On the side of the Crow by Christien Gholson

This collection of “prose poems” is unsettling. (Prose poem is a description that makes me cringe a bit – perhaps calling them single page short stories might be better). 

They are stand alone pieces and yet gradually you pick up on the same names being mentioned – there is a thread that runs between them, but what exactly that thread is never comes completely into focus.  They are both gritty and surreal, are they of the past or of the future? you can’t pin them down, but there is a deep sense of the “real” about them.  They force the reader’s own imagination into work as you try to make sense of the world that is being sketched before you – and that is the real strength of the collection, they demand your input and so you are drawn in.

Vision and Values in Primary Education Edited by Kathleen Taylor and Richard Woolley

It was an unusual experience reading this book, the collected word of a number of authors, because for once I knew most of them - from the time I spend in the midst of Bishop Grosseteste University (nee College).  Not all of them are still at BG, but that would have been the place where most of the paths crossed that led to the creation of this book. I could hear they individual voices speaking through the text.

While I knew them at BG, mostly what I shared with the authors was the usual grumbles over coffee that will be heard in any staffroom and so it was really good to encounter them here with their profession hats on.  But I think it was also good to have that other insight and as such to ground what is often an idealistic book - that these ideals are not the product of super-humans but ordinary mortals acts to empowered the writing rather than detracting from it (and I think that they would be please to have that insight shared – these are, if we believe what they have written, educators who would see no value in maintaining a mystique around their presence).  

Among the chapters some were more directly practical; and perhaps I personally took less from those, but I am not a Primary School Teacher and therefore not really the target audience and so that is no criticism of the book.  It was instead with the more “philosophical” chapters that I personally found the greatest connection.  In part this was me reading as a School Governor, for whom the key question is mostly “What?” rather than “How?” a school should deliver.  But I think I was equally making connections as a “general reader” – so much of where is at steak here is about the kind of society you wish to live in not just the running of a primary classroom, and as such you don’t have to be an educationalist in order to take an interest.

I was recently at Local Authority session for School Governors where an HMI was forcefully asserting that Ofsted has no agenda on the “How” of what you do in school, as long as it works.  The difficultly comes in the definition of “works” – which for Ofsted has to be framed in the measurable standards as captured in SATs and other formalized assessment measures. What the HMI was sort of saying was the best education will result in high standards in SATs etc as an incidental result rather than as its sole focus.  If you take him at his word (and I am not sure how much Ofsted’s working practices bear witness to this belief…) Ofsted is entirely in tune with the message of this book – an idea which might both horrify and delight (and perhaps also mystify) its authors!

There are some fundamental skills which Primary Education needs to impart, such as moving children from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”, but actually a greater part of the curriculum should be there to inspire the life long desire and the habit of learning, rather than thinking it has delivered a package of knowledge (armed with which the child can go away and get on with life).  

I accept that my own Primary Education is from an era when facts were out of fashion, the National Curriculum arrived in my final years at Whitings Hill, but as far as I can tell it was yet to have any real impact in our classrooms by the time we left – and Literacy Hours were not yet even a twinkle in a Secretary of State’s eye.  I encountered SATs only at the end of year 9, and, having opted out of school for most of the preceding term, I ended up doing an English SAT on Romeo and Juliet without actually having read any of the play (it was not a complete disaster and for better or worse I have gone on to often deploy similar tactics in the rest of my educational career…).  As such I am naturally drawn to the “softer” side of education and away from “hard” facts (I got through my History A-Level without learning a single date – but without “flying colours” either…).

As the report “Every Child Matters” has now been superseded we are once again freed to say that we believe that every child matters without it being part of an “Agenda” or a hallow cliques.  Running throughout the book it an approach in which the starting point should be a delight in every child, the belief that they not only matter but are amazing.  This in not to say that they always (or in some cases even often) make that an easy thing to remember, but it is true. 

I am not sure how much the coming together of the authors at BG as an institution with a Christian identity will have impacted their thought, or how many of them personally own a Christian identity, but the valuing of the potential and the inherent gifts of each individual is surely an expression Christianity at its best. There is much that the Church could learn, healthy Churches will be learning communities built on individuals exploring their potential, not on rout learnt catechisms or buzzing with this week’s proof text.  

The following quote really spoke to me “Education should seek to produce learners that are curious, creative, imaginative, motivated, enthusiastic, and prepared to take ricks. It should develop aspirational, self-assured, flexible, and resilient human beings who not only can answer questions independently, but seek to raise their own questions and hypotheses as well.  It should be liberating and empowering … [It] should allow children to not only produce products, but also to luxuriate in and dwell on the process of the learning journey.”  You only have to substitute a couple of words to shift it from the context of school to church.

A Commonplace Killing By Siân Busby

To approach a novel where the foreword is a eulogy to the author from her grieving husband sets a degree of tension, will she, Siân Busby, overshadow, overpower, the narrative.  There is a caution in reading this, the final act of a literary life. I was thankful that in actual fact there was very little sense that this was the work of someone who knew they were terminally ill, only by over stretching the analogies would you make any of the characters a proxy for Siân.  It was only at the penultimate page that I experienced a moment of transference – as she wrote “It would be hard to die like that, he thought; knowing the precise moment. Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. To have death steal up on you knowingly, expectantly.  He imagined that all you can do in such circumstance as that would be to deny that it is going to happen; believe that there will be a reprieve – even up to the last second…” you could not escape that fact that in writing it she was in her final days, ok Cancer does not give you quite the exact time and place in the way that the hangman did, but by that stage in the illness, for all intents and purposes, it as unavoidable a death sentence as in the novel.  There is a kind of arrogance almost to continue to write a novel, a long term project, against the backdrop of such a short term future – it is a declaration that you are in charge – that you can out run the hangman?.

Turning to the substance of the narrative; I found DDI Cooper a bit of a cliché, a mixture of Morse and Frost. There were a couple of moments when I could all too readily imagine the second rate TV adaptation, with Cooper and the plucky Policewomen Tring solving every murder under the sun despite the best, and well intentioned but Neanderthal, efforts of the rest of the Met.  But this is to Siân’s credit, it made me cringe exactly because her writing desires better. 

What was most interesting was the way in which Siân inverted the general narrative; this is of World War Two as a period of sacrifice and hardship followed by a great liberation with the coming of peace and the welfare state.  The common bond between the very different lives of Policewomen Tring and Lillian Frobisher was that the war years had been years of freedom and self-fulfillment which were not carried over into the peace.  The old rules were being reapplied but these women were not prepared to take the steps backwards which would have been needed to fit contentedly into old role models. Lillian is by far the strongest character in the novel – and her storyline is the captivating one, the parallel track of the police investigation, while not badly written, is definitely second fiddle, perhaps because it is centered on DDI Cooper rather than Tring.   

The Byzantine Patriarchate 451-1204 by George Every S.S.M.

When approaching a book like this which has been sat on your father’s study bookcase for some 45 years (and was published 20 years before that) a degree of caution does need to be exercised as there is the chance that scholarship might have moved on in the intervening decades.  In particular, I was a little wary of the account of the changing nature of the papacy during the period.  This seems to support a particular Anglican version of history in which the Church of England’s split from Rome was no revolution.  Rather it was a restoration of its proper status as a “National Church” that had pre-existed the Popes overstating of their authority from about the tenth century onwards.

The majority of the book is a narrative account of the Emperors, Patriarchs, and Popes and their relationships with one another. It is only really the last chapter, “The nature of the schism”, that is, as it were, operative.  Once we are looking at a great sweep of history and the division, and ultimately mutual-denial, of the Western and Eastern Churches you get the sense that the outcome was in fact determined by the personalities of individuals. 

There were theological differences between East and West, but these were for most of the period held in tension within the scope of a single Church, it was issues of power, status, and jurisdiction that ultimately resulted in separation.  I am not sure whether it is a comforting or a depressing thought that a millennia later you could apply the same sentence to the Anglican Communion.  As Anglicans we talk a lot about our theological differences, between “liberals” and “conservatives”, but what really drives those differences to become open conflict is issues of power, status, and jurisdiction.  

Maybe the message of this book is, really, that there is nothing new under the sun…

So many ways to begin by Jon Mcgregor

This was this year’s Greenbelt “Big Read” and despite hating last year’s Big Read book I still decided to give this one a go. This was most definitely a good move.

I will flag up that it will be fairly hard to talk much about the book without running the risk of spoilers – therefore if that is a problem for you perhaps you should stop now. The power of the book is rooted in the way the Mcgregor depicts the ordinariness of life with such clarity and pathos, the drama of the book is on a very domestic scale – but it is still the scene for gut wrenching tension.

There is a parallel with the Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry and the honest account of depression is central to the narrative. The success with which the reality of depression is shown in this book makes it a very powerful read, but also in some ways a test of the reader’s endurance. The persistence of love between David and Eleanor even when their daily life together has become devoid of any outward sign of tenderness is both beautiful and harrowing.

We are fed a diet of TV soaps where stories move quickly and even in the midst of tragedy there is a buzz from the pace of the time line. This is almost the exact opposite, after the long years of ordinary pain it appears that a resolution is going to come, only for hope to be dashed, and yet in that moment it is not a return to despair but contentment that emerges.

It felt like a privilege to see into the private, and often dark, spaces of David and Eleanor’s lives.

Thank you Greenbelt for choosing this book and thank you to all the others who came along to the Big Read session to share their own experience of it.

Transcendent Vocation by Sarah Maxwell

The sub-title of this book “Why gay clergy tolerate hypocrisy” certainly doesn’t pull any punches. 

I think the strength of that word “hypocrisy” was what drew me in, too often I think those advocating an “inclusive” agenda within the Church pussy-foot around the current situation.  Here it becomes a deeply personal as well as a complex and challenging subject.  I have spent many years in various ways exploring my “vocation” within the Church of England and recognise the corrosive self-censorship which Maxwell identifies among her gay clergy had at one time become a part of my life. 

It was a deeply troubling time in my life, I had an overwhelming sense of vocation to ordained ministry but I also found that in conscious and sub-conscious ways the only way to fulfil that vocation was to base it on a lie, a half-truth, a partial account of myself.  How could I serve a God from whom no secrets are hid when there were certain friends that I quietly lost touch with in case they prompted an awkward question?  And this was in a Diocese where the ordaining Bishop was well known as a strong support of gay inclusion in the Church.  However for all his “support” he was still signed up to all the official messages of the House of Bishops.   

Often the issues of gay ministry and women’s ministry are taken in the same breath and I would not for a moment want to diminish the pain and damage the Church has caused to women in the exercise of their vocations.  However I think hypocrisy is an issue that particularly effects gay clergy – the ordination of women is pretty black and white, but it is clear that it is not unusual for gay clergy to find their Bishop will warmly support them and their same-sex partner in private while publicly denying their existence.  I feel we need to get off the fence and call these Bishop’s out – at the moment I feel we are trying to make the omelette of gay emancipation without breaking any eggs.

But what is a Church that keeps such double standards worth? – it says one thing and then wilfully ignores that its ordained ministers don’t live by its teaching – why should any of the rest of us pay a blind bit of notice to anything it says while those who preach at us are happy to collude in lies?

I am honest about my cynicism – so reading about the experience of gay clergy in certain London deaneries (where they make up the majority of the staff because clergy with families simply don’t choose to live and work in those areas) makes me wonder.  The senior staff in those areas know they have a deanery full of gay clergy and understand the essential role those gay clergy play in delivering the ministry of the Church – yet they seem unwilling to normalise the position of their staff by seeking the emancipation of gay clergy.  Who does this serve? – are they perhaps fearful that once gay clergy find they have a secure standing in the Church the rule “beggars can’t be choosers” will no longer apply and gay clergy will become as reluctant as their straight colleagues to work in these “undesirable” neighbourhoods?

The account of the legal changes in the status of gay people in the UK over the last 40 years is amazing – given here in a clear and concise way.  Maxwell’s research finished just before the Government started the process of providing for Same-sex Marriage – the far end of a continuum from “de-criminalisation” through to societal affirmation. And it is interesting that the changes to the age of consent which were revolutionary for me as a teenager now don’t even warrant a mention.

I also wonder if the picture that Maxwell paints is a little bit bleak, I infer that most of her interviewees were older.  They were all to some extent “closeted” in a way that some of the clergy who appear on my facebook wall clearly aren’t.  As I finished the book one of them was posting pictures of his fancy dress for a pride march…

It has been adapted from a PhD thetis and this does show, the structure is at times a little clunky, however this does not detract from the power and the importance of the content – I really hope that one way or another it finds its way in to the hands of every member of the House of Bishops – because whatever their views about sexuality they all need an urgent wake up call that we simply can not go on like this.  The sad fact is that the vast majority of people who will read this will be those who are already frustrated by the Church’s status quo – and not nearly enough will be those who could stand up and contribute to a change of heart.

When a book deals with something so personal to oneself it becomes difficult to write about – there is a rawness and a nakedness in this which I am not altogether comfortable with – but given the subject of the book I feel compelled to live with a little nakedness rather than the comfort of concealment.

On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer

This is one of the Penguin “Great Ideas” series – but it is one of the few within that collection where I have found the writer’s thought completely without merit. 

OK he is anti God and religion and therefore there would be little common ground between us in terms of conclusions, however often reading the writings of those that have come to other conclusions from yourself sharpens your thought and is an intellectually stimulating counter-point.  I found done of this with Schopenhauer, his arguments seemed to fail even on their own terms. 

I would also add that his Essay “On Women” would suggest that he wasn’t a feminist to put it mildly…