Ecumenical in standing. The Council did neither. Whilst it declared the Councils after the 8th Ecumenical Council to be of ‘universal authority’, the Encyclical of the Council did not declare them to be ‘Ecumenical’. But in the same paragraph of the Encyclical, the gathered bishops did declare the Church to be a Church of Councils. This is vitally important. I wrote on Friday about the sinfulness of excessive ‘autocephaly’; self-governance. I argued (controversially) that the instinct to self-governance (autocephaly in Orthodox Church terms) and to ‘taking back control’ in the UK is the same instinct that led Adam to choose to eat the apple in Paradise. I argued that the instinct to be in control, which we all share in, resulted in the Orthodox Churches become more estranged from each other over the last 300 years. This instinct has led to a sense of self-sufficiency rather than interdependence. The independent Churches of the Orthodox communion have been separated by historical circumstances like the rise of communism in Russia, but there is a danger that the separation becomes itself an article of faith, that the churches should be separate and can make self-sufficient decisions. The message of the Council was clear that excessive autocephaly is not acceptable. It stated “The principle of autocephaly cannot be allowed to operate at the expense of the principle of the catholicity and the unity of the Church”. By this it means that conciliarity, the processes whereby issues and questions that are relevant to all 14 Churches can be discussed and decided upon by the whole Church, rather than by one on its own. The texts of the rest of this Council deal with some, and only some, of those issues that are universally important. Advances in science and technology, individualisation and globalisation, freedom without responsibility, the wholesale degradation of the environment through excessive and profligate consumerism, new forms of systematic exploitation and social injustice are big social changes that have occurred since the most recent of the Councils of ‘universal authority’. They are issues that cannot be adequately tackled by one church on its own, so therefore interdependency needs to be recognised and the Churches need to act as a whole, as the single Church of Christ. This witness, in the words of the Encyclical, “ is essentially political insofar as it expresses concern for man and his spiritual freedom”. There needs to be “a new constructive synergy with the secular state and its rule of law”, preserving “the specific (i.e. separate) identity of both Church and state” in order to assure social justice. These external issues, as well as the nature of our relationship with other Christians, as well as internal but global questions such as Orthodox governance in new territories (diaspora and autonomy), family and marriage and fasting were all discussed and agreed. Notwithstanding the detail of those texts, the next battle will be over the status of the Council itself. It won’t be an Ecumenical Council, in the formal sense, until such times as a Council like this can come to a consensus on what constitutes an Ecumenical Council and what distinguishes it from a ‘Council of universal authority’. But who is going to be bound, or more softly influenced, by the Council? The texts of the Council could be quietly dropped, or ignored outright. Some bishops may wish to distance themselves from the details of what they have signed- there is some slippage in meaning between the different translations, which can only have been arrived at in a hurry in five days of meetings. Naysaying commentators were suggesting that the presence of the US military providing security means that some of the bishops were being made to sign the documents against their will, or might have been strong-armed in some way by the other bishops.. They are bemoaning the fact that none of them turned out to be the heroic St Mark of Ephesus who famously was the sole voice in the Council of Florence Ferrara that almost resulted in the reunification of Orthodox and Catholic. They were expecting there to have been another St Nicholas of Myra, who apocryphally slapped Arius in disgust at his theology. Those who are not familiar with these churchmen, they are often invoked as an Orthodox version of Godwin’s law. Regardless of the correctness of the examples of St Nicholas and St Mark in those situations, these poor saints are invoked by all separatists and schismatics when the Church, either in this Council or even in the Council decisions of their own churches, cry foul and demand that their solitary analysis the only true and correct analysis. They are often more strident in their criticism of the purported actions of other Church’s Patriarchs especially if it smacks of the ‘pan-heresy’ of uncontrolled, over-enthusiastic and syncretistic ecumenism. This Council has marked out the boundaries of future ecumenical dialogue, and rejected such ecumenism, but those who wish not to be bound or influenced by anything apart from their own ego will find every iota to pick over in order to undermine the whole. The number of bishops attending was equivalent to the Ecumenical Councils of old, but they did not contain representatives of 4 of the 14 churches, but total representation of all the Patriarchates has not been a requirement in previous Councils, and nor has the participation of every possible bishop in the world. The problem was illustrated by the question of a Russian war correspondent (yes, I kid you not, a war correspondent) who asked the press conference whether the Council could be influential if it did not have the Russian Church represented. The answer came back “Let me ask you a question. You come from a democratic country (a long, suggestive pause). During the elections in Russia, do you expect your voice to count, if you fail to vote?” The fact that some bishops were not there to have their voice heard or to vote does not mean that the decisions are invalid, any more than a 72% turnout in the EU referendum renders that invalid. Like it or not, neither side can count the 28% of the population who didn’t vote as their own. 52% of those who actually voted decided to support the Leave campaign. The majority should be judged on the basis of how narrow it was, not on the basis of those who didn’t vote. The Great and Holy Council has proposed further meetings in which the other churches could return to the texts of this Council. It would be good to see these partial texts refined and expanded in scope. Their weaknesses are in what issues are not covered, or are dealt with in inadequate detail ,rather than in what they actually say. Ultimately, however, it won’t be Councils or Bishops who decide. It will be those ordinary people in parishes around the world who will read the documents and begin to live according to their precepts. It won’t be the facts of the documents that matter, but whether these documents create a harmonious symphony with the traditions and prayers of the people of God. [this article needs to be read beyond the title. It’s not what you think, but the title made you think]
[since I wrote this note, the Great and Holy Council has confirmed my thinking and condemnation of excessive separatism exercised in the name of ‘autocephaly’ with these words “The principle of autocephaly cannot be allowed to operate at the expense of the principle of the catholicity and the unity of the Church.”] I am supposed to be writing about the vitally important Church Council in Crete this week, but something else has happened, the UK has voted to leave the EU. I have called it a sin, and I’ll explain why. For all of you who are not Christian, bear with me, because it is still relevant. Those of you who are wanting word about the Council in Crete, I will get to that too. For Christians, the first sin is when Adam eats an apple in the garden of Eden. For someone who is not a Christian, this is nonsense, it’s a myth. Well, as a myth it still works. Contrary to popular belief, the first sin of humanity, represented by Adam in this story from the Old Testament, is not eating an apple. That would be silly. The first sin happens before that apple is eaten, before Adam commits any act, or behaves in any particular way. The first sin occurs when Adam resolves to ‘take back control’. He rejects the loving-kindness of God, which he takes for granted, and grasps self-control, autonomy and self-determination. His sin is first to be selfish, to think that he knows best and that he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of his split from God. The same selfishness pervades the whole Brexit debate. Across all the political parties and those who are not politically affiliated I have seen over the last couple of months a debate, not about the structures of the EU, but a debate about selfishness, about taking control. This has resulted in the UK taking control of its own destiny, of becoming autonomous and self-determining. The UK has voted to leave a framework within which sovereign nation states pooled their sovereignty and gave up some of their autonomy in order to express our common humanity. Now we have given permission for everyone to ‘take back control’. Every playground bully is no free to tell a foreign kid to shove off because we have taken back control. Every greed and rapacious employer can safely dump any restrictions on working conditions because we in the UK can now determine our destiny- all laws are now up for grabs. We can even establish what we think are UK human rights. Not universal human rights, but human rights that apply to us here in the UK only. We can now free-load on the common environmental protections that reduce pollution across all our borders. These are individual issues, and can and will be debated, but the underlying ethos will now be ‘we can decide’. The sociologist Michel Foucault theorised in the 1970s that the elites disciplined the individual to keep control of the people, and now we have seen the reaction to that, as we all (not just the brexiteers) take back control of our bodies. Instead of the elites, we as isolated individuals try to take control of our bodies, through discipline and punishment, we pierce, and mark, augment and reassign our bodies to fit our own sense of self. We seek to construct our own identity whilst at the same time trying to understand what it is to be male or female, what it is to be human, when all we know is how to be ourselves. The selfishness of adam descends into solipsism. The brexiteers are no more sinful or selfish than the rest of us, it’s just that they have expressed their selfishness in a particular and very obvious way, but our need, our uncontrollable desire, to self-determine is now universally celebrated. We would rather be in control of our country, in control of our bodies, in control of our own identities than cede some of that control to another human being, or to God. We are so suspicious of the stranger that we have become strange to ourselves. The debate about control and selfishness also erupted in the press and media regarding the Great and Holy Council in Crete that is happening this week. There have been discussions amongst the bishops gathered there about the Mission of the Church in Today’s World (which I commented on here) and the challenges of Orthodox Christians being scattered all over the world by war and persecution and creating a problem of the disaspora (I commented on this yesterday, but Brexit has jammed up Huffington Post’s publishing schedule, so you will have to read a draft here). Whilst the bishops went on to discuss internal issues like how much fasting we should indulge in the lead up to Christmas, the attention of the commentators shifted from the problem of the diaspora to the question of autonomy and self-governance. The discussions peaked with a debate on what actually constitutes an ‘Ecumenical Council’. The discussion is summed up by this one comment :“In reality, almost every major and divisive document at the Council revolves around the subject of ecclesiology: how do Orthodox Christians in traditionally non-Orthodox countries canonically organize themselves?... Every topic on the agenda relates to our understanding of what the Church is and how it is meant to function, on some level.” In this statement, the commentator is really grasping at the essence of all the papers at the Holy Council, and of the debates going on in the Council chamber and across the world, and it all still boils down to self-governance, autonomy and selfishness. Self-governance is an important principle in Orthodox Church circles. It is more accurately known as ‘autocephaly’- literally speaking ‘one-headed’ or ‘of one mind’. All the 14 churches of the world are essentially independent and self-governing. They have a head bishop, but they also have a synod or council of bishops who, between them, decide on important matters like whether Orthodox Christians can marry Roman Catholics, or whether we should eat oysters on a Friday in December. Just as importantly, they get to decide whether people who are not Orthodox Christians are even Christian or not. In the last 300 years, this group of self-governed Churches have enjoyed, and in some cases exploited, the political situations in which they found themselves to increase that level of self-determination. The rise of nationalism meant that new self-governing churches stopped being identified by the city in which the lead bishop was located (the Patriarchate of Moscow, for example) to being identified with a whole country like the Church of Cyprus or the Church of Poland. Political strife, war, the rise of nationalism and imperialism like the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union meant that contact between the Churches was limited. Taking advantage of that, the self- governing churches became used to determining their own affairs and considering their own situation to be unique. In some cases, they developed a sense in which their version of Orthodox Christianity is the only true and correct Christianity. When it came to the scattering of ‘their people’ across the world as a result of these forces of war and empire, they took it upon themselves to make their own decisions about how to respond. When, in the middle of this, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Church of Constantinople-New Rome called for a collective response, it took 50 years to devise and agree on an agenda, and finally meet this week to begin to formulate a common response to new problems. Why? Because autocephaly was taken too far. The constituent member churches of the Orthodox Church made autocephaly, the ability to govern themselves, the most important aspect of their ecclesiology. They were so concerned to distinguish themselves from the centrally governed Roman Catholic church that they neglected any real sense of conciliarity amongst themselves. Formal means of remaining in communion with the other churches were strongly maintained throughout- the churches prayed for each other, they sent each other oil of chrism as visible signs of their unity, they even celebrated the divine liturgy together as an external sign of their unity. But they didn’t get to know each other as brothers. They didn’t come together as a family in Christ. This is beginning to change, and the heads of the Churches gathered in Crete have indicated that the most important parts of this meeting has not been the agenda, or the papers up for discussion, but for the chance to get to know each other, together. Whilst autocephaly means not being controlled by a higher bishop, like a pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch, we must be clear that autocephaly contains within it the problem of selfishness, the very sin of adam. The Orthodox Churches must be willing to cede some of their sovereignty, to resist ‘taking back control’, to limit their freedom in order to be obedient to the gospel, especially the quote that I started the week with and repeated again to my parishioners today; that “there 'is no jew or gentile, no slave or free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ' Galatians 3:28”. The Churches must come together to decide on what makes their decisions truly authoritative to all Orthodox Christians. There is no agenda item to decide on how decisions are made in the church. The nature of the Council is hotly contested, and this extends back into time into debates about which of the Councils in history are really ‘Ecumenical’. Some are arguing that because there is no longer a Roman emperor, no new council can ever be ecumenical, because typically emperors convened such Councils. So deciding factor on whether a Council is binding on the whole church depends on whether a civil authority like the Emperor convoked the council, not whether the council spoke the truth. Others argue that Councils are ecumenical because their decisions are important to the whole church (rather than local issues) and because they have been received as authoritative by all the churches. Some argue that there will only ever be seven ecumenical councils, convened by an Emperor. Others argue that there are more councils (like the 4th and 5th Councils of Constantinople in 879–880 and 1341–1351, the Synod of Iasi, Romania in 1642 and the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672). Some argue that any Council that does not discuss ‘dogma’, i.e. vital questions of who God and Jesus are, cannot be ecumenical. Others would consider that the first, Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, that decided that the good news of Jesus Christ could be preached to non-Jews is not an ecumenical council. This complicated picture means that the process by which we act as a church, in which we decide which issues are vitally important and affect the whole world, which ones only affect the know Roman imperial world (one way of defining the word ecumenical) or which ones affect the whole household of God (another way of defining the word ecumenical). Without that, the separate Orthodox Churches are just that, separate. They are subject to the sin of selfishness; they can be tempted to ‘take back control’. They retain the power to decide how to decide. We don’t need centralised power to resolve this problem, we need conciliarity. We need for the churches to cede some of their power to the Council of the Patriarchs. This may begin to happen. In the UK, however, we have withdrawn from conciliarity. We have withdrawn from the Council of European States. We are in the process of walking away from the difficult business of living with our neighbours and are preparing instead to treat them as ‘jews and gentiles’ as separate peoples. We are repeating again the sin of adam in demanding self-control. We are repeating the first sin of selfishness. |
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