Where does one begin…

Part of our evening routine with Josephine is that one of us sits with her after bath time to read a short story, and then keep her company for a few songs or stories on her mp3.  It’s a lovely, really special time (although sometimes frustrating).  Often we’ll have little chats about important matters – tonight was a perfect example…

“How did God become Jesus?” – innocent enough, you’d think, no?  Well, I talked about God putting a baby into Mary’s womb like how she was once in Mummy’s womb.  Apparently, I missed the point of the question as with the directness of Paxman she pressed on – but focusing this time on the ‘why’ aspect.

So, I talked about Jesus showing us how God wanted us to live. I tried to make something as complex as the incarnation (and the subsequent life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus) make sense to a 4 year old.  As I finished this, she asked “so is Jesus asleep now”, thinking that she was just about to go to sleep herself.  Perfectly sensible question, eh?

This parenting thing is great. It brings highs and lows, joys and frustrations. It also brings conversations like this.  I’ve written previously about how I want to Josephine to grow to experience and encounter her world, and of course I have dreams about how I want her to live that life.  But I also want her to have a life that she chooses, not one I choose for her.  I want to share something of what makes me tick, something that feels as natural as breathing to me, without shielding her from the doubt and uncertainty that are a natural part of faith.  I want her to ask tricky questions that make me think hard about what I believe, and in doing so make me rethink those basic elements.

So, I’ll do my best to answer questions, but I wonder how much a 4 year old will remember of these fumbling attempts to make sense.  Maybe that isn’t the important bit.  Perhaps the willingness to have a go at answering is more important as having the right answer in the first place?

I value immensely the upbringing I had where I was allowed to ask questions, to feel around for what was right or wrong, knowing that I was loved.  I was given permission to believe or not, whilst knowing my parents desperately longed for me to invest my life in what they believed in.  That’s only natural.

Forcing belief down a child’s neck just doesn’t work.  It’s something they have to find for themselves.  We can create a framework, we can share our story, but only they can truly ‘own’ it for themselves.  If Josephine grows up with my faith then the moment she hits a crisis (which will happen), that faith won’t amount to much.

And so I will be a parent who reads from the bible and prays with his daughter.  I will help her to think about God and faith.  I’ll answer her questions as well as I can and will give her permission to ask as many as she wants.  I’ll even try to be brave enough to let her make her own choices when it comes to believing or not, however much it may hurt.

But for now, where does one begin with such an important task as helping your child to think?

on why lying doesn’t help anyone…

WARNING – TEACHING FOCUSED POST

I don’t often blog on here about teaching, but I just wanted to share a few thoughts on the problem the profession is facing at the moment.

On the one hand is the reality of many teachers’ lives – hours of prep, teaching, marking, parents evenings and extra-curricular activities; stunning levels of stress and depression across the sector; never ending paperwork; focus on exams and statistics. As a profession, though, you won’t find many who don’t work their hardest to help their pupils achieve their potential. Hours of extra revision sessions, one-to-one coaching, marking and simple encouragement is the norm, not the exception.

Ok, that’s the deal, I get it. We have a reasonably good package in terms of salary, benefits and pension scheme in comparison to many others. We have great holidays (which don’t quite stack up as people think). So hard work during term time is to be expected.

There are signals that there are some problems in education. Commentators (few who are actually educators, or at least front-line educators) talk about curriculum and behaviour issues in particular.

I’m privileged to be at a school where everything seems to run smoothly with few discipline issues (if any). Our results mean that we don’t necessarily get the level of OFSTED scrutiny that other schools do. We do have some pupils who cause problems, but they’re managed well. I’d argue that most schools are more like us than like those nightmare schools you see in terrible TV dramas. The reality is that all professions that work with people – especially every young person in society – will have notable exceptions to the rule. You just deal with it when it arises and try your best to help modify behaviour as well as punish that which isn’t appropriate.

There are, of course, frustrations with the limitations of what we have to teach and why we have to teach it. You often find that time constraints allied with what exam boards ask of us mean that you can only scrape the surface of fascinating subjects. Everyone has an opinion on what we should teach and why – and that’s just in school. To suggest, however, that the curriculum ignores basic knowledge in subject areas like history, or doesn’t teach grammar (as I heard in a laughable interview last week) is ridiculous. We can only teach a certain amount in the time and with the resources we have. If people want to explore these areas in greater depth they can do at college or university. The point of secondary education, surely is that it gives a good comprehensive education – not specialist.

On the subject of history – I’m a bit of the history geek, but there are areas of history where my knowledge is, well, shaky. Ask me about history from about 1700 onwards and I’m fairly confident. Anything before that I’d have to go away and find out about it. That’s the point, though, isn’t it? I was taught at school how to find the information, not all of it! Of course, ‘experts’ outside education can talk about what we don’t teach (19th century British politicians, or ‘classic’ British authors) – whilst what we do achieve is give our pupils a sense of what it is to be a British citizen in an increasingly diverse society, as part of a global community. Learning about white male heroes winning battles doesn’t achieve anything. I love my military history – but I recognise that what is much more important is what prepares us for the future, not the past.  Skills are the key tool, not the ability to hoover up parcels of information.  Having said that, the acquisition of skills can sit comfortably alongside the gaining of knowledge – that’s clear in any classroom.

This post is an attempt to lay out some of the issues we face in school, acknowledge some of the challenges we are given from outside the sector and accept that there may be room for improvement. I think education is up for debate because everyone has experience of it. We’ve all been there…and dare I say it…we all think that we’re experts because of our experience.

We need a new social contract between educators, decision makers (government and academics) and society at large. We need to stop swinging punches at each other. We need to treat those who work in school with respect. We need to treat ministers with respect who have the hard job of pleasing the electorate and their power base – chanting “Gove must go” makes us look silly, really. We want parents, carers and the general public to have a deep interest in the future of our children, but more importantly we need them to actually take their time to listen to what is happening in schools, not just what they’re fed by a media that doesn’t have anything helpful to add to the debate.

We also need an Education Secretary and Chief Inspector who believe in dialogue and working with professionals, rather than against us. We’re not interested in protecting the status quo – we’re developing new ways of doing things all the time whilst working with the most unpredictable and fascinating people in the world. We’ll embrace ideas that take us forward, not backwards to a time when privilege decided who got the furthest in society. We want an education system that gives everyone the chance to succeed, not just the few who go to a select group of fee-paying school or gilded universities.

Stop using examples that are simply inaccurate (all teachers leave school at 3pm) or verge on untruthful (claiming that schools use Mr Men to teach about Hitler…).  They make you look silly and people ‘out there’ think teachers are useless.  Maybe that’s your aim.  That would be very sad, though, wouldn’t it?

Give us a chance. Work with us. Listen to our ideas and let us contribute to this new curriculum. We want to help. Just give us that chance.

wandering…

Inspired by a quote on the TR14 dance group’s t-shirts from yesterday’s TEDxExeter event that I helped out with (assistant clicker to the Tobit master):

‘Not all those who wander are lost’

This is a line from a poem that appears in JRR Tolkein’s ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’, the first instalment of the epic ‘Lord of the Rings’.  It describes ‘Strider’, the mysterious character who will soon become known as Aragorn, or the ‘King’ in waiting.

It describes the experience that many of us who are exploring the Christian faith and tradition for all it’s worth, perhaps perceived as heretical by some, liberal by others or even progressive by a few.  Whatever label we give it, it doesn’t really matter.  What matters is the willingness to be open and enquiring, embracing doubt and uncertainty along the way. It doesn’t mean we’re lost.

Wandering is a vital part any journey.  If we end up just focusing on whatever destination we think we’re travelling towards, we might just miss out on the incredible sights that we’re supposed to notice on the way.  It also provides us with the space to push and pull and poke and figure out and seek to understand the many mysteries we encounter.

Here’s to a life of wandering and wondering…

on hopes and dreams…

I’m going to start this one with a very clear statement: I believe that Jesus was/is the son of God. I believe that faith in Jesus gives us a life full of life, if that makes sense.

However, I do want to ask a few questions…

A couple of nights ago I was reading with Sephi from a kids prayer book, which has got to the Easter story a little earlier than our 2013 calendar. As I was reading I came across the line ‘thank you for dying for us’. I changed it quickly to something like “thank you for your love”. Now, I’m not trying to protect Sephi from the reality of human existence. We’ve had many conversations about death. I don’t think that she’s obsessed…just exploring thoughts at the moment!

So why did I change it?

I guess what I believe about the cross has changed a lot in recent years. I think it’s a massively complex thing – and have tried to explain my thoughts previously about what’s going on. But I’m increasingly certain that to focus on the ‘Jesus died because of my sins’ is to focus on a penal substitution argument that leaves us with a vengeful God, literally a sacrificial lamb, and a whole heap of guilt to put on a small child – or any new believer.

One of the things I’ve thought a lot about is how the cross represents an incredible victory against violence that sums up much of what Jesus taught us during his ministry. The human powers attempt to silence his critique of their authority by murdering him, and yet their violence fails. He defeats death. It is powerless. Jesus teaches us that when we are struck, we should turn the other cheek. He tells us that violence only begets violence. It always fails. And here is the greatest symbol of his argument – the violence of a public execution on a cross – it doesn’t kill his movement, if anything it gives birth to it, propels it forward from being a tiny bunch of confused followers into a movement that quite literally transforms the whole world.

I’ve also been influenced by what Peter Rollins writes about (and I’m sure many have written before) in that the cross represents the destruction of the idol that we’ve made God into. Instead of allowing God to transform our world view, we transform God into something we can manage, just another thing that we aspire to be or own, to fill our emptiness. Instead, God fulfils everything by disrupting that possessive world view. We can’t own God anymore than we can own the moon, or the air that we breathe. God is everything and in everything and…well, words begin to run out and we haven’t even scraped the surface.

Essentially, the cross is a moment of existential crisis – God, in the form of Jesus’ cries out ‘why have you forsaken me’, accusing God (the Father) of failing. And thus our pursuit of a God who sorts everything out for us and makes life simple is broken. God breaks it himself. Doubt seems to be placed at the centre of everything. Jesus dying saves us from that corruption and creates a new way of being and living that holds the mystery of who God is close, invites us to participate in that mystery with us and gives us permission to doubt because we believe. The cross isn’t about guilt – it’s about love and hope and doubt and uncertainty and…well, so much more…

I’m probably not articulating it very well, but this is where I am at the moment.

So what now? What difference does this make?

Well, I suppose it means that I look at the world and seek to see God everywhere and in everyone. I doubt, I have ‘dark night’ moments when it seems like it’s pointless to try to know God, and yet somewhere within that I experience the presence of that absent God.

I want my daughter to grow up knowing that God is love and grace, that there are huge questions that arise as a result of that, things that we need to ask and doubt about, because to doubt is to truly believe. I want her to question, to probe, to have a faith that isn’t broken the first time her prayers aren’t answered, or the first time she experiences adversity or tragedy.

I want her to grow up knowing that violence will never work, and that even if she is beaten and broken and all seems lost, that she will never be defeated because she walks in the way of Jesus. Love hurts, love is costly, but love is worth it. Violence will break whenever it encounters this true love. I want her to love lavishly.

I want her to grow up seeing God is the most hopeless of circumstances, in her neighbour, in those who call themselves her enemies. I want her to marvel at her world and not accept the simplistic answers that both religion and science sometimes offer. I want her to love her community, to give sacrificially, generously because generosity is at the heart of who we are. We never give up, no matter how hopeless it may seem. In fact, I guess I want her to be one who brings hope with her.

I suppose more importantly, I want her to figure this out for herself, within a framework of exploration that we’ve equipped her for. I want her to be a ‘free thinker’, who knows the God story and what it means to her parents, her family and those we commune with, but also willing to listen to those who disagree, to do so generously and willing to learn about herself from others.

All of this I fail at miserably, but it’s what I strive for.

Reading a simple children’s prayer book…this is what happens!

 

35…

40 – 5.  That’s what’s going on in my head. Wow.  How did we get here?

My brother, love him, is 40 in 2014.

My parents retired two years ago.

I’ve known Kay for 10 year this summer and been married for 9.

My daughter is 4 in May.

Numbers. But important numbers.

That’s something of my life story summed up. Born in 1978, still going strong in 2013.

On a side note, being born on St Patrick’s Day rocks. Even when for 33 of those 35 years I didn’t touch the black stuff!  Seriously, though, the good stuff is about the guy the day remembers.  Many others will have posted about him today, I just want to focus on a prayer attributed to him:

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every one who speaks to me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.

If this is how my life runs, then I’ll be happy.  I may not believe everything I suppose I should (!), but I’m still determined to have this at the centre of my life.

de or un-churched…

Those of you who have followed this blog over the past 18 months or so will know that we’re on something of a journey as members of the church universal. Both Kay and I grew up in church, served as very active members and leaders, and I even trained and was ordained as a church minister – albeit for a short while before resigning and moving on another avenue of service.

Since then we’ve been moving gradually away from organised religion. I think we still both believe in God and certainly are sharing our story and beliefs with our daughter, but how we view church has changed vastly and thus shaped our desire (or perhaps lack of) to bring her up in the same context as we were.

I’ve written before of how I feel this period has been a movement away from institutional church, having been right at the heart of it at one time. Much of what once was important has been stripped away. At times, I must admit if I’m totally honest, I’ve wondered if my faith has gone. My ‘experience’ has been dry and empty, and I’ve lacked the desire to do anything about that. I now believe that I do, in fact, believe, just very differently now – perhaps best summarised by the series of posts I wrote at the beginning of 2012.

And so now we find ourselves as un-or-de-churched. We have an inherent, perhaps in built desire for community, but find this increasingly met by our relationships with those we share life with and work with. These include friends that we ‘commune’ with on a fairly regular basis, or hang out with in our local pub. I increasingly see my workplace as a central community in my life, one where I feel I’m contributing to building something that lasts. I suppose you could call it kingdom living, although I’d hesitate to be so brave to name it as such.

So, whether we are churched or not, I don’t think it matters any more. Maybe the desire to be so will return at some stage. I think maybe we’ve ‘lost our religion’ and yet, certainly in my case, rediscovered my faith. We know that there is much to be done, and we take seriously the call to follow we both, I think, feel.

I remember hearing time and time again as I was growing up in church that you couldn’t be call yourself a Christian if you didn’t go to church regularly. Well, I guess I would have different feelings about that now.

Church, surely, is where we live out our faith amongst those who seek to follow, and those who don’t. It’s a place, or perhaps more pertinently, a life where we share life in all it’s infinite beauty and horror, attempting to make sense of who we are and what we’re here to be and do. Church as we experienced growing up and even fairly recently certainly doesn’t stop you from doing that, but for me, well, it just wasn’t right,

This…well…this idea excites me. It scares me too because so much has been stripped away and I no longer have any clever arguments or ideas. I just have life. A life to live and serve and love.

To the journey…

why RE?…

So – why am an RE teacher?  In recent days I’ve asked myself this as I’ve seen headlines like this appearing in the national press, combined with RE not being included in the EBacc, which will become the standard ‘kite mark’ qualification for pupils from 2015 onwards.

It’s dispiriting at times, especially when you’re working with pupils who often ask why they have to study the subject, or even parents occasionally challenging the usefulness of RE on parents evening.  You wonder why you bother – why spend the hours of prep – or the year training – to be part of a subject that some would have us believe is dying, and at worst utterly irrelevant to society today.

I guess my answer is to share with people the conversations we have in RE – about who we are, what makes us ‘human’, what helps us to understand what is right or wrong.  My instinct (perhaps wrongly so) is that we provide a unique space in a frenetically busy timetable for pupils to ask huge questions about life, death, purpose, meaning.  We complement subjects which help pupils to understand so the nuts and bolts of what we are and why we are.

In a place like Devon we provide a vital space for pupils to explore the world ‘out there’, when they may have little contact with different cultures or belief systems.  Without this, it’s easy to have a negative mindset about anyone or anything ‘different’.

We live in a world that is still defined by what we believe – somewhere in the region of 90% of people across our world claim adherence to some kind of belief system.  Even atheism is a belief system – so we need to study why we believe what we believe.  We need to learn from each other so that we can defeat fundamentalism and ‘phobia’ wherever we find it.  We open people’s horizons, not close them down.  We learn about belief because, basically, we all have something within us that needs to believe in something.  When we understand that, we understand ourselves and each other.  That’s worth something, isn’t it?

Perhaps it’s the name?  Religious Education makes you think that we spend our time indoctrinating pupils into some form of religion – mainly Christianity.  That we present a glossy understanding of the religions we study, never really exploring some of the problems religion creates.   I for one would prefer it if we focused on something like philosophy and ethics, whilst retaining the importance of studying religions for how they have answered the biggest questions.

Whatever we call it, RE has a place in our classrooms.  Not just because I need a job, but because pupils need to explore the world in which they’re growing up and trying to make sense of who they are.  I think we provide many of the tools that will help them to do this successfully.  We help pupils be lifelong learners by having an open mind to whatever they encounter.

If you’re a doubter – I invite you to come to my classroom for a day…

Tomorrow we explore our response to asylum seekers and immigrant workers, we try to define what makes us human, we think about wealth and poverty.  That’s a day well spent, I think.

one week on…

I thought I would reflect a little on what has happened over the last week.  Not specifically, just generally as it’s been quite a challenging one.

I said last week that I was going to try to start to pray again, so I did.  The simple words I articulated were ‘God help me pray’.  They were what came to mind, so they were what were spoken.

There’s been cause for prayer this week…and I have prayed. And in honesty I can’t tell if those prayers have been heard let alone answered.  Not in some vague, ‘maybe the answer will come’ kind of way, but very real needs in very real circumstances for which the  ’maybe it’s meant to be’ thing just doesn’t cut it.

I’m still trying to figure this out at the moment.  On the one hand I’m at peace over it, on the other I’m kind of angry.  Maybe I was expecting too much, maybe my ‘lack of faith’ was the core of the problem. I don’t know.

It’s not going to stop me trying.  If nothing else I feel like I have to hold God accountable for those promises about asking/seeking/knocking…not that I’m trying to be a spoilt child who is angry because he hasn’t received something he wanted, but because I do still believe despite the doubt and confusion.  And I’m a stubborn bastard.

Hope still exists even when all else makes it seem like it has vanished.

Another dark night to walk through…

on prayer…

In recent days I’ve been challenged on the subject of prayer. After a year away from church and a bit of a detoxifying of sorts from church culture, I realised that I had ‘lost’ the ability I once had to pray. I guess by this I mean being able to articulate my thoughts towards God in my own words, and also losing any sense of what prayer actually does.

Those of you who have followed my journey will know that I’ve been influenced by the thoughts of the mystic St John of the Cross, who speaks of the dark night of the soul, a place of emptiness, of loneliness and separation from God where our best efforts to connect fail. I’ve also recently learnt of the apophatic theology movement, and identify with much of what it has to say about how we understand (or not) God.

All this is to say that I have wrestled with this. I come from a Christian tradition of holiness that values an active and participative prayer life, where we lift all our concerns to God, publicly and privately, but somehow, this ground to a halt as I grew disillusioned with my experience of it. Words of empty meaning have stopped, words that once flowed easily when behind often lay great doubt.

I know what prayer is, what it’s meant to be. I know how different traditions view it. I’ve experimented with liturgical approaches, trying to use someone else’s words, words almost as old as the church sometimes to keep things going when my own words have dried up. I know the importance of praying without ceasing, of persistence through the dry times. I know the value of doing this in community – but that at its heart prayer is an intensely personal and private thing.

Moved by Martin’s #God52 movement I am going to pray simply in these next few days. I’m going to try and speak out words that express who I am and where I am.

I’m not demanding an answer, or angry with God for not answering prayers previously spoken. I just want to be honest. Honest is matching what I believe with what I say with what I do. Living Kingdom, praying Kingdom. I suppose the reality is that I feel disconnected, and know deeply the need to do something about this, as if something is…missing. Is it like an addict desperate for a ‘hit’ of something from my past, or something much more profound moving deep within?

I value rhythm – maybe this be the start of a new rhythm that reconnects me.

Here’s praying…

tweeting…

After years of prevaricating, I’ve finally decided to join the world of Twitter. You can find me at @missiome (seewhatididthere) and get a glimpse of what goes through my mind on a daily basis.

Following a salient piece of advice from my friend Andy (@GeekDadGamer) I’ve decided that this will be a year of less and deeper – in terms of blogging. I’d like to try to post once a week, reflecting on experiences of that week or inspired by whatever I’ve been reading, both on paper and online.

So, fervent twitterers, where do I start? Any hints on who or what I should be following? What pratfalls should I try to avoid?