The current and future ABC

IT’S OVER! Yesterday morning I left campus, and am now back at the nice young man’s house in Milton Keynes, to return home on Wednesday. For the last couple of days we’ve had a kind of retreat to unwind after all the madness, and we shared some of it with the ABC. On Tuesday we had a morning with him, reflecting on what we had felt about the Conference and to share our experiences from the last few weeks. It was really something hearing him speak and want to listen to what we had to say. I had the opportunity to talk to him a bit during our coffee break, and so I took the chance to ask him how I could get his job. His reply was that you have to be a ‘personality’, as the ABC is seen as the voice for Christianity in England for those who are not clear on the boundaries between denominations. Aside from admin, the role of the ABC is almost to be the ‘comic vicar’, someone who will stand out and who people will notice. That this is an important part of being able to fulfil the duties of the office then I am rather relieved – I am not lacking in personality, and am more than willing to stand out as much as is necessary to further the positive view of the Church in the eyes of those who are not members, as well as promoting the common core of unity within the Anglican Communion.

The next day we went on a pilgrimage, following rather loosely the footsteps of Augustine, starting at the memorial cross on the Isle of Thanet, and ending at Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury for an outdoors Mass with the ABC. I sat next to him on the coach on the way from Reculver to Canterbury, which was AWESOME. I decided not to ask him any awkward questions, because I figure he must be sick of them by now, so we chatted about Malawi, and about Julian of Norwich, and it was all pretty cool. That evening the bishop of Dover invited us all to his house for dinner as a way of saying thank you for all we had done during the Conference. REAL FOOD! Man, after eating so much Tex-Mex in Origins I was so glad to finally have some proper salad and some veggie lasagne…

Thursday, then, and we hopped on the bus to Dover Castle in some horrible drizzly foggy weather. If you go to Dover Castle, pay the extra few pounds to go in the WWII tunnels – they are tunnels built into the cliffs that were famously used for the organisation of the Dunkirk evacuation and are incredible. There is even a makeshift operating theatre. I love old buildings, but I wasn’t really in the mood to trek round the inside and look at a load of information boards, so Elizabeth and I bought a pair of wooden greatswords and had fun outside instead. Watched by some tourists… Once we got back there was some time for packing and general faffing around, then we were off to the Cathedral again, for ANOTHER proper meal. This is brilliant. We did a candlelight tour of the Cathedral, really a pilgrimage, which ended in Compline. It really struck me that this was the end. It was the last thing we’d ever do together as a group. It hit me all of a sudden, and I had to grab on to the steward standing next to me. Luckily it was my good mate Nick, and he managed to say something pretty comforting, but unfortunately I cannot remember it for the life of me. At least it helped at the time though. We got off the bus, back on campus, and Luiz gave a small speech, explaining how in Portuguese they have a noun that expresses missing someone, and also connotes belonging to them. This, followed by the ‘hug chain’ suggested by Ngira made everyone realise how final this was, and how much we were going to miss each other when we left the next morning. We’ve been through so much that no-one else will ever experience and it’s brought us all so close so quickly. Because it’s been so intense this month has felt like an eternity, and I don’t think any of us can really believe it’s over. I have so many new friends, so much more confidence, and a sofa to sleep on in over a dozen countries. It’s been a rollercoaster, fun and crazy and utterly exhilerating. Bring on 2018.

Two bicycle related things today. One of them extremely tenuous, so I’ll start with the more obvious. Dave tentatively asked me if I’d be up for a sponsored bike ride. 500 miles, two weeks, raise £1,500. In Malawi. Now, I know that I’m hardly the most obvious candidate for doing this, (and I’m pretty sure my parents feel accordingly) but I’m actually rather determined to prove people wrong. The furthest I’ve ever travelled is either the Rhineland or Denmark (my geography’s a bit shaky) and neither of those are particularly adventurous, especially as Denmark was specifically for Legoland when I was about 3. This would be an incredible opportunity to do something so completely different than anything I’ve ever done before, a real incentive for me improve my overall fitness and to do something that MATTERS. As far as I know the money would be going to LEPRA, who help with health problems amongst poor countries. As far as I know, Malawi is one of the poorest countries at least in Africa and HIV/AIDS is rife, as well as leprosy. I like giving money to good causes, especially when it’s helping to eradicate some of the most socially problematic diseases that exist in our world. Yes it’s going to be hard, yes there are malaria-carrying mosquitoes and cholera-infected waters, and yes I haven’t ridden a bike for a very long time, but I think it would ultimately be so worth it. I do need to talk it over a little more with the parents, but I hope to be begging Dad’s parishioners for money sometime soon…

Onto the tenuous bicycle link: On one of my earliest posts you will see a photograph of a nun on a bicycle (there we go, there’s the connection) This is Sister Pamela – one of the nicest people I have ever met, fantastic sense of humour and a touch of ‘Maria’ about her. She is based near Norwich, at the All Hallows community, and it was she who told me about Julian of Norwich. Julian’s story is not particularly well known, and even her name has been taken from the church where she was an anchoress – a woman (voluntarily) bricked up in small cell behind the altar with just a small hole to hear mass and to receive food. When she was 30 she was so ill that she believed herself to be on her deathbed, and started to receive intense visions. She recovered suddenly, and wrote her visions down, becoming the first woman to ever write a book in English. Her theology was simple – she professed faith as being centered around God’s love, not around laws and duties. She saw no anger in God, but decided that He “regards us with pity and compassion as innocent and guiltless children.” She also perceived the nature of God as that of a loving Mother, as well as a divine Father, and no-one dared contradict her because of her status as an anchoress.

Julian is a huge figure for me now for two reasons. One reason, she was a ‘first’. Being the first woman to do something is always a milestone in our patriarchal society, and while this is becoming less and less true in the secular sense, the Church is still well behind on equality for women. As WATCH (Women And The Church) say “God is an equal opportunities employer. Pity about the Church.” I want to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I feel a very strong call to lead the Church and I feel fervently that I can achieve this. it is through the example of women like Julian that this is possible. my second reason is her theology. I’ve said it more than once in these pages, that we need to focus on the love and compassion of God, and not get bogged down in the rules and rituals. It is an enormous relief to find that a woman as holy and notable as Julian shares my thoughts exactly. I do not see God as vengeful, and I do not believe that He could ever let us go down to Hell, for He loves us too much. Punishment for sin and for not believing will be complete forgiveness and admittance to Heaven, for what else could both save us and humble us so equally? When i am ordained, this attitude is what I shall preach, and this attitude alone.

If there’s one thing I can take away from this conference, one thing I’ve learned and one thing I will remember from my experiences here, it is this:

I can sleep ANYWHERE.

Seriously. I have slept in a chair at the entrance to the Spouses’ Hall, the back of the Big Top, the common room, the coach on the way to London, on a table outside a discussion room and on a bench in the foyer of Keynes College. And then, in the early hours of this morning, the two passenger seats in a van. See, Dave has realised that I’m quite good at organising things, so when we were doing the 2am coach loading I ended up in the van coordinating where on earth we were meant to be going next. Except I only lasted a couple of hours. I suppose that it didn’t really help when it shut my foot between the van door and the internal step so I couldn’t walk anymore, but I had been up for far too long with far too little food and couldn’t really function anymore… We had taxis turning up with lists of people who were nowhere to be seen, coaches for Gatwick turning up half an hour late, and a bishop who didn’t know where he was going but turned up at the bus stop anyway. For all of this I had my radio earpiece in, so heard all the commotion and Elizabeth threatening to set Ngira on the lost bishop as well as Nick finally sighting the Gatwick bus and the bus marshall who never noticed when people were called him on the radio. And Olivia asking me if I had fallen asleep on my radio button because my messages were so unintelligable… I had to succumb to tiredness in the end, and curled up on the front seat, coming round occasionally to cries of “who’s that asleep? awwww…” Of course, I still had my radio earpiece in, so kept hearing ends of conversations until Dave had the thoughtfulness to turn down my radio and leave me in peace. Bless. I managed to get to sleep at 8ish, and apart from a half hour at noon to say goodbye to the medics I slept until half six. Genius.

We may have had a few mishaps, a few bishops seperated from their luggage, but in the end every single suitcase got to its owner (albeit on seperate buses) except for one left completely unlabelled in Tyler Court. I’m well impressed. And very tired. Currently I’m in our common room, looking after a steward who’s a little bit worse for the goodbye party we just had for Dave, and I can’t wait to spend a whole night in my bed instead of day times in bed and evenings on sofas and car seats. it’s been worth it, but completely knackering.

Tomorrow we start our retreat/youth conference with the Archbishop. it’s very exciting, and I just hope I’ll be in a fit state to appreciate it!

This is how exciting I found the Spouses' Conference.

(sorry, just for clarification, Ngira is our lovely steward from New Zealand. He’s ordained and turned 21 during the Conference, which is pretty good going!)

Last night was the last evening prayer service – a stunning worship session led by the Church of Ireland that ended on a real high with the song ‘In Christ Alone’. Morning prayer today was led by the Chaplaincy Team and the stewards. Morning bible study no longer required stewards to point bishops to their rooms as they’d finally worked out how to get there themselves and the afternoon plenary was full of thank yous and summations of the Conference. And then, at 6pm, the closing ceremony in the Cathedral. I didn’t enjoy the service as much as the opening one; I think everyone was too tired to give it the energy it really needed, but near the end there was a massive high point, one that overshadowed everything that’s happened in this conference. And it was nothing to do with reflections, debates, controversy, unity or any other flashwords, it was the official recognition of seven Melenesian brothers as Matyrs of Our Own Time. Their story is, in a nutshell, this:

On one of the Melenesian Islands about five years ago there was massive civil unrest. There were two warring factions with a kind of ‘no man’s land’ in between. It was in this stretch of land that the Melenesian brothers and sisters set up a camp. They went to both sides, gathering up and neutralising weapons, and returning to their massively dangerous temporary home. One brother was dispatched to visit a warlord to try and convince him to stop the violence, but he never returned. Eventually another party of 6 more brothers also went to try and find what had happened to the first. They also never returned. All seven brothers were found, tortured to death, suspected of being government spies. Their bodies were brought home. Their deaths, however, were not completely in vain – it was an act that made the warlords reconsider their lives of killing, and the violence ended.

Today the brothers were accepted as martyrs, and their names carried the full length of the Catherdral by the brothers and sisters who were singing a litany of Melenesian saints. I don’t think I was the only one to start silently shedding tears at the sadness of the deaths of such humble people, and the beautiful harmonies offered up in their memory.

But, I will not end on that note, for there was for more to come of that evening! Despite some lovely English summer rain, we were all invited to a buffet lunch in the Cathedral grounds, and allowed to escape to the rather less moist atmosphere of the International Study Centre auditorium, where there was a jive band playing. Led by the bloke who runs the UKC Big Band… I though a cassock would be quite hard to dance in, but the bishops certainly didn’t seem to phased by it, and one of the stewards even managed to get a dance with the Archbishop. Get in. I even got a few bars of dancing in with Dave Walker (after one of my steward mates reminded me how to dance, hah) By the time the band had finished almost all the bishops had left, and it was mainly stewards walking back down Burgate to get on the coaches home. But there were enough bishops on our coach for a good sing-song on the way back to campus, wahey!

Thing is, the delegates start leaving tomorrow morning. Some quite early. or, rather, very early. And theyneed stewards to load the coaches to the airports. And guess who’s on the coach shift that starts at 2am?

No, they're not doing the Lambeth Walk...

I don’t know how many of you have read Giles Fraser’s column in the Church Times this week, but I really urge you to do so if you haven’t yet (link to Church Times on right). He is writing about how the Bible should not be perceived as a “manual for moral uprightness” and explains that the Gospels did not use the Old Testament as such, but associated the old laws with religious leaders who wanted to judge and accuse. Later that day, or possibly the day after, I went to a service where we sang hymn 6 in our special ‘Lambeth Praise’ hymnbooks (of which I have two free copies. There are huge benefits to being a steward.), and it contained these lines:

“But we make his love too narrow

By false limits of our own;

And we magnify his strictness

With a zeal he will not own”

Now, that hymn was written by someone born in 1814, so the idea of the Church being too legalistic is not a new one, and I’m heartened to find that I’m not on my own in being unable to align my image of God as kind, loving, mercyful and completely forgiving with a God who would still expect us to stone to death an adulterer. I am not saying that reading the Bible literally is ‘wrong’ – we each should decide for ourselves ho we interpret and understand an ancient scripture in our modern culture – but I think that we need to realise that we all have our differences. I consider this to be part of the reason why we are not currently as united as we should be within the Anglican Communion. I feel that we have lost our way by being mired in the details of rules from a culture far removed from our own, and that we are not focussed enough on the vital messages of love given to us by Jesus. I hope I am not in a minority by judging the actions and attitudes and teachings of Jesus more relevant to me than the laws that went centuries before him that He fulfilled with His own word. As a Communion we need to keep the messages of Christ in our hearts and minds – He is our common theme, the fire burning at our core – and that each Church can make its own decisions about how it interprets scripture without being alienated or without alienating anyone else in turn. Like I said before, the stewards manage it, so why can’t our leaders?

Every day, at the end of morning Eucharist, (real morning – 7:15am – not this namby-pamby 10 o clock nonsense ) something called the ‘Daily Journal’ is played on the screens in the Big Top. This is usually a load of talking heads discussing a certain facet of the Conference or what a particular bishop is thinking about a topic under debate. Today, however, focussed on the stewards. Unfortunately, as well as giving the world’s worst interview when the cameramen found me, I made friends with an American bloke who turned out to be the video editor. I didn’t find out that he was the video editor until the night before, when he told me he was making me “a star.” Oh dear. What he didn’t tell me was which part of my interview he’d used… So we’re all sitting watching this Journal, a couple of stewards have been on screen, talking about what their duties entail, then my face appears and I hear myself saying “Basically, we’re herding Bishops” and luckily the laughter drowned out the second half of that sentence which was “which is rather like herding cats.” There was also a photo of me keeping the lane at Buckingham Palace and me saying how the Queen walked past me lots. I’ll see if I can get hold of a link to the video. I was stationed at the Spouses’ Hall after that and people kept stopping and commenting on what I had said, and I am so relieved that it was all positive!