Curate contemplations

The murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich last week has shown again how living in an age of mass media distorts our normal human responses. The problem of over-exposure to tragedy is well known – the images on our TV screens no longer have any effect on us – but this atrocity revealed again that our responses can also become affected .  This isn’t a rant against the press, just a few thoughts on how it might be possible for public figures to better express themselves, using the media for authentic communication rather than letting it control them and their reactions. This deeply disturbing event has induced public statements from politicians and faith leaders from across the country. But the problem with statements is that they produce soundbites, and the problem with soundbites is that they’re reductive, boiling all complexity down to pithy sentences which can be easily quoted. It was particularly these lines spoken by David Cameron outside Number 10 that were unsettling: ‘

There has been some dismay today at the news that the supposed ‘fast-track’ solution to enable women to become Anglican Bishops is actually going to take a further two years. After the uproar last November when the General Synod rejected legislation (which had been 12 years in the making) to bring women into the Episcopate, the new Archbishop declared that it was top of his priority list. Many had hoped that Archbishop Welby would make it possible for some of the church’s internal legal processes to be bypassed so a new solution could be brought to the table as rapidly as possible. However, after a two-day meeting of its General Synod, the Church of England last night issued a Statement on Women in the Episcopate with a new timetable stating that new legislation could only gain final approval in 2015 at the earliest. Assuming the new proposals are passed without hiccup this time, we would see women entering the episcopate by 2017 – not exactly imminently then! Hence some people’

This blog was once a place where I occasionally released poems into cyberspace without any direction or purpose other than a general hope that someone ‘out there’ may read them and have a few thoughts. This didn’t feel comfortable so I didn’t do it for very long.  Since then I have done a lot more writing, a bit more thinking, and am now of the view that purposelessness is fine – in fact, it may be the point. This blog, then, is to be a place of wandering and wondering. In my writing (both poetry and journalism) I will be asking lots of questions of people, of God, of the church, all without necessarily having the answers. And when I do come to conclusions, these can and should be questioned again. Please go ahead: please change my mind.   The title quote above is a truncated version of lines by Tennyson:   'T here lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds.’ He wrote them out of grief at a friend’s death at a time when he too was asking many que