Just finished watching Polar Express for the first time.

I am stunned at the way so much of Protestant Christianity is taken up into the Santa Myth, particularly the emphasis on the need to believe (including in things we "can't see", says Tom Hanks at one point - Dawkins would love that bit).  There is still room for a bit of Pelagianism to creep in (the anxiety over the one naughty child, in amongst  throng of righteous children).

So here we have:

North Pole = Heaven

Elves = Angels

Conductor Tom Hanks = John the Baptist

Bloke on Roof of train = possibly the Holy Spirit

Children = Apostles

Polar Express = The Church

Omniscient Benevolent Santa = God

On True Hope

Read a brilliant article yesterday by Margaret Wheatley from the journal Shambhala Sun.

It complemented this article on Church authenticity, the seductions of pragmatism and sentimentality, and the effect this will have on Church growth: it will cause your Church to grow small.

I read it on the day I was hit by a real blow in the Church.  The quotes were also given added poignancy by reading on the day that Vaclav Havel died.

“Many of us have worked hard for many years to created a better world.  We have worked for a world where more people would be free from suffering – the physical suffering of poverty, disease and loss, and the emotional suffering of ignorance, misperception and invisibility.  In this time of rekindling hope, we must also acknowledge that suffering everywhere, both material and spiritual has increased.”

“As long as we ‘keep hope alive’ and work hard, our endeavours will create the world we want.  How could we do our work if we had not hope that we’d succeed?

Motivated by hope, but then confronted by failure, we become depressed and demoralised.”

So we have to abandon hope, all of us, and learn to find the place beyond “hope and fear”

There are few people towards whom less deference is owed upon death than Christopher Hitchens.  His utter irreverence to the deceased (he said of Jerry Falwell that had they given him an enema after he'd died he could have been buried in a matchbox) cleared the way for searing honesty upon his own departure.

So there were a few problems I had with Hitch (not that I suspect he ever knew), beyond the whole theist/antitheist thing.

There was the way he polarised the debate, made it so brutish, gladiatorial.  This was good box office, but made it impossible to think.  It is difficult to calmly meditate and contemplate the mysteries of life whilst being bombarded by a thesaurus.

Then there was his despising of grace and pity - I once heard him speak (during an interview by Simon Mayo) of some parents who had declared forgiveness for their sons' killers whilst also keen that the same killers face justice.  Whilst most would admire the parents, or at least reserve judgment out of sympathy for their agony, Hitchens had no hesitation in declaring that the parents were displaying "moral grandstanding of the worst kind."

And then there were the facts.  Nick Clegg said that fact-checking for Hitchens was an easy job because he produced such clean copy.  Not when it came to the one chapter I knew about in 'God is not Great' (on the New Testament)-  it was riddled with basic errors and factual clangers.  The substance of his argument, that the story of the woman caught in adultery was not an original part of John's gospel, was facile and uncontroversial, and yet presented as if Hitchens was pulling the very rug out from underneath the New Testament.

This on the inspiring otherness of the Christians, from October 27th in Common Prayer: an excerpt from the Letter to Diognetus.

The Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor by language, nor by the customs that they observe; for they neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech.  They dwell in their own countries, but simply as sojourners.  They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not destroy their offspring.  They have a common table, but not a common bed.  They are in the flesh, but they do not live after the flesh.  They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

Diarmud McCulloch's history is a treat, full of gems that I had never previously encountered.  MacCallum is determined that Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, forms of the faith that grew up in Roman Empire, and who adhered to the councils of Niceae and Chalcedon, do not get to be the only story.

Much is made of the subtle thinkers of Alexandria (the much maligned Arius - not the first intelligent priest to fall foul of a crude minded bishop) and the fathers of monasticism like Pachomius (picitured here) and Anthony.

Anthony with his inspirational hermiticism stands in contrast to Pochomius whose vision of the monastic life was about a community.  He got round issues of seniority by stating that seniority was based on how long someone had been a part of the community.  Such an unalterable policy put an end to jostling (as much a relief to instinctive jostlers as to their victims would be my guess).  MacCallum is at pains to point out that the Syrian monastic tradition was equally rich and was in competition with its Egyptian ccounterpart to find ever more rigorous approaches to asceticism (one historian has called inter-monastic rivalry "a noble contest").

(from page 39)

In 1950 Bob Pierce founded what has become World Vision, the world's largest Christian relief and development agency.  Today that organisation serves more than fifty million people a year in 103 countries.  Passionate for Jesus and for a world without hunger or disease, Bob Pierce began humbly, helping children orphaned by the Korean War.  Every outreach he touched grew in size and scope.  With unstoppable vision and energy he dreamed the impossible and then did everything imaginable to make it happen.

Books and magazine cover stories were written about him.  His friends said "He is a man restless to win souls", "I have never met a person with greater compassion" and "He is a true Christian Samaritan who literally laid down his life for the needy 'little' people of the world.

Bob often prayed, "Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God." That zeal drove him to the ends of the earth, marked by a seemingly inexhaustible passion to meet spiritual and human needs where he saw them.

Unfortunately his approach had disastrous consequences for his family.  As one family friend stated politely, Bob's wife, Lorraine, "knew deprivation of a different kind than those to whom her husband was ministering."

The stark reality is that he all but abandoned his own family.  He consistently put opportunities for expanded ministry and greater impact ahead of his wife and children.  For example, when one of his daughters phoned him on an overseas trip to say she needed him to come home, he declined, not understanding her desperate need.  His wife, who was with him, pleaded with him to return with her.  Instead, he chose to fly on to Vietnam.

When Mrs. Pierce arrived home, she was shocked to discover their daughter recovering from an attempt to take her life.  "I just needed to feel Daddy's arms around me," she explained, adding, "I knew he wouldn't come."  Alerted to their daughter's emotional battle, the Pierces tried to get her help, but their belated efforts failed.  Two years later, she took her life.

Bob's relationship with his wife also deteriorated over time.  At one point, years passed when they did not even speak.  His relationships with his two remaining children were equally strained.  Although God gave the family a night of reconciliation before his death, Bob Pierce lived many of the last years of his life alienated from everyone in his immediate family.

Years of eighteen-hour days, unsanitary food and constant jet lag gradually depleted Bob's emotional reserves and made him susceptiible to all kinds of physical difficulties.  One biographer wrote, "The temper that he had battled all his life to control go the upper hand more and more often, and the mind that had once operated with computer-like accuracy began short-circuiting occasionally, causing a growing erraticism in his behaviour."

Bob's oft-cited request, "Just let me burn out for God." was sadly being fulfilled.

The Big Patterns are always true

Given the similarity of structure, sequence, and motive in the rites of passage among disparate and geographically separate cultures, one would have thought their ceremonies ordained by some central committee – page 28

The entire process that we call initiation somehow made it possible for a man to experience these five essential truths.  They became the five essential messages of initiation:

1. Life is hard
2. You are not that important
3. Your life is not about you
4. You are not in control
5. You are going to die

I was speaking to a friend yesterday who had been inspired by the model of leadership that saw the leader not as hero (a model that has been hugely discredited) but as host.  More on this here.

This is from Henri Nouwen (August 5th in Common Prayer)

"That is our vocation: to convert the enemy into a guest and to create the free and fearless space, where brotherhood and sisterhood can be formed and fully experienced."

An admittedly Guardian-centric collection of quotes gleaned from the whirling maelstrom of comment:

On the Murdoch worship of war:

Rupert Murdoch was the only figure powerful enough to be able to state explicitly, without consequence, that he was backing war on Iraq to bring down the price of oil. So his "free press" all cheer-led for said war, and began commodifying their version of it, even confecting their own military award ceremonies as though the medal system were inadequate.

The whitewashing report into the death of a scientist who questioned the basis for that war was mysteriously leaked to Murdoch's papers - another WORLD EXCLUSIVE - while others in his pay hacked the phones and emails of those casualties of war being repatriated in bodybags, to be monetised as stories all over again. - Marina Hyde, 9th July

The idolatry of power:

This is the tape that was made by Shabhaz Bhatti, Pakistani minister for Minority Affairs, four months before his murder on the 2nd March 2011.  On his instruction, it was to be sent to the BBC in the event of his being killed.  More on his remarkable courage (which like Bonhoeffer's was not without fear) here.

The Youtube version of the recording is here with a transcript below.

Your life is threatened by who, and what sort of threats are you receiving?

The forces of violence, militant banned organisations, the Taleban and pro-Al-Qaedi, they want to impose their radical philosophy in Pakistan.  And whoever stands against their radical philosophy they threaten them.