November 9, 2009
you know, i think i’m starting to believe some of this stuff
PRESS RELEASE
http://www.dltbooks.com
Thousands to leave the Church of England
According to author Craig Borlase, recent headlines predicting an exodus from the Church of England are just the tip of the iceberg. In 2159AD– a new history of the Church written from the perspective of 150 years in the future – Borlase
predicts a split in the Anglican Communion (within a decade), the death of Christendom (by the 2050s), and the return of the Vatican City to Italian sover-eignty.
He also suggests that the state of Israel will come under nuclear attack, that Utah will secede from the United States and that the Church will be increasingly judged over its response to humanitarian and ecological crises.
‘The Church is heading for colossal change,’ Borlase explains; ‘we’ve tried to ignore certain issues for so long, but closing our ears and eyes is no longer an option. The latest news from the Vatican is just the beginning.’
But 2159AD is not all pessimism; Borlase thinks that Richard Dawkins will end up trading in his atheism for an obscure brand of Orthodox Christianity.
For more information, requests for interviews with Craig Borlase or a review copy of 2159AD, please contact: Primavera Quantrill, Marketing Manager at DLT tel: 020 8875 2815
email: primaveraq@darton-longman-todd.co.uk
2159AD
I’ve enjoyed the radio interviews so far – yesterday’s with BBC Merseyside was one of the nicest. Thanks, Helen…
What’s weird is what people are interested in. The things that I thought were controversial at the time of writing just don’t seem to bother people that much. So, yesterday was the first time that the Church’s future view on homosexuality got a mention, but only as an intro to another topic.
What does this mean? Are we already more accepting of things than I thought? Has the landscape change so quickly?
Nah. I just think that the press release didn’t cover that stuff.
Still, it’s nice to be talking about the book.
Oh, by the way, I always feel awkward when it comes to self-promotion, but I can now see that having a few reviews of your book on Amazon helps. So, I’ve got five copies of the book by my desk here. If anyone wants one, drop me an email and if you’re happy to then write a review and post it up there, I’ll happily send you one.
C
i met a truth
I just heard that there have been floods in the corner of Uganda I visited in January. Livestock, supplies, a school – these have all been destroyed by the waters. In one village, six people have died.
The images of terraced hillsides and burnt earth are still fresh in my mind from that trip, but I struggle to imagine the sorrow and fear that must have settled on so many of those remarkable people during the storms. I feel as though they are a long way off – further now because of their suffering and struggles. I’m finding it hard to think of them. It’s as if they’ve slipped out of focus.
Depth of field – a blurred background behind something sharp in the front – it looks fine in a photo, but I’m less of a fan when it comes to life itself. Strikes me that the tight focus is part of the barrage of ailments that gets in the way of faith. We get all narrowed and myopic, obsessed by the detail and captivated by the agenda that we fail to recognise the drama that unfolds around us.
Last night a few of us were talking about the things that hold us back in our faith. I got thinking about the story of the prodigal son and wondered at the different phases of the narrative that I find myself on – at times head down in a trough, at other points wanting to take the first steps home, sometimes searching for the father, sometimes feeling the embrace.
It has often been said that the story’s title works better as The Parable of the Forgiving Father than the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and there’s something about the former that trumps the latter. There’s a wider view, a greater perspective, a fuller depth of field when we think about how the father chooses to unhitch his dignity and run. Once he was heading back, all the son had to do was look up and see him coming. Had there been Skype back in the day, I suspect that all the son would have had to have done would have been to click, call and see the father’s love straining against the separation.
The choice to live eyes down, head fixed, heart bound is one that appeals to so many of us. We reframe it as ‘focus’, ‘determination’ or ‘coping’, yet none of these tags can beat a 360 view underneath a marathon sky.
Quite what this has to do with the floods in Uganda I’m not sure. In fact, I’m tempted to think that it also has little to do with the news that I’m going to be doing some interviews on Sunday with local BBC radio stations. But, in truth, I think that both will be better for my looking up and seeing the picture as fully as I possibly can.
i met a band
[actually, i’ve not met them yet, but we’re in a flow with these titles. The Rend Collective Experiment are sounding both strangely familiar and pretty new at the same time. more evidence of the shift away from celebrity-style worship leaders or a bunch of musos who have faith and decent playlists? you decide.]
i met a man
I met a man – a nice guy too – at a wedding on Saturday. He told me I ought to blog more. So, I’ll give it a go.
The truth is this: I flicked a switch. A couple of months back our latest – and, I’m pretty sure, last – child decided that she wanted to make an early appearance in the world. Cue hospitals, tests, machines that monitor things I never even knew needed to be monitored, and – a few days later – one baby freshly delivered.
All’s well, but in the premature-baby fallout I had to make some dramatic changes, snapping out of summer holiday mode and reloading my full Daddy Daycare Program.
Hence the flicked switches. Blogging – like writing in general, sex, running, reading, writing, praying anything more than ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!’ and remembering to get the car MOT’d – it just got whacked on over to standby.
And now I need to find those remotes.
faking it
When I was training to be a teacher I read a great book called How Children Fail by John Holt. It introduced an idea that I had never previously considered: that children learn to appear to be learners, rather than learn how to acquire the core knowledge we are trying to impart. In other words, they’re tricksy little blighters who frequently get the better of us. The truth is that we fail them.
Yesterday at lunch Barney was telling me how he had ‘done some really hard maths’ at nursery. Now, his nursery does not both with maths – the crowd of four-year-olds have ages to wait for the joys of geometry. Instead they play and make things with tape and glue. But Barney wanted to appear to be engaged in proper activities, he wanted to be able to tell us that he had been doing some proper learning.
And so, I guess, it begins. Yesterday he wasn’t that good at convincing me that he was learning, but he’ll get better. Soon he’ll be able to fake it with the rest of them. He’ll guess at the answer – knowing that the destination matters more than the journey.
And I wonder whether this habit leaves us when we leave education behind us. I wonder… and I think not. From the quick response uttered from a suddenly-ended daydream haze, to the professions of false contrition to the traffic officer, we know how to play the game.
And then there’s God. Perhaps when it comes to matters of faith – and our public expressions of it – we do this most of all. We know the moves, the accents, the word-choice and the code to show the state we’re in. We’re so good at it that we can even muster up a decent amount of shock and awe when one of our leaders gets caught in the act of covering up his integrity-gap.
How strange that we do this with God. Of all those to whom we are subordinate throughout our lives, this Father of ours is the one who we have the least chance of duping. But we can’t seem to help ourselves.
I suppose there’s a comfort in playing this role. At least it’s familiar. But how many journeys are we missing along the way?
a new book, an old story, a few lies
PRESS RELEASE
2159AD
A History of Christianity
Craig Borlase
RICHARD DAWKINS to become a Christian
According to Craig Borlase, author of a new history of the Christian Church,
Richard Dawkins will join an Orthodox Christian Church, the Anglican
Communion will split, under the leadership of Abp Rowan Williams, over the
homosexuality issue and a new mutant strain of bird flu will kill 11million people
worldwide.
In 2159 AD, a serious study of church history told in an accessible and
lighthearted style, Borlase projects 150 years into the future – by imagining
himself as a writer in 2159AD – to see a hopeful vision of christianity
rediscovering its core values in the damaged and secular world of the future.
I just skimmed through your manuscript during a vacation at the Mars
Colony, and it really does look good!
Brian Maclaren, 2049
Our past, present and future – all Christians should read this book.
Martin Smith, Delirious?
2159AD lays a challenge at our door … the way we live out our faith now is
creating a spiritual legacy for future generations.
From the Foreword by Maggi Dawn
Publishing: September 2009
Price: £8.95
what the gay olympics have in common with christians
I suppose it’s not that surprising after all, but my world has just been moderately shifted by the knowledge that there is such a thing as the Gay Olympics – or, to give the event its proper name, the Gay Games. Apparently it’s all kicking off in Copenhagen right now.
I often find myself thinking about Christianity whenever I hear about things going on within the gay community. I must admit that I think the idea of a gay athlete competing against other gay athletes across a range of disciplines (such as badminton, triathlon and the delicately monikered ‘physique’) in the name of ‘Participation, Inclusion and Personal Best™’ is odd. OK, perhaps not so odd for the participation and personal best – but you just know that those two are thinly-sliced add-ins to the trademarked strap line… what the gay community wants from this event is inclusion.
But how does isolation breed inclusion? How does beach-volleyball-with-a-twist-of-queen help convince a wavering homophobe that we all need to get a long a bit better?
And so now I’m thinking about the church. We like the language of inclusion and recognise the foundational importance of community, relationship and self-sacrificing love for others (unless, of course, you happen to be a moron), but given half the chance, we keep ourselves to ourselves.
Maybe we can learn from the gay community. Maybe they’ve got it right: talk about inclusion but make it something to be discussed only on their terms. Maybe we out to be more out there with our clique? Maybe we out to have a gold medal for the best Christian Greco-Roman Wrestler?
Or maybe not.
The gay people I have learned most from are those who are not bullhorning their policy of inclusion at me from within a walled event.
There ought to be a neat ending to this post, but I’ve got too much other stuff to do today. I’ll just leave you with the mental image of Joyce Meyer having Rowan Williams in a double-leg bind.
[Shudders…]
jesus is my boyfriend/banksy/blank cheque
I travelled with my friend to Michigan to attend a conference last week. We arrived on the 4th of July, dropped our jaws at the sheer volume of the fireworks and opened up our notebooks to capture the pearls from a couple of seasoned preachers.
I wrote a lot down. But I think I’ll share a story that was told by the third on the bill, a guy who spoke in oxymoron and whose second session I skipped in favour of some mindless task back at the hotel.
There is a woman whose baby has just died. Her grief is paralysis. Her world thrown out of time. Her infant – too fleetingly acquainted with life – now cold and rigid, is held fast to the woman’s breast. The days are paced out by eternity, the sun and moon no longer dictating the tides of sleep and work. Her body and mind wage a civil war upon each other; the one prepared to nurture the infant that never lived, while the other tries to comprehend its death. The one thing she knows for sure is that she must find a reason for this loss.
And so she asks people. She starts with the holy men who live nearby, dead baby at her breast, the single-worded question on her lips. They have nothing to say. She asks the magicians. They remain silent. Finally she makes her way out of the town, up to the saint who lives on top of the mountain. Why? she asks.
He says only this; go and find a handful of mustard seeds from a family who has not suffered.
She leaves and starts her new quest, visiting as many homes and families as she can. At each one she asks about their own suffering, and at each one she hears a different story created from the same ingredients as her own.
Finally she understands the saint’s plan; to see her suffering as part of a chorus, to hear her question echoed across the hills. Then, and only then, can she bury her baby.
‘Suffering needs empathy, not answers.’
With these words the speaker closed the story out and we all enjoyed a brief silence punctuated by our own internal ‘mmmmmmmm’s.
But while I enjoyed the moment, I have to say that I’ve never really been much of a fan of asking ‘why’ when it comes to suffering. Perhaps I’m a slacker, but it’s struck me that the question is both completely impossible to answer on one level, and utterly easy to respond to on another; why do we suffer? Because we live in a world of action and consequence, because imperfection is part of our story, because crap happens.
That’s not what I wanted to really say about the story though. What I wanted to say was that I sat cynically throughout the guy’s first talk, resisting the urge to roll my eyes with each pseudo-heretical quote he sent up like the previous night’s fireworks.
And I realised that life comes full circle. As he criticised the vogue in contemporary worship for songs he called ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’, he spent considerable time reciting a list of provocative, artistic, creative ways in which he and his community of believers had engaged with God. It was every bit as narrow-focused as the Boyfriend thing, and in the car on the way to lunch I declared that his ‘Jesus is my Banksy’ theme made him just as limp.
I felt pretty good about that line. And I felt pretty good about writing off whatever else of his talk I remembered. And I felt pretty good about planning what I was going to do during his next session on the stage.
The circle completes. I become the fool I sneer at – or what I despise in others is highly likely to be at the root of my own rubbish. I end up unable to tell the difference between his myopia and my own. And I’m reminded of the time when I first realised that if you put an extreme right wing fascist in the same room as a hardcore dictatorial left wing nut-job, they’d probably have a good old chat about the best ways of silencing whoever happened to be winding them up at the time.
So, with that in mind, you should check out Peter Rollins and mine the wisdom for yourself.
nothing is written 