theological

&

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insights for

faithful living today

Tales, Memories and Tails

I want to reflect on how we continue to know Christ, and why Barack Obama is such a powerful speaker, but first you must understand that my great-grandfather had a long bushy tail!  He died whilst I was still a baby so I was never able to verify it.  Nevertheless my grandfather often assured me of the fact and, aged six, I implicitly trusted whatever he said.  He was a wonderful storyteller, so he said rather a lot.  Listening to him was one of my great delights, especially if I was bounced on his knee at the same time.

Although I heard about granddad’s father’s tail often, that wasn’t my favourite tale(!).  The stories I liked best were those about his pet monkey named Jacko.  My sailor uncle, Tom, brought the monkey back from a cruise to South America.  Jacko lived happily in the south Cotswolds for several years until just before I was born.  Now Jacko, of course, really did have a long tail.  And that’s where the confusion arose in my very young mind. 

I knew Jacko had a long tail from which he often dangled in the branches of granddad’s fruit orchard.  Consequently when I was told of great-granddad’s appendage the picture that was fixed in my mind was that of a monkey’s tail.  That picture has stayed with me for fifty years but now I discover it was entirely wrong.  My memory had deleted a significant detail only revealed in a recent conversation between my daughters and my mother.  You’ve probably noticed it straightaway, but it has taken me decades!

Yes, great-granddad didn’t have a slender monkey’s tail, but a bushy tale.  His wasn’t the tail of a mischievous primate but of a red-brown canine.  Great-granddad was, according to his son, a foxy character.  His country-bumpkin appearance fooled people into underestimating his quick wits, astuteness, and ready shrewdness.  Simply put, he was crafty.  A real fox, probably in an almost literal sense since I suspect as a landless labourer he sometimes resorted to poaching to put meat on the table.  Impoverished and uneducated, the strength of his arm and his animal cunning were his only resources.

My granddad’s stories about his father were meant to pass on something of his pride in a father who kept his family together against the odds.  Granddad’s determination to better himself had its roots in the relentless foxiness his father needed simply to keep things together.  But my child’s mind heard stories of monkey business not cunning; mischievousness not serious struggle.  And that’s the way I’ve remembered it all these years until so recently corrected.

I tell you this tale because it illustrates the social nature of remembering.  Like most people there are things from my early childhood, like granddad’s storytelling, that I remember with great clarity.  Much, of course, of what happened to me then has long since been forgotten.  What marks the difference between remembering and forgetting is how those memories are related to social groups that still have significance for me. 

I take great pride in the Thomas Hardy-like community from which I come. The peasantry of Wessex, the opportunities brought by the Great Western Railway, and the mellow stone cottages of the Cotswolds are all things of great significance in my personal history – real and imagined.  Narratives that link such things with my own family history and personal experience are much more likely to be readily remembered than other things that have no such linkages even though they may have been really important at the time they happened.  Sometimes the remembrances are distorted, as mine were of great granddad’s tail, and yet other social events – in this case my daughters’ chatting to their grandma over the dinner table – will correct and reshape them into new memories.

This social nature of remembering figures prominently in the high hopes generated by President Barack Obama; the heritage of the civil rights movement in the United States are obvious enough but it is more than that.  Obama has somehow managed to engage people from all sorts of backgrounds with the notion that achievements in the past can be repeated, and that the effort to do so can be owned as ‘ours’ by everyone.  What was abstract fact about the past has become motivating vision for the here and now.  Social memory has become the rhetoric of immense possibility.

In his appeal to the memory of Abraham Lincoln Obama links his aspirations with nation-forging strivings to overcome division and create hope in the harshest of circumstances.  Of course many have looked to Lincoln as a model for this or that strategy or ideal.  What is different this time is the evident similarities between the two despite the differing party allegiances.  By that I don’t mean age, relative lack of experience in high office, physical stature, success as an author, or the number of other similarities mentioned in the press recently. 

What strikes me in particular is that Obama shares Lincoln’s ability with the spoken word that overcomes a jaundiced suspicion of the value of words.  Whatever else can be said of him it is clear that Obama speaks with directness, simplicity and an authenticity that is Lincolnesque. In stories as well as ideas he positions those who hear him as sharers in a great and worthy task. He redraws the memory as a thing of belonging and purpose; a way towards change for the better.  His “Yes we can” asserts a hope prompted by memory. And it was there again in his inaugural address in the appeal to remembrances both personal and national.

Memory here is more than recollection.  It is rather a means towards a common purpose and an inspiration towards achievement.  This is a use of memory familiar to Christians.  In our coming together in worship we constantly renew our shared memory of Jesus and make that memory operative in the world.  To keep that memory true and active we have to constantly share it with one another.  Memory is kept alive by our action together.  It is corrected and tempered by our worship together.  Memory is never only something that goes on in our minds.  It is no coincidence that Saint Paul writing to the Christians of both Philippi and Thessalonica links his remembering of them to his action in praying for them.  Memory requires activity, and without activity memories die.

Christ commanded us to “do this in remembrance of me.”   Together in the Eucharist the memory of Christ is alive amongst us.  Out of that memory, we ourselves can be made more Christ-like and find new resources to make the world a better place.  Yes we can!

An English Christianity?

I'm dismayed at the current comment about the Anglican Communion.  All the argumentation seems to assume that the Anglican Communion is some kind of trans-national Corporation.  It's as if the Anglican Communion is a smaller scale Macdonalds with a corporate strategy and a global work manual to go with it.  The headlines shouting at us are so often written as if it is in the throes of a boardroom coup.  Grandiose strategies, campaign speak, and supra-national fixes leave me cold.  I am neither a shareholder nor a member of the Anglican Communion and I don't know anyone who is.  That thought comes to me by reflection on an incident many years ago:

The talk was loud and fast.  I understood not a word of what was being said.  Were they talking about us?  Was it fun, annoyance, or disapproval I heard in their tone?  It all felt intimidating, even threatening, though I was never addressed directly.  Completely at a loss I wanted to turn tail and exit quickly – though that would have given the game away.

I was part of a school biology field trip in north Wales.   The voices that troubled me were speaking Welsh, a language I had never heard in the flesh, as it were, before.  It was no fault of the speakers that their pub banter was to me alienating.  The small group of school students of which I was part were ordering at the bar, though in fact none of us were quite old enough to do so legitimately.  No doubt it was my fear of being challenged as an under-age drinker that coloured my reaction to that first experience of Welsh.

Youth, naïveté and plain ignorance marred my reaction.  And like so many teenage experiences the feelings it aroused remain vivid in my memory.  My adult conviction is that the great variety of human languages is something over which to rejoice.  Language is at the very heart of what it is to be a person, and no one should be pushed out of their mother-tongue.  Sitting on the train to Aberystwyth I'm heartened by the conversations in Welsh going on around me – and the ones in Polish too!  That conviction, however, is the product of reason, justice and reflection not feelings. 

If I let my feelings get the upper hand, then that sense of inadequacy and alienation of so many years past can so easily re-appear.  When that happens I feel rather ashamed of myself.  It is tempting to put it down as an example of that little England mentality that is indifferent to other languages and just speaks all the more loudly.  But surely something more significant than that is at issue?

We exist as persons in distinct language worlds.  One of the most significant ways I identify myself is by my language.  This is one of the most important of all the boundaries inside of which we exist.  Indeed these boundaries go beyond the categories of formal language into things like accent and tone.  Like most of us, I can identify someone brought up in the same part of the country as me on hearing less than a sentence of a person's speech.  There is something primordial about this.  Language boundaries tell me who I am and where I belong.

That, of course, is precisely the reason why no one should be pushed out of their mother-tongue.  Language is an identifier.  It binds us together, it gives us a sense of belonging, and it shapes our outlooks in subtle and distinctive ways.  It tells us who we are and who we aren't.  It is folly to think that the boundaries it creates are dispensable or insignificant.  This is what is it to be creatures who exist by culture.  This particularity is how God created us and how God intends us to be.

Christian faith to be heartfelt and deep must be just as particular.  Faith, like language, is a way of seeing the world.  It is inherently rooted in culture and context, again just like language.  And also like language it has about it subtleties and nuances that are very hard to translate.  It cannot be otherwise or faith would be a life experience shallower than language which would no longer be faith.

Immediately someone will object that Christian faith is generalisable and universal.  Which, of course, it is, but those universal truths are always but always expressed through particularities.  So, for example, that parents should and do love their children is a generalisable truth, but anyone who has seen how families operate in, say, Italy, in comparison to Britain, or the Caribbean, will be struck by the very differing ways in which children are treated and viewed.  The universal of 'family' is recognisable, but the particularities of how 'family' is expressed are incredibly varied.  What touches a person deeply always has to it a defining and boundary creating aspect.  Always.  When a child is denied that locating and defining distinctiveness the consequences are often horrendous for that individual.  Again like being denied the use of one's mother-tongue.

And that's why I say that I am neither a shareholder nor a member of the Anglican Communion, as I might be of some global company or an international scholarly society.  It is impossible to be a generalised Christian.  When Saint Paul writes to the church in Corinth, Galatia, or Rome, he is not writing to branch offices of a mega-organisation.  The local church is the universal, catholic Church.

In describing God's congregation the New Testament in every circumstance uses a thoroughly secular Greek word (ekklesia) that means the assembly to which every citizen is summoned to deal with the business of the city.  In other words, God's assembly is closely related to the particularities of place and life.  This is how people come to be as church, just as a specific language is how people come to be as identifiable persons in the world.

I am an English Christian, and a member of the Church of England.  Surely such a sense of belonging cannot be any less precious than this English tongue that I also hold dear.  My loyalty to Christ must be expressed within that Englishness simply because it is impossible to step out of culture.  Heaven forbid that such loyalty should ever be an excuse for xenophobic nationalism.  I rejoice that my brothers and sisters in the faith, of whatever background or ethnicity, similarly express the particularities of their own cultures.  And I will strive to learn what Christ may be saying to my way of being faithful through encounter with other ways of being faithful.  Nevertheless I cannot shed this skin of Englishness, nor indeed should I try to.  This is a plea to take the particularities of human existence with absolute seriousness.  Let's not fool ourselves into thinking we can sidestep these things.  It's time to restore the sorely neglected Englishness of how we live our faith.

Let the last words be those of John Donne preaching at Saint Paul's Cathedral nearly four hundred years ago,

Beloved, outward things apparel God, and since God was content to take a body, let us not leave Him naked and ragged.

Too many virgins conceive
(Matthew 1.18-end)

 
Too many 'virgins' conceive; that's the problem. According to government figures just published  * although the under-18 conception rate in the UK is at its lowest level for 20 years it still compares very unfavourably with other Western European nations. Teenage conceptions in the UK are running at nearly 40,000 a year, and almost 7,500 of those are to girls under 16 years old. The government regards teenage pregnancies as a major factor in social exclusion. The geography of deprivation, poor education, no skills, and poor housing matches teenage pregnancies exactly. An under 18 year old is four or five times more likely to become pregnant in Manchester than in Dorset. Some recent research suggests that of sexually active teenagers, most lost their virginity at 15. Too many 'virgins' conceive; that's the problem.

Our faith tradition guards the uniqueness of the new beginning that is Christ by reference to the virgin's womb. We use that idea to assert the absolute prevenient grace of God. In other words, when Matthew the gospel writer echoes Isaiah’s naming of Immanuel – ‘God with us’ – he does so to emphasise the fact that this is God’s action.  ‘The Lord himself will give you a sign’ as Isaiah puts it. This isn’t about biology anymore than it is about social causes and consequences of pregnancy. The virgin’s womb is the marker of all the action being God’s. In Matthew’s teasing and allusive language, God gives birth to Christ through the womb of Mary. That isn’t a million miles from those verses in John’s Gospel that have ended countless Carol Services:

“No man hath seen God at any time,” says the Authorised Version, “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”  Or as the version we use has it, “the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart, … has made him known.”  The word used there could just as well be translated as “womb.” The Son who comes from the Father’s womb is born from Mary’s womb. The doctrine of the Incarnation will have nothing to do with the idea of it being a product of our seeking after God. The first move always comes from God – if it all depends on us, our actions, our intentions, our strivings – then we are fools, pity and disillusion our currency.

Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood

Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,

Dreading to find its Father.  

No, dread is not to be our lot. God acts. Here we take our stand with the saints before us. The Christmas we celebrate is a totally new beginning - born of a virgin.

Yes, I too will guard the truth of the first move always, but always being God's; but those 15 year olds, so recently virgins, require of us a theology that is thoroughly incarnational, not anaemically spiritual. The Word became flesh, but we are constantly perceived as trying to reverse the process - turning flesh into mere words.

The young woman is with child. What could be more of flesh –– of the yearning and aches of desire, of tender love or impulsive urge, of pain and fatigue, of soaring joys and wearying confusions, of wondrous power or of anguishing powerlessness, of surging hope and disarming relentlessness, of changes that envelope and overpower a mother to be? A young woman said to me, "I felt my body was no longer my own."

With every second that passes four people come to birth - 247 babies a minute. Let not the uniqueness of Christ's birth blind us to its commonness. What I'm trying to get at is that alongside the prevenient grace of God we must always hold on to the condescension of God. St Augustine called it the humility of God. In blood and pain God enters our common life, to make it holy through and through.

Dare we name that God amongst us? Not in the Church but in the everyday world. In the struggles of the school kid with a baby, as much as the upright and sensible? With the irreligious scoffer, as much as the gentle soul? With the confused as much as the so sure? Where religion is dead, as where it thrives? Dare we name that God - Emmanuel? In the confusions and complexities of human life - all of them!

The great Karl Barth put is like this, 'What is Christian is secretly but fundamentally identical with what is universally human.' With Dietrich Bonhoeffer we can boast of Emmanuel, the Christ - of him alone is it really true that nothing human remained alien to him. Of this man we say, "This is God for us." All of us!

The young woman is with child; and virgin's name was Mary (Luke 1.27) - thanks be to God.

Trust or Trussed.

I'm fond of a grilled turkey schnitzel now and then.  When laying a well marinated poultry steak on the barbecue on a balmy summer evening I give no thought at all to where the meat comes from.  Instead, a well chilled wheat beer in hand, all my attention is on cooking it but keeping it moist so that it will do justice to the salads prepared earlier!  Like many other people, recent news may cause me to think more seriously about what I'm doing.

The sheer size of the slaughter necessary to confine the recent Suffolk outbreak of avian flu was a revelation.  Had I ever imagined that just one farm producing my barbie treat would have 159,000 birds on it?  The thought never crossed my mind; anymore than did the presence of an army of migrant workers to make the process work, or the importation of meat I somehow assumed to be in a sense 'local.'  Naïve I may indeed be, after all it is widely called the food industry, but I think there's something else to be said as well.  And that something else has a profound faith edge to it.

All of us in the UK enjoy the benefits of cheap, plentiful and varied food made possible by the industrialisation of production.  Whether it be wine, vegetables, cheese or any other of the thousands of food stuffs easily available to us, the techniques of the factory system figure.  Occasionally we may balk at the idea and insist on small-scale products, but generally the cost keeps us happy with what is more easily available.  Price and good looks rule in food shopping as in the rest of retail.  Food has become just another commodity in a host of commodities.

In the world of commodities choice is the key.  Within my budget I can choose what I like.  On the face of it I have a high degree of personal autonomy.  My preferences, my needs, my whims, predominate.  And, of course, the successful marketer will use such vaunted self-determination to promote sales by emphasising that it is all down to just what I want.  The self-selection display has become the ubiquitous way of selling things precisely because it appeals to that proud sense of personal autonomy.

The notion of choice, however, hides other things that are just as important.  And food scares, like the one about bird flu, quickly discloses one of those hidden things - trust.  Every time I buy a food I am making a commitment of trust that it is wholesome.  Likewise I am trusting that the way it was produced is also in a sense wholesome.  Often questions about production are quite deliberately set to one side, as it were.  How often do you hear sentiments like, "If you knew how they made it you'd never eat it?"  Food presented as attractive commodity allows us to avoid hard issues.  But such avoidance brings with it a greatly increased trust requirement.

Meat provides a particularly vivid example of how things have changed.  Where animals are raised very close to where they are consumed every stage is open to personal scrutiny.  A clergy friend working overseas was often paid in a live animal destined for the table.  There the health of the animal, the way it was handled, the nature of its preparation, and the storage of its meat was all a matter of face-to-face transactions.  Nothing was hidden behind a veneer of glossy plastic film.  Close involvement with killing and butchery is not something most of us relish.  Distancing ourselves from it requires us to put great trust in those who will be closely involved.  Food scares demonstrate that trust is all too easily knocked.

There is a lot of evidence that generally trust is becoming ever more difficult for us in all circumstances.  Simply put, we appear to be socially much less trusting and much more suspicious than were our grandparents.  It seems that as a society our stock of social capital is in steep decline.  In other words, the active connections between people forged by mutual understanding, common values and shared behaviours are much less powerful than they were.  Networks and communities no longer have the pull towards co-operative action and mutuality they once had.  We have somehow become disconnected from one another; as one commentator famously put it, nowadays we all "bowl alone."  And there's the rub: commodities require of us profound trust in people and processes far distant from ourselves and yet our social experience is of a disconnected and isolating individualism that makes trust ever more difficult to maintain.

This is where the 'faith edge' of the issue comes to light.  In the United States in particular large sums are being invested in researching how religion creates and sustains social capital.  There it is taken for granted that churches, for example, are essential to the common good of society as a whole.  Here in the UK the same thought is often voiced but also often severely criticised, as recent news stories about schools and about adoption agencies have made plain.  Too often the implied message is that faith isn't really trustworthy.

Trust is an idea that runs through our scriptures.  Time and time again we are reassured that God is to be trusted.  And profoundly and disarmingly it is also disclosed that God entrusts his people with the message of salvation and hope.  In other words, we are trusted by God with the truth that God is to be trusted.  This foundational trust is the antidote to the cynicism so prevalent in our social relationships.

If trust is needful to every transaction, and yet denied, we are condemned to an ever more fearful world.  Perhaps an essential component in Christ's mission now is that we seek to live explicitly as those who trust and do all that we can to enhance trust and trustworthiness.  Without such efforts won't we all end up trussed in wariness and suspicion?

You must remember this?

Will my daughters aged 18 and 24 remember Tony Blair in years to come?  Current evidence suggests it is unlikely.  They are keen for more women to hold political power, and Mr Blair's achievement in that quarter doesn't mark him as memorable.  Despite politicians' polemic about the immense importance of current issues my daughters remain unmoved.  There is nothing in government or opposition promises or actions that signals for them particular significance.  Like so many others, their judgement on politics is summed up in one word, 'boring.'  In their eyes Mr Blair has all but disappeared into a sea of men in dark suits.  If politicians are concerned about being remembered, and I suspect they are, then Mr Blair should worry about the millions like my daughters.

That nothing and no one is memorable is another sign of current disengagement with politics.  My grandmother was a young adult when National Insurance began in 1911.  Throughout her life she remembered Lloyd George as the Chancellor who had given the people the old age pension.  In her later years, no revelations about Lloyd George's personal life or political misjudgements could sway her from that fond and respectful remembrance.  Will Gordon Brown be so devotedly remembered as the Chancellor who gave pensioners a free bus pass?  I doubt it.  Things no longer seem worth remembering.

If amnesia has struck politics, it has also struck religion.  It is clear that remembering is a command of Jesus.  At the Last Supper, he instructed his followers to always remember him in the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine.  So began the Eucharist as an act of communal remembering.  Whatever else that rite may be, all Christians agree that it is a calling to mind through shared physical actions of the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Christians remember, but according to a Reader's Digest survey a while ago more than half of Britons have forgotten.  So less that 50% of those questioned in the magazine's survey knew what Christians celebrate at Easter.  The survey produced the usual crop of earnest complaints about the failures of religious education.  Yet again evidence of the demise of Christianity in Britain was bemoaned by some and welcomed by others.  What went un-remarked, however, was that such forgetting is a social phenomenon that goes way beyond the practice of Christianity.

Just as many more people believe in God than attend any kind of religious worship so also many more believe in democracy than actively participate in it.  The last General Election saw a vote from just 59% of those eligible, and Mr Blair's return to power had the backing of just 24% of the electorate.  Figures like those are hardly the foundation for memorable achievements.  Any democrat should be worried.  Somehow we've forgotten the actions and the knowledge whilst holding on to the belief.  How long can the belief survive without the supporting actions?  Commitment to the ideal must surely be more than a nod of assent or a tick on surveyor's clipboard.

Political democracy like religion needs more than casual belief to survive.  The obligations of participation and mutual concern don't come easily in a society where individual choice is lauded as paramount.  More than personal preference or nostalgia, we need to recover a sense of shared memory.

As long ago as the 1920s the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was working on the idea of collective memory as a fundamental component of society.  Halbwachs maintained that the sharing of ideas, actions, and meanings in groups enables individuals to remember.  He claimed that talking and sharing in groups like workplaces, families or schools gives structures that allow a person to remember by associating thoughts with place and actions.  In this way he reckoned that memories become links in sustaining chains of belonging and purpose.  Without such social frameworks the thoughts that could be memories fall apart and disappear like dreams.  The fear must be that politics reduced to inconsequential dreams is but a step away from a nightmare.

The genius of Jesus' command 'do this' in remembrance of me was to link action, sharing, and intent to memory.  So each 'doing of this' not only calls to mind the first Good Friday and Easter but also re-members, makes afresh, the community of those faithful to Jesus.  For religion and politics the doing is crucial to the remembering.  Without it nothing is memorable.

---------------------------

What's in a word?

"She's a real Christian."  The judgement was being made by the next-door neighbour of the person described.  What was meant by the comment was that she was kind to cats and shopped on behalf of elderly residents in her street.  In other words the term 'real Christian' actually meant 'kindly neighbour.'

'Christian' as a label for benevolent behaviour has been common currency for generations.  It is reflected in the familiar titles of charities like Christian Aid and Christian Action.  Presumably those who devised the titles thought the Christian label would immediately communicate a concern for welfare and compassion without need for further explanation.

Using 'Christian' as shorthand for social caring without any reference to faith in Jesus Christ has often felt difficult for us churchgoers.  We have protested that Christian refers to being in discipleship to Jesus Christ; that Christian must have some relationship to the practice of worship; and that a Christian by definition has relationships and responsibilities within the community of Christians, namely the Church.  We have objected when organisations defined as secular have been described by their members as doing Christian work.  We have protested that being kind to cats and neighbours just isn't enough to warrant the appellation 'Christian.'  It was, we said, a kind of inflation that devalues the currency of faith and worship.  Let Christian mean faith in Christ and the worship of God, and nothing less.

Such concerns start to look like ideas from a golden age now passed.  Things change fast in the game of language, and the kindly notion of the label 'Christian' has evaporated before our eyes.  Now, it seems, Christian has come to mean religionist and what is clear from the news is that religion is a threat.  Far from being kindly, religionists bring prejudice, extremism, confrontation, and perhaps even violence with them.  This side of 9/11 and this side of the Atlantic, religious adherence has become the force that threatens our liberties.  So far, the word Christian hasn't quite degenerated into a term of abuse, but the possibility that it might do so is real.  It seems that some collectors in the recent Christian Aid Week fundraising campaign have indeed met this response as something new.

Such language change is beyond any obvious strategy to prevent it.  It simply happens and there is no stopping it.  Just as those who objected to the word 'gay' losing the meaning 'bright and happy' and coming to mean 'homosexual,' so those who prefer that usage are unable stop its meaning changing again to signify 'rubbish' or 'flimsy.'  When complaints were levelled against the DJ Chris Moyles using 'gay' to mean unserviceable or poor quality, the BBC governors had to admit that he was simply using the language of his young audience.  They could only advise care in any future use of the word in a derogatory sense.

Unfortunately negativity seems to be an all too familiar part of language changes, or at least those changes that become headlines.  Changes that carry no criticism go un-remarked.  More problematic ones become matters of controversy, and strangely the very debate seems to spur the change on.  That Christian may get a colloquial negativity attached to it should worry us all.  Trying to shout the change down, however, is only likely to make matters worse.  What then should we do?

I take heart in the fact that words and the ideas they are attached to are entirely separate things.  In other words (!), words themselves are essentially arbitrary things.  It is no more than social convention that a table is called a table rather than something else.  As people of faith we can always find new positive ways of describing ourselves.  Indeed, I think finding the right words is one of the key tasks in the life of faith.

In the first book of the Bible, God urges the first human being to name the world, and we the descendants of that first person have been busy doing just that ever since.  Only God can create with a Word, but our humbler and changing words give us the social world which we inhabit.  So our responsibility is to name this world, and everything and everyone in it, as belonging to God.  By such action we must find words that can tell God's story in our own day.

_______________________

The Effect of Advertising

 'Adverts work' was the startling news reported by the BBC at the beginning of January.*  After two years of investigation amongst a group of 15 to 26 year olds University of Connecticut researchers have reported a direct link between advertising and youth drinking.  Published in the journal Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, the research suggests that for each extra advert experienced in the period of a month, one per cent more alcoholic drinks are likely to be consumed.  The study also analysed youth drinking in relation to the money spent on advertising, and found that marketing expenditure definitely increases consumption.

 The American report warns that young people are drinking at an earlier age than ever before, and that alcohol use impacts performance at school and the incidence of accidents.  Claims that advertising only causes brand switching, or only influences those older than the legal drinking age, are refuted by the study's findings.

 Adverts are more strictly regulated in the UK than in the United States, and drinks' advertising which could appeal to under-18 year olds is banned.  Nevertheless with the UK youth drinking rate one of the highest in Europe, and something like one in five of those aged between 11 and 15 drinking alcohol at least once a week, the research demands serious consideration.  Most people will surely admit that there is an important health and social issue here that should not be ignored.  A further recent UK news story* about the banning of a brewery advertisement as suggesting that beer consumption leads to social or sexual success makes the point.  But there is more to reflect on in this story than the presenting issue of alcohol use and misuse.

 News of the research and its findings also discloses something about the nature of consumer society that is worth pondering.  The study was reported as establishing a link between advertising alcohol and drinking alcohol, with the clear implication that finding such a link is newsworthy.  In other words, it assumed that the existence of such a link comes as something of a surprise!  It was reported as if finding that the millions of pounds spent on advertising actually influences people was unexpected.  It seems we find it hard to believe that advertisements can achieve what their creators claim. 

 Is this anything more than just a proud reluctance to admit that adverts influence us?  I suspect so.  Any parent of a small child knows that adverts can prompt pester-power that is very difficult to resist.  We will readily acknowledge that young minds are all too easily influenced by the glitz and pull of commercials, but we adults are beyond such things, or so we like to think.  We tell ourselves that with more maturity comes increased rationality, and ability in discernment, that puts us beyond the glib sales messages.  We may even be tempted to think that the young adults the study discovered to be so susceptible to drinks adverts were only so influenced because they are young.  Unfortunately the success of advertising campaigns for such distinctly 'mature' products as malted night-time drinks, over 50s car insurance, and stair-lifts, give the lie to our claims of aloofness.

 Adverts work.  We all know it, but many of us find it hard to admit it.  Working with our scepticism, clever advertisement compilers play on our minds and emotions with humour, irony, or even irritation, to keep us aware of the product.  Underlying their efforts is an absolute conviction that adverts work, whether the public admits it or not.  Maybe we who are preachers should take some encouragement from such tenacity?  After all many people tell us, as they tell the advertisers, that our messages often go unheeded.  The example of advertising suggests that giving the message and getting the message is much more subtle than appears at first sight.  Communications that are dismissed or despised aren't necessarily ineffective.

Total recall?

 Do you remember Post Office queues before the days of tape barriers and a single line?  Those occasions when you only wanted a couple of stamps but everyone in front of you needed complicated transactions involving triplicate forms, whereas the other queues all seemed to be moving speedily forward.  Did I really always join the wrong queue or was it just a trick of mind and memory?  The experience was brought to my mind earlier this month when I discovered the queue of thousands I had been standing in for ages wasn’t going where I thought it was.  Unable to depart sideways and hesitant about trying to push my way back through the throng, I decided there was no alternative to going with the crowd.

 So it was not by design that I found myself at the tomb of John Paul II underneath the great Church of St Peter in Rome.  There in a quite austere but splendid vault that great figure of recent Christian history has his resting place very near the tomb of Saint Peter.  Having reached the memorial stone, I, along with everyone else in the queue, was quickly ushered past by a steward.  The speediest of glimpses from the shuffling throng was all that was permitted.  Those who attempted to stop and pray were quickly moved on with a stern “no praying” in a variety of languages.

 Undoubtedly the steward who kept us moving was simply trying to safely manage a huge crowd in a confined space, but his insistent ban on prayer seemed strangely incongruous.  But then looking around I realised there was actually plenty of space elsewhere for people to stop and pray.  The issue was that everyone wanted to pray in the tiny space at the foot of John Paul’s grave.  The other tombs were largely ignored by the throng.  The queue I had inadvertently joined was most definitely a queue for John Paul II’s tomb, not for the tombs of the Popes.  In death, as in life, John Paul II is an inspiration and encouragement to a lively faith for millions of people; surely something every Christian can rejoice in.

 In the crowd I saw just one person kneeling in uninterrupted prayer.  She was at the spot assumed to be the tomb of Saint Peter himself.  Hardly any of the rest of us even momentarily hovered at the place where she was offering her devotions.  Saint Peter didn’t seem to have quite the same power of attraction as the nearby recent tomb.  Almost like the forgotten corners of so many country churchyards, the shadows of obsequies long past, as important as they may be, are pale beside those of our own living experiences.  All too aware of the importance of our own times and feelings it is all but impossible to feel with the same urgency the emotional pull of things and people long past.

 Remembering turns out to be more closely tied to current feelings and activities than we often assume.  What is remembered is largely determined by the present.  The annual November observance of Remembrance Sunday is itself a good indicator of the process.  By the late 1970s there was much press comment about Remembrance Sunday 'dying out.'  The numbers of those attending Remembrance services and events was in sharp decline and the generations born after the end of World War Two seemed uninterested in maintaining such things.  Then came the Falklands War of 1982 and the need to remember was urgent and demanding.  Remembrance Sunday that year was marked by more people than it had been for years previously.  The horrors of all too recent deaths and injuries prompted heartfelt remembering.  The poignancy of anniversaries since then has continued to sustain the remembering.

 The fact that remembering serves contemporary needs is a particular problem for a historical faith like Christianity.  A Christian cannot be content to view Jesus as simply a great figure of history.  To do so would turn Christ into an archaeological entity only of interest to history enthusiasts.  Instead Christians have insisted from the very earliest days that Christ is both ever present and a real figure of history.  Our forebears in the faith understood well that remembering always serves current need.  For them, Christ's words "Do this in remembrance of me" served not solely as a looking back that fades as the years pass, but more powerfully as a way of experiencing for themselves that same saving presence Christ's disciples knew before them.  In this way the Eucharist is not about remembering something remote in time and place but rather a means to re-member, that is recreate or continually establish, the community gathered around the living Saviour.

 The person kneeling at St Peter's tomb perhaps appreciated rather better than the rest of us in the crowd under the Vatican that the Church in a community unbounded by time.  Steeled by the conviction that we are companions of an eternal Redeemer we can rejoice in the company of all the saints.  That can never be the wrong queue to join.

Makeover Madness

        I used to think makeover shows on TV were harmless fun.  You know the formula: here is a back-garden that looks like a bomb site and the team have just 72 hours to convert it into an oasis of stylish greenery fit for cocktail parties.  We all marvelled at what transformations could be achieved with decking, a water pump and a few container grown plants.  We hardly noticed the array of labourers just off camera, the expensive power tools, and the seemingly endless supply of perfect plants and artefacts.  The message was ‘You too can do this; it takes nothing more than a little effort and imagination.’  Of course, with that message goes the unspoken thought that your garden is a tip because you haven’t the imagination and you’re too lazy to put the effort in!

I suppose my doubts about these shows was first kindled when a resident returned to see what had been done to her house and hated the result.  Far from joy, hers were the tears of bitterness that a loved home had been converted into something of loathing; her cosy sitting room reduced to a stylish wasteland of fashionable tat.  As she dissolved into an angry, sobbing heap of disappointment and loss, I wondered whether her distress was a proper source of ‘light entertainment.’  The obvious discomfort of the presenter confirmed my worries.

Despite such occasional setbacks (or, more cynically, perhaps because of them) the format has been extended and developed.  Let the makeover be not just gardens or a few rooms but a whole house or even a neighbourhood.  And why stop with things, why not makeover people as well?  And why stop at a makeover of clothes and cosmetics, why not go for the literal whole body approach?  Somewhere there is a surgeon who can cut you into shape and that will make for engrossing TV pictures.  And if that comes over as too materialistic, why not a makeover of relationships as well?  Cameras can be so small now that any willing volunteers will soon forget it is in the corner of the bedroom.  Later the experts can analyse the footage to tell the punters how to improve their sex lives.  The opportunities are just about endless: makeover parenting, makeover courting, makeover recruiting, makeover holidaying, makeover purchasing, makeover exercising … … Is there anything left of living that can’t be the subject of a makeover?  Is there any human experience that can’t be turned into toe-curling embarrassment by an expert who knows so much better, and all in the cause of entertainment?

In this endlessly repeated cycle of expert advice we are all made childish.  These shows tell us that we haven’t matured enough to know how to handle the everyday things of living.  What is meant to be entertainment carries the coded implication that we don’t know how to dress, behave, look after our own well-being, create a home, or bring up a child.  TV has become the nagging parent always ready to comment on our personal shortcomings.  The consequence of such overbearing parenting is that we begin to doubt our own abilities.  Self-confidence gets driven from us by the repeated calling into question of the way we handle the things of daily life.

The weasel of personal doubt creeps into everything.  Whilst checking some facts on the Internet at work recently, a banner in the corner of the screen drew my attention to expert advice on what to wear at work.  To confirm my own diagnosis I should admit here that I clicked onto the website!  Only after checking out whether my dress sense is adequate did I pause to ask myself why I was taking it so seriously.  For a while I lay prone before the all powerful media voice telling me how to dress for work.  On reflection, that is the kind of advice I haven’t sought since I was at primary school.  Those who know my sartorial style may well say it shows!  Nevertheless, I feel that such constant looking to experts for advice on daily matters is demeaning and destructive.  No one doubts that on occasions we all need professional advice, but to make everyday judgments and choices the subject of such advice is nonsense.

According to Professor Frank Furedi of the University of Kent, however, the makeover project goes alarmingly beyond nonsense.  He says the prevalence of ideas of lifestyle coaching and makeovers has extended the professional-client relationship into all kinds of areas where it can be actually harmful.  As the professional-client relationship is always one of inequality ordinary people are being made ever less capable and authoritative in matters of daily living.  In this process our abilities in learning how to deal with problems via experience are diminished and we become needy children who cannot do things on their own.  By inserting ‘expert’ advice where it is not appropriate personal learning processes are short-circuited and intuition compromised.  Far from assisting us towards full-living, the culture of the makeover expert actually disables us.

I think there’s something in Furedi’s argument, so giving up all makeover shows for Lent isn’t a bad idea.  If this season of the Christian year is about each of us personally learning more of Christ’s call to discipleship then beginning with a renewed awareness of our own abilities to learn and reflect for ourselves is a good place to start.

Christopher Burkett