Tag: madeleine bunting

The adventure of tentin

David Herbert2 Comments
compost capitalism

The occupations of Occupy London are, according to their website, “about social justice, real democracy and challenging the unsustainable financial system that punishes the many and privileges the few”. But the juxtaposition of the protesters’ camp and St Paul’s is challenging those of us on the inside of the Church of England wearing the vest of vested interests.


saint paul's [1]The juxtaposition highlights the challenge that has faced Christians down the centuries. Juxtaposed is the soft and the hard, the fixed and the flimsy, the playfulness of the tent and the seriousness of established tradition, the movement and the institution. These contrasts are not new. Paul, to whom the Cathedral is dedicated, was, as Giles Fraser pointed out, a tent maker and missioner of no fixed abode. Tonight a friend who is beginning to explore the Christian faith emailed me her puzzlement that “God and religion don’t seem to match”. What has been happening in London seems to be another replay of this mismatch. (Is it either the grace of God, or prophetic imagination and energy that makes more of a match?)


capitalism is a kind of slaveryMadeleine Bunting has written of the spatial aspect of the paradigm shift represented by the protest. For her, the protest is about “seeding questions in thousands of minds, shaking certainties and orthodoxies so that there is space for new alternatives.” It is about “taking key symbolic public space … to use it for conviviality, living, learning and participation.” To me that sounds exciting, and something which Christians should be engaging with. In fact, it represents the very heart and aspiration of Christian practice. Conviviality, living, learning and participation are fundamental to the intention of Christian liturgy.


The British Jewish community seems to have responded to the protest positively. In the statement they have published today, they “welcome the movement’s openness, pluralism and commitment to imagining a more just world.” Their statement includes a reminder that “the Jewish heritage includes a long tradition of reshaping society to help the least fortunate, from the teaching of prophets like Amos and Jeremiah, to Rabbi Hillel, to modern figures such as Abraham Joshua Heschel and Naomi Klein.” The church shares the same Jewish heritage, but the juxtaposition and apparent conflict of tent and Cathedral suggests the ease with which an institution can forget its origin as a movement of liberation.

>Lambeth Walk

David HerbertLeave a comment

>What is “holiness”?

Is it the ability to “grasp the intense suffering of the human condition without fear or flinching, and to be able to live with that knowledge and find within it hope and a great compassion”? Madeleine Bunting describes holiness in this way as she recalls the recent meeting between, what she describes (and I agree) two of the world’s holiest men.

Madeleine Bunting’s article in today’s Guardian is very much on the ball about Anglicanism, Lambeth and the Archbishop.

This is what the men share, and strikingly it is not in what they say that one senses it, but in their presence and how they relate to people: the warmth and humour, the lack of egotism to neither perform for listeners nor manipulate them, the humility and the capacity to pay attention. The holiness is not to be found in slick communication skills – both men are complex thinkers whose ideas are very hard to compress into soundbites – but you sense the holiness in the face-to-face encounter. A world that increasingly speaks to itself through media of mass communications increasingly cannot recognise this, the most inspiring of human experiences.

Williams may be one of the most holy men to lead the Church of England, but shame on us and our age for proving the old adage true: a prophet is never recognised in his own land.

Madeleine Bunting recognises that global communications are disrupting all religious traditions, traumatising identity and fuelling a literalist fundamentalism; the result is a gross simplifying of the complexity and paradox that is part of human experience.

The presenting issue is “gay clergy” and ++Rowan is told to get a grip. What is the point of that when people have adopte such extreme positions? He would only have to “get a grip” on the next issue and the next. The presenting issue is “gay clergy” (or to others “women bishops”) The real issue is how we deal with difference. That is the issue of our post-modern world. In Archbishop Rowan we perhaps have someone who is wise enough, holy enough and strong enough to lead us on that.