Sir Alex Ferguson: the consummate professional?

Professionally speaking: is that speaking well, or is that being paid for speaking?

Speaking well: is that speaking without hesitation, notes or blasphemy, or is it speaking truthfully?

In what sense has Sir Alex Ferguson been a professional football manager?

There is a sense of professionalism which comes from a realisation which is personally transformative and attitudinal. This is the sense which is behind the religious profession through which a person gives themselves utterly because of that realisation and profession. Here’s my starter for eight about such a professional life. Can anyone help me to make it a starter for ten?

1. Professionals are driven by values that go to the core of their being. Their motivation comes from this inner sense of values.
2. Professionals profess those values in their practice.
3. Professionals enjoy their busyness when they can profess their faith, but become anxious when they lose sight of these guiding principles in their busyness – when practice prevents profession.
4. Professionals are preoccupied by their profession at all times. They occasionally switch off when fully engaged by something else.
5. Professionals choose an enabling lifestyle.
6. Professionals develop disciplines to make themselves resourceful and effective.
7. Professionals don’t count working hours or kill time. They are intrigued by opportunities. Kairos beats Chronos every time.
8. Professionals cultivate their values as best friends. Continuing professional development is not an option but a natural course of action.

It is important to recognize that mastering any of the disciplines requires effort on both the levels of understanding the principles and following the practices, It is tempting to think that just because one understands certain principles one has “learned” about the discipline. This is the familiar trap of confusing intellectual understanding with learning. Learning always involves new understanding and new behaviours, “thinking” and “doing”. This is the reason for distinguishing principles from practices. Both are vital.

Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline p 384. This quote from Peter Senge (picked up from Friday mailing) emphasises the ins and outs of learning. We can indeed take in many things in terms of understanding, but there needs to be outcome in terms of disciplined practice, through which we learn more and better.

You can tell a culture is in trouble when its elders walk across the street to avoid meeting its youth.

Quoted by Meg Wheatley in Finding our Way and attributed to Malidoma Some from Burkino Fasso and Parker Palmer. Meg Wheatley’s has written a very appreciative and moving essay Maybe you will be the ones: to my sons and their friends.

Hallo.

‘Allo, ‘allo.

One of the running gags of TV sitcom ‘Allo, ‘Allo! was the line, delivered in a French accent, “I will say this only once …….”, which was said over and over again, in a comedy called “Allo, allo”.

And we can perhaps imagine the market trader saying, “I’m not going to give you this once, I’m not even going to give you this twice, I’m going to give you this three times.”

That is what we get in today’s readings. We get it three times.

In the gospel, Jesus gives it to Peter three times. “Do you love me?” “You know I do.”

Three times, to correspond with the number of times Peter denied Christ before the cock crew.

Three times to emphasise that Jesus had got over that, that Peter was forgiven.

Three times to underline Peter’s particular pastoral responsibility

I wonder what he says to each of us, this Jesus risen from the dead. What his call is. “Mary, do you love me?” “You know I do.” “Then feed my lambs, teach my people, help them find their freedom.”

It’s not just once that Luke gives us the story of Saul’s conversion. It’s not just twice. It’s three times.

Why?

First of all, I presume it was because he thought this is a story worth telling.

And I presume that it was Luke’s intention that this story should capture the imagination of the church, and help us in our own journeys and our own transformations and conversions.

It’s worth remembering also that it’s not just one, it’s not just twice, but it’s three times that Luke tells us how brutal and callous Saul was towards the followers of the Way.

1. In chapter 7, Luke tells us how Saul was involved in stoning of Stephen to death. He may only have been holding the coats, but Luke does say that Saul “approved of their killing him.” He was not a nice man.
2. In chapter 8, Luke reports that “Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.” What was wrong with the man?
3. Here in chapter 9, he goes and gets letters from the high priest to authorise him to arrest those who followed Jesus’ Way, and imprison them in Jerusalem. This is a truly frightening man.

What on earth was Jesus doing with Saul?

This is a story of conversion told three times, intended to capture our imagination.

I want to look at this in not just one way, not even just in two ways, but in three.

I want to look at the idea of “going out of our way” (in the sense of waywardness), “mending our ways” and “finding our way”.

And I want to refer not just to one person, Saul, nor even to just two people, but three. I refer to Saul, to the prodigal and to ourselves as the people this story is intended to inspire and transform.

Firstly, Saul.

Saul went out of his way to find the followers of the Way.

It comes across as an obsession.

There are two places named. There’s Jerusalem and there’s Damascus. It’s hardly Runcorn to Liverpool in 20 minutes, so long as there are no lane closures on the bridge. This is 135 miles away, across rivers and mountains, on horseback – perhaps 4 or 5 days away.

Then, lo, Jesus meets him, risen from the tomb.

Lovingly he greets him.

“Who are you?” Saul asks.

“I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.”

And he said to Saul, “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what to do.”

And Saul had to be led the rest of the way by hand, and then he was told his way forward.

And what a long way he went.

Luke emphasises all the places Paul went, by road, overseas, through storms carrying Jesus’ to all the nations.

The way was found for Saul, and the way was followed by the convert all the way, all the miles, through trial, suffering, all the way to his death.

Saul’s way, Paul’s way, reminds us of the ways of the prodigal son.

His way was to get his inheritance and run for the time of his life.

Until his luck runs out, and he sees the error of his ways.

The father’s way is to tuck his skirt into his belt and run out to embrace the son he thought he had lost.

Lovingly he greets him, in such an outrageous way that the elder brother protests.

“This isn’t the way.

This isn’t the way to deal with someone who stripped you of half of your money, and who let down the family business.”

And the father says “This is the only way.

The only way to share your father’s pleasure is to forgive your brother. That is the only way. That is my way.” 

What about ourselves?

What are our ways? Are they his ways?

Our waywardness may not be as dramatic as Saul’s, or the murderer who becomes a preacher, or the prodigal’s.

Or as awful as Peter’s, who when he realised what he had done just broke down and wept.

Waywardness is part of our reality which is realised in our worship. We confess the ways in which, whether in thought or in deed, we have sinned against our brothers and sisters, and sinned against God.

We ask for God to help us to mend our ways.

We let Jesus lovingly greet us, lead us, his way, so that we may “do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you our God.”

That is the way God wants us.

He wants us to walk with him. He wants us to be yoked to him, on the way and all the way.  This is the way of life.

Before Jesus’s followers became known as Christians, they were known as followers of the WAY.  The followers of the WAY were known because they had a way of life.

And that way of life is spelled out not just once, not just twice, but three times, by both Jesus and Luke in today’s readings.

Through both Peter and Saul Jesus experienced betrayal and persecution.

To both he showed forgiveness.

For both he gave them a way to go, a direction.

For both there is the prediction of suffering, but for them that was another aspect of walking with Jesus and following his way.

Ourselves, we help each other on our way at the end of our liturgy.

Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord. “In the peace of Christ, we go”.

We don’t simply get on our way.

We commit ourselves to his way, to keep in step with Jesus, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God as we meet other Sauls, Peters, Sharons and Janets.

What is our way with them?

“This task [of giving hope and changing lives] moves beyond what the city council or national government can do, not least when budgets are being reduced drastically. It will require the combined energy, resources and wisdom of everyone to address some of the fundamental economic and social issues we face, and to protect those who are most vulnerable in our communities.

“I am aware that I am taking a leap of faith that we want to promote another’s fulfilment at the same time as our own. As we seek the welfare of the whole city, may we know that we are committed to Giving Hope and Changing Lives when, in our relations with our fellow human beings, distant respect moves to deep appreciation and mere tolerance becomes full participation.”

David Urqhuart, Bishop of Birmingham, writing in the report Giving Hope Changing Lives on the future development of Birmingham, as reported in the Chamberlain Files. Jenny Gillies brought this to my attention in a tweet @revjennyg.

What shape is the Diocese of Chester in? Received wisdom casts the Diocese as a tea pot Following the shape of the old Cheshire. I’ve never quite seen it. I assume that the handle is to the east, and the spout is the Wirral peninsula to the west. It’s like those gestalt pictures through which we jump to conclusions about what we see.

What do you see here?

For me it’s got to be a bird. And the shape it’s in is as a dove. The tail feathers are in the west. It would be better if we could tilt the Wirral down a bit, but we don’t have to be precise. The beak district is in the east, the Peak District. The doves markings are the map pins identifying the churches of the Diocese. One episcopal eye winks at Altrincham. The other suffragan episcopal eye is in the tail feathers giving a steer to issues of poverty and life expectancy exposed by the contrasts between Deeside Wirral and Merseyside Wirral. Chester (with Cathedral and Bishop’s House) is the reproductive egg laying organ.

Or it’s a scary monster waving its hands in the air. You see what you want to see don’t you?

Metaphors generate meaning. The metaphor of the teapot may have been a godsend to those whose concern was to create a sense of fellowship. But would you rather have a diocese which is like a teapot, or a diocese which is like a bird? But not just any bird. Would you like a church that is like a dove?

What shape is the church in?

Forgiveness doesn’t change the past, but it releases us from the power of the past. Forgiveness doesn’t rewrite history. But it prevents our histories from asphyxiating us. Fundamentally, forgiveness transforms our past from an enemy to a friend, from a horror-show of shame to a storehouse of wisdom. In the absence of forgiveness we’re isolated from our past, trying pitifully to bury or deny or forget or destroy the many things that haunt and overshadow and plague and torment us. Forgiveness doesn’t change these things, but it does change their relationship to us. No longer do they imprison us or pursue us or surround us or stalk us. Now they accompany us, deepen us, teach us, train us. No longer do we hate them or curse them or resent them or begrudge them. Now we find acceptance, understanding, enrichment, even gratitude for them. That’s the work of forgiveness. It’s about the transformation of the prison of the past.

Sam Wells from his Easter Day Sermon 2013

In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility; for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

Parker J. Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

We need to “go out”, then, in order to experience our own anointing, its power and its redemptive efficacy: to the “outskirts” where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight, and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters …. giving what little ointment we have to those who have nothing, nothing at all.

A priest who seldom goes out of himself [herself], who anoints little …. misses out on the best of our people, on what can stir the depths of his [her] priestly heart. Those who do not go out of themselves, instead of being mediators, gradually become intermediaries, managers. …. It is not a bad thing that reality itself forces us to “put out into the deep”, where what we are by grace is clearly seen as pure grace, out into the deep of the contemporary world, where the only thing that counts is “unction” – not function – and the nets which overflow with fish are those cast solely in the name of the One in whom we have put our trust: Jesus.

These quotes are taken from a sermon preached by Pope Francis on Maundy Thursday 2013. The full text of Pope Francis’s sermon is here.

For that Arab Spring
we don’t ride with Josephs & Sons
into an Egypt promising sanctuary
dragging chains in an Egypt of plague,
with a Pharoah begging
“Moses, go.  Get me a blessing.”

For that Arab Spring
hope and moonshine
for a people on the run from oppression.
An uprising thirsty
for the blood of  lambs,
and Egyptian oppressors.

For another Arab Spring
we ride with Joseph’s son
into a full moon of another garden.
This time a lamb questions,
“do you thirst for this blood shed?”
“Is there a blessing for Pharoah?”

This Arab Spring,
an uprising for tormentors
of chalice shed for them. Cheers,
a kiss, and the strange taste of freedom.

Today, Pope Francis has been celebrating Mass at Casal de Marmo, a juvenile detention center on the outskirts of Rome, and washing the feet of the prisoners there.

This is one of the many gestures that has captured the imagination of people around the world, along with his willingness to get out of his car to shake hands with people without the fear of getting shot, wanting to pay off his hotel bill, and choosing to live in a simpler apartment. I don’t know about you, but I find all of this very exciting. In recent years the Roman Catholic Church has had problems with its PR (rightly so, because of the ways in which it has covered up abuse scandals). But with the white smoke has come a whiff of excitement. Maybe, the church in its impoverished state, can become the church of the poor, for the poor. And, without doubt, what the world needs is, according to Pope Francis, a wounded church that goes out onto the streets, rather than a sick church that is withdrawn into its own world.

There has been far too much inspiration and charity from within the Roman Catholic Church for it to be hidden behind a smokescreen of scandal.

The juvenile detention centre has 48 prisoners. The majority of them are Muslims. Pope Francis will wash the feet of 12 of the prisoners.

I wonder how they will feel. I wonder what will go through their minds. I wonder what sensations will travel from their feet and from the ground of their being. Will they know, through this action, that God loves them? Will they know that they are dear to him? Will they know that they are forgiven for the wrong paths those feet have taken them?

I wonder what Pope Francis will feel through his hands, in his mind and at his heart. Will he feel the journey those feet have made? Those feet of young people. Will he feel inside their shoes, their trainers, their boots, their bootees to the life they have led? Will he understand their running away from their homes, rival gangs, the police? Will he feel the cramping of life in those shoes and why they have kicked off?

This is what Maundy Thursday is about, that we love one another. It is a new commandment which is fleshed out in Jesus example of foot washing, and which is reenacted across the world this evening, including prisons and a detention centre in Rome. This is a love which is prepared to lovingly tend the other, whatever the state of the other’s feet may be, wherever those feet have been. This is a love which feels for the other, and which forms the foundation for a community of vulnerability, compassion and love with the least, the last and the lost.

It is a transformative act. The two parties will never feel the same about each other again. He felt for me. He understood me. He held me dear. He loved me.

Another Francis has hit the news this week. The Francis Report is the independent inquiry into what has gone wrong with the NHS in the light of the Mid Staffs Hospital. The important thing highlighted is the question of how to restore compassion to the National Health Service, and how safe care can be given to every patient every time. The publication of the report had nurses ringing in to Radio 5’s phone in, frustrated that they are unable to provide the level of care that they should be providing. Their hearts were going out to those who have been neglected, but their hands were tied up in so much other work.

I looked for a response to the Francis Report on Twitter from nurses. Mara Carlyle, now singer, but was a NHS nursing assistant for 7/8 years, mostly on wards so understaffed, tweeted:

If you give nurses enough resources and time to do their jobs properly, guess what? They will and they do. Because there weren’t enough staff for everyone’s basic needs to be attended to which inevitably led to some poor standards of care, that we often had to choose between attending to patients who were (variously) crying, dying, hungry, thristy, dirty, fallen out of bed …

Alison Leary, a registered nurse and macmillan lecturer in oncology writes of the work of a nurse (work described by Florence Nightingale as “women’s work which should be done quietly and in private”) and she asks:

How would you feel about dealing with a stranger in such an intimate way? A stranger who is so humiliated at his or her inability to control their own bodily functions that they weep? Then imagine having to care for him or her and 29 other patients with only two colleagues to help you.

So we have the juxtaposition of the Francis Report and its admissions about compassion, and Pope Francis and his expression of compassion, feeling for the other, loving the other.

Nurses want to alleviate suffering – physical, psychological, social and spiritual.

The dilemma for nurses is how they can show compassion in a system which expects so much from them.

If that is the dilemma of the nursing profession, it is perhaps the dilemma of our society. Don’t we want to be the answer to the problem of suffering, however that is experienced?

But how?

How does the NHS recover its capacity for compassion? How do we become compassionate? How do we feel for one another? How do we love one another?

The answer is repeated in story after story – from the story of the care of the Good Samaritan, to the story of the nurse most likely referred to as an angel. All of them are touching stories.

The answer is hinted at in tonight’s liturgy, and in Jesus own example of footwashing and his encouragement (“should”- is that command or encouragement?) for us to do just the same. This is the practice of loving one another, just as Jesus loves us.

It is taking one step at a time, one gesture at a time.

If the time has come for you to be asking where compassion has gone from our dealings with one another, if society has become so complicated that you don’t know where to start, I can tell you the place to start is HERE. It always has been. The first step is in the here and now, in truly local initiatives like Jesus washing the feet of his dearest friends, like Francis washing the feet of the prisoners in a Rome detention centre, like the nurse holding the hand of a patient who is afraid – who through that touch reaches beyond the physical condition of the patient to her heart of hearts.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe

“I am against bigness and greatness in all their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time. The bigger the unit you deal with, the hollower, the more brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all big successes and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead, and puts them on top.” William James

Richard Beck’s blog is well worth following. He has helpfully organised his blog into series of posts. One of them is A Walk with William James. Richard regards James as one who anticipated the leading ideas of the emergent church movement as well as the “greatest American psychologist”.

I am increasingly struck by the big significance of the small, and the tiny significance of the big. The large institutions are increasingly seen as disappointing. It is the tiniest interactions which constitute nature and these are becoming our trusted teachers.  This subversion was already realised in Jesus. His subjects included a mustard seed, a small child, a raven. His relationships were in the margins of the alienating big society.

This beautiful photo By the Rivers of Babylon is by HungLiu. By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept.

This is one of the most poignant lines in Scripture (Psalm 137:1) recalling such sad times of exile. Those exiles wondered “how can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land”.

Ben Quash, in Abiding, reminds us of the wisdom that the people of God are nearer to God “when they are in some sort of exile”. The Letter to Hebrews reminds us that “we have no abiding city” and Jesus has warning for those who feel too much at home in this world. Exile and the loss of home(land) must be an awful experience, shaking people to the roots of their identity. I don’t know whether it would be possible to sing any sort of song in such a strange land.

Quash, and many others, suggest that Christians should choose exile. This is “some sort of exile” which may, or may not have the brutality of violent removal and fearful flight. Quash refers to Hauerwas and Yoder who commend life lived “out of control”, “without the compulsion to hold on to the strings of power”. This is some sort of exile which is a walking with God who showed himself in Jesus as having nowhere to lay his head and who finished his days on the dump outside Jerusalem’s city wall.

The Jewish prophet Jeremiah points the way to vocation found in exile. He makes the “prison” of exile into a far more constructive way of life. He writes: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

It is countercultural and strange to live “out of control”, accepting exilic status and praying for our enemies. It means that we are no longer to see ourselves as “host” but as “guest”. (It may be that the Church can’t be trusted with being “host”. There have been so many complaints about the abuse of power by the Church “in control”). When Jeremiah suggests that the exiles “pray for the welfare of the city” he is encouraging them to be “good guests”. The exiles’ vocation was, and is, how to be a blessing to a host culture on territory which is strange, without losing heart.

I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.
Pope Gregory VII

Our own culture is strange. There are many things that go on in society which are strange ways. Many aspects of social policy (I am thinking of the “bedroom tax” and other impending welfare reforms and the impoverishment of families and children) are out of our control. We don’t see the world in the same way. Our values are different. In many ways, we are in a strange land. Most of us don’t bear the physical hardships of those in refugee camps, but there is much that we lament. How do we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?

Singing the Lord’s song in this strange land is something Jeremiah and Quosh insist that we do. The worship offered by exiles is, according to Quash, both resistance and gift. Quash writes:

God’s will to restore people to freedom before him, to overturn the idolatrous service of other gods, needs people who will use their voices to ‘sing his new song’ …

The early Christians may have handled the currency of the Empire each day, but before any of that, before sunrise, they met as the people of God, as the Church. That was their true city, their real ‘kingdom’, their Jerusalem. Christians’ present challenge too, is to live and work in the world in such a way that the song they sing as people in the Church is strong enough and beautiful enough to relativise ad transform other less sacred songs.

Today is the inauguration of Pope Francis’s papacy. We pray for him. This quote on the temptations and spirituality of leadership in times of chaos (all times) is from Meg Wheatley’s Finding our Way. It struck me as helpful on a day when many will be thinking through issues of leadership.

The photograph by Cea is Branching Morphogenesis, a walk-through installation by Jenny Sabin, consisting of 75,000 cable ties resembling neural net of the brain. This is a pattern and organising structure at the heart of our nature – and a far cry from institutional patterns highlighted by the likes of Virginia Woolf in an earlier post.

Diarmuid O’Murchu calls institutions “frazzled” in Adult Faith. The financial crisis of 2008 has reminded us that “banking institutions are more vulnerable than anybody had suspected”. O’Murchu’s observation that “all major institutions are in a state of identity crisis” reflects Dee Hock’s view of “organisations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand as they devour scarce resources, demean the human spirit and destroy the environment.” (Birth of the Chaordic Age, p 28). He lists:

• Schools that can’t teach
• universities far from universal
• corporations that can neither cooperate or compete, only consolidate
• unhealthy health-care systems
• welfare systems in which no one fares well
• farming systems that destroy soil and poison food
• families far from familial
• police that can’t enforce the law
• judicial systems without justice
• governments that can’t govern
• economies that can’t economise

Hock’s comment on this is that “such universal, ever accelerated institutional failure suggests there is some deep, pervasive question we have not asked.”

One question I often bear in mind in relationships is “how big or small do I now feel?” Our usual answer is “small” in relation to institutional life. There’s not much we feel we can do except for the institution in which we walk tall and big ourselves up in relation to everyone else. We walk away, in increasing numbers, where we can.

For Hock, the problem is our “Industrial Age organisational concept” which is “a wrong concept of organisation and leadership based on a false metaphor with which we must deal. Until our consciousness of the relational aspect of the world and all life therein shall change, the problems that crush the young and make grown people cry will get progressively worse.”

For O’Murchu “all the major institutions we know today evolved as instruments for the implementation of patriarchal power. Many are beaking down and losing credibility, giving way to networks with a greater potential for collaboration and adult empowerment”. For O’Murchu institutions “inherently disempower” however democratic they may try to be. “No matter how democratic a hierarchical system is, it will fail to do justice to the aspirations of the people. People want to participate. They want to be involved; in a word, they want to exercise their adult creativity. And when that goal is jeopardised, it is then we need policing … the prevailing power – culturally, politically, religiously – feeds power. Only in a minimal and superficial way does it empower.”

Competition and control are the assumed guiding principles for institutions and our evolutionary history. But work done by micro-biologist Lynn Margulis suggests a paradigm shift to our thinking and our organisation. Margulis’s theory of symbiogenesis highlights an orientation for cooperation rather than competition.

Human imagination has been “domesticated” by institutions, according to O’Murchu, so that the “human being is seen primarily as a deviant creature whose behaviour has to be tightly controlled. Instead of being perceived as creative adults, whose long evolutionary history verifies … a heavy commitment to conviviality and collaboration, humans have been subjected to highly destructive imperial control.”

O’Murchu suggests that there are other “structural strategies” besides institutions with their “top-down hierarchical line of control, usually with clear distinctions between “us” (at the top) and “them” (at the base)”.

I suppose that our institutional framework has been shaped by the myth of The Fall. But there is a dangerous circularity to that assumption. The argument may be that the Fall accounts for human sinfulness which needs to be controlled (by institutions). But institutions (religious) account for the Fall. One depends on the other as is being increasingly recognised. The emperor/institution really is in the all together.

In some ways the church has been tarred with the same brush and there is decline in confidence and “bums on seats”. But then there is another more hopeful sense in which some Christians are behaving less like institutionalised “bums on seats” who are envisaging alternative structures for the sake of the least, last and lost.

Developing viable alternative structures seems vital (as well as inevitable) in a world in which  institutions have become so devalued. Alternative structures are already emerging in the form of networks but the context for that emergence is still governed by institutions who become ever more fearful and seem ever more remote from a (human) nature that is essentially cooperative, collaborative and convivial.

It is not revolutions and upheavals
that clear the road to new and better days,
but revelations, lavishness and torments
of someone’s soul, inspired and ablaze.

Boris Pasternak, “After the Storm”, 1958, quoted by Meg Wheatley in Finding our Way: Leadership for an uncertain time

Seeing red is a turn on for male primates according to a recent survey. The survey suggests that men are more turned on by women in red and that although men like to think that they respond to women “in a thoughtful and sophisticated manner, it appears that at least to some degree their preferences and predilections are, in a word, primitive”. Well!

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza playfully argues in Discipleship of Equals that if all the bishops are going to be men, all the cardinals should be women. What would happen to the bishops if they were seeing red? Fiorenza quotes from an article by Congo, Goodwin and Smith called “We Are Catholics and We Are Feminists”:

Perhaps we should wear red. red to acknowledge courage. Red to acknowledge that we are angry. Red to acknowledge that we are passionate. Red to acknowledge that we are sexual and like our sisters of herstory are still officially barred from the sanctuary because we menstruate. red to acknowledge the blood that flows from us with each birth, with each abortion, with each battering and with each assault …

For now, we pray for the election of a Pope who can build leadership which is holy and humble of heart so that bridges can be built and mended. Our Daily Prayer today contains this prayer as response to Psalm 79:

When faith is scorned
and love grows cold,
then, God of hosts, rebuild your Church
on lives of thankfulness and patient prayer;
through Jesus Christ your eternal Son.

Our default position about weaknesses is complaint and annoyance. The consequence of this is that it is more usual not to publicly acknowledge individual weakness, and internalise the complaint and annoyance. That can’t be good for teamwork! Weaknesses are only usually judged negatively, but some weaknesses are allowable and could be viewed constructively.

Why do we not celebrate our weakness? It seems to me that Belbin gives us permission for that, because there is always a flipside to weaknesses. Instead of complaining about X’s lack of drive, we can recognise that X can play a vital part in our enterprise.

For my part (my preferred role is “plant”, I know that some may find my inability to “communicate effectively” (because I get “too preoccupied”) and my “ignoring of incidentals” frustrating and annoying. But that’s what you get in exchange for someone who can be “creative, imaginative, unorthodox”. Personally I am grateful for those who have seen through the problem that I represent, to the potential that I represent.

So, why don’t we talk more openly, and more positively, about weaknesses?

Carmen Agra Deedy spins a story starring her maddening mother.