Hand on heart, he did what he knew was wrong

There's only one big item in the news in Britain - Tony Blair has announced his retirement. His speech in his constituency had a bit of the "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" about it. I particularly winced at the theme of "I truly believed it was the right thing."

Insofar as it referred to the invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent blood-bath, I don't doubt it. Blair has always done things because he thought they were right. And often I've agreed with him. More money for education, attempts to mend the NHS, the independence of the Bank of England, the Human Rights Act, the Good Friday Agreement, commitment to Europe, devolution and so on. Admirable, liberal and arguably the Right Thing. They were certainly not all his idea, and some built on foundations inherited from his predecessors (especially the Northern Ireland peace accord). None the less, he rightly supported them. Even most of his military adventures have been arguably right. Opposing Serbian genocide, for instance, is hard to criticise.

Even where I personally think he was absolutely wrong - the imposition of ID cards (the cost alone is staggering, and could wipe out the NHS debt if applied to something useful), the increasing removal of civil rights under the guise of fighting terror (why do we wage war on abstract nouns?) and the universal smoking ban - I'm sure he thinks they are right.

But Iraq, which despite all the good stuff, will be his abiding memorial, is different. Why? Not because it was unpopular (though in a democracy, anything which provokes a million people to take to the streets is likely to be suspect). To do what is right is sometimes necessarily to swim against the tide. I don't think it's obviously wrong to follow the USA's lead - though the quality of that lead is transparently suspect in this case.

I'm sure our outgoing Prime Minister genuinely thought he was right. He really did think Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. After all, the receipts are probably on file somewhere in Whitehall. They certainly are in Washington. What makes Iraq different is that Blair quite obviously went against his own convictions in pushing the attack through. False information was given to Parliament. The country as a whole was misled. The enterprise was touted as part of the response to terrorism when we all knew that Iraq had nothing to do with terrorism. If we wanted to invade a terrorist supporting regime, Iran was not much further away (not that I think Iran should be attacked either).

In order to do what he thought was right, he did wrong.

Of course, it may seem a small thing. Perhaps if there had been a proper plan for reconstruction, instead of an optimistically get-rich-quick scheme for American companies, if the Iraqi defence forces had been left intact, if a thousand things had been different, I wouldn't be venting my spleen to a minor blog. But I hope I would. It matters to do what is right. It matters all the more when wrong is done under the banner not of national interest, or cynical real-politik, but as a matter of moral principal.

To make matters worse, Blair has made no secret of his Christian faith, despite the fact that it has been used against him by the non-thinking chatterers. That's commendable. What isn't is the failure to think in anything like a Christian manner on the Iraq issue. If Christianity offers no alternative to the normal worldly mailed fist, it is hardly worth commending. Throughout history, Christian rulers have decided that it doesn't and therefore isn't. Blair has followed the historic pattern, without even the sorry excuse of no alternative. He could have stood with Europe, but chose to be an American neo-con instead. He could have gone with the visionary plan that church leaders from both the US and Britain put to him on the eve of the invasion, but he did not.

He did wrong. He claims the right, but in the end, delivers only the American Right, and that, sadly, is the legacy that overshadows all the good achievements of New Labour. As he leaves the ship, it may well be that he has opened the sea-cocks and left it sinking.

Oils and footwashing

An unbroken personal record has ended. Since being ordained in 1980 I have managed never to go to a blessing-of-the-oils service. It hasn't really been deliberate, it's just that I've never been in a church where anointing with episcopally blessed (and nowadays, undoubtedly fairly traded) olive oil is a normal part of ministry.

Today I went, and the event was OK. I discovered that there are three different oils: for anointing the sick, for signing with the cross, and for chrismation (blessing at baptism). Presumably they could all be mixed together to give a general purpose 3-in-one oil, if that hadn't already been trade-marked.

In days past, this service took place on Maundy Thursday, but our bishop, +Nigel, is the Royal Almoner or something, and has to go and hold the Queen's purse on that sacred day. This year, the service is in Manchester, and I know some people who are to receive the royal small change after due security vetting, and proper recommendation as to their worthiness to receive the queenly largesse.

That latter aspect worries me. I don't doubt that it's an honour, and a way of recognising a few local pensioners for their services to church and community, and so on - a sort of gongless honours event. But is Maundy Thursday the time to do that? It has echoes of the old notion of the "deserving poor". Which is a long way from what Maundy Thursday is about. This is the day when Christians remember the story of Jesus' washing of his disciples' feet. It's an acted parable of service - and above all of God's grace. God doesn't do deserving. He does grace - unmerited giving.

On Maundy Thursday, those in positions of leadership re-enact the washing. It's about saying that we are there to serve, and that the service offered isn't about giving just deserts, but about sharing God's love with sinners. Royal Maundy stuff keeps power firmly where it belongs as far as the world is concerned. It doesn't wash feet (not since James II anyway), and certainly not the feet of the undeserving. It hands out symbolic largesse to duly deferential and security vetted subjects. Grace has been properly sanitised, and God properly cut down to size.

Easter

It's near the end of the month, and the chore of a parish magazine article comes round again. Little time for the blog, so here's my Easter article, for what it's worth.


You can never go home again. Or as Heraclitus put it, you cannot step into the same river twice, for new waters are always flowing over you. Whether it's pre-Socratic or pop philosophy, it's a truism. There's no going back. We change, the world around us changes, and try or wish as we might, we cannot recapture the past. More importantly, we cannot undo our actions. Whatever we do, or experience, we have to live with the consequences.

Depending on what our experiences and actions are, that fact may be either comforting or depressing. I'm sure that for nearly everyone it's a mixture of both. There are many things we are happy to live with, and many which we could desperately wish undone.

Whichever it is, we must move forward.

As we move towards Easter, it may seem that the very inability to undo what has been done gives the lie to the centre of the Christian message. If Jesus rose from the dead, was God not undoing what had been done? And if he did, in that one special case, what relevance has it for us for whom the river continues to flow?

But of course, the resurrection is not about Jesus coming back to life. The Bible does contain a few stories of people returning from death; Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son for instance. Even these, though, are not truly an undoing of what has happened, any more than resuscitations which take place in operating theatres and accident and emergency rooms. And we hold up none of these as the answer to death itself; they are merely postponements of the inevitable.

Easter is different. It is God's statement that as the river of time flows on, the consequences even of disaster and death may work out in triumph and life. Jesus' resurrection is not a revival, but a transformation. It is the unfolding of the chrysalis within which is discovered the answer to apparent defeat and destruction. Jesus is transformed, and becomes the first to experience the new life of eternity, a life based on this one, but expanded and fulfilled beyond our wildest dreams.

It brings hope even in the face of death, and it brings hope into our ever-changing lives. We cannot go back, but with God we can discover a future which builds on our present experience and action, and transforms it. If we cannot undo what we have done, or revisit what has been visited upon us, we can allow God to take us further into his future, and find there the new beginnings which foreshadow the final resurrection.

Recycling

Being ecologically conscious is a pain. Now, instead of the immediate, I'm-not-falling-for-that-one satisfaction of throwing unwanted credit card offers straight into the bin, I have to unfasten the envelope and separate the recyclable paper bits from the plastic and other nasty bits. This means that I run the risk of reading the tantalising offer, and maybe even taking it up. Is recycling a plot by marketeers to make us open junk mail?

Beer and salsa

Looking round a few other blogs, I notice the preponderance of moans and groans, so here's a celebration. We were away for most of the weekend to help a friend celebrate her 50th birthday and 10 years with her partner. We arrived at Walcot Hall for a two night stay, and have to recommend the place - it's a "stately home" whose outbuildings have been converted into self-catering apartments. The whole place is littered with art works, antiques and a general air of amiable eccentricity.

Jill and Mike, it turned out, were also celebrating their marriage, so the festivities were now triple. They are part of a salsa band (latin american rhythm, not the sauce) so the main evening kicked off with a deafening roar.

Also recommended are Facers beers. Mike produced two barrels, one of Northern County bitter, and the other of the rather nice Landslide Ale. The basic bitter is much like Boddington's used to taste, which is no surprise considering that the brewer, Dave Facer, was Boddie's head brewer before the Ancoats brewer was taken over and eventually closed.

The beer of the weekend, though, has to be Butty Bach, from the Wye Valley Brewery , which for my money was as near perfect as you can get (though beer is, of course a matter of taste).

Spam blog!

Apparently, blogger has automatically detected that my blog is a spam blog. That is to say that it has the characteristics of "irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical text". So much for the high literary quality of my writing.

At least, the couple of days I will have to wait will give me time to think of something worth posting. Perhaps.

Ah - back on again. Damn - still no great ideas.

What's in a name?

There's an interesting article in the Guardian's G2 today. Stuart Jeffries presented a pretty well-balanced summary of the increasingly hostile divide between the religious and secular voices in public debate. (Actually there's an occasionally slight sneering tone, but this is the Guardian mentioning religion, after all; it's nothing like Polly Toynbee's foam at the mouth and bite a vicar approach).

Those voices do seem to have become pretty strident. Religious fundamentalists demonstrate against gay rights and Jerry Springer the Opera, and and seem to be working flat out to divide not only the Anglican Communion, but the CofE itself. On the other side atheist fundamentalists come out of the woodwork to condemn everything from astrology to Roman Catholicism as the same sort of destructive and irrational superstition.

On the one hand modern society is castigated for overuling the laws of God, nature and common decency in the name of tolerance, and on the other believers of all flavours are assumed to be heretic burning bigots who deny modern science in the name of faith.

And to confuse the issue further, there's a third side, of believers and unbelievers alike, who gaze with some bemusement at the fight, wondering where the old-fashioned live and let live tolerance went.

One thing in the article did strike me, though: the use of the term, "faith schools". It's become the accepted way of referring to all schools with some sort of religious foundation. It probably started because someone in Whitehall wanted to coin a term which included all religions, and may well have sprung from the purest of motives. But it has resulted in a term which is about as misleading as you can get.

Once upon a time there were church schools (Church of England, that is) and Catholic schools, with a sprinkling of other denominational schools (a friend went to a Quaker school, for instance). The different labels were important, because they allowed a recognition of the different styles of schools under consideration.

If you went to a church school, you probably (but by no means certainly) sang hymns and had Bible stories in assemblies. Otherwise, it was a pretty ordinary sort of school. Of course, there were varieties of church schools. A very small number were private, fee-paying ones. A larger number were "aided" schools, which had their own admissions policies (in most cases weighted towards church-goers) and a large input from church governors. Most were "controlled" - essentially the same as state schools, but with a small input from church governors. The emphasis of all these would be secular education in a "Christian ethos" (which seems to mean being nice to each other, just as in any school).

If you went to a Catholic school you would expect much more doctrinal teaching ("indoctrination" is the term, if you don't approve of religion). But it was what the school was for - to teach catholicism in a setting of wider education.

Of course, you might have gone to a Jewish or Islamic school, which would have its own approach to education and to teaching of faith and lifestyle.

Now, though, you don't. You simply go (or even worse, send your children) to to a faith school.

The new terminlogy has stripped away all the information that the various old style terms provided. It lumps together all schools with any connection to a religious institution. The local church school and the fee-paying fundamentalist Darwin-was-wrong outfit are now regarded under the same umbrella. And with that comes the argument that the government should not provide any funding for things that are so obviously wacky - even though it in fact does not, since normal publicly funded church schools don't teach any such nonsense.

It also removes our sense of history. Faith schools is a new term, and it's easy to present them as a new development. Of course, we know that church schools have been there for a long time. At one time, if you wanted an education and weren't rich, you relied on the church to provide it. Most of the existing church schools were set up to provide teaching (and not primarily religious teaching) to children who couldn't get it anywhere else. The long and respected tradition of church involvement in education disappears with a change in terminology.

And what replaces it is fear. Let's face it, "faith" schools don't sound so friendly as church schools. You knew where you were with the old village school, nestled in the lea of the church. But this sounds like some plot to indoctrinate, to churn out kids who will be intolerant fundamentalists. Not that faith means that in reality, but that is the flavour it can so often have these days. Which strikes me as rather a pity, since what we need nowadays is surely less simple polarisation, and more nuanced understanding.