Pitch A Comment

Canon Lucy Winkett considers ways to bring our concerns for the environment and sustainable development into liturgy. This is an edited version of a paper she delivered at the Bishop of London's Study Day - the first event in the St Paul's Institute's autumn programme, Costing the Earth? The Quest for Sustainability - on 29th September 2006.

We exist because the Sun is. It was 5 billion years ago that the Sun "turned on" and scientists estimate that there is another 5 billion years of life left in the Sun. We live in the midpoint of its life; at its noonday. It is a star - it is our star - it is our daystar. It's not the biggest nor the smallest of the 200 billion stars even in our galaxy - but to sustain life on Earth, it is just right.

We experience the Sun as a largely benevolent force, although with the holes in the ozone layer, we are increasingly aware of its danger to us too. The sun gives us life and light. We measure our life by it; evening and morning are because the Sun is. We watch the sunrise and the sunset and they are calming images; they help us put our lives in perspective - today's troubles are cast to the setting sun, as in the Kenyan Eucharistic liturgy, and the new morning brings with it new light, new possibilities, new mercies of God.

But the Sun is by no means a tranquil part of God's creation. This created light is violent, awesome in its power and constantly active, spewing out solar flares, generating electrical energy beyond our wildest imaginings.

How does the sun shine? 400 trillion trillion trillion hydrogen nuclei fuse into helium every second, releasing more energy than all humans have used since the beginning of civilisation. From the core of the Sun, energy takes 170,000 years to reach the surface of the Sun. The Sun is not only violent and active providing us with energy and life; it is also creating sound with this activity. The Sun is singing. It is playing a secret melody, hidden inside itself. Sounds are coursing through the Sun's interior - throughout the whole globe; sound waves moving in and out rhythmically like the regular rise and fall of the tides or the beating of a heart. It is the secret music of space.

Including environmental concerns in our liturgy is not just about mentioning recycling in the sermon or pollution in the prayers. Liturgy in the light of our creation and redemption is all about orientation. All liturgy is embodied and enacted in the context of the sun that shines by day and the moon by night, and liturgy proclaims the two truths of Christianity: God is beyond us, God is with us. Yahweh and Immanuel - transcendent and immanent.

For me, I have two pictures in my mind to help me remember this perspective when I am planning liturgy or writing prayers and sermons. The first is that stars are being born in space now - in the most spectacular way. The combination of chemicals and energies create new light. The second is that 2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day and over 90 per cent of the world's population has never used a mobile phone. God beyond us, God with us.

Liturgy is a foretaste of the heavenly banquet made visible and embodied now on earth. It is therefore a place where right relationships are rehearsed. Biblical justice, Biblical righteousness, and the Hebrew Bible's focus on the anawim, the poor, is not a recognition of individual rights (for example the right to attend public worship or receive the bread and wine) but a making right of an unjust society. And so in liturgy, we rehearse right relationships in proclaiming three fundamental relationships that human beings have. First, to God - that all we have comes from the abundance of God's creation and the gift of human ingenuity and endeavour. All our worship is a response: We have this wine to offer, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. Second, to each other - that all of our prayers to God are from a particular standpoint, a particular view of life in the world and a particular place in the economic web of human relationships. And that we are the body of Christ on earth. As the grain once scattered on the hillside is reunited in the body of Jesus Christ, so we are gathered. Third, to the earth - that particularly in the Eucharist we take material things seriously, that we neither despise nor worship nor ignore material things, but reverence them in their transfiguration. Bread and wine become body and blood.

Liturgy as a paean of praise to God is a visceral and natural activity for human beings. It is acknowledging the perspective from which we pray. The created worship their creator from within creation, interdependent, vulnerable yet responsible. And in the 21st century, the human perspective from which we pray is entirely new. For the first time in human history, we are able to be co-creators, co-redeemers and co-destroyers of the earth.

This is theologically profound. Activities once solely the preserve of God; the maker of life and the bringer of destruction upon the earth are now also within the grasp of humans. Humans who once were dependent on the action of God to bring about the end of the world, are able to do it ourselves. The "end times" could be at our bidding. The eschaton is a divine prerogative that humans have the possibility to adopt.

These are profound theological questions as they address the issue of our trust. In whom do we place our trust? In whom or what is our security?

For the first time, we are able to separate ourselves from the earth and look at it in its entirety. Astronauts have spoken of seeing the earth from space and feeling a strong sense of "home". We know it is a beautiful and blue planet. Our perspective and our imaginative engagement with the heavens and the earth are different from ever before.

Liturgy is worship that is purpose-free rejoicing in God. Worship is not utilitarian - not there to "recharge our batteries" or make us feel better, although it will from time to time perform those functions. Liturgy is a response to our creation and redemption. Similar to our discussions about the Sabbath, which is not just a gap in which we can recover from the working week, liturgy is the distinctive moment that makes new the experience of daily life in the world. It is intimately connected to the experience of life and helps us maintain our orientation towards God in Jesus Christ.

Liturgy in Worship is not designed as a protest but it is nonetheless a protest, a counter education in a different set of values. The language of worship is that of God's gift and grace, not the language of contract and exchange. Liturgy, as one recent commentator puts it, is a de-tox from the sickness of consumerism. Liturgy is not of itself counter-cultural, but a repetitive and prayerful encounter with the texts will make it so.

Liturgy is a vehicle for the cultivation of wisdom. It is a place where the truth is told; the story of the earth, the story of human endeavour and the proclamation of hope in Jesus Christ. Liturgy is an expression of hope, which imagines its future and then acts as if that future is irresistible.

So what can we do? I have already used one environmental illustration for meditation at the beginning of this paper. There are many other obvious Biblical ones; trees, fire, mustard seeds and even that icon the environmental movement, the Whale: Leviathan in the psalms, the personification of evil, the seductiveness of evil in Jonah - whose time in the belly of the great fish symbolised the ambiguous relationship between good and evil. Now, much is written about the symbolism of whales as a totem creature in the conservation movement. Whales live in a mysterious environment about which we really know very little: the ocean. They are millions of years old and have been granted the status of the indigenous people of the ocean; they hold ancient wisdom of the earth's origins and have seen dinosaurs. Somehow they know the secrets of the Creation.

The accounts of Creation in Genesis always sound too calm to me - placing the stars, the morning and evening of the first day, the rhythm of it is seductive and reassuring. In fact, for anyone who has been present at a moment of creation - say, at the birth of a baby - the reality is far from calm and quiet. The pain and blood involved in creation is something to meditate upon - the cost of creation, perhaps even to God. This is consonant with the ground-breaking perspective of the philosopher Hannah Arendt who said that human beings defined themselves as "mortals" because we are focussed on our death. A different and enlivening way of understanding ourselves is to define ourselves as "natals" - that is defined by our birth. This in turn is consonant with the teaching of Paul to the Galatians; Jesus Christ is nurtured and formed in the community; as a mother nourishes new life in her, so the community is the womb that nourishes Christ in order that he may be born among them. Christ is formed, shaped in our communities, by our prayers and our regular gathering, as Paul's letter to the Galatians has it. In our liturgies, we are, like a woman carrying a child, to make space, to create a nourishing place for Christ among us; because it is inside our own miraculous and fragile communities - in the Church - that Christ will be born, in the vulnerability of a baby, and with the light and power of the Sun.

Let me identify four places in Church that we can nurture this sense - intercessions, the built environment, the natural environment and in meditation. First, intercessions. An intention to pray for the "Earth", as opposed to the "world" (which tends to be more androcentric) stops church from being too self-referential. We are anxious about expressing our creatureliness and sometimes the language can be a little twee when we thank God for, say, "the meadows where we play". What is the ideology undergirding our prayer and liturgy? It can very easily be of keeping things the same. Chaplaincy to the status quo is expressed in a liturgy that doesn't groan with all creation. It's "Rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate" liturgy. It matters what language we use and how we use it. Because the suffering of the earth and its peoples is so difficult to express, we ask for the Spirit's help in a prayer that is at its fundamentals a sigh too deep for words. Intercessions can be informed by other disciplines; science, philosophy, medicine, astronomy. And when we do pray for people, who are "they" that we pray for? Them and Us? In the light of our creation by God, there is no them and us. There is only us. It is only together that we face the challenges of our planet and its flourishing and the language of our prayers should reflect that belief.

Second, our built environment. Beauty is absent in many urban environments. In 2006 for the first time, more of the world's 6 billion people live in cities than in rural areas. The tipping point was predicted to happen around June of this year. In the spirit of finding a high place like a hill or a wide space like a clearing in a forest, we can define our churches as sacred space - responding to a natural and visceral desire of humans. We boundary this sacred space with stone and wood and make it beautiful.

Again it widens our perspective: we think of St Paul's Cathedral as 300 years old, but the Portland stone which forms it is millions of years old. There are fossils easily available in Portland stone from the last Ice Age. All that happened 300 years ago was that it was crafted to the glory of God who is the maker and origin of all the earth. We might rightly be proud that, for repairs, we use the same quarry on Portland that Christopher Wren used, but this is the last few minutes of the story as far as the stone itself is concerned.

Third, the natural environment. It is of course possible to hold services outside in the churchyard or in another environment where it is more obvious to connect with the natural world. Encourage pilgrimage, praying with your eyes open. Fourth, a focus on meditation. Within the building, of course there are many ways to focus our meditations and praise: in the spirit of Julian of Norwich's hazelnut. In St Paul's in the last few years we have used yew trees, cashew nuts, rosemary plants, images of the sun from the NASA website, packets of seeds, sounds of birdsong, the ocean. Our imaginations are challenged to bring the natural world into church but with sound, smells, animals and produce, it is possible. And of course at our weekly gatherings we have bread and wine - of the earth but work of human hands. The bread we break and the wine we drink has a history; a catalogue of lives; the farmer, baker, distributor, church worker, the one who handles it and then receives it.

In all these ways, and many more, we can help ourselves and our people reconnect with the earth to which we have become strangers. It has never been more important for the church to take a lead in reconnecting cycles of birth and death and in proclaiming the paradigm of life, death, and new life that is the paschal rhythm embodied in Jesus Christ, evident in the natural rhythms of creation. It has never been more critical to look honestly at Christian history, which has separated spirit and matter and to great effect despised the material. A contextual theology and liturgy will encourage a holistic view of the Creation. Because this generation asks once again: Lord teach us to pray.

Posted by Lucy Winkett on December 3, 2006 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Loveday Morris, of the Next Century Foundation, recently helped to stage a one-day Forum at St Bride's entitled Xenophobia and Disinformation in the Media. Here she writes about continued threats to a free press in Egypt. This piece originally appeared in the Middle East Economic Digest on 25th August 2006.

The People's Assembly (parliament) approved the last of the new articles of the penal code governing the press on 10 July last year. The legislation places numerous restrictions on journalists, despite an intervention by the president to overturn the controversial article 303, which specifies prison sentences for journalists who question the financial integrity of officials and publicly elected figures.

The amendment followed a demonstration by some 500 journalists on 9 July, with more than 25 independent and opposition newspapers refusing to go to print in solidarity. Mubarak's intervention was declared a triumph for the opposition but journalists say the changes do not go far enough. "The law still enables the government to gag the press," said a spokesperson for the Egyptian National Union of Journalists.

There are concerns that the legislation, which retains the option of prison sentences for anyone who vilifies the president or foreign heads of state, will discourage journalists from reporting on foreign affairs altogether. The penalty for such a crime ranges between six months and five years in prison, or a fine ranging from £E 5,000-20,000 ($870-3,480) for the editor and £E 10,000-30,000 ($1,740-5,220) for the journalist. In a country where libel insurance has yet to catch on and journalism is not a particularly well-paid profession, the threat of fines will seriously discourage journalists from doing their job.

The government maintains that the law is a step towards a freer press. It removes some custodial sentences, and the government claims that the ones that remain work to discourage sloppy journalism. Although many agree there are some improvements, there are still a range of problems. Journalists may face a charge of "insulting the president" or "spreading false rumours". In the ambiguous and loosely worded new laws, there are also no clear parameters for what constitutes "defamation".

However, Human Rights Watch (HRW) asserts that the laws invite abuse and contravene international standards for freedom of expression. "These laws hang like a threat over journalists and foster self-censorship," says HRW deputy director, Middle East and North Africa Joe Stork. The press law makes it illegal to even possess a picture or drawing that could "tarnish the image of Egypt", a crime punishable with a maximum of two years in prison and a fine of £E 5,000-10,000 ($870-1,740). The mere possession of a picture of a policeman beating a demonstrator could become a criminal act.

On 26 June, Issa Ibrahim, editor-in-chief of the outspoken opposition paper Al-Dustour, and one of his journalists were sentenced to one year in prison following their coverage of a trial that accused President Mubarak of squandering public money. Article 48 of the constitution allows for the "supervision" of media and publications during a state of emergency and grants the government the right to confiscate publications and newspapers and shut them down. It also allows arrest and imprisonment without charge. "The Egyptian penal code is a minefield for journalists," Ibrahim was quoted as saying in a recent HRW report. "If these provisions were evenly enforced, most of the journalists in the country would be in jail."

It is not just the media that should be concerned about this new legislation. Stork warns of the repercussions for business: "Free expression is a pretty critical factor in dealing with corruption and transparency; this is an issue that anyone in the financial or commercial sector should be very worried about," he says.
In the 2003 Annual Worldwide Freedom Press index, compiled by Reporters Sans Frontieres, Egypt ranked 110th out of the 166 countries studied. The list was drawn up by asking journalists, legal experts and researchers to answer questions on press freedom violations. By 2005, Egypt had slipped to 143rd out of 167. According to Egyptian commentator and journalist Adel Darwish: "It's not so much a case of one step forward and two steps back, but one step forward and two to the side... The process of reform has frozen."

After the success of the Muslim Brotherhood in last year's elections, during which it gained almost 20 per cent of the seats, political analysts say the push for reform has slowed. On 30 April, the national emergency law was extended for a further two years, 25 years after the assassination attempt on President Sadat that put it into effect. "The government has painted a false picture to Egyptian liberals and to the West that the Muslim Brotherhood is the only alternative to the current regime, so people put up with it," says Darwish. "Better the devil you know."
For journalists, the fight is not yet over. "If the government is serious about reform, how can it possibly justify this muzzling of the country's press?" asked Cairo's independent Daily Star. "The press is what stands between the people and the abuse of power."

Posted by Loveday Morris on December 2, 2006 6:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was invited on BBC radio recently and introduced as a "former leading PR expert". As a former expert (and current ignoramus), my view was being sought on the collapse of Swindon-based Farepak, a Christmas-hamper operation that had gone down the pan along with the Christmas aspirations of some 150,000 savers.

Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS) was being fingered as the Scrooge of this scenario, having foreclosed on the wretched Farepak, while the likes of Tesco, Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and Morrisons were the Spirits of Christmas Yet To Come After All by piling in with cash to rescue otherwise spoilt Christmases, to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

As a former expert, I could picture the scene in the boardrooms of these retail chains. Do we have a commercial obligation to bale out these savers? Of course not. Moral obligation? No. But what's the PR cost likely to be if we resist the calls of Labour politicians to do so? Considerable. And is there good PR mileage in doing so? Yes. Okay, let's do it.

I hope that's cynical of me. I really hope some the gestures of compensation arose from genuine compassion for those families who suffered considerable financial strain just ahead of Christmas. But the trouble is that such uplifting gestures are obscured by those posturing, hand-wringing, holier-than-thou politicians. The supportive retailers looked like they were being forced into it. And other unworthy suspicions arose in my mind: Could it be that other retailers were concerned that Farepak's failure could take the shine of the great annual retail festival? Heaven forefend that shoppers should be put off their annual homage at the great altar of Mammon.

Actually, I expect most of the other retailers were behaving thoroughly decently. It was the finger-wagging politicos that were getting it wrong. The communications problem that they created was largely the consequence of their thoughtless choice of vocabulary and their wilful misunderstanding of how business is done. MPs said "Christmas had been cancelled" for Farepak's investors. Well, only if you believe that Christmas is exclusively about the retail experience. And only if you believe that individual friends, family and strangers, rather than companies and Government, aren't going to rally round in the spirit of Christmas to ensure that the dispossessed aren't excluded from the celebrations.

Again and again, I heard MPs on the radio say that these savers were "decent, ordinary, hard-working people", the implication being that those who work for big retailers and banks are villainous, pampered layabouts. Perhaps a fraud may be discovered in the system; almost certainly Farepak's management was incompetent. But MPs chose to sneer at HBOS too. What was the bank supposed to do? Continue to back failing companies until it went bust itself? If so, I suspect the same MPs would be on radio saying it was a disgrace that thousands of small HBOS shareholders and pensioners should be treated this way.

At the forefront of the political attacks on big business was Ian McCartney. He called the Farepak collapse "a national emergency". No it wasn't. A national emergency is the terrorist threat to the UK that his Government has generated through its foreign policy. This was a company failure. Mr McCartney is known for his in-depth understanding of British business. A decade ago he dressed up as a pantomime fat-cat and stood outside the AGMs of privatised utilities complaining about the profits they made. It makes one quite giddy to know that he is a minister in the Department for Trade & Industry.

For this breed of politician, there is some arbitrary point at which the profits made by a company, operating within the law, cease to be about prosperity and become about greed. I heard one of his colleagues saying that he was campaigning for Farepak customers and against HBOS "because he was a socialist". Not enough of a socialist, however, to campaign for the banks to be nationalised. Remember, these are people who are quite happy when companies are making lots of money and giving it to the Labour Party in exchange for peerages.

These are just some of the issues that the communications functions in the companies concerned could have got into. But, of course, it's safer just to cough up. It's a pity, but I don't know what should be done about it. As a former PR expert, it's someone else's problem.

Posted by George Pitcher on December 1, 2006 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)