post-modern dominant narratives

Since I'm on a roll as regards blogging, here goes another...


I visited Australia's National Museum in Canberra this week. It's a curious place.

Constructed in the last decade, here is a museum of the current age. It is far from being constructed along 19th century lines, with separate galleries for natural history, technology, artifats from colonial days,and so on. Instead, there is a blended presentation, exhibits arranged according approximately to a time-line of Australian existence.  Many are presented alongside words from those for whom they were of particular significance: the whole impact is multi-voiced, with a sense of the rich diversity of cultural heritage.

And yet, there is unmistakably a single framing narrative.  The Story of Australia --- that time line --- is even set out at the beginning, in an expensively-produced multimedia presentation (complete with multiple screens and seats on a rotating dais).  Without any narration, it shows a series of images (many at once, on different
screens), but the totality is the single Australian Story.  [For those unfamiliar, The Story is one of a unique and diverse ecology, with the Aboriginal people living in harmony with it; European colonial settlers bring great dislocation and more than a little pain; eventually colonialism declines and Australia takes its place as a nation in an increasingly interconnected world; previous hurts are gradually diminished through reconciliation with the Aboriginal peoples. This is The Story; there is no other.]

There is essentially just one path through the museum: it follows The
Story. The perspective is almost entirely a social history: the
nautral history, for example, is presented through the narrative of
those who helped to understand it. We learn about the duck-billed
platypus from the tale of the fellow who established that though it is
a mammal, it does lay egges: he proved this extravagently by
collecting a thousand of them to study.

This presentation leaves little room for science, or anthropology, or,
indeed, much rigorous mind-stretching at all. I was reluctantly coping
with that lack, when I came upon a gallery devoted to the Aboriginal
Australians. Here, the over-arching story was The Dreaming: the
Aborignial mythical creation tale.  Here, we had a largely
uninterpreted presentation of Aboriginal myth and culture, including
the poentially surprising information that Aborginies have lived in
Australia "since time immemorial" (because that is how they conceive
of themselves).

Presenting that history is fine, but it did seem a little reminiscent
of what I've heard of being in the Creationist Museum. It's an
interesting story, but quite out of keeping with scientific - or even
historical - scholarship. There seems a missed opportunity here to
present - perhaps in a separate gallery - what we know about early
migration into this continent.  There was a tantalizing mention of
some cave paintings which date from the time "when the sea-level rose
150 metres and changed the whole landscape": but no mention of
time-scale (nor facsimiles of the paintings - I recall that
photographs of these are taboo).  An interpretation of the changes to
the landscape over millenia, illustrated by aboriginal artifacts,
would have been fascinating.

My point, and my fear, is that it is too easy to allow acceptance of
many voices to become a substitute for critical thought.  Mistreatment
of Aboriginal people has made their culture and history politically
sensitive, of course, but I fear that to refuse to ask rigorous
questions is a cop-out.  There were lots of children in the museum:
I'm pretty certain that they went away with The Story strongly
impressed upon them.  I'd be quite surprised if many went away
stimulated to think hard thoughts about how we know what we know as a
society, how to organise ideas, and how to make sense of the world we
live in.  That seems like a decadent waste of a museum; a true missed
opportunity.

review: Crave MCC

I've only occasionally done church reviews on this blog: if you say very much, it seems a bit personal and unfair.  But perhaps I should do more.  So here's one.   Being away on holiday, I wanted to step a little beyond my comfort zone and see the world through different eyes.  Here are my reflections (headings stolen from Ship of Fools: The Mystery Worshipper: I'm just borrowing them; I'm not in any way associated with SoF):

The church: Crave MCC, Sydney  Denomination:  Metropolitan Community Church. The building: Crave MCC meets during the afternoon in the building beloning to the Uniting Church, in Oxford Street, Sydney. The church: The church subtitles itself Dynamic--Inclusive--Progressive.  Their web site's "about us" section tells you more about their perspective.The neighborhood: Oxford Street is in Darlinghurst, which Wikipedia says is "is widely-recognised as Sydney's main gay district": from the direction I approached from, simply 'eclectic' would be a better word, I think. The cast: The music/worship was led by Natasha (I think) (vocals and guitar), together with three singers, one playing a drum; the speaker and celebrant was Pastor Karl. The date & time: Sunday 1st August 2010, 3pm

What was the name of the service?
I don't think it had a name. 


How full was the building?
Not very full - but the chairs were arranged to accommodate comfortably the 20 or so who gathered.  It was explained that the previous Sunday had been a Big Event, and quite a few were missing this week. 


Did anyone welcome you personally?
Several people welcomed me and introduced themselves and others. 


Was your pew comfortable?
Chair, yes. 


How would you describe the pre-service atmosphere?
Very relaxed, quite chatty.  It carried on well-past the 3pm start time: there was a sense of community and gathering.

What were the exact opening words of the service?
Er, I can't remember.  Welcome, perhaps.

What books did the congregation use during the service?
Books?  C'mon. This is 2010.   All the words you wanted were projected with tasteful backgrounds onto a medium-sized screen.

What musical instruments were played?
Acoustic guitar and tom-tom-type drum.

Did anything distract you?
Not a great deal.  The space was quite tranquil.

Was the worship stiff-upper-lip, happy clappy, or what?
Low-cringe contemporary.  Songs - I knew none of them; maybe they were written by the musicians - were singable tunes, though the band gave a strong (and very musical) lead, so you could stop and listen if you wanted to.

Exactly how long was the sermon?
I didn't time it.  I'm guesing about 20 minutes. 


On a scale of 1-10, how good was the preacher?
6. Engaging and clear (but see below).

In a nutshell, what was the sermon about?
There were two parts. The first, shorter part, was a report on an international conference Pastor Karl had recently attended.  We were left in little doubt that Crave MCC is part of MCC and that MCC helps to define what Crave MCC is all about, and that MCC had lately had a conference in Mexico.  (yes, MCC featured heavily - yet is not, evidently, over-prescriptive).

The second part was about Amos.  There's a theme of justice - and judgement.  Judgement is hard for people with an inclusive ethos to hear about, but justice puts us in mind of the kind of justice God likes: justice for the oppressed.  At least, I think that was the gist, but I couldn't really swear to it.  I think I got the wrong end of the stick in the middle somewhere, and I lost the thread thereafter.

Which part of the service was like being in heaven?
The easy-going welcome, leading almost seamlessly into worship centered on the person of God and knowing Jesus.

And which part was like being in... er... the other place?
Being a fairly reserved Englishman in the company of some fairly demonstrative Australians; being an outsider in a somewhat close-knit community: feeling welcome in principle but awkward in practice.  

What happened when you hung around after the service looking lost?
I took off fairly quickly - it was some distance from where I'm staying, and I had a dog to feed.

How would you describe the after-service coffee?
There was the offer of going to the road to a pub after the service, but I didn't take it up (see above).

How would you feel about making this church your regular (where 10 = ecstatic, 0 = terminal)?
3.  Firstly denominations make me uneasy, and I got the impression that MCC, for all its broad-mindedness, is more of a close-knit organisation than, say, the Baptists.  Secondly, every church or denomination is I suppose shaped by the circumstances of its founding.  The MCC website begins its history like this: "In 1968, a year before New York’s Stonewall Riots, a series of most unlikely events in Southern California resulted in the birth of the world’s first church group with a primary, positive ministry to gays, lesbians, bisexual, and transgender persons".  That primary ministry appears to shape everything - including, I'm assuming, a large part of the congregation.  That this should be necessary is largely the fault of the rest of the church militant - but it left me feeling that there was a bit of a narrow focus here.  The obvious caveat is that this is a first impression, and may be quite mistaken.

Did the service make you feel glad to be a Christian?
Yes indeed.

What one thing will you remember about all this in seven days' time?

The permeable openness of the fellowship, and the connectedness of its life and worship.

war and parliament

Visiting Canberra this week, I've been struck by the arrangement of
the national Mall.  Inspired by Washington DC perhaps, a broad green
sward descends from the parliament house to the lake: and across the
lake, it continues in an avenue of memorials leading to the Australian
national war memorial.

The effect is impressive: from the door of the Parliament, your eye
cannot help being drawn to the war memorial.  It's as if the war dead
are watching over all who come and go from the seat of Australian
Democracy, reminding them of the blood-price of that place.  I guess
the American Mall includes a number of war memorials, and the British
Offices of State overlook the Cenotaph, but the effect in Canberra
seems particularly striking: attention is not on a statesman, or a
nation-builder, or a king, but upon those whose lives were laid down.

Each name on that memorial represents a life broken, a family
shattered.  Each individual loss seems callous and senseless.  Each
individual could have been someone else, were it not for that stray
bullet, that piece of shrapnel, the path of that disease, that
particular fire: though some undoubtedly were in harm's way precisely
because of a sense of duty or as a result of conspicuous valour.

But the combined effect of those individuals is something else
entirely.  Wars arise for good reasons and bad: undoubtedly, some
should not have been fought.  Some have genuinely, measurably, reduced
the amount of tyrrany in the world.  Notwithstanding a few WW2
expeditions by the Japanese, Australia's borders have never really
been threatened since European settlement: but her sons (and
daughters) have travelled to Europe, Asia, Africa, for causes
percieved as just.

Can we decry that?  The criteria for a Just War seem defensible: there
are situations when an aggressor can be stopped only by the use of
deadly force.  Our willingness and ability to act may be patchy, but
that does not diminish the value or worthiness of doing so.

Where is today's Christian in this?  In the days of conscription, our
parents and grandparents struggled with this issue in a way that few
of us have to: pacifisim and conscientious objection was no coward's
way, but it certainly wasn't the route of social acceptability.  Most
of the time, few of us think about it at all, I imagine.

When bringing military remembrance into church, we often give thanks
for the freedoms we enjoy - not least the freedom to worship - these
having been brought about by those who fought and died `for freedom'.
Whether freedom to worship is the thing we should be most thankful
for, I'm not sure. But more importantly, I'm not certain that that
line of thinking holds water in every case - the Just War criteria are
not crafted around the concept of freedom, as such.  Its undoubtedly
true that in some conflicts our own freedom has been enhanced by
fighting to install decidedly non-freedom-loving regimes in foreign
parts.

It seems to me that the main point of occasional wartime remembrance
in worship is for the sake of the pastoral care of those touched by
war and conflict: delving deeply into geopolitics is better left to a
differnt context.  Too readily we wander into a kind of Christian
nationalism which rather confuses the kingdoms (and republics) of this
world with the kingdom of God: there's much sloppy thinking here, and
its best avoided altogether.

I can only respect those named on the Australian war memorial: and on
memorials in towns and villages across the whole of Europe - and I
imagine America and much of the rest of the world.  Would that we
could say "never again": but while the world contains leaders bent on
violence, "never" seems wildly optimistic.  In the meantime, the
location of that Australian memorial contains much wisdom.  Our
leaders, and we who put them there, would do well to look daily into
the eyes of those commemorated in memorials across the world, and
recall the cost of our way of life.

gay bishop shock

This is getting to be rather a long-drawn-out saga.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/7877839/Gay-cleric-blocked-from-becoming-Church-of-England-bishop.html

Blocking the man's appointment "because it would split the church" seems expedient in the short term, but the issue isn't going to go away, is it? And there seems little prospect of it not causing a split, when it finally does come to a head. So is there really any merit in deferring that day?

strange juxtaposition

I was walking past the University Museum this morning when I saw that they were setting up for (or maybe tearing down after) some kind of festival.  The Museum is famous for having been in the 19th Century the location for an early debate on Darwin's Origin  of Species, between T.E. Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce.  As I recall, Huxley convincingly won the day.    It is, rather self-consciously, a cathedral of science, and a humanist icon.

So I was a little perturbed to see as part of whatever was going on on the lawn outside seemed to include something looking suspisciously like an ark.  My first reaction was to think "don't go there": surely this will get the nutters all excitable.

But on reflection, that seems far too defeatist. The story of Noah and the Ark plainly isn't about global geomorphology of 5000 years ago; it plainly isn't a treatise on practical biodiversity.  We can benefit from it without taking those perspectives.  Surely it's a story of wickedness and faithfulness; a story of redemption; a story of care for creation; a story of hope.  It does belong to those of a rationalist disposition (as well as to those who believe that however many gigatonnes of water came into being briefly for a year, and then vanished again leaving little or no trace behind them). 

I think that since I decided that the global cataclysm wasn't a matter of 'fact', I've been scared of to think of it at all: I'm a bit of a literalist at heart, still.  But as a tale to teach us, it has a lot to say, and we mustn't shy away from that.

quotes from Tomlinson

I'm reading Dave Tomlinson's Re-enchanting Christianity. I normally wait until I get to the end of a book before commeting, but this is so rich with pithy little thoughts that I have to report some of them. A proper review will follow.

One particularly striking section is about how we understand who Jesus is - this after a discussion of how to understand the bible and a contrast of 'literal realism', 'critical realism' and 'non-realism' in thinking about who God is.  I was left gasping for air after I got to:

Only the doggedly rationalist mind imagines that truth is equated solely with fact.

Well, if you put it that way, suddenly everything makes sense.

And then, there's the section on atonement.  After discussing a number of ideas, we get something which perhaps we can put ona par with Chalke's 'cosmic child abuse; line which caught so much flack.

Substitutionary atonement theory could be seen as a crime against divinity!

Ho ho.  Nice pun, but makes the point well: he quotes from Wink who says that this theory portrays God as a cruel and unforgiving patriach 'unable to love as a decent parent should, trapped in his own rules that force him to commit a ghastly crime.'

All in all, this isn't a book for those of a sensitively evangelical disposition.  But it's littered with food for thought.  I love it!

sometimes

Sometimes, I feel a great urge to tell people just to get over their hang-ups.

Divorced-bishops-to-be-permitted-for-first-time-by-Church-of-England.html