Into Cuture: Into Pakistan III

Frustrated I decide to walk around my accommodation. I am listening to David Gray’s classic 90s album ‘White Ladder’. My mum always chose an album to listen to on repeat when she travelled to capture memories within music. To this day I still can’t listen to George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ without thinking of my trip around Scandinavia. I am frustrated that my plans are not stable, and I do not have ready access to a 3G (let alone a 4G) network in Pakistan and so can’t leave the range of my Wi-Fi connection in case the person I am meant to be meeting contacts me with revised timings.

As I turn a corner a man makes eye contact with me and approaches. I take my headphones off and greet him in attempted Urdu.

“I don’t speak very much Urdu.” he responds.

Join the club!

What follows is a fascinating conversation about life as a Pakistani Christian. The tone is different from my host. This man was born and raised in England to Pakistani parents. He now travels around Pakistan encouraging Christian communities. He talks about how many Christians are forced to live in unwanted land which has bad soil and floods every year. This means they permanently live in temporary homes. Every year the floods wash their homes away and they rebuild. He is working to build bamboo houses which stand on four or five-feet legs. The engineering was designed by bamboo artisans who had only worked on plates and cutlery.

He speaks of things I can not write publicly asking for my prayers. I hold back my tears listening to the story of Esther John, a Pakistani Christian martyr, one of the 12 martyrs honoured on the side of Westminster Abbey. After she was killed the authorities said she had had a lover out of wedlock. They knew about him as she wrote about him in her diary. That lover’s name was Jesus.

He shows me a cross salvaged from a burnt church that he is hoping will be put in a chapel dedicated to the Pakistani martyrs. Suddenly my presence and my planned interactions with the wider Pakistan feels compromised. I reconsider my published writing and return to my room to re-read to ensure that I have not caused danger. This proves fruitless and I spiral into anxious paranoia.

Lord, have mercy.

Why does the request for prayer from such devastating and desperate situations fill me with such impotence and an inner demand to do more? Why is this the first and often only response to offers of help? As a minority community which has faced genuine persecution and where their basic desire to follow Jesus is curbed, it is God alone who can help. Here in Pakistan, Christian security is not guaranteed and at any moment normal life can be interrupted by unannounced attacks which are likely to be covered up or justified by the authorities. Although Christians are given freedom to worship and be called citizens these are not secure. The only security they have is in God and his promises.

In this conversation evangelism is spoken of as first priority. Church leadership of the past is criticised as falling into maintenance mode and the congregation sizes shrunk. I wonder whether my conversation partner focuses on evangelism and conversion as the solution due to his British upbringing which differs from my host who is Pakistani born and bred. Does this man who speaks so passionately about the situation of the ‘hidden church’ carry with him a metamorphized colonial spirit which seeks adventure and expansion of horizons? My host, existing as he has in a large country part of a larger subcontinent amongst millennia long multiculturalism, may opt for the personal discipleship and focus on the community of faith as an expression of this different culture.

There is also a difference between the hidden ministry and the public. Ironically, the public ministry looks to hide its evangelism in Pakistan because of the very real consequences, whilst the hidden ministry is more bold about the telling of Jesus. I am not sure if this is correct but there is something here which requires more reflection.

We find ourselves standing listening to a group of young people singing a song based on a Psalm.

“You are the God who forgives.” They sing in Urdu.

I am touched by their gentle boldness of faith. I note they sing this in a sanctuary but my new found friend leans in and says they have sung this in the desert. I ask what he means and he tells me that they developed this ministry during Covid and afterwards toured it to the Cathedrals and some small churches across Pakistan and ended in the desert to the south. They were expecting 20 people to join them but they ended up having 200 people, some of whom had walked 8 hours into the desert to hear worship sung.

Forgiveness. The breaking of retaliation and revenge. This is the story, whether spoken out loud or lived out in bold acts of defying expectations, that changes lives. I finished reading ‘The Train to Pakistan’ earlier. It finishes with a scene of suicidal violence in the face of longstanding religious hatred and distrust. This tale of how the Partition changed a small, fictional, intercultural village is depressingly bleak. Bleak in its inability to offer a way out of revenge and generational grievance. All peacemakers are silenced with no narrative to persuade or hold to. Redemption never gets a look in. The deaths may be called martyrdom in the cultures in which they are rooted but this form of martyrdom does not sow seeds of new life. The ‘martyrdom’ depicted in the Muslim and Sikh characters of the book offers nothing to those who live except a reason to be mightier and angrier.

This is not the martyrdom of Esther John or her ‘lover’, Jesus. For we who seek to follow him to the Cross do so, not to receive a personal heavenly welcome but to make a heavenly gift for all. We should not seek our own post-mortem security but the establishing of God’s eternal Kingdom and thus security and justice for all, even those who kill us. If the martyr’s blood is the seed of the Church the martyrs are those whose blood is spilt due to acts of forgiveness.

People, particularly young people, are yearning for forgiveness and grace. Our world cannot find a way to justify this. The narrative is not structured towards this. Without Jesus and the good news of his redemption of humanity there is no reason for total and unrestrained forgiveness. Most cultures and religions promote some forms of forgiveness but they are all limited. We cannot continue to allow Christianity to bend towards this temptation.

I pray as the young people sing with beautiful fragility that only young people can.

“Shukriya, Khuda (Thank you, God)”

Into Culture: Into Pakistan II

The night before I had sat with my generous host. He had worked all day with little sleep and had come late to be with me and share a cup of tea. Tea, in Pakistan, is as much a cultural icon as it is in England. There is, in parts of the country, a belief that you are not really befriended until you have shared three cups of tea with each other. Cup one and I am grateful for his hospitable heart towards me, a stranger.

We discussed the recent attacks on churches in Jaranwala. Attacks which had been a catalyst for me to come and visit. Attacks that opened my eyes to how fragile seeming tolerance between faith communities can be. Attacks which inspired the convening bishop, Azad Marshall, to be firm and gracious even at risk to his own life.

“How is it that many Pakistani Muslims in the UK rightly demand equality and freedom of religion and worship, and yet, once they have received it, do not offer the same courtesy to Christians back home?” my host had pondered.

The Jaranwala incident has clearly shaken the Pakistani Christian community. I know this as I have sat with brothers and sisters from Pakistan in Bradford and seen them wrestle with anger, fear and the desire to be faithful to Christ. Bishop Azad Marshall’s stance is clear: as Pakistani citizens, Christians want to know they are safe to live in their own land. This is resonant with other communities elsewhere across the globe. There is, however, not a call for revenge or retaliation in his communication. There is no bitterness towards the people who burnt their churches and Bibles and looted their homes. A simple but firm request for assurances that their lives are valuable.

I wake at 5am to a loud Friday morning adhan/azaan (the Muslim call to prayer) or it may be another liturgical proclamation. It is echoed across the city as muezzins seem to compete to be heard. I am thankful that my wife is not here and I calm my irritable tiredness and mutter my own devotions to God. I feel affinity with a neighbour in Bradford who in a moment of annoyance had complained that we rang our bell at the Cathedral at all hours of the day. I contemplate the challenge of contesting devotional practices in multicultural spaces and how interculturality should encourage a sharing of devotional rhythms whilst maintaining distinctive content to the worship. I drift back to sleep.

I wake again at 6.30am to loud bangs and rumbles. In the darkness I immediately assume it is gunfire and bombs. This same instinct is still present back home when unseasonal fireworks go off at odd times of the day. Here in Pakistan the possibility of warfare is slightly more plausible, and so I get up to investigate. It’s merely a much-needed thunderstorm which, rather than bringing death and destruction, brings lightness and the breaking of the dangerous toxic smog that has engulfed the east of the country. The Punjab region was put under a lockdown yesterday to protect further citizens contracting conjunctivitis from the polluted air. I thank God for his mercy and drop off to sleep again.

I jerk awake just before 9am cursing that my alarm was not set to go off on Fridays and I have missed morning prayer at 8am. I contemplate the consequences of this. No one is expecting me but how am I now to introduce myself to the college community in which I am staying? I acknowledge the irony of missing my own communal worship because the Muslim’s call to prayer had compounded my already disrupted body clock. I get dressed and decide to head to the chapel which doubles as classrooms and see what can be salvaged from the day.

I arrive to find people sitting in groups studying the Bible. I sit and ask God to direct me to a part of Scripture and I feel drawn to the book of Daniel. This is interesting bearing in mind last night’s discussions around interfaith relations with Muslims and reflections on being a minority faith amidst a majority population of a different creed. This is one of the aspects of my research on this trip: to explore what it feels like to be part of a minority faith community. In preparation for coming to Pakistan I jokingly added after telling people this is an area of study,

“…to prepare for the worst.”

My host had been realistic and disarming about the reality. Quoting Brother Andrew

“I was told that ‘one [man] and God is a majority.’”

I read in Daniel the story of a religious minority existing alongside people of different faith. Their witness to peaceable cohabitation whilst maintaining an integrity is freshly inspiring in relation to evangelism. I recall the same missionary approach by St Augustine of Canterbury. I return, again, to the conversation with my host.

What does it take to grow Christian communities in the context of being marginal and outliers? For my host it is focussing on discipleship, an intentional training of the small gathering of faithful people. When evangelism is denied (in the case of Pakistan, legally), a securing of the remnant is key and is seen in the story of Daniel in Babylon.

“Discipleship is always one on one, one by one.”

The stories told of the Pakistan Church facing a shocking lack of biblical literacy and doctrinal confidence is uncomfortably familiar.

“How are we to stand surrounded by a loud and popular religious culture if we are not tethered to our own conviction. This is why I start every conversation with Christians with one question, “Why have you chosen to follow Jesus?””

The use of the word ‘chosen’ is significant in Pakistan as the given religion is Islam. Is it so different in the UK? I have wrestled with this same instinct amongst the congregations I have served. What is discipleship without a choice to follow Jesus? This is not just in relation to the discussions around infant vs. adult baptism for the choice to follow Jesus must be daily. I long to have the mindset of these Pakistani Christians: to have to choose to be distinct and to hold firm to the belief in Jesus as the way of life, the truth of the world and the life to which I was made.

The response in Pakistan to the lack of basis of the faith has been to invest not in evangelistic mission but in teaching in order that wider mission can flow from it. I have long spoken of the UK not facing a missional crisis but a discipleship crisis. I now begin to think about how, in the wider, holsitic view of mission being the 5 marks of mission (tending, teaching, telling, treasuring and transforming) how slowly we have realised that teaching the faith is missional. Evangelists rightly call us to ‘tell’ and bemoan our lack of confidence to do so. There is something about Philip’s model of evangelism with the Ethiopean eunuch, which is both telling and teaching.

The General Synod of the Church of England will meet next week. I am suddenly grateful that I have limited access to the internet and will avoid the usual toxicity of Anglican social media. I contemplate on the state of my denomination. I pessimistically see the Pakistani Church as our future state and pray that, if we are called to be in real exile in our own land, I will be faithful and meet others one on one, one by one and be led by the Spirit to sure up the remnants of faith and tend to the needs of those I meet, tell them afresh the good news of Jesus Christ, teach them the faith as it has been historically handed down to me, treasure the gifts God has given to the Church and offers to them… but finally, I pray that I will, if called to do so, stand firm but graciously to see justice done; not as an act of subtle revenge on the perpetrators of injustice but to establish true justice. True justice being justice to both the oppressor and the oppressed.

I feel the shame of my lack of confidence to go and talk to others and sense their own reluctance to speak to me. The strangeness of social hierarchy baffles me afresh and I regret not asking for more formal introductions and structure to my visit. I sit in a class and pretend to follow. I notice recognisable words spoken.

“Taliban… masjid… Allah.”

If only I spoke Urdu better I could learn so much more from them.

Into Culture: Into Pakistan I

I wake in a foreign country to isolating silence.

I arrived in the early hours with little to no introduction or orientation. My host wanted me just to sleep and merely asked when I wanted breakfast. I tried to communicate that I didn’t want to be a bother and would eat when others ate.

“9am?”

“9am is fine.”

Here I am at 9am walking around a building that looks very different than when I arrived in the dark. I do not know whether I am expected and there is no one around to ask, not that I could if they were. I enter the kitchen that was pointed out to me in the early hours, assuming it was done as an invitation to help myself, and try to find food. I stop with the fridge open and ask myself,

“Am I allowed to eat this? Should I serve myself?”

Essentially I want to know what are the rules and am I allowed to be here?

It turns out I am both welcome and not welcome. I am welcome as a guest but not welcome in the way that I would want to be welcomed. I am definitely not welcome in the kitchen; the women have made that perfectly clear. I am discovered looking for bread to make toast and I am told (I presume) that they will make me breakfast but I do not know that. I patiently wait for bread to be brought not knowing if it will. After ten minutes it is and I happily make myself toast. Halfway through my toast a plate of croissants stuffed with egg appears on the table in front of me

“Shukriya (thank you)” I say

“Sorry.”

What is she apologising for? She looks embarrassed. I don’t know why.

I finish my toast and read my book. A man enters. I stand, as is the custom, I believe. I bow, hand on heart, and greet him in fumbling, unconfident Urdu. He makes himself a cup of tea and another woman comes in from the kitchen, the door having now been firmly closed, and takes the plate of croissant and egg and takes it over to the man. He looks over at me and looks confused.

“Nehain (No). I am sorry.” I find myself saying now realising I should have eaten it. I had thought the apology was that it was not for me. I didn’t eat it because I don’t like scrambled egg.

I have now been rude in multiple ways without knowing that I was being rude. Suddenly a question from one of the women early reminds me of another breaking of custom. I had arrived for breakfast without shoes on and was promptly asked,

“Where are your shoes?”

“In my room.”

I had rushed to put them on and now, having rejected the food they made for me, I feel terrible. I take my plate and cup into the kitchen to wash up; trying to make amends. The cook who had made my rejected breakfast is sat making lunch. She looks at me briefly and says nothing. She does not hold my gaze. I begin washing my cup and plate and she snaps.

“No. You must not.”

I stop immediately. I apologise, in English. I have tried different words for ‘sorry’ in Urdu but none of them seem to be right. Stupid phrase book! Stupid, Ned!

I have not done well on first impressions.

Reflecting on the many interactions of my first day, I am aware of the different customs, particularly around gender roles in this culture. In Pakistan, having not had a liberation movement, the sexes remain slightly segregated but not in the totally submissive way we Westerns would expect. The kitchen is not just ‘their place’ it is their domain, i.e. I am not allowed there and I must not operate within it. As a guest, and a male guest at that, I should not do anything. I am here to be served and if I am not, I am looked unfavourably upon.

Reading ‘Train to Pakistan’ by Khushwant Singh I am struck by the graphic and matter of fact depictions of sexual encounters between men and women. To my Western eyes, what is being described is rape; exploitation by men but it remains uncommented on and the women navigate it without resistance or horror. In a much less extreme way, I am forced to think about the structure of Pakistani culture and how I feel the sexes should exist together. As a guest I feel obligated to first inhabit the culture. I am not being invited to challenge it; that’s not my role. And yet, my culture does challenge it. I am, by being myself, an alien who disrupts.

This all, of course, is my experience growing up as a neurodiverse person. So far I am swamped by the same loneliness and paranoia without any moorings to soothe me. I return to my bed and sleep.

I wake to singing and head out of my room to explore. People pass me, greet me and walk on. No one seems to care I am there or do not know how to handle me. I get it. I question the rules I have read before coming and there’s no one around to guide me. I am happy on my own… and yet also, not happy. I am also lonely. I am foreign.

An English speaker approaches me and asks about my life. I attempt to return the favour in Urdu. He acts impressed and compliments my accent. I thank him for his graciousness, but I immediately remember that it is Pakistani culture to compliment. I characteristically reject the compliment internally. We have a nice, awkward conversation. Everything in me wants to cry. I need to soothe and groan as I do when I’m overwhelmed. I stifle my instincts to scream. I focus my attention, whilst he speaks, to standing still and controlling my more unsocial ticks. It takes all my energy, but I maintain the conversation and act normal. The problem, obviously, is I do not know what normal is here.

There are several games that share a categorical mechanic. I call this particular mechanic the ‘Spy Mechanic’. These games are based on the fundamental premise of dividing the players into spies and detectives. Spies must pretend to fit in and obey the rules, without knowing the rules. The detectives obey the rules, which they know, whilst trying to stop the odd person. You either win as a spy by hiding your ignorance or you win as a detective by discovering the fraud. I hate these games.

I hate them because it triggers such haunting and character shaping ‘trauma’ from my childhood. Times when I worked really hard to ‘be normal’. Sometimes I was successful and got no praise for it. Other times I was not successful and was punished for it. This is the root to my inner critic. An inner critic which uses the personal pronoun.

“I am a bad person.”

I want people to praise me for the times when I’m normal but why should they consider that praiseworthy? Here in Pakistan, I am pushing myself to face up to this issue in an extreme way. This morning is a great introduction to the challenge I face.

Pray for me.

Into Culture: Curated Silence

Conversations are broken

So begins the blurb on the back of Nihal Arthanayake’s new book ‘Let’s Talk: how to have better conversations’. I picked up Arthanayake’s book whilst on holiday and devoured it within a few days. It was a timely read for me as I continue to imagine what is being shaped at Bradford Cathedral in the run up to City of Culture. We have articulated aims at the Cathedral to “be a place where challenging issues facing the world can be discussed and debated openly and safely” as well as being recognised “as the safe place for gathering when local or global events require a spiritual response or an honest conversation.”

So what makes for good conversation? Why is the art of disagreement such a popular idea at the moment? From ‘The Rest is Politics’ podcast’s stated aim “to disagree agreeably” to the Church of England’s repeated mantra to learn to “disagree well”; lots of people are trying to recapture the skills to debate safely in an increasingly polarised world. Public discourse has lost a sense of maturity, calmness and creativity. We can point fingers towards the rise in social media (or, should we call it unsocial media?) or the cuts to education which disproportionally impact the humanities and thus our ability to learn the empathetic imagination required to converse with people of difference. There are, however, many other factors that have led to the erosion of social cohesion and community integration. The Covid 19 pandemic didn’t cause this conversational decay but it has undoubtedly accelerated the degradation of all the skills required to interact with others.

This month we have held 3 events at Bradford Cathedral that I have helped to produce, all aimed, in different ways, to position us as an organisation to fulfil the aims stated above. Each of these spaces, in different ways, used the arts to inspire and/or hold difficult, contested views in the hope of discovering, with people of difference, a new way forward together.

‘Journeys of Hope’ was an exhibition that told the stories of both the Ugandan Asian diaspora, who travelled to Britain in 1972 after being expelled from their homeland by Idi Amin, and ‘the Windrush generation’, who arrived from the 1940s seeking to fill labour shortages after World War II. As part of our engagement in ‘Black History Month’ we wanted to hear different black histories alongside one another to discern the universal experience as well as the nuanced and distinct narratives from different ‘black communities’. The banners that made up the exhibition depicted, in word and pictures, the journeys made by these different migrant communities. The public were invited to engage in the dialogue between the two different narratives.

The launch event amplified the voices from these two particular communities of Bradford. Individuals talked about their experience of having multiple ‘homes’ e.g. both the Caribbean or Uganda and Britain. The contributors began to explore together what they understood by ‘identity’ the painful memories that have shaped them as well as the joyful realisations they have discovered. I chose to give space for those stories, particularly the painful parts to just hang in the air. The silence inviting us to face the uncertainty without the pressing need to respond immediately; to ‘befriend’ the emotions that were stirred.

In the press coverage surrounding the exhibition the media were most interested in the deliberate shift we are making in Bradford from talking about multiculturalism to interculturalism. Multiculturalism carries connotations of a kind of deceptive ‘tolerance’; a meagre allowance of another’s existence. It rarely inspires any creative interaction and, indeed, I would, in some small way, agree that “multiculturalism is dead”. I do not see how this acceptance of the other in my periphery as doing anything beneficial and will, with little encouragement, fall into ghettoisation and conflict. Interculturalism, on the other hand, invites ‘inter’action between cultures. It means, as one local, Bradfordian broadcaster said at a recent Religion Media Conference hosted in our city, “getting up in each other’s business.” 

Secularists would have us all believe that the public realm is a naturally neutral space. This is not true. There is no such neutrality because it is always curated by a particular worldview, most often a secularist’s. A healthy and honest public space that encourages healthy, creative conversation around shared political and social goals is hard built and even harder to sustain. Intercultural practice, as opposed to multiculturalism, requires particular skills which are not obvious or easily learnt. One principle is deep, empathetic and imaginative listening. I explore this and a complimentary principle of ‘overaccepting’ in an article soon to be published in the Oxford Journal of Intercultural Mission, entitled, ‘Improvisation as Intercultural Practice’. Essentially I argue that the skills that make improvisatory drama work are the same that make public discourse work: curiosity and mutual trust. This is what is lacking so often in our interactions with others.

We were also invited, by the Council, to host an ‘interfaith service’ to begin Hate Crime Awareness Week. This year’s theme was tackling religiously motivated hate crime. Because interfaith worship/prayers are more complicated than many understand, I decided to invite friends from different faiths an opportunity to share, from a personal perspective, what their particular faith teaches them about relating well across religious difference. This kind of sharing can easily descend into a kind of Faith Battle as individuals feel they must ‘represent’ and defend their position. It was specifically to counteract that temptation that I encouraged contributors to speak only from their personal view and followed it with silence, reflection and, if the congregation wished, to pray privately. This approach disarmed the pressure we put upon ourselves when we talk publicly about a deeply held, identity shaping thing such as faith. It encouraged people to simply accept the offer being made with no need to respond either affirmatively or negatively.

The event was held on 16th October, just 9 days after the atrocities seen in Israel and the subsequent heartache across the region as Israel and Gaza fell again into bloody conflict. This event was naturally overshadowed by the pain, confusion and anger felt by many in our community in Bradford and across the world. Fortunately I had already devised a creative way that we could stand together as people of different faiths in a meaningful way without using words that can regularly, particularly at such times of heightened hostilities, get taken out of context, misheard/misunderstood. We simply lit a single candle from individual candles representing our different faith traditions. We held silence together and allowed one another to lament and be baffled together without requiring a verbal response.

Sometimes the skill of conversation is knowing when not to speak.

Finally we hosted a delegation from one of our Diocesan links. Bradford has partnered with the Church District of Erfurt in Germany for over 30 years. We have regularly engaged in an exchange programme: us visiting them and they us. This year it was their turn to come over to us. As we devised an event at the Cathedral we discovered it had been 90 years since Dietrich Bonhoeffer visited Bradford and made, what became known as the Bradford Declaration. It was the start of the work that culminated in the much wider known Barmen Declaration which spoke against the Nazi regime and led, ultimately, to Bonhoeffer’s arrest and death in 1945.

In honour of this anniversary we decided to host an event that helped us to reflect on the role of faith in politics and politics in faith. We had three speakers: Dr Matthias Rein who is a Lutheran pastor in Germany who gave us a good background to Bonhoeffer and his ongoing legacy in Germany in 21st century, Revd Dr Noel Irwin, a Methodist Minister who teaches community development and organising, political and public theology who spoke about the impact of Bonhoeffer’s thoughts on violence/non-violence during the Trouble in Northern Ireland and Rt Revd Nick Baines, bishop of Leeds who talked from his experience of being a bishop in the House of Lords. Tough questions were raised and some complex ideas began to be unpacked.

Again, in the media interviews I engaged with they focussed on the common request that people make to ‘keep faith out of politics’ or ‘keep politics out of faith’. In the light of the Israel/Gaza situation and the overwhelming complexities involved in that historic, multifaceted issue, such requests are, in my mind, naive and reckless. Whether you ascribe to a particular shared religious doctrine or are not part of an organised expression of belief we all believe in something. This is either a spiritual, political or psychological idea or, most likely, some mixture of all three. There is some set of values which coalesce into some form. This is your faith. This shapes your decisions and choices. Those choices direct your actions and engagement in the social world. This is politics. It is, therefore, dishonest, to suggest that anyone can separate their faith/beliefs from their political choices.

The event was held within the context of a bilingual choral evensong. I had thought that many would only turn up for the intellectual part of the evening but in fact we had all 80 or so audience members from various backgrounds come and experience the sung liturgy which included prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The music, I felt, played a significant part in settling people into our time together and expressed in the hauntingly beautiful harmonies the complexities Bonhoeffer faced in his time. In our own time, as demands are made on us to make choices and to pick sides, I listened to the quartet of voices sing words of trust often creating deliberate dissonance in the melody. I was reminded of a contemporary of Bonhoeffers, Karl Barth, who once wrote,

And he who is now concerned with truth must boldly acknowledge that he cannot be simple. In every direction human life is difficult and complicated… Men will not be grateful to us if we provide them with short-lived pseudo-simplifications.

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1968) p.5

Arthanayake, referring to words spoken by Professor Tanya Byron earlier in his book, concludes by saying, 

…we must make sure that our education system encourages rather than diminishes curiosity. The curious may well dive into the online world to find answers to questions they have, but they will also wish to discuss those answers, refine them and even have them changed by new advice or evidence. The curious will have their ears open to empathise with the experiences of others or to process and push back on opinions they do not agree with. The curious will talk to strangers.

Nihal Arthanayake, Let’s Talk: how to have better conversations (London: Trapeze, 2022) p.266

That curiosity should be directed towards deliberately shaped silences in the world around us in order that we can engage better with to the daunting silence we find within. The arts should curate public spaces of silence to invite us, to woo us, into the uncomfortable conflicts that lie within us all so we can hold firm in the conflicts outside. When people declare our silence as deafening or that non-words are hurtful I weep. It’s because they cannot feel the gift that shared silence can be.

Into Culture: Lingua Communis II

In the first Lingua Communis post I began to articulate the cultural underpinning of language. I described an encounter with a Slovak family and their neighbours and reflected on the complexities of communicating and connecting with them over a linguistic divide. Since that time I have become more adept at Google Translate but this has only confirmed my declaration all those months ago,

Language is cultural; sharing the same linguistic language does not mean you share the same cultural language.

This month I went on holiday to Spain and Portugal. My wife and I booked ourselves on a coach trip through an online company. The booking stated that the tour would be in Spanish and English. When we arrived at the pick up site in Madrid early on the first day we found no one in the office spoke english and I fumbled my way, with Google Translate, through discovering if we were in the right place on the right date at the right time. After a fretful 30 minutes a tour guide came in and asked us in Spanish if we were on her tour. We vaguely understood the place names involved in our tour and so said, “Si/Yes”. Thus we met the lovely Orphelia, our Spanish tour guide who, we quickly discovered, spoke beautiful English. For a moment we thought that the tour was going to be challenging not having any way of navigating this new place without verbal communication.

That morning as we set off on our journey, Orphelia said something powerful,

Growing up in my family home, I was taught we were always to speak only the language of our guests.

Despite the coach being full of Spanish speakers with little to no English, for the rest of our tour everything was spoken in both Spanish and English. Orphelia asked just one thing from us: we were to learn some Spanish… even just one word. I vowed to learn more and to start all conversations with Orphelia and to attempt requests/questions in Spanish.

How might I practice my tour guides axiom ‘to speak the language of our guests’? What would this approach to hospitality look like in my context and ministry? Should I become more willing, even before the question of ability, to step over the linguistic divide to make people feel welcome? Is this necessary and/or enough to build a meaningful connection with an other and begin the journey towards unity of heart and mind?

As part of our Spanish/Portuguese tour we visited the Shrine at Fatima in Portugal. I had been before and on my previous trip had attended Mass in Latin. This time the only languages available to us were Portuguese or Polish; we opted for Portuguese, in the hope that there might be some words I could learn for the Portugal leg of our journey.

Coming from a Roman Catholic background, and knowing that the Church of England’s liturgy remains similar to the rites from our historic roots, celebrating the Eucharist in a foreign language is not so much of a problem for me. Although I could not follow the words in Portuguese, I knew, by ritualistic action and the shape of congregational responses, where we were in the service. I could follow and feel a small part of the family by my knowledge of the cultural practice even if the lexicon was different. I experienced a glimpse of understanding that went beyond spoken word; a unity with others as we worshipped together in our different heart languages, despite mine not being the primary lingua communis.

In Bradford I attend an Urdu/Hindi bilingual service as often as I can. This service is led in both Urdu/Hindi and English. I sing along to the Urdu/Hindi songs. I translate the title and, if there is one, the refrain/chorus but apart from that I participate in my limited way. The experience of being a guest in a community that do not primarily speak my language gives me an insight into the experience of those who come into an English church wanting to worship but with little to no grasp of words we speak. It is a challenging exercise but one that humbles me and makes me reflect on the nature and necessities of worship; in spirit and in truth. This Urdu/Hindi congregation go out of their way to speak English with me but I am unable to reciprocate in any meaningful way, although I am trying to learn conversational Urdu.

Although I can get by in worship and prayer in these contexts without syntactical understanding, when it comes to preaching/teaching I am at sea. I have been reflecting with my clergy colleagues about intercultural preaching at Bradford Cathedral. There has been some concerns and confusion from members of our congregation from different etnic and cultural backgrounds around a sermon I preached some weeks ago on Peter’s attempt to walk on water. I won’t go into the detail of the sermon but during it I made the point that the attempt to defy gravity by Peter was instigated not by Jesus but Peter himself. He says, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” (Mt 14:28) I was struck by the similarity of the phrasing in the temptation accounts earlier in the gospel where the devil says, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread/throw yourself down.” (Mt 4:3,6) In an attempt to make the point I suggested that “there is, maybe, something demonic in Peter.” I pointed out that there is further evidence that later in the gospel Jesus responds to Peter’s refusal to accept the need for Jesus to die by saying, “Get behind me, Satan.” (Mt 16:23). This was not the major point of the sermon but rather was leading me to the point that we need discernment and humility when we seek to follow Christ. For those from different cultures, although they speak good English, the word ‘demonic’ caused questions to their understanding of my teaching. They heard that their preacher was saying that Peter was demon possessed. I did not mean that but I can see, in hindsight, how they came to that conclusion. 

Again, the challenge to be united in heart and mind with my fellow human beings is both linguistic and cultural. In some cases it is enough to share a culture without the need for a shared lexicon like in the Portuguese Mass and the Urdu/Hindi service. In other cases it requires a shared spoken/written language for connection to be made and deepened particularly in the context of preaching/teaching. For this reason the instinct to start with a shared lexicon in order to develop a shared culture still remains necessary in most instances. We cannot agree the parameters and rules of a shared life without common linguistic understanding. Could worship, however, be able, in some ways, to bypass the linguistic divide and aid the creation of unity before a shared language is established? What would be involved in this process?

As Bradford Cathedral seeks to ‘excel in intercultural worship and seek to better reflect our city’s many cultures and ethnicities within our community life’ it might not need to mean, in the immediate, doing worship completely in other languages in a reactive way to the people who join us. It will not be enough, even if it were possible, to learn, to a good standard, the linguistic language of all who come through our doors. There will also be times when there are multiple guests with diverse languages at the same time. We must still show willing to meet the other halfway in the linguistic exchanges, enough to establish trust in order to walk together towards a shared culture between us. It will need to start with an acknowledgement of the linguistic divide and to show an openness to all tribes and tongues to add their voice to our shared song of praise.

If we are also to ‘be a centre of intercultural practice, learning from and encouraging other local churches’, I am mindful of the work we must do to follow the rule of thumb ‘to speak the language of our guests.’ How we do this outside of praise and prayer, in preaching/teaching or administrative spaces, for example, is more complex. There are two translations required: one linguistic and the other cultural and these must be done simultaneously and with a great deal of humility. Through mutual linguistic translation the real work is to teach one another and to all input into our shared cultural life.

I think it is willingness that is important. I am ashamed with my lack of ability to speak other languages. I am passionate about language and I have attempted to learn many languages over the years. I have not persevered and have put it down to not having the necessary aptitude to do it. I envy others who can speak multiple languages and who have settled in other cultures. They say the best way to learn is to submerge and force yourself to survive in the foreign land and tongue. This is where my commitment to intercultural practice must begin: to force myself and show a willingness to be immersed in the experience of foreignness as often as I can. To experience again and again the feeling of lostness when you are unable to communicate with spoken/written language. To welcome opportunities in my ‘home’ to speak the language of my guest. In this way I want to seek a shared cultural language that transcends a limited lexicon.

Mein is kaam ke liye khud ko paband karta hon (Urdu)/ I commit myself to this work.

Into Culture: Pilgrim’s Progress

At the beginning of August I returned to Riding Lights’ Summer Theatre School. This residential week of theatre and faith was the place and community which brought me back to God. It was also the place and community that introduced me to my first wife, Sarah; it was where I proposed to her and where, for several years, we went to celebrate these two fundamental parts of our identity: God and theatre. The summer school and the wider Riding Lights’ community have been my home base in terms of reflecting on who I am, as a Christian and as a theatre practitioner.

Before last year I had taken a break from Riding Lights’ Summer Theatre School due to bereavement. Sarah died in 2018 and I struggled with the idea of returning without her. In 2022 I received a text message from the Artistic Director, Paul Burbridge, asking if I would consider being a tutor in that year’s summer school. I was to direct, with him, a series of Chekov short plays. I jumped at the chance, not only of returning, but also working, for the first time, with him. It was a delight but it was tinged with sadness as memories came unbidden.

I was preparing to return to summer school this year and had had some brief but non-committal conversations with Paul before he sadly died in April. The shock of Paul’s death put everything, understandably, on hold. When Riding Lights asked me if I would still come and tutor again I agreed and asked what script I would be working with. I was to produce an abridged version of ‘Walkout!’, itself a stage adaptation of John Bunyan’s, ‘A Pilgrim’s Progress’.

Each year Riding Lights has a theme that aims to unite the different courses across the summer school. This year’s theme was, “Rise Up and Find Your Voice”. I have to admit I struggled to know why the text of our show was chosen to explore this particular theme. Don’t get me wrong, I can see how it could be very apt: Bunyan encourages his reader to be confident with their faith and not to be swayed by the many tempting and demanding voices we hear in life that try to silence us as we progress towards the celestial city of God. My question was, knowing that the summer school would produce shows of protest and ‘speaking out’ on all the issues of our day, how Bunyan’s 350 year old text would be received or explored at this politically contested time.

John Bunyan is unashamed in his evangelical fervour and uncompromising demands of faithfulness to the gospel. The adaptation, despite some dated reference, keeps the tradition of the text alive in terms of challenging and questioning political, philosophical and sociological progress and suggests that these lead people away from the historical faith as passed on by the Apostles. Exploring this text as part of the theme made me ask deep questions about what it might mean to ‘find my voice’.

Here’s the rub. Can we really ever ‘find our voice’? How do we know when we’ve found it? Do we have only one voice, or are we a cocktail of voices some of which compete and contradict one another? What is the purpose of finding ‘our voice’?

Regular readers of my writing will know that I struggle with the popular notion and demand of self-knowledge that our culture obsesses over. Thankfully we have seen the end of the popularity of the reality ‘talent’ shows that regularly showed us people who “believed in themselves” and could only do “what they were made to do”, ie. sing/dance/perform, etc. Despite many being told they were not any good they were there to “prove themselves”. This has impacted our society by implying that the self is a singular, static thing that we are charged with discovering and protecting. This denies, therefore, the possibility of change. This is not good for relationships or our mental health and yet our culture increasingly demands we ‘find our voice’. Why?

When directing a piece about faithfulness to God and not being lured away by ‘self-actualising philosophies’ and ‘vain confidence’ I found again the extremes in the current socio-political debate of our time jarring. In our production we chose to rotate the main role of Christian round the cast so that most people got a chance to voice the epitomous pilgrim and, in addition, they would also play a role of temptation be that, Vain Confidence, Hypocrisy or any of the other cavalcade of distractions Christian and his fellow pilgrims (Hopeful and Faithful) face along their progress. We wanted the cast and the audience to acknowledge the different voices we can possess (or, maybe, that possess us). We wanted to explore how we slip into characters that others and wider society want us to perform and how we have a choice as to which voice we find and use.

Thomas Merton, a trappist monk of the twentieth century, wrote a lot about ‘self’ and his writing is still a prophetic challenge against the narcissitic tendencies of the modern world. He questioned the ease with which we talk of ‘self’ outside the context of God and invited us, as does ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, to find our selves only in relation to God’s desires for us. Merton saw the task of the Christian life, expressed in the monastic tradition, as “an unconditional and totally humble surrender to God, a total acceptance of ourselves and our situation as willed by Him.”

It means that renunciation of all deluded images of ourselves, all exaggerated estimates of our own capacities, in order to obey God’s will as it comes to us in the difficult demands of life in its exacting truth. “Purity of heart” is then correlative to a new spiritual identity – the “self” as recognized in the context of realities willed by God

Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (London: Darton, Longmann and Todd, 2005) p.83

I regularly find the debates around identity baffling, confusing and disorientating. This is in part due to my neurodiversity but it is, I think, also about the deep dissatisfaction we all feel having pursued the social liberal project to its extreme position. Our deconstruction of social institutions that have formed our civilisation for centuries have not brought peace and balance but the opposite. We have not arrived at the utopian social construct promised to us by the revolutionary movements that have shaped our culture but rather we live in deeper confusion and division. It’s because, I suggest, despite all the conversation about power, we’re not being as honest or transparent about it as we should.

When it comes to power I am of the mind always to know what power/privilege I have and to use it for the benefit of others and, if there is a conflict, to side with the economically poor and dispossessed. Surrounded by a society that asks us to find our political voice in the current social justice culture I have to admit I am not encouraged to find my voice or, worse, the voice that I find is wrong and needs to be corrected. How do I deal with that? When I am asked to ‘rise up and find my voice’ and yet I am left feeling like I’m also being told to ‘sit down and shut up’ do I just accept that I am now dispensable in public life? This, I feel, is a deliberate strategy by certain parts of our society who have ambition not for others but for them selves.

I get it. I am a straight, white man. I know my privileges but my privileges are not, I don’t think, due to my race, gender or sexuality. My privilege is class, education and economic privilege. I want to talk about those things because they are things I can use to benefit others and they are things we can actually change. We are lost in political battles for ‘equality’ which, as Douglas Murray rightly suggests, has overreached itself so now we strive that all are to be equal but, to quote George Orwell, ‘some are more equal than others’. Murrray, a gay man himself, notes the strange situation where ‘straight’ people who come out as gay are lauded as brave but ‘gay’ people who come out as straight are treated with suspicion and doubt. The increased valuing of news items of people ‘coming out’ in different forms and the accompanying demand for others to affirm this new ‘identity’ out of fear of causing suicidal offence remains strangely unhealthy to me. Why do we feel forced to publicly declare our identities? What is the purpose of the obsessive discussion and demands that we affirm one another’s current identity as the definition of ‘loving’?

Rightly or wrongly, I believe that love doesn’t just accept the other as they are but is expectant that the other will continue to change. I am who I am today, but tomorrow I have hope that my voice might be different. I hope that tomorrow I’ll sound less like me and more like Jesus Christ. The voices I hear in the public square at the moment are not ones that I find comfortable or desirable. So I am strangely content to step aside from the competing noise of public life and find my voice in harmony with his, who created me and who desires me to change from glory to glory; for that is what means to be on the pilgrim’s progress.

Into Culture: City of Travellers

I have become fascinated with a particular phrase that I hear quite a lot: “But we want to make it Bradford.” What does it mean to be ‘Bradford’? My colleague the Dean praises certain things by the adulation of, “We made that Bradford.” I was in a discussion about the creation of an Artists’ Charter to be proposed for the City of Bradford. As part of the consultation we were asked “how we would make this distinctly Bradford?” This singular cultural concept rooted in a local place is interesting to me in a city which is so global in its population.

Before moving to Bradford last year I began to be interested in a similar philosophical question but on a slightly larger level: “What does it mean to be British?” or, at times, “What does it mean to be English?” Do such conceptual categories exist? The term is used enough that we all seem to accept it and to bestow upon it meaning but is that meaning shared? I have witnessed it being used in contradictory ways and yet I still feel a truth lying at the heart of the sentiment; or, maybe, I long for it to mean something even if it does not.

A friend of mine often says that stereotypes, however insulting, are rooted in some truth. The issue is the removal of nuance and dimension from the object we’re stereotyping so they become caricatures without dignity and a deeply mysterious depth. Indeed, to stereotype is the start of the de-humanising of a person, but my friend is right in that these broad and basic categories have an element of truth: they’re just isolated from the plethora of other factors that make up a person or nation. Take Germany for example. There is a broad truth that there is, within the German culture, a valuing of efficiency and order. This is also seen in the wider category of germanic cultures outside of the current national identity of ‘Germany’. The question should be asked, therefore, are the people of germanic countries culturally conditioned or is the culture shaped by the people?

As we at Bradford Cathedral go through a vision and value setting process looking ahead to further strategic development, I am aware of the balance of listening and receiving a culture as well as shaping and making a culture. As part of our listening and consultation process we studied our history and probed it for cultural markers and definition. There are certainly some cultural artifices that repeat over the centuries of the community that worshipped on the site of the Cathedral; we have articulated this as ‘a story of change and ambition, of hard work and dedication, of failures and yet trust and hope in a God who changes lives and transforms communities.’ 

We hear the story of the civil war and how the people of Bradford were outnumbered by Royalists. They were besieged many times and cannons opened fire on the parish church (the future Cathedral that stands today). At the final battle, the Earl of Newcastle ordered the whole of Bradford to be killed. This order was rescinded after he had a visitation from a girl in white who famously said, “Pity poor Bradford.” Whether the people of Bradford like that story or not it is part of the history and it tells us several things that can still be felt and experienced in Bradford today. 

Firstly there is a history of being small, outnumbered underdogs who punch above their weight and, with daring do, manage to survive against all odds.

Then there is a sense of being people of protest. Bradford is protestant not just religiously but politically as well. We are the birth place of the Independent Labour Party don’t forget and there is still an alternative or contrary spirit in Bradford but there’s also something radical about our protest. What I mean by that is, like our Puritan ancestors, our protest is about reforming traditions rather than making up new ones. It’s hard to express this cultural nuance in detail but it is a particular Yorkshire trait of being both stubborn and proud of our heritage as well as being radically fresh and innovative. There’s a strange cultural importance, I feel, to the fact that Dietrich Bonhoeffer made his de-nazification speech in Bradford (now called the Bradford Declaration). This was a protest against the Nazi regime and how it had infiltrated all cultural institutions in Germany. This was not a progressive vision but rather a radical demand to return to some previous, lost tradition.

These two aspects could, I suggest, play a major part in what makes ‘Bradford’, but it equally, I think, makes it ‘Yorkshire’. Does it also just make it English? British?

My interest in Englishness was first raised after lockdown as I reconnected with my love of Tolkien. Tolkien had a particular interest in England, as separate from Scotland, Ireland and Wales. He believed that England lacks a cultural myth, whereas the other peoples of Great Britain have such myths. It is this mythological foundation that shapes culture. So what, Tolkien asked, is England’s mythological foundation? This question led him to write the sagas of ‘Middle Earth’ and to formulate a pre-Danish, pre-Beowulf mythology of England.

When people ask me, “Where are you from?” I say I am from Kent. It is where I was born and brought up. It is where my maternal family hold strong roots (my paternal family are mongrels from all over!) I don’t say Tunbridge Wells, although it is more factually accurate, because I do not associate myself with that town, despite being shaped there. When I say, “Kent” I have a mythological concept of green wolds, softened sea breeze, apples and woodlands. I feel comfortable with that imagery and have a nostalgia for that place. It is, I have come to realise, my subconscious attempt at identifying with the Shire and the world of Tolkien’s hobbits. The hobbits, more than any race in Middle Earth, are the English people. 

I want to be a hobbit. That is my cultural archetype.

So what of Bradford and it’s cultural shape?

As well as the underdog fighting against all odds against the ruling class and the radical protest for ancient principles there is one historic cultural expression that repeats itself in Bradford: we are ‘a city of travellers’. This phrase appears in J.B. Priestley’s ‘English Journey’. Priestley, a Bradfordian himself, returned to his hometown in 1933 as part of his grand tour of England. He wrote the following,

Bradford was always a city of travellers. Some of its citizens went regularly to other side of the globe to buy wool… They returned to Market Street, the same sturdy Bradfordians, from the ends of the earth… When they returned they did not give themselves cosmopolitan airs; it was very dangerous in Bradford to give yourself any airs, except those by tradition associated with solid wool men. And then there was this curious leaven of intelligent aliens, chiefly German-Jews and mostly affluent. They were so much a part of the place when I was a boy that it never occurred to me to ask why they were there. I… obscurely felt that they had always been with us and would always remain… Bradford was determinedly Yorkshire and provincial, yet some of its suburbs reached as far as Frankfurt and Leipzig. It was odd enough. But it worked.

J.B. Priestey, ‘English Journey’ (Manchester, Harper North, 2023) p.197-198

Although the German-Jews left during the 1920s, Bradford soon welcomed other migrants. First came those from Poland and Ukraine, then South Asians and Caribbeans and we are proud of our City of Sanctuary status. We are not naive in thinking that such welcomes were/are not hard, challenging and, at times, some may experience racism and hostility but we have a way of welcome and are happy to broaden out the category of ‘Bradford’ to encompass people who settle and make this place their home. 

It is this singular cultural value that we retell at Bradford Cathedral. The reason is this: we boast a history of Christian witness on the site of the Cathedral that stretches back 1,400 years. Back then there was no settlement, no village or town. A preaching cross was established and from all around people journeyed to hear the Christian faith proclaimed. Soon a market was established to cater for the travellers and then a small village, growing to a town and now a city. This legend says something about the heritage of this place but, as well, says something of a cultural narrative that might be. A unifying story in a multicultural society. We all bring with us a cultural narrative; mine of a Shire and the unassuming littleness of Tolkien’s England, others of family honour, generous gift giving, etc. We all value different things but, if we are to genuinely say something collectively then we need to do the work of exploring shared values and mythologies.

This is the challenge of City of Culture. When all eyes look at Bradford, what is it that we want them to see and to celebrate? What cultural narrative do we want to tell? How might Bradford stand up to the prevailing culture of division, polarisation, post-truth, etc. and protest for a better story? I think it starts by exploring this historic value of welcoming fellow travellers in a uniquely Bradfordian way, which is, in itself, a Yorkshire way of welcome, and, even an English/Hobbit welcome… for more on that read about Bilbo Baggins.

Into Culture: Post-Industrial Cathedrals

When I started as Interim Canon Missioner last year (before being invited to take on the full time role as Canon for Intercultural Mission and the Arts in January), I joined Rev. Canon Philip Hobday who had only recently been appointed as Canon Missioner at Wakefield Cathedral. I invited myself to go and have a look round Wakefield as one of our sister cathedrals in the Diocese of Leeds and to get to know him and see how we might work together. He had already been in contact with our counterpart in Ripon, Rev. Canon Matthew Pollard who started as Canon Chancellor at the same time, in the hope that we might support one another.

I greatly appreciated my time with Philip and our visit raised lots of questions around models of cathedral ministry, particularly, in our case, being one of three cathedrals in a diocese (unique in the Church of England) and also being in post-industrial towns/cities. My reflection, after my visit, was that I went too soon. Philip and I hadn’t gained enough experience or insights in our contexts. Our conversation was, therefore, much more about sharing aspirations. That was still beneficial but I now want to visit again and have deeper and more detailed conversations with him and, indeed, Matthew in Ripon; different as that context is to Bradford.

If three new Canon Generals (the common name for residentiary canons who are not precentors) starting in post at the same time was not interesting enough, in December, Rev. Canon James Lawrence began as Canon Missioner in Blackburn Cathedral. James and I have a very tenuous link through a mutual friend but I was very excited to hear that he was beginning in cathedral ministry with me. He was quickly adopted into the small, informal Canon Generals network. The group also extends to Rev. Canon Maggie McLean, Canon Missioner at York Minster who has been in post longer than us all and brings a wealth of experience.

Wakefield Cathedral

As I had reflected that my visit with Philip in Wakefield was too soon I gave James six months to settle in before asking if I could visit him in Blackburn. I was keen to visit Blackburn because, like Wakefield, it has a very similar history, foundation and population demographic to Bradford. Blackburn became a diocese in 1926 only seven years after Bradford. The cathedral was created from a large, central parish church and over the next decades (during the great financial challenges between the two world wars) expanded and redesigned the building. The design, therefore, in both, is 1950/60s in style. Around this time the British wool trade, which was a large industry in both Blackburn and Bradford, began to shrink as cheaper products were imported from elsewhere. Bradford Diocese was dissolved in 2014 and, in this way Blackburn and Bradford differ in status slightly. But there are great similarities still, in multi-faith dynamics and demographics as well as in economic indices. For all these reasons it was going to be useful to go and see how the team at Blackburn Cathedral were responding or reflecting on their own future.

I knew James and I had similar methodologies of reflection and research and was delighted when he not only agreed to welcome me but then produced a thorough tour with meetings with key members of staff. In advance he contacted his staff team and clearly outlined the purpose of my visit: to be an opportunity for mutual learning and reflection on our models of ministry and mission. I was not disappointed with my visit. Here are my two main takeaways.

Cathedrals, like Blackburn and Bradford, who are situated in small but ethnically and religiously diverse towns/cities must quickly acknowledge that faith is a cultural object. What I mean by that is, quite simply, for the global majority, faith is not relegated into the private realm and plays a significant role in public identity. This is because, as I was reflecting with James in Blackburn, other nationalities, ethnicities and cultures that we encounter day to day have a deep recognition and appreciation for how faith shapes and/or has shaped their native/historic cultures. Faith for most other peoples is still able to be proudly owned culturally. The secular West is an outlier in this respect and so, for those of us working amongst global majority heritage communities, we are faced with the challenge of what it means to be a confident Christian community in Britain today. The historic and classical liberal approach to Christian mission and civic engagement is no longer working when faced with people whose faith is central to their public identity and whose differing culture is also lauded by our secular society in Britain.

The cultural value in diversity and celebrating difference has a strange shape to it in its current form, in my mind. I continue to reflect on the selective way in which our current society goes out of its way to highlight and amplify different, often conflicting, faiths and cultural heritages. Mainly white, middle-class people who feel divorced or estranged from their own religio-cultural history seem to spend so much time promoting the faith and cultural heritage of others and express appreciation for their beauty and power. They stop short, however, of adopting it for themselves. Why is that? Is it a kind of faith tourism which demands nothing of them but where they feel virtuous for embracing it publicly. The same embracing does not happen with the public expressions of Christian faith and heritage. This is where cathedrals find themselves challenged. Gone are the days, or they are going as we speak, when we are cultural centres producing socially valued cultural expressions. For this reason we are driven to remain relevant by importing other cultural events (even if they are jarring) in order to attract people into our costly historic buildings. 21st century Britain does not flock to the Church as a connection to our shared past because modern Britain seems to want to cut itself off from its past.

Sure there are some painful and difficult things in our collective past but if we are not willing to be reconciled to it then we will continue to float adrift from any potential cultural narrative that could unite us. Without an historic story our identities will have no roots and will not survive the storms of our current age. It is this very problem that the smaller, more industrially shaped cathedrals must lead on if all cathedrals and, indeed, Christian communities are going to be renewed.

Blackburn Cathedral

Leading on from this, I was greatly encouraged that in both Philip in Wakefield and James in Blackburn I found young (ish) academics who are keen to think theologically about these very practical issues facing our cathedrals. Both of these partners were not embarrassed about asking challenging questions of the status quo of cathedral ministry. It has been even more encouraging because I have long felt called to cathedral ministry but have never seen someone like me doing it.

There is a type… If you know, you know.

I’m not dismissing them nor criticising these fellow cathedral ministers but there is a certain person who fits ‘cathedral ministry’ and if we don’t at the start, we somehow get shaped into it. I am not looking forward to my seemingly inevitable transformation! I don’t know if it is the highly public nature of the role that pushes us towards a more performative persona or the privileged positions associated with our work that give us an inflated sense of our own abilities. Somehow, at some point we fall for the temptations and traps of cathedral life which means we fixate on processional orders, protocols, historic traditions, etc. and our egos expand within the shrinking ecosystem that is our particular cathedral.

I feel it within myself already. It begins subtly with the sheer scale of financial pressures and, alongside that, cultural expectations. I have started explaining to my peers who are in parish ministry that being in a cathedral is like the parish but more so: all the challenges are scaled up but, thankfully, all the benefits and opportunities are too. The problem comes when you succumb to repeatedly dropping your guard and allowing things to happen without consideration or reflection. I get why! We don’t have the time or the energy but step by step, precedents are set and accidents become habits become practice become strategy.

It is in this time and resource poverty that the cultural pressures from other organisations and individuals with their own political and personal agendas just wear us down and we take the easy road of least resistance. Risks are not worth it. Optics are! And, again, I get it! This is what I was touched by meeting with James and speaking candidly with him about our hopes for our own futures but also the future potential of cathedral ministry, if only it could be re-framed: there is a new breed of ministers who are joining the ranks of the AEC. I am glad that I have someone who is young enough and still idealistic enough to keep me from slipping into the full pastiche of a cathedral dean of the 1970s!

Our country and society does not need cathedrals to ‘absolve an entire people, unquestioned and unconditionally’ (Dietrich Bonheoffer, Discipleship (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003) p.53), nor to open our doors and meekly ask “if we could but beg a few moments of your time to ask that you might consider giving a few pence to our collection.” In the post-industrial areas like Blackburn and Bradford where families are struggling not with philosophical issues of identity but with practical things of unemployment and poverty, where popular culture is increasingly passing them by and has no relevance to them, it matters who the Church is seen to be blessing, partnering and dialoguing with and the language they are adopting. It is in this confusing and traumatic time that the Church needs to be robust in our proclamation and coherent in our offer of an alternative solution to the problems of our time. Seeking to agree with the often incoherent and conflicting cultural narratives in the public square will not bring Jesus Christ and his Kingdom into the places we are called to evangelise.

Bradford Cathedral

Interfaith work, as with intercultural work, is not about keeping silent or denying the very real and significant distinctions between our very different worldviews. If we pretend that we are all the same we undermine all of our beliefs and we are all poorer for that. Instead it is about being rooted in our heritage and being able to see it with all its strength and with its challenges. It’s about being clear as to what it is that is unique about your own faith and the faith of our friends and neighbours. It is about being hospitable in seeking our own healing, humbly accepting where we need to repent, and seeking the healing of those who we differ from.

I am grateful that I have colleagues who are ready to wrestle with the very keys of discipleship as a catalyst for mission in the very public life of cathedral ministry. I only pray that I will remain sharp and passionate about it myself.

Into Culture: The Empty Space

For the last month we, the Senior Management Group of Bradford Cathedral, have been fine tuning the high-level vision document (read here) that was offered to the congregation and wider community with whom we have been listening and discerning at Pentecost. The process leading to this point has been long, intentional and in-depth. We have met with various groups of people from all levels of engagement and investment asking questions of perceived values and repeating patterns in the long history of the Cathedral. Some common threads became evident in our many discussions, positive and negative. The two main, negative stories that were told again and again were a narrative of scarcity and a narrative of being ‘passed by’/overlooked. Both need, I believe, hearing, tending to and transforming.

The narrative of scarcity can lead to two opposite outcomes: one is towards risk aversion, the other is the embrace of innovative use of resources. The narrative of being passed by can also lead towards two different options: the first is towards a lack of motivation, the alternative, to disregard the fear of judgement as no one is watching anyway. These dynamics will now, no doubt, be played out as we enter the next phase. We will need to reflect together on how we navigate between the two options and we respond to these named stories that we tell ourselves.

These narratives and their possible futures, mixed with the ongoing reflections about the way in which a cathedral engages in the cultural life of a 21st century, intercultural, UK city at a time of great social upheaval and change, have caused me to return to an old friend; Peter Brook’s, ‘The Empty Space’.

For long time readers of this blog you will know of my love for this book. Search for Peter Brook in the bar at the top and read over my reflections on ‘Theatre Church’ from way back in 2011 as I shaped my BA dissertation thesis on creative Christian communities. You can track how the theory behind my theatre making pre-2009 transitioned into my emerging Church leadership post 2012. You will see how I cited Brook’s writing on the power of theatre and its need for reform to continue to shape culture to explore how the Church too might reform to continue to also shape our culture.

For this month’s reflections, then, I turn to ‘The Empty Space’ and ask: how might we, at Bradford Cathedral, avoid ‘Deadly Mission’ and, instead, ensure we look always to ‘Holy Mission’?

Those two titles do not come from nowhere and are not my invention. Peter Brook begins his book by describing and exploring what he terms, ‘Deadly Theatre’. Yes, he does, at the simple level mean ‘bad theatre’ but what, in his mind, makes it ‘bad’? The whole chapter is a slow but achingly profound attack on commercialisation and capitalism at work in the 1960s. It is the way in which finance and economic need kills off risk in favour of secure ‘success’ and a return on investment. At times of scarcity, the money to pay for time to explore and develop meaningful and beautiful work becomes more contested and financiers want to limit the risk by ensuring that they’re able to make the books balance. This requires, therefore, a proven way to know what will attract the audience who will pay for the product put on sale and cover the cost of development. Art becomes a product to sell rather than a vehicle for re-enchantment and social transformation.

Deadliness always brings us back to repetition: the deadly director uses old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects… A deadly director is a director who brings no challenge to the conditioned reflexes that every department must contain.

Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Penguin Books, 1990) p.44

When money is tight there is little room to experiment. As part of our developing strategy at the Cathedral we have had to express an aim to be financially sustainable. It’s not the main headline but it is significant. We cannot do any of the exciting things we feel called to do if we cannot keep the lights on and the staff paid. This can lead, if we are not careful, however, to turn to that deadliness that, in the long run doesn’t excite or sustain the engagement of the ‘audience’ we long to inspire.

Lev Dodin, a brilliant director of the 20th century wrote about how his unsupported theatre company was enabled to create the inspiring work they did.

Failure… leads to quite artistic things, because if you are not afraid of failure you can try, you can experiment, you can search for new ways, whereas when you are afraid of failure you wouldn’t do it, you would do it the way you did it yesterday…

Lev Dodin in conversation with Robin Thornber at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, 23rd April 1994, Michael Stronin (tr.), cited in Maria Delgado and Paul Heritage (eds.), In Contact With The Gods?: Directors Talk Theatre (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996) p74

Bradford Cathedral has a history of being an embodiment of that Yorkshire spirit of ‘make do and mend.’ Whether it is the pioneering way of recycling old bricks to reshape the building, evolving it for a new context, or using wool sacks to protect the tower against shelling during the civil war. We have never been an asset rich, or even a financially rich cathedral. We may never be a glitzy place with historic reserves on which to rely, but we have always shown ourselves, like the beautiful people of Bradford, as resilient survivors. Our history is a tale of scarcity, but we have chosen, at some key moments, to be innovative and creative with what we have.

I want our contributions to City of Culture to not be safe, secure and risk light. I do not believe that there is, at this time, such a thing. The tribute bands and the franchise installations that do the rounds across the various cathedrals are just as risky financially as well as reputationally, I personally believe, and so if we are going to take risks let’s do it properly and aim for something that doesn’t pretend to be lively but is actually full of life and connects an audience with something transcendent.

…the notion that the stage is a place where the invisible can appear has a deep hold on our thoughts.

Brook, The Empty Space, p.47

This is how the chapter on Holy Theatre begins. It is what I spoke to the gathered artists at the Outdoor Arts UK Conference earlier in the year. We can, at the Cathedral, return to being the place where the Invisible appears, because the rest of our culture has lost its confidence in the Invisible. Our worship, our concerts, our envisioned co-productions should all be shaped by our pursuit to be embodiments of that Invisible Truth to which we commit our lives. Brook describes the work of Jerzy Grotowski, who I also have reflected on previously (read here).

The theatre, he believes, cannot be an end in itself… the theatre is a vehicle, a means of self-study, self-exploration, a possibility of salvation… the act of performance is an act of sacrifice, of sacrificing what most men [sic] prefer to hide – this sacrifice is his gift to the spectator.

Brook, The Empty Space, p.66-67

I see, in our vision at Bradford Cathedral, an opportunity to be an exciting workshop for the re-enchantment of the cultural life of Bradford and, in time, the UK and the world. We have expressed our ambitious aims to be reaching out to the world and encouraging experiences within our space of encounter with the Holy Truth. This is not just aesthetic beauty of the well performed choral music for which we strive or the excellent engagement with heritage and history that we wish to continue to develop but to be a place where new expressions will be forged giving people fresh insights into who they were created to be.

Interestingly, Peter Brook discusses Coventry Cathedral situated in the City of Culture 2021/2.

In Coventry, for instance, a new cathedral has been built, according to the best recipe for achieving a noble result. Honest, sincere artists, the ‘best’, have been grouped together to make a civilised stab at celebrating God and Man and Culture and Life through the collective act. So there is a new building, fine ideas, beautiful glass work – only the ritual is threadbare. Those Ancient and Modern hymns, charming perhaps in a little country church, those numbers on the wall, those dog collars and the lessons – they are sadly inadequate here. The new place cries out for a new ceremony, but of course it is the new ceremony that should have come first.

Brook, The Empty Space, p.50-51

I have ambitions to create within the historic space of the Cathedral an expectation that whoever comes in, for whatever reason, may be struck by the Invisible-Made-Visible. It is this incarnational mission that requires little speech but an enactment of intentional ritual and experience, a public spectacle of true sacrifice that all society yearns for in their deepest being, that will make us more accessible, more visible and more sustainable as we seek to weave Jesus into the rich fabric of the city and beyond. It is this striving towards Holy and not Deadly worship and mission that, I believe, will change the narrative of the Cathedral, Bradford and the world.

Into Culture: Lingua Communis I

Last month I reflected on my previous exploration of No-Man’s Land as an image for intercultural ministry and mission. My tentative conclusion was that there was a need to acknowledge and identify both privilege and responsibility within the various spaces we traverse. As a Christian I am minded to suggest that I must acknowledge that I am, simultaneously, both welcomed in and called to welcome others in any space I inhabit. The balance is key.

In previous drafts of that published post I utilised a quote that I return to again and again. It is by Vincent Donovan in the preface of his book, ‘Christianity Rediscovered’. The quote is a succinct summary of the whole book which, in my mind, beautifully depicts a vision of intercultural mission.

…the unpredictable process of evangelization, [is] a process leading to that new place where none of us has ever been before. When the gospel reaches a people where they are, their response to that gospel is the church in a new place, and the song they will sing is that new, unsung song, that unwritten melody that haunts all of us. What we have to be involved in is not the revival of the church or the reform of the church. It has to be nothing less than what Paul and the Fathers of the Council of Jerusalem were involved in for their time – the refounding of the Catholic church for our age. 

Vincent Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered (London: SCM Press, 2009) p.xix

A Slovakian family contacted the cathedral this month enquiring about baptism for their children. I was responsible that week for responding to these requests and rang the number. The conversation was confused and frustrating as his English was poor and my Hungarian is non-existent. We managed to make the necessary arrangements for them to come to a Sunday service, which is part of our preparation process, and they duly arrived and we met face to face. This conversation was easier with the additional non-verbal forms of communication and I arranged a visit to their home to chat about faith and to understand their reasons for seeking baptism for their children.

I arrived at their home and was warmly welcomed in. I had brought my standard baptism preparation material but quickly realised that this was not appropriate or useful and decided to improvise the conversation. Midway through our fumbling attempts at understanding with a significant language barrier, the mother (who spoke no English and was relying on her husband for a translation) left the room and moments later another couple came in. I was introduced to them and was told that they too wanted their children baptised. This couple also spoke little to no English. The four Slovaks (from the Roma culture) sat intently listening to me articulate my desire to welcome them and their children into our community and what it means to be part of the family of God. I attempted to describe, in simple English, what an intercultural Church should be like, one of mutual listening and learning and, ultimately, of mutuality. The person with the most English translated to the others and their eyes lit up and then I saw two of them weeping. I was told, “This is beautiful. This is what we want.” The others touched their hearts and nodded. I had done enough but I wanted to do more.

What would it mean to genuinely live this intercultural life out in practice with such a language barrier, not to mention the other, even more significant, cultural barriers? How would I encourage fuller engagement into a shared life and what did I imagine that would look like? The answer to that second question must start with both parties making an effort to learn, at least in order to cross the language barrier if not yet the cultural barrier.

“Do not try to call them back to where they were, and do not try to call them to where you are, as beautiful as that place might seem to you. You must have the courage to go with them to a place that neither you nor they have ever been before.”

A young person reflecting on the line of thought presented in Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered, p. xix

At the same time as I was processing these significant intercultural questions I was asked to organise two civic events at the cathedral: a prayer vigil for Sudan and a memorial service for those affected by knife crime. Both events had an additional request that they would be ‘interfaith’ and inclusive. I am still very new in my interfaith journey and am asking a lot of questions as to my understanding and practice. I have not yet seen, in my admittedly little experience, a good example of interfaith prayers; particularly within a particular faith tradition’s building. To pray together requires, in my mind, a shared language, not necessarily of the tongue but of the heart; otherwise our prayers would be in the same space, at the same time but would not be united and, in that way, deeply ‘together’. Hugh of St Victor, a 12th century theologian, suggests,

It is of no avail that the same walls encompass us if difference of will separate us.

Hugh of St. Victor, Dom. Aloysius Smith (tr.), Explanation of the Rule of St Augustine (London: Sands and Company, 1955) p.3

Is there a way of reaching this togetherness in an intercultural or even, more radically, in an interfaith context? Is this even to be desired? It is what I am beginning to desire.

The reality that I am becoming more conscious of is that language is cultural; sharing the same linguistic language does not mean you share the same cultural language. This has a profound impact on Bradford’s journey towards City of Culture in 2025. It cannot be a celebration of a singular culture for that does not exist, but nor can it be a celebration of a multiple of cultures for who can decide what is worthy of celebrating? The result therefore seems to be an attempt at just presenting difference side by side with no means of passing judgement, even of appreciation and good. I heard at an intercultural conference this week that we can all agree that we would want to celebrate, embrace and learn from the good from every culture. This is a nice sentiment but who decides what is ‘good’ in a culture? The judgement of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is surely culturally pre-determined. Multicultural spaces keep others at a distance and true sharing and peace is unattainable. Intercultural spaces encourages deeper interaction, with the risks that involves, but still it does not genuinely navigate a way of creating a ‘lingua communis’, a shared language. ‘Interculturalism’ is still predicated on the existence and maintenance of different and distinct cultures with competing and exclusive value systems. What is our aim when we engage in intercultural work? Is it to accept, as with multiculturism, the acceptance and promotion of difference as a desired aim? Or is it to pursue, even if it is an eternal striving, for the ever elusive and yet transcendent goal of unity; whatever that means?

In the Acts of the Apostles, the writer describes the Christian community as being ‘of one heart and mind/soul’ (Acts 4:32). The Holy Spirit had given to them the gift of being able to cross the language barrier, either by giving them a new, angelic tongue or by giving them the ability to speak in other, human tongues. Had the Holy Spirit now given to them the ability to cross the cultural barriers too? What does it mean that they were of one heart and mind/soul?

This question was central in my Masters dissertation exploring the Augustinian Orders that held this aim as their primary goal. A whole theological school developed in Paris during the 12th century called the Victorine School (based in the Abbey of St Victor). Hugh, who we heard from earlier, advanced a process of ‘reintegration’ of ourselves: a personal journey towards inner harmony of self which involved and impacted the outward harmony in a community of others. In my new role I have realised that this theological project of the 12th century could be a framework for 21st century intercultural dialogue. It begins with a change of will, an opening of the imagination and the articulation of possibility.

My hope, therefore, for the legacy of Bradford’s City of Culture is that we begin this long journey towards a new, genuinely shared culture; a place where none of us have been before. This will require some key principles and deciding on what those very principles requires radical dialogue and a sharing of will. Like my clumsy attempts at communicating with my new Slovak friends this will require a shared linguistic framework to start with but that must lead to the joint construction of brand new cultural edifice that we could share in ownership and, therefore, responsibility for. In this way I am encouraged to dust off my MA dissertation on the Augustinian approach to communal unity and try to implement it in the reality of my new complex context of Bradford.