Governing Body – Presidential Address, September 2002
A few weeks ago, the Johannesburg summit on sustainable development ended amid a chorus of –at best – modified rapture: some useful markers laid down, some very praiseworthy aims defined, but a widespread sense that the major players were still avoiding the real challenges. We have a number of commitments, some of great importance, to be realised by 2015 (perhaps one of the most important is that which promises access to clean water supplies, massively significant for areas afflicted by epidemic illness and a major factor in assisting containment of the development of HIV); but the problem is that, for most of these commitments, we lack a spelling-out of what agreed measures will be taken in the interim. We lack, above all, sadly and predictably, any detail as to what adjustments in the standard of living we enjoy are going to be necessary.
Predictably; because of course governmental representatives can’t easily commit their nations to substantial policy changes that would need a popular mandate. Quite rightly, we are sent back to our own backyards: the struggle for international benchmarks for sustainable development begins in campaigning education here, to change what we expect of our governments in environmental and transport policies – and in turn requires some very hard thinking about the changing patterns of employment in the developed world that might result.
And before anyone mentions it, yes, I realise that there is plenty of irony in mentioning this at a GB where I think we have had more preliminary paper circulated than ever before; and we are looking very seriously at how to tackle that as an issue.
There is material enough there for plenty of GB debates. But I touch on these things in order to focus on a deeper question which has to do with why (and not exclusively in the developed world) we let our minds swing away from the gravity of the environmental crisis. Perhaps I can make it a bit more vivid by quoting from a short story written some thirty years ago by Doris Lessing, ‘Report on the Threatened City’. In this, we read the reports forwarded by a pair of sympathetic extra-terrestrials who are working in disguise on earth so as to alert the inhabitants of a particular area that a massive natural catastrophe is about to occur. They are completely taken aback to discover that the earthlings already have all the relevant information.
‘The trouble with this species is not that it is unable to forecast its immediate future; it is that it doesn’t seem to care. Yet that is altogether too simple a stating of its condition. If it were so simple – that it knew that within five years its city was to be destroyed, or partly destroyed, and that it was indifferent – we should have to say: This species lacks the first quality necessary to any animal species; it lacks the will to live.’
The problem, for the extra-terrestrials is working out why this is so. They conclude, with mounting horror, that among human beings ‘Fear is not experienced, or not in a way that is useful for protecting society or the individual. No one sees these facts, because all the sets of words that describe behaviour are in contrast to the facts. The official sets of words are all to do with protection of oneself and others, caution about the future, pity and compassion for others’ – but the reality is that human actions simply don’t bear it out. The visitors retreat in despair: ‘We have been able to achieve nothing…There is no species like this one on any other planet known to us’.
It seems strange to ‘hear’ these extra-terrestrials saying that we don’t experience fear, especially as the narrative makes it clear that there is widespread depression, panic, even mass suicide as the catastrophe approaches. But the point is surely that humans know fear almost entirely as something that kills or paralyses action instead of prompting thought. And that relates back to what they have to say about lacking the will to live: if we don’t understand our lives well enough to want (at some level) to go on living, we can only respond to threats in a passive way. The looming catastrophe could only jolt us into action if we had some sense of the preciousness and purposefulness of life in the first place.
This is why Christ in the gospels tells us what look like two contradictory things. Live every moment in the knowledge that the judgement of God is coming; and give no thought to tomorrow. Live here and now in awareness of who and what you are, a child of God, created to serve and love God and so find your fullest joy; don’t mortgage your joy to material comfort and gain, putting it on hold until you have achieved the next goal of acquisition. And if you can in that way live fully in this present moment, then when catastrophe threatens you will know what matters – what can be let go of, what needs to be treasured. You know what choices there are for you to make; you’re not passive, because you will want to act out of love, the love of a world in which you have learned to see where real value lies. My favourite expression of this is Martin Luther’s reported remark, ‘If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree’!
So learning to live before God in the present is the best way of preparing for the future. It gives us the perspective to react in freedom and love to the potentially terrifying facts about what’s coming that may be thrown at us. As Christians, we don’t withdraw in despair, we don’t deny the facts and carry on as if nothing could change, and we don’t fling ourselves into manic attempts to do what’s beyond our capacities. We work out what we love, what matters; and in the light of that we work out what we can and can’t do. Our discussions about the environmental future might look very different if we bore those principles in mind, so that we shared some sober reflection on what the real choices were.
It won’t have escaped your notice that a lot of this can apply to our thinking about the Church’s future. As you can imagine, thinking about the Church’s future has become a bit more urgent for me lately; but the presentation at this GB of what our CMM working parties have been doing should have brought this into focus for all of us. What would sympathetic extra-terrestrials have to say about our attitudes to the challenges facing the Church?
I’m intrigued that sometimes in recent years when I’ve tried to open up this subject some have said that I and others are being ‘defeatist’, or that we’re being hostile to what is now going on and unsupportive of the efforts of laity and clergy. If that’s how it comes across, that is a pity and I’m sorry. But the aim is to get us as a Church to engage in the two simple exercises already mentioned – working out what we love and value and working out what we can and can’t do. If people get jumpy about ‘scenarios’ of the Church’s future, they haven’t quite understood what a scenario is – not a prediction, not a threat, not a plan, just a possible story that might unfold – told so that we can think more clearly about the choices we’d like to make (that was how the whole idea of possible scenarios first evolved in the management of a major international company a few decades ago).
Of course, this involves us in a task that is, as Doris Lessing implies, not easy or welcome – looking at what we are afraid of. Are we more afraid of change than of death? Sometimes we are – and sometimes, believe it or not, we’re right to be, where it looks like a change that would really mean the death of what matters most (that’s why some German Christians in the thirties refused the changes pushed at them by the Nazi state; it’s why the Anglican Church in South Africa in the fifties closed down many church schools rather than operate apartheid in education). But what is important is precisely working out what matters most, going into the heart of the faith we currently hold and share and testing whether this or that development would simply drain away the joy of Christ’s gift in us. The worst possibility is the apathetic gloom which suggests we’ve lost the will to live as Christians.
The Church in this province has not lost the will to live; there may be places where the talk is all about Christian faithfulness, but the facts suggest resignation and depression; there are places where the seriousness of the contemporary challenge is half-recognised but denied. Of course this is so; but our recent meetings and discussions in this body, the work of the CMM, and above all the steady labour of the overwhelming majority of pastors and people point to a community that has not lost the capacity for what Doris Lessing thinks of as constructive fear, that is, realistic acceptance of what’s before us and the will to respond rather than just react. And this depends on our awareness of here and now being the recipients of grace and of joy, having a life, human and Christian, that matters incalculably and that gives us a proper perspective on everything before us.
I leave the province with, humanly speaking, a very heavy heart – not because its situation is depressing, far from it, but because I have without reservation loved the experience of a church where some real common identity and sense of common purpose seems still to win through all the issues that actually and potentially divide us. This is a very significant time in the province’s life: we are more conscious than we have been for many years of problems ahead, but I’d dare to say that we are also more alert and imaginative in meeting them than we have been at times in the past. The excitement of seeing what choices will be made and what God has prepared for us to walk in, as the old Prayer Book wonderfully says, I shan’t be around to experience at first hand. But I hope you know that the life of the Church in Wales will be constantly in my prayers; it has fed me for years, in ways hard to sum up briefly. I have delighted in the friendships formed in this body, and have been humbled by the commitment and skill of its members. My debt is enormous; I can only ask your prayers as I go on to the most alarming task I have ever faced: like Augustine of Canterbury shivering in his shoes on the French coast at the prospect of dealing with the savage English, I stand on the shore wondering what lies ahead. And while I don’t share quite the same anxieties about what will come after me, I must end by referring to another farewell on the shore, Paul’s goodbyes to the elders of Ephesus in Acts 20, and say, ‘I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are sanctified’.
(References are to ‘Report on the Threatened City’ in Doris Lessing, The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories, London 1972.)