Watching this proved to be a significant moment in self-awareness!!

Enthusiasm?

Should Tiger bread really be redefined as Giraffe bread and does it make any difference?

"Call me Tiger bread if you like but surely I am much more like a Giraffe!!"

Due to the observations of a little girl called Lily who believes that Tiger bread is an inappropriate label for a kind of bread which she believes surely resembles a giraffe in terms of the splodges of colour that make this bread what it is, Sainsbury's have decided to call Tiger bread, Giraffe bread instead.

This is all happening at a time when the government investigate whether people would prefer for marriage to be defined differently and not exclusively as something between a man and a woman. Christianity Today have a reasonable and gentle, generous and yet biblical reaction to the investigations that are being explored around the way that we define marriage.

Click here for Christian Today's article and tell me what you think - should marriage be redefined?

...and now for something completely different

Should you want to keep abreast of all things 'women bishops' start with Nancy's blog and navigate from there. A little plain-reading - how helpful! :-D

The beeping Americans and the beeping Indians

These thoughts do not represent my diocesan team or the Indaba project. 
(Continuing Indaba Encounter Social network and Blog Policy)

Primarily that blog-title in itself becomes my starting point. It will have been misconstrued.

Oh, that we be ever more conscious of the ways in which what we say and do can be misconstrued.

By it, I simply wish to offer an analysis of the driving habits of the New Yorkers and those in Mumbai.

Upon this I want to hang some rather undeveloped theological thinking.

Thinking will always be undeveloped as we reflect on cultures because we can so easily lose the individual and start falling into making very pejorative statements.

Stereo-types can block our vision as does prejudice, for however enlightened we suppose ourselves to be, we all arrive with presuppositions and baggage, we all need to become critically reflexive practitioners.

I always wonder how I can become reflexive about that of which I am unaware for if I am unaware, how can I be reflexive and so the circle continues but perhaps this is why we have research supervisors, good friends and other means of accountability.

Anyway before all of this becomes simply impossible to say, through a kind of hyper, self-defeating super-self-consciousness, I will continue.

Sunday prep beckons so I will be quick about it.

In New York, there was a beep-beeping of horns that seemed to say - "Get out of my way - I am moving forward and I will think about the consequences later."

In Mumbai, the beep-beeping -enough, I hasten to add, to drive any sane person to distraction, was, in spite of that, benign in its intent.

It said, "Excuse me, I am behind you, if you just take a minute and look over your shoulder, you will see for you yourself were in this very space before me but I am here now, you have moved forwards...but do not ignore me... remember me!"

Now, I am pretty sure that this is speaking to me theologically. Everything spoke to me theologically in Indaba, India. Everything seemed to have a prophetic voice, even the traffic, very much being channelled through me, I hasten again to add -  a very mere human being! What I am left with now is the prospect of trying to discern what was just for my own development and what needed to be said aloud. I will have at times confused the two. But, hey - we are all learning!

To get back to my theological reflection - the beeping - ....

The Episcopal church does in many ways seem to be, at times, behaving in a way concordant with its beeping. "I will behave how I will - I am moving forward, get out of my way." Now I am aware that this is crude and I want to look into this and come to some more nuanced position but we are living now in the Communion in the fallout that came out of their decision in 2003 with that particular consecration that threatened to 'tear the fabric of the communion' - Rowan's words, not mine.

Now from what I could gather about our North India friends, they too are running in concurrence with their beeping. They are calling us to look back and see what we used to be. There is an Anglican church functioning there in terms of much of its litugy and ecclesiology where we were perhaps about thirty or forty years ago here, in England. I need to do some more research into both their ecclesiology and liturgy before I make any bolder claims but it seems to me that they are asking us to recover our Anglican ideals or tenants. In many ways, to me, it felt as though they were asking us to return to our first love.

As regards how the Church here in England drives the analogous car, well, here we are hesitant. You know us English peepers, on the whole, we very hesitantly use our horn, it's rather an embarrassment, we probably used to shout 'excuse me' from open windows in the past. I think in this way too, we sit on the fence, we push forward in places with a very missionary gospel, we proclaim and we evanglise but quite frankly, sometimes, we do so with acute embarrassment and look to our rather more politically savvy and intellectual/rational overseas American friends and hope to be as culturally relevant and inclusive as they are.

Anyway, it could be I am way-off with all this stuff, but that is just the way it appears to me, and until I hang some more research on its bones, it all might have been expressed rather crudely.

In attempts to research the issues, any suggestions are welcome. For now I am saving a paper up for some free time and then hope to get my head around "Anglican Covenant – Bishop’s Council" reflections by Doll which appears to have come under my lens.

Au revoir and onto Sunday preparation!

Unpacking after indaba

 

These thoughts do not represent my diocesan team or the Indaba project. (Continuing Indaba Encounter Social network and Blog Policy)

As you can see here my belongings scattered widely as I unpacked after Indaba but I continue to unpack spiritually too.

I am hoping that some of what I discover and share can become a resource to myself and others.

I dare to imagine - What if I do Indaba? - What if it becomes something I think through to prepare people for, how might it be utilised and how might I prepare to use it as a tool in my own ministry?

One of the resources that I am finding hugely helpful is this rather profound meditation. This could be used to prepare a group before encounter across cultures, whatever those cultures might be.

It will call out of participants an openness to the dangers of this kind of work but the joys too and the opportunities for such self and group growth and identity.

So I reproduce it here with notes as to its original citation.

It is a meditation that I think could be hugely helpful for preparing people before they come together (1 Corinthians 11:33).

THE UNCERTAIN PATH TO DIALOGUE: A MEDITATION by Sallyann Roth
Published in Relational Responsibility: Resources for Sustainable Dialogue, S. McNamee and K. Gergen, Eds. (with commentary by associates). Chapter 8, 93-97. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1999.

(All words below are Sally Roth's, I might develop my own response to some of these questions at some point.)

I invite you to join me in a meditation. The questions below are not requests for information; they are invitations to experience the sense of human connectedness and shared responsibility that comes from allowing ourselves to wonder, to not understand, to participate in the re-personalization of the generalized and objectified, to open up space for the future, now-being-realized world, the world that we create together. Perhaps, too, the questions are answers in themselves, pointing beyond themselves.


Think of the “I” voice as yourself as you read and reflect. Sometimes I am in a conversation, or an argument, or perhaps even a shouting match that goes nowhere, an encounter that produces nothing but heat. Sometimes I feel certain that I know exactly what someone else is about to say and I anticipate, with great conviction, just how wrong-headed it is going to be.



Sometimes I feel hopeless about ever being heard, understood, or adequately listened to by a particular person or in some particular conversation or on a particular subject. And sometimes I just get tired of trying to make myself understood. I don’t want to try to explain myself again, or I feel dismissive, or perhaps violent. Sometimes I want to run right over what others say.



At times like these...
 How can I keep from being taken over by hurt, hopelessness, anger, or disrespect?
 How can I keep from being taken over by the belief that the other person – or group – is really the problem?
 How can I keep myself from just shutting down?
But then, on the other hand...
 What do I do that shuts others down?
 What do I do that leaves others feeling insignificant, blank, out of place, silenced, walled off, unwilling to be open when they are with me?
 What do I do that prompts others to try to convince me of their rightness, of my wrongness, to will their assertions on me, to not speak directly to me – or to ignore my presence or even my very existence?


When I meet people who challenge my views, or my beliefs, or my values...
 What makes it possible for me to listen to them?
 What makes it possible for me to invite them to tell me more about what they think and feel?
 What makes it possible for me to ask them how they came to think and feel as they do? When I feel challenged, or even threatened by others...
 What makes it possible to wonder about, to be interested in, to ask about, how they came to believe what they believe or to ―know‖ what they know when it is so different from what I believe and from what I know?

THE UNCERTAIN PATH TO DIALOGUE: A MEDITATION
What kinds of actions and contexts encourage me...
 To speak with an open heart?
 To listen with an open heart?
What kinds of contexts feel safe enough...
 To enable me to speak so openly and listen so openly to others that I may be changed by the contact, influenced by the conversation?
What kinds of actions and contexts make it possible for me to shift the meanings I make of my experiences of past and present events and of imagined futures?
 How can I open up to explore our many differences, our stories, our lives, our present circumstances?
 How can I speak fully even when speaking fully may reveal that we simply can not understand one another?
What kinds of actions and contexts encourage me...
 To abandon assumptions that I know what others mean?
 To turn my passion to inquiring about things I do not or cannot understand?
 To reveal how much I do not understand?
 To make space for differences in experience, in the meanings I give to that experience, and for every other kind of difference there may be?
What do I do...
 That calls forth from others that which is unusual for them to speak openly?
 That brings forward responses of unusual complexity and richness?
 That calls forward other people’s reflections, or their most passionate intentions?
 Or their readiness to speak of fragmentary thoughts, thoughts that are only on their way to being fully thought, or those that have been thought but never before spoken? When I have thought that others would find my thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or perspectives “wrong,” “off center,” or just too
different...
 What have others done that has allowed me to be open with them, to think of and speak of things I have not spoken?
 What have others done to call into voice that which I feared to say or perhaps even to think when I imagined, perhaps rightly, that open speaking might alienate the very people I cared about, or depended on?
 What have others done to call into voice my full feeling, thinking, and speaking in a way that has permitted me to welcome confusions, to feel less certain, and to open myself to change through my connection with them?
When I feel that other people’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or perspectives are “wrong,” “dangerous,” or just too different from
mine...
 What might others do or say to prepare me to listen to that which feels intolerable to hear, too different, too confusing, too challenging, too incomprehensible, things I just don’t want to hear?

THE UNCERTAIN PATH TO DIALOGUE: A MEDITATION
How can I remind myself to speak for myself, from my own experience, and to not shore myself up by speaking as a member
of a group, as if I represented others?
 How can I remember to listen fully, openly, with genuine interest, without judgement and without argument, to another’s challenging, or different, ideas, feelings, beliefs?
 How can I stay open to hearing fresh things even in other’s familiar words?
 And how can I listen just as fully, just as openly, and just as generously and without judgement to myself?
If I do hold myself open in this way, and if the “other,” the one who is “different,” does the same...
 Might we then experience and speak of our similarities and refrain from defining ourselves strongly by our differences?
Might we refuse to define each other as ―other?
And if I hold myself open in this way with “like-minded” people...Might we speak openly of our differences when we have previously defined ourselves by our similarities? Might we step away from seeing ourselves as an ―us that is distinct from the ―them?
How can we create a place where we can experience our connection with each other through our very differences? A place where neither of us gives up central beliefs, values, and commitments, but where the tension of our difference can provide a kind of meeting, so that our conversation about difference can generate a fresh culture?
What does each of us each need to gain the vision, the will, the strength, the simple doggedness to travel this path? 

How shall we find the courage to make this journey?