A friend recently sent me some pages from Lewis Mumford’s “Technics and Civilisation” published in 1934 about what Mumford called ‘our present mechanical civilisation’. Of course, at that time he was reacting to the inventions of the telephone, the typewriter and the car, but some of the things he said seemed to me extraordinarily insightful about the way technology influences us. Here’s a quote from the book - it’s lengthy but well worth attending to closely:

“One further effect of our closer time co-ordination and our instantaneous communication must be noted here: broken time and broken attention. The difficulties of transport and communication before 1850 automatically acted as a selective screen, which permitted no more stimuli to reach a person than he could handle: a certain urgency was necessary before one received a call from a long distance or was compelled to make a journey oneself: this condition of slow physical locomotion kept intercourse down to a human scale, and under definite control. Nowadays this screen has vanished: the remote is as close as the near: the ephemeral is as emphatic as the durable. While the tempo of the day has been quickened by instantaneous communication the rhythm of the day has been broken: the radio, the telephone, the daily newspaper clamour for attention, and amid the host of stimuli to which people are subjected, it becomes more and more difficult to absorb and cope with any one part of the environment, to say nothing of dealing with it as a whole…. Even the weekly period of cessation from familiar tasks and contemplative reverie, which was one of the great contributions of western religion to the discipline of the personal life, has become an ever remoter possibility… we have multiplied the mechanical demands without multiplying in any degree our human capacities for registering and reacting intelligently to them.”

He writes about how technology has become an end in itself, that progress and acceleration are assumed to be good things. However we have rarely stopped to think about whether this is true.

“Railroads may be quicker than canal boats and a gas lamp may be brighter than a candle, but it is only in terms of human purpose and in relation to a human and social scheme of values that speed or brightness have any meaning. If one wishes to absorb the scenery, the slow motion of a canalboat may be preferable to the fast motion of a motor car; and if one wishes to appreciate the mysterious darkness and the strange forms of a natural cave, it is better to penetrate it with uncertain steps, with the aid of a torch or lantern than to descend into it by means of an elevator and to have the mystery entirely erased by a grand display of electric lights.”

Faster, brighter, more efficient, is not necessarily better. It all depends on what you’re trying to do and what the goal of life is. He puts his finger on the flaw at the heart of our fascination with technology: the belief that “most of the difficulties that had hitherto vexed mankind had a mathematical or mechanical - that is a qualitative – solution.”

On the one hand it’s reassuring that our problems with encroaching technology are nothing new. But he reminds us again that the deeper questions are not technological, but spiritual.

One day I went for a walk just a little distance from my hotel. I walked up a busy dual carriageway near the city centre and turned left - into the Shankill Road - the heart of Loyalist Unionism. Murals remembered UVF volunteers, loyalist pipe bands or those who died in the Ulster regiments of the First World War. The Belfast Rangers supporters club stood proud, kids tapped drumsticks in preparation for the marching bands of the 12th July, Union Jacks flew everywhere. Every now and again, there was the memory of death. On 13 August 1975, republican gunmen killed five Protestants in the Bayardo Bar on the Shankill Road. On the site now there is a display of anti-IRA protest, equally critical of British governments who loyalists feel have let them down over the years.

At the end of the Shankill Road you pass through a street barrier that can be closed when tensions are high and you pass into a very different place. Just walk half a mile through a nondescript housing estate and you’re onto the Falls Road, heart of Catholic, Nationalist Belfast. Here is also the memory of death and sacrifice. Irish tricolours were draped all over a memorial to “D Company, Second Battalion of the Irish Republican Army, who made the supreme sacrifice in their quest for Irish freedom” remembers IRA members who died. Some, like their Protestant counterparts who perished on the Somme, died during the war for Irish Independence in the 1920s. Others were killed during the ‘troubles’ between the 1970s & 1990s.

Each community has their martyrs and heroes, their memories and loyalties. Glasgow Rangers and Northern Ireland shirts are worn on the Shankill, Glasgow Celtic and Republic of Ireland jerseys on the Falls. Palestinian flags fly in nationalist areas, countered by Israeli flags in Loyalists areas. Republicans celebrate Che Guevara, Nelson Mandela, or any dissident group rising up against old authority. Loyalists remember the First World War, Edward Carson, and King William III the rescuer of Protestant Londonderry from the Catholic King James II in 1689. Bonfires lit on the 12th July trumpet his victory at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 as if it was yesterday.

The memories seem raw, the determination to keep them alive tenacious. The cultural difference between two communities that have so much in common (Christian roots, working class origins, living in the same city) is stark. At their best they are colourful, vibrant and alive. At worst, antagonistic and aggressive. The tensions have not gone away. How could they with such a recent history? You hear stories of paramilitary organisations still in the wings waiting to take up arms again – and it wouldn’t take much to spark something sinister.

Two things struck me overall. The first was the remarkable achievement of the Good Friday agreement. 50 years ago, in 1976, the idea that you could walk down the Shankill and Falls Road without fear or anxiety was impossible. Now the streets are cultural icons and tourist attractions. The Agreement, and those who made it – John Hume, David Trimble and the rest – deserve huge praise.

The other was the power of forgiveness. Some while ago I had written an article on the story of Richard Moore, a young Catholic boy who was blinded by a rubber bullet fired by a British soldier on the Creggan estate in 1972. Later, he had reached out to find the man who had affected his life so much, without any rancour or hatred, just out of curiosity and a desire to find peace. The two had established a close friendship, forged out of forgiveness in the context of pain and conflict. I had the chance to hear him tell his story in person this past week, and it struck me afresh how remarkable it was and how only forgiveness can heal.

Desmond Tutu once wrote a book entitled ‘No Future without Forgiveness.’ He was right. Political solutions can take you so far. But the restoration of relationship takes moral courage and the willingness to look a former enemy in the eye – it takes nothing less than the scandal of forgiveness.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the World Cup is on. I tend to get more worked up about club football and spend far more time watching or worrying about the fortunes of Bristol City or Manchester United than England or Ireland (I know - having two teams might be weird but there’s a reason….) However, I’ve been enjoying this World Cup. It has been fun. It is a truly global event, one of those things that unites people across the planet, as well as a window into different cultures across the world.

Football generates huge emotion. You just have to watch the pictures of Scotland fans partying their way around Boston or supporters of whatever team kicking every ball, watching every move with rapt attention. I absolutely understand the feeling. That total absorption in the game, the frustration when one of your players does something stupid, the elation that comes from the last-minute winner. There’s something elemental, perhaps even pure about this. On one level football really doesn’t matter. On another level it matters hugely. As that great Polish goalkeeper, Pope John Paul II said: “of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.”

Which brings me to my rant. What irritates me in watching these games is the half-time adverts (thankfully in the UK we are spared the ones during the dreadful and unnecessary ‘hydration breaks’). Every one seems to simulate that emotion in the service of getting us to buy something. I sometimes imagine what it takes to make these adverts. They get a bunch of actors to pretend to be excited while watching the TV or at an imaginary game, leaping in the air to celebrate an imaginary goal. They deck them out in face paint, wearing team shirts, waving scarves. And it’s all fake. Not only is it fake, it is there to sell beer or insurance or computer programs or credit cards. It is the commodification of emotion and precious life experience to sell us stuff.

Of course it’s not just football. Advertising seems to wheedle its way into all our most intimate emotions and experiences to get us to part with our money. They depict moments of childbirth, the joy of parenthood, the beauty of a couple growing old together, all in the service of profit. Now I have no problem with profit. We all have to make a living and the companies and institutions we work for need to think about the bottom line. Yet this trend to take the most precious things of life and turn them into a means of making money always seems grubby, demeaning and distasteful.

So why do these fake adverts about football emotion annoy me so much? It’s partly because they depict something unreal. 90% of football following is humdrum, dull and disappointing. It is trudging to obscure stadia through ordinary streets in some random part of the country. It is away games at Peterborough, Port Vale, or Preston. It is enduring anxiety during tight draws or boredom at dull games, frustration at your players’ inability to kick the ball in the right direction. It is driving home after a 1-0 defeat, with not even a goal to celebrate. The moments of joy depicted in the adverts when you score the last-minute winner are pretty rare. And you only deserve it when you’ve been through the trudging, the boredom and the frustration. To depict it in an advert as if that’s all there is to being a football fan is just telling a lie. It’s a shortcut to joy that doesn’t go through pain. It’s cheap grace. Taking that outpouring of joy when your team does something remarkable, making it generic and then using it to make money just seems plain wrong.

So forgive me if I leave the room at half time to avoid these irritating adverts. I would much rather endure the full package, including the boring bits. And even hope that one day, the joy of winning something big might even happen to a lifelong Bristol City fan.

What is less often noticed is the extent to which we in Britain are influenced by our own Civil War. Strangely the English Civil War rarely features in school curricula. When I was at school - or even when our kids were - we seemed to avoid the topic. We studied the Tudors and Stuarts, perhaps a bit of the 19th century, the Nazis and the 2nd World War and that was basically it. We never went anywhere near Roundheads and Cavaliers and my only memory of learning about it was a simple Ladybird book about Oliver Cromwell and the story of the future King Charles II hiding in an oak tree.

Since then, I’ve become very interested in 17th century British history, becoming increasingly convinced that the English Civil War was a seismic event that continues to ripple down into our current debates and discussions even though we don’t often recognise it. In that tumultuous period, we killed a king, banned bishops, established a Republic, tried to found a godly society, changed our minds to bring back the king’s son. Politics, religion, power were all bound up with the story - just like today.

That kind of event doesn’t just pass us by. I was talking with a historian recently who mused that the Civil War is like a traumatic event in the national memory that we don’t like to talk about – like a bad dream that we don’t want to revisit, or a murder in the family many years ago that we don’t want to admit happened.

Living in Oxford, the royalist capital during the conflict, you can’t escape Civil War stories and sites. Just a mile away from where we live, is ‘Cromwell’s house’, the Parliamentarian headquarters during the siege of Oxford, and where the Royalists surrender was negotiated in 1646.

So in recent months I’ve been reading around that mid-C17th period in England (sparked not least by my reading about the same period in France for my Pascal biography – soon out in paperback by the way!)

What strikes me though is how many of our current debates and characteristics are influenced by that period of history. I think you could make an argument that our two-party political system, our debates over Brexit, the tendency towards centrist politics and fear of extremisms, what is often called ‘Christian nationalism’ the tensions in the Church of England, our constitutional monarchy and a lot of our moral debates - they all emerge out of those conflicts.

At least it’s something I want to continue to ponder over coming months and years…

It’s hard to avoid the apocalyptic sense of division in the US. Conversations with friends, articles in the papers, the tone of Fox News and CNN – it all suggests that many Americans feel these are terrible, dangerous and unprecedented times we live in.

At the same time, I was thinking about the recent revelations in the UK that the ‘Quiet Revival’ report was not as accurate as originally thought. Christians had got very excited about statistics that suggested a wholesale turn to church, claiming that God was on the move again, and that this was a sign of a great revival on the way.

So - are we living in perilous times? Or wonderful times?
While travelling, I was reading a book about Augustine’s view of history (as you do) and something Augustine said in one of his sermons caught my eye:

“Bad times, hard times - this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and time shall be good. We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.”

In the 4th century many Christians had got very excited about the growth of the church. After the accession of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, paganism seemed to be collapsing all around, churches were springing up all over the place, and Christianity seemed on its way to dominate the world. Christian writers and preachers, such as the great church historian Eusebius, saw the hand of God in this and proclaimed the coming victory of the church.

Augustine, it seems, was briefly tempted by this approach but soon began to be very wary of it. Almost alone amongst Christian writers and thinkers in the 4th century he refused to claim that he could discern God’s hand in current events. He could see providence at work in the events recounted in the Bible because the divinely inspired writers told us what was happening. However, he didn’t get too excited by the apparent triumph of the church, because he knew it could go into reverse any time. Which of course it did in 410 when Barbarian tribes sacked Rome, and his own homeland of north Africa was overrun by the Goths and Vandals.

He didn’t get elated when things were going well, or depressed when it went the other way. The significant moments of sacred history were the Creation, the call of Abraham, the coming of Christ and his promised return to bring about a new creation. Events which may or may not happen between these vital markers in time were of lesser importance and Augustine was humble enough not to think he could identify the purposes of God in them.
Don’t worry about the times, he seemed to say - whether they are good or bad. Worry about living well. The times are good in bad in so far as we live well or badly. “We are the times. Such as we are, such are the times.”

His approach struck me as giving a great freedom from the swings of emotion that come with feeling we are living in the worst times ever, or the best times. The best time is yet to come when the world will be flooded with the presence of God. Until then, for the Christian, the times do not determine us, we determine the times.

That project has grown over the past few years and the fruit of it is a book coming out this month, edited by Josh and me, called “A Voice in the Wilderness: Why should we listen to the Church of England?”. It tries to make a case for the importance of the church’s voice in national life based on four sturdy pillars.

The first is that the Church’s voice depends on its loyalty to its own faith. If the Church tries to be something it’s not - a political party a lobbying group, a special interest faction, paradoxically by trying to be relevant, it in fact loses its legitimacy. It forfeits the very thing it is looking for. The Church of England only has legitimacy by unapologetically being itself – the church of Jesus Christ in this nation.

Second, the church is the inheritor and interpreter of the profound way in which Christian faith has shaped this nation and many others over the past couple of millennia. You can’t understand English culture, even western culture, without the influence of Christianity, and in England the Church of England both stands for and helps to interpret that heritage for the present.

Third, the Church of England retains a commitment to place. We still have a parish system which means there is a church in every village, town, suburb, city centre even if at times the system seems to be creaking at the seams and we’re hanging on with the fingertips. Uniquely in English life the Church of England has a presence in every community - even more than Starbucks, Barclays Bank, or even the NHS.

And then lastly there is Transcendence. The Church of England guards and reminds the nation that there is more life than politics, economics, and culture wars. It is a reminder of the spiritual, transcendent dimension of human life and it does this not just for its own sake but on behalf of other Christian denominations, and even other faiths. That is why calls for disestablishment don’t tend to come from other faith communities but either from within the Church of England itself or from its secular critics.

The book is a collection of essays by a range of different authors – historians, theologians, politicians, bishops and many more. They don’t all agree with each other but that makes the discussion richer. I hope it’s a helpful and important contribution to understand the place of the Church in the modern world. You can pre-order it here (the publishers have an early cheap deal of £16) or here if you prefer Amazon.

The book is also about what he sees as modern attempts to reject this underlying order to things, and to replace it with a merely subjective understanding of goodness or beauty, an attempt which he thinks is impossible, as you simply cannot step out of this moral and aesthetic order, but only use some parts of it to turn against other parts. As he puts it: “The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour or indeed of creating a new sun, or a new sky for it to move in.” In fact to try to live outside this order is to lead to the ‘abolition of man.’

The story of how the book came about is worth noting. Apparently, Lewis gave a set of lectures on the theme in 1934 but didn’t actually write the book until 1943, in the middle of the Second World War. It’s a significant detail. Those times felt quite apocalyptic, with the outcome of the war still uncertain. Lewis was asking the question of whether there are things that are worth dying for? Is this war worth fighting at all?

Lewis’ book is a defence of the idea of some form of Truth underlying all things that exists before we got here. The Christian would go on to say that this natural law, this ‘Tao’, has becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ and the Christian life is therefore a life of prayer, worship and service, becoming conformed to the image of Christ, which is the human expression of this natural law.

It occurred to me that this defence of Truth might be particularly significant in our day, faced on the one side of the political spectrum with an agenda of progressive deconstruction of all truth or value as being merely about power, or on the other side the image of the strong man (and it usually is a man) imposing his version of truth on others.

The last paragraph of the book is worth pondering:

“You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ forever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of ‘seeing through’ something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

This is a film for kids, brilliantly put together, as always with Pixar and Disney. Yet it tells a story that touched on all our worries – young people losing their way, the devastation of the planet, corrupt politicians – and the biggie – technology out of control.

So many of the stories we tell are about our fear of the things we create developing a life of their own and going on to destroy us. It’s a story as old as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but we are ever more aware of the possibility of the next machine becoming more powerful than us. What if we do create something that mimics our own intelligence and even outstrips it and it turns on us? Yet somehow, we seem unable to restrain ourselves form hurtling down this path.

In the film, the plucky young kid and the animals win the day (you might have guessed it, so it’s hardly a spoiler). Yet in real life we don’t have quite so much confidence that our leaders know what they are doing enough to be able to turn it around.

In other areas of life, we don’t let technology loose until we know it’s safe. Imagine an aeroplane manufacturer inventing a new design without doing safety tests? Yet we seem unable to do this with our digital creations. The recent landmark LA court ruling that social media apps are addictive and designed to be that way is a significant moment in this story - yet too late for a generation whose minds and Hearst have been shaped by them.

One of the New Testament writers says this: “make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control.” He was a wise man. Together, goodness, knowledge and self-control can produce good and useful things. Knowledge on its own, severed from goodness and self-control is dangerous. It’s a word for our time.

You’ve heard it many times. It’s one of the mantras of our age. It’s a message of self-acceptance, unconditional love, reassurance, often used to counteract feelings of shame, inadequacy, or the pressure to be perfect.

I was thinking of this recently while seeing a message on the tube in London. “You are loved and wanted in London” is a campaign from the Mayor of London’s office. I admire his confidence but how does he know? Who loves the hordes of lonely people in bedsits & routine jobs who seldom talk to their neighbours and think they need to be more pretty, clever, and have a better social media profile to be worth loving? Is a poster on the tube going to convince them they are? A Council Tax bill from Wandsworth Council hardly works as an expression of love.

Now there seem to me two ways of thinking of this message. One, a more indulgent and lazy way, is to say that we are exactly fine just as we are. Love yourself. Your thoughts, desires, longings, habits are all to be affirmed and not questioned. Nothing needs to change for you to feel good about yourself.

If we stop for any serious amount of personal reflection, we recognise that all kinds of unwanted desires well up within our souls. We waste our time doomscrolling on social media, entertain malicious thoughts about other people, cultivate habits that in our heart of hearts know will ultimately destroy us if we don’t bring them under control. And being told all this is fine doesn’t work.

But there is a second way of thinking about this message. When the Victorian hymn writer Charlotte Elliott wrote the famous hymn ‘Just as I am’, she offered a different way of thinking of this. The hymn acknowledges our internal conflicts and confusions:

“Just as I am though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt,
fightings and fears within, without.”

She urged singers of the song to bring themselves, just as they were, messed up and confused, before God. She was convinced that, despite these things, we are loved and accepted, not by the Mayor of London, but by the God who made us and who died for us in his son Jesus Christ.

I was reading a book on Luther’s doctrine of justification the other day & came across this:

Suppose your child were to ask you, “Dad, Mum, what do I have to do to be your child?” Is there some law, some deed, some program you could propose? Perhaps the first thing you would have to do would be to weep that the question could ever be raised. But what could you say? What do you have to do to be my child? “Nothing. Just listen. Believe me. You are my child, I love you, I will never let you go.”

That is what justification by faith means. We are accepted as we are. We are children of our heavenly father and simply invited to believe that and live out of it. But that doesn’t mean we stay as we are. Implicit within this vision is an impetus for change, for moral renewal, for spiritual growth, but not one driven by a desperate need to please.

You are fine as you are. You are accepted as you are. Knowing that is precisely the impetus we need to work on those destructive desires, those depressing habits, to pursue virtue, goodness - holiness if you like - free from anxiety and guilt, yet eager for change.

The service was a mixture of the contemporary and the ancient. Some newer worship songs with a cello, piano and guitar, along with some Lenten liturgy, Holy Communion and the offer of the imposition of ashes. Roughly half the congregation were in their twenties – many of them students. It was, to be honest, a bit bewildering.

Why did they come? What is it telling us? The easy answer is that this is part of the ‘Quiet Revival’ – which may be true – but there may be more to say than that.

I noticed the blend of the spiritual and the physical. There were the usual modern worship songs enabling people to express their heartfelt longings to God. Yet there were also the tangible signs of bread and wine, the smear of black ash on the forehead, the invitation to fasting and self-denial.

It was moving to see all these people go out into the night, each marked for all to see with the smudge of facial ash. On the bus home, you could pick out the Christians, or at least some of them, because of this very obvious sign. Because we tend to assume the default position of most people is unbelief, sitting on a tube or a bus you can very easily think you’re on your own as a believer. Suddenly with this sign, the communion of saints became visible for a short while. Perhaps there are many more Christians on your daily commute, or on your street than you think there are.

But mostly, I wonder if there is something about Lent that captures the mood of our cultural moment. This is not one of those times when we are feeling bullish, confident about ourselves, blazing a trail towards the exciting uplands of future prosperity. That might have been true in the 1960s or early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but certainly isn’t true now. With the looming threat of climate change, loneliness at record levels, uncertainty about where AI is taking us, the sinister reaches of the Epstein files into so many parts of public life, and young people wondering whether they will ever own a house or have a secure job, we are much more aware over the brokenness of our society and our own hearts then we were before.

There is something about Lent, the note of penitence and acknowledgement of failure, that chimes with the mood of the age. “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return” they were all told. The first lie of the Bible is when the serpent tells Eve: ‘You will not die’ – and we have believed him ever since. Suddenly being told we will die one day, that we are mortal, that we have limits, while also being graced and surrounded with the love of God, perhaps comes as something of a relief, when we finally tell ourselves the truth.

At the same time as reading the book, I’ve been listening to the worries of American friends and watching with some bemusement the developed drama of the USA, the trajectory of Donald Trump and his coterie. Trump’s view of the world seems indelibly marked by hubris – constantly reminding us of how great he is, how terrible his opponents are, and how little can hold him back.

The ancient myths are full of stories of hubris. And it always turns out the same way. Phaeton was a teenage tearaway, a son of the sun god Helios, who stole his father’s chariot for a day, thought he could steer better than his dad, drove too fast and too close to the earth, earning a lightning bolt from Zeus for his pains. Arachne was a weaver who thought her cloth more beautiful than that of Athena, the goddess of all weavers. It didn’t end well. Icarus made himself a pair of wings, soared too high, melting the wax that held them together, plunging him into the sea, sinking into the dark blue depths of the ocean. And then there’s King David – thinking he could dispose of the soldier Uriah to acquire his beautiful wife Bathsheba, only to be unmasked by the prophet Nathan to his eternal shame.

These are ancient stories of brash and overblown self-confidence. They recur in pretty well every human strand of wisdom. Hubris usually arises from an insecure desire to be better than anyone else, better even than the gods, or God. It is essentially competitive. If greed is the desire to be rich, then hubris is the desire to be richer than everyone else. Of course, social media is full of it. It is hard to like hubristic people. They generate envy or resentment, or when they fall, a delicious dose of Schadenfreude. None of which are particularly good for us.

If the myths are true - and they generally tend to be - then we might be able to predict the end of the story of Donald Trump. Now of course there’s always the possibility he may learn humility. Who knows? We can but pray he does. But for those deeply anxious about where America is going, the myths might bring some measure of relief and a reminder to take the long view and wait for things to take their course. Jesus, the ‘myth become fact’, as CS Lewis put it, was ‘gentle and humble in heart.’ If ever we needed a reminder that humility, not hubris, wins the day in the end, that should be it.

The argument that ‘you don’t need God to be moral’ has gained traction,
especially when a whole swathe of Christian leaders have fallen into numerous
scandals of financial, personal and sexual abuse. For those who adopt a moral
framework of individual libertarianism, the sight of evangelicals supporting causes
antithetical to the progressive ethos, such as traditional marriage and opposing
abortion, seemed the opposite of what religion was supposed to do - make life easier
and to give freedom to live your best life. Taking such positions was not a ticket to
popularity. Even worse, when they supported a President whose morals left a lot to
be desired, religion’s credibility was even further undermined. Religion didn’t seem to
making people Good. Or Nice. Or Happy.

The problem is not is much the frailty of Christian leaders - they have aways been
subject to failure and fallenness - or competing narratives to Christian morality – the
early church didn’t do too badly, even though there were plenty of competing
narratives then. The problem is what people think religion is for. When religion is
thought of as socially useful, a comforting balm to smooth your path in life, or
fundamentally about morality, (you can tell the problem when people start talking
about ‘Christian values’), it is bound to fail.

Christianity is not at heart about morality. It is fundamentally about God. It is about
re-connecting us to our deeply mysterious yet intimately personal Creator, the source
of all that is true, good and beautiful, through the death and resurrection of Jesus,
the act of divine self-sacrifice for us and for our salvation. Of course, when that grips
our hearts and imagination it has the capacity to make us good. It can help build a
social fabric that works, but that is always secondary to the main thing. The problem
with American religion was perhaps that it got side-tracked into service of something
else – the American dream, or the project of America itself.

So, the demise of traditional religion in America is perhaps not surprising. But it is
also an opportunity to rediscover its true purpose.

Over the past 10 years I have visited many prisons, especially during my time as bishop for prisons in the London diocese. Time and again, I heard that same story of difficult family backgrounds – of parents being absent, of being addicts themselves, of violence in the home, of being neglected or abused growing up.

Now of course not all kids from difficult homes end up in prison. And of course, some from very secure two-parent families go wrong. And all families have their struggles. But all the stats tell us that if a child has a parent with a drug or alcohol problem, has been taken into care, or has a parent who has been in prison, the chances of that child ending up inside are much higher than if they had a stable family background.

It reminded me of how important healthy families are. One of the most effective things churches can do for their local communities is to offer support for strong family life. Incentives to keep families functioning well should be at the top of government to-do lists.

It also made me reflect on the value of the very ordinary tasks of life. For many of us, either as parents, grandparents (like me!), teachers, friends of teenagers or parents, the day-to-day business of strengthening the families we know or are part of, bringing up the kids well, giving them the time and attention that ensures they keep out of trouble, make good choices, and – hopefully – find a faith that will guide them through life - is vital.

It made me thankful for my parents, friends, teachers who did that for me growing up, the people who guided me, especially when I wasn’t being that co-operative. Bringing up a child, moulding them into a wise adult is one of the most important and worthwhile things we do in life. Parents or not, we all have a role in that – it’s vital we do it well.

Perhaps the point is to draw attention to the unique miracle at the heart of the story, that the one whose birthday is celebrated here is both ordinary and extraordinary.

To the naked eye, he is just another baby born into an obscure town in a corner of the Roman Empire to a young couple struggling to make their way in the world. He looks and feels just as human as the rest of us. And yet the extraordinary elements all signal that this is no ordinary baby. This is the divine Word becoming flesh, the One through whom all things were made taking on a human life and living as one of us. Last year we remembered the Nicene Creed – and it was all about this miracle:

For us men and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary and was made man.

As we start on the new year with our memories of the Christmas story beginning to fade a little, it’s a reminder for me to have my eyes open, not just to the ordinary but to the extraordinary. What if I went into this new year determined to keep my eyes peeled for the extraordinary within the ordinary, the unseen as well as the seen?

Where do angels visit me, those surprising strangers who intervene into my life at key moments? What if I saw the strange gifts that come my way, sometimes desired, sometimes not, as not just chance happenings but signs that tell me something about the God who gives them? What if the underlying purpose of my life is not to earn a living, to write interesting articles, to go on holiday, to watch football, but to grow in likeness to the God revealed in Jesus Christ, to allow his presence to light up every moment of day, making the ordinary the vehicle of the extraordinary?

That would be to celebrate Christmas all year round.

It was hard in such a brief visit to get much sense of the personality of the current Pope. He seems quieter, more reserved, a little harder to read than the ebullient, impulsive, big character of Pope Francis. I’ve now met two popes within the space of the last couple of years, and what strikes me is that you are meeting not so much a person but an institution.

As I shook hands with Pope Leo, behind him stood the vast edifice of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It was built on the traditional site of the burial of St Peter, crucified upside down nearby for his Christian faith in the 1st century. I think of him facing exactly the same temptation to deny Jesus that confronted him in Jerusalem just a few years before, but this time finding the courage and the faith to remain loyal to Jesus to the end.

The building has one other significant historical residence for me. I have spent much of my life studying and writing on Martin Luther. When Luther protested against the selling of indulgences in Germany in the early 16th century because it seemed to offer cheap grace, forgiveness in return for a donation to the papal coffers, the money being raised was going towards the building of this very edifice. St Peter’s therefore played a crucial and controversial role in the emergence of the Reformation.

So back to my handshake with Pope Leo. The papacy was built on martyrdom - the desire to remember the sacrifice, faith and courage of Peter. Some of the characters who have filled the office over the years have been saints, some have been scoundrels. It is far from a perfect institution. And yet it has endured. For 2000 years, bishops of Rome have exercised leadership within the western church through thick and thin, good and bad. I’m not a Roman Catholic and don’t see any prospect of becoming one. My Protestant roots run too deep for that.

Meeting the Pope reminded me to take the long view. That the Church goes through good and bad times, “the Kingdom of God suffers violence” as Jesus once put it, and yet somehow God’s purposes are worked out through it. It taught me not to take the present moment quite as seriously as I sometimes do, getting elated or depressed by what is happening right now, but instead remembering not my, or the church’s heroic faith and ability to endure, but the faithfulness of God through time in history.

In that context a couple of articles caught my eye this week both on Seen & Unseen. The first was (full disclosure) by my son Sam – no mean theologian himself and a Salvation Army Officer in Liverpool. He reflected on the fact that Elon Musk recently became the first person to receive a remuneration package of $1trillion. His point was to wonder what happens when such extreme wealth is concentrated in a few hands. Yet he didn’t take it in the direction that you might expect, that it is unjust, unfair and should be redistributed to the poor (even though he lives and ministers in one of the poorest areas of the UK). Instead, he simply highlighted the spiritual power of money. It gets hold of you. It dominates your thinking, feeling and interactions with others. Jesus calls it ‘Mammon’, almost personifying it as an idol, and we all know what idols can do to you. You basically have to choose who you serve - Jesus or Mammon. You can’t serve both.

The second article that filled out Sam’s was by an American writer David Clay, called ‘The Insane Economics of Jesus’. He describes how Jesus lived in a world of much more poverty than we do, where one bad harvest could lead to starvation. It was a world where many lived on the edge of poverty and were scrambling to make ends meet. We, however, live in a world with so much more at our disposal and yet we still think the main reality we deal with is scarcity. We never have enough money, time, followers, opportunities, even though in reality we have far more of these than the people in Jesus’ time.

So what does Jesus tell us to do in this world of apparent scarcity? Ignore it. “Or, at least, behave as though scarcity is not that interesting or important. God feeds the birds and clothes the lilies; you’re more important than a bird or lily to God; ergo, God will take care of you. Stop stressing.” Assume abundance. Assume that God is perfectly capable of giving you everything you need. Radically resist the worship of money – seek first the kingdom of God, and your daily bread will follow.

What does it mean to live like this? Neither David nor Sam spell out the details – for good reason. Jesus puts before us a kingdom that is here, but not yet here, beckons us to a way of living that entices rather than explains, stimulates the imagination of the artist, not the cold logic of an economist.

Sam simply points out the dangers of wealth and the spiritual value of relative poverty: “When you have little, you have little other choice than to rely on God. Trust and lack of human control are literally built into the fabric of your everyday life in a way that is alien for those who live with more than they need. Learning to trust God therefore will come more naturally as it is a pattern that is familiar.” And if you’re wealthy, then learn the one practice that breaks the hold of the idol of money – radical generosity.

David Clay ended with what I took to be a good challenge to me – and maybe all of us in our anxious world:

What does it mean to live as if abundance and not scarcity is the final word? I don’t know. What I do know is that what really feels insane, some days, is thinking I can conserve enough time, money, energy, focus or whatever else to build a life in which I find fulfilment or peace. There are cracks in my no-nonsense, economically rational world that beckon me to ask, what if I have no money, time, energy — nothing but my daily bread — only to find that I already have all I need?

TS Eliot’s haunting poem ‘The Hollow Men’, written in the aftermath of the First World War, depicted a crowd of lost, broken men (and women, I suppose, but this was 1925), with nothing heroic – just a sense of emptiness. They were to be remembered “if at all - not as lost, violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.”

I thought of this recently during a brief bus journey. A gaggle of teenage girls, a school hockey team - poured on board. Almost every one of them whipped out a phone and started scrolling through short videos on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever. Their conversation largely seemed to consist of pointing at said videos with looks of shock or laughter. It was like a feeding frenzy on the endless stream of content on their devices. (I wrote a bit about this in the Times last Saturday).

It’s not just teenage girls. Apparently, the average person checks their phone 80 times – around four hours - a day. We seem to be like passive, empty vessels, waiting to be filled with this constant stream of material. It is as if we have a deep, bottomless pit inside which needs to be constantly filled with ‘content’, by a never-ending supply of podcasts, news, information, snippets of comedians telling jokes, animals tripping over fences, or people jumping off cliffs in wingsuits like falling leaves.

As I watch this generation (and I include myself in it) pour an endless stream of trivia into our heads and hearts, that like crisps and sweets, gives instant gratification but leaves us feeling hungry in the long term – perhaps we too are a generation of ‘hollow men’. People with a gaping abyss at the heart which this stuff is incapable of filling.

What might it look like to not need such stuff? John’s gospel describes Jesus as “the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

To be full of grace and truth is not to be empty. It is not to need the stuff we fill our heads with, free to enjoy it, but not to need it. When you have tasted rich satisfying fare, the trivia of Instagram reels might seem just a little less satisfying. Jesus is the picture of a man full to the brim with grace and truth. I want to be like that.

As Christmas approaches it reminds me to fill my heart with grace and truth rather than games and trivia.

PS - If you’re looking for Christmas presents for friends or family – there is this biography of Blaise Pascal that I’m told is a good read!

I was thinking of this recently while reading the Reformation historian Alex Ryrie’s excellent little book: “The Age of Hitler, and How we will Survive it.” His thesis is that: “A century ago the most potent moral figure in Western society was Jesus Christ. Now it is Adolf Hitler.” In pre-second-world-war times, morality was judged by whether it accorded in some way with the life and teaching of Jesus. Now is it is defined negatively by opposition to Hitler and everything he stood for – bigotry, racism, discrimination, hegemony and so on. Our culture’s greatest story is now not the Christian one but the anti-Nazi one. Whatever we do, we know we don’t want to be like Hitler. The post-war interest in human rights as the basis for all morality was, he thinks, an expression of this anti-Nazi ideology, even though human rights in themselves are notoriously difficult to define and it’s always unclear who is meant to grant them.

He now thinks the anti-Nazi story is being expanded into other narratives - anti-capitalism & anti-transphobia etc. on the left and anti-wokeism on the right. Now all this may be valid, but he argues that we have replaced a positive moral exemplar – Jesus - with a negative one – Hitler, or racism, or woke or whatever we take as the object of our distaste. And the story of the Second World War, a brave resistance to evil which wins a total victory, with the other side (Germany) realising the error of their ways is a very unusual kind of battle.

Most conflicts don’t end like that, and therefore it’s not a great model to use in fighting other moral crusades. It also encourages us to think of our enemies (even if we don’t use the word) as like Nazis – not people to talk & discuss with but simply to denounce and fight.

It got me thinking of how we might define our visions for politics or faith positively not negatively - of what are we for, rather than what we are against. Which is why returning to Jesus as a vision of the kind of life we want to live - and the spiritual resources needed to live that way – might be just what our times need.

The other day, I was in a discussion with a number of people from different national backgrounds around what we considered to be ‘home’. One well-educated reasonably affluent American living in the UK said: “home is wherever my family is”. To be honest I resonated with him, as I recognise that instinct as well. But then I thought: that is not how most people in the world think.

And the reason is that people like him, and me and in fact most middle-class, wealthy professional people no longer live in the place that we were born and almost certainly not in the place where our parents or grandparents were.

In other words, in a strange paradox, the wealthier and more socially mobile you are the more likely you are to understand something of the experience of the migrant.

Of course, you won’t understand much about poverty, fleeing warfare, the desire to make a better life by moving to a different part of the world, even if the journey is dangerous. But people like us do understand about not having deep roots in the place where we live.

Any yet for most people, especially in less affluent places, where people are less socially mobile, home is a place. It’s the place where you were born; where your parents came from, where your parents and grandparents are buried in the local graveyard; where the streets, fields and hills have been your constant companion since youth. It’s a particular town or village in a particular country on a particular spot on the face of the earth.

With that much longer historical memory of a particular place, it becomes much more difficult to watch the character of that place changing radically over time with mass immigration. By contrast, in poorer parts of London, for example, where most people have moved in from somewhere relatively recently, very few people have a memory of what the local neighbourhood was like 20 years ago let alone 50 or 100 and so rapid change is less noticed and remarked on, and often welcomed.

I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from this but it struck me as an insight that helped me understand why we think differently about these things. It resonates with the Brexit debate we had a number of years ago in the UK, as well as David Goodhart’s analysis of ‘Anywheres’ and ‘Somewheres’– people who can live anywhere they like, and those who roots lie in a particular place.

These days I keep finding people referencing Simone Weil’s great book “The Need for Roots”. In it she wrote “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.” Understanding the right relationship between the entrepreneurial desire to move, to change, to explore and the need to remain rooted in a place over time may be key to finding a way to overcome some of our differences these days.

To believe that is weird. It changes everything – life is not a search for wealth, friends and success but for holiness and wisdom. It is not a search for self-fulfilment but a radical turn away from self-centredness to a growing love for God our Maker. The poor not the wealthy are the ones who matter. We are held in the hands of a God whose love for us is endless. The universe is not impersonal and silent but pulses with love. Evil is a force trying to undo everything that God has created. Death is just the gateway to something far better for those who believe.

Tom Holland put it like this this: “If you’re a Christian, you think that the heart of the entire fabric of the cosmos was ruptured by this strange singularity where someone who is a God and a man set everything on its head.”

(More here -https://www.seenandunseen.com/one-thing-new-archbishop-can-offer-world