Some words from Venice

Not much to say, too busy having a great time relaxing, discovering and getting lost in the amazingly lovely and enchanting streets and lanes.
On Christmas Eve the flood sirens sounded at about 10pm and when we woke on Christmas morning the Agua Alta had been but was already well on its way to receding and the rain had stopped. We attended a Book of Common Prayer service at St George's English church - the small congregation invited everyone to prosecco and panetone afterwards to celebrate Christmas. (I am not a fan of the BCP - well I am a non-conformist - but it seems to be much loved by expat Anglican communities, the thees and thous are almost unpronounceable even for mother tongue English speakers ... and as for the theology, far too much concentration on sin and not enough on grace.)
Then we set off for a day on the vaparettos enjoying sunshine and amazing views across the lagoon as the mists gave way to blue skies. We took far too many photos and found our way to a great little osteria in the early afternoon for some freshly cut parma ham with more prosecco.
Today we attended the German-speaking church, a good sermon and a rather low church Lutheran liturgy - followed by more panetone. Tomorrow a service in Italian may be tried. Quite fun to be ecclesiastical tourists in this place which seems even more international than Geneva, much to think about.
Ah yes and I've mentioned the prosecco but not the coffee, each espresso I drink is the best I've ever had. Wonderful.

More photos from Venice

Some photos from Venice

And the angels sing - just for men or for humanity or for the world?

At our Advent service in the ecumenical centre we sang the angels' song from Luke's gospel Gloire à Dieu au plus haut des cieux paix sur la terre, sur la terre, bonne volonté envers le monde. Amen Alleluia
Of course the original French version in the hymn books says envers les hommes but I doctored that to say "le monde".
Meanwhile Suzanne Mccarthy, JK Gayle and the Better Bibles Blog have been having more erudite discussions about this than I am able to.
I do passionately believe that the Good News song is for all and hope that you too will hear some echo of it sung for you, those you love and those you find it hard to love this Christmas.
May we all become more angelic.

Buon natale! Christmas Eve greetings from Venice

The train from Geneva to Venice is direct but yesterday it was two hours late arriving, partly due to the usual delays around the Swiss Italian border. The journey was lovely and we looked out over snow covered Alpine landscapes as we ate breakfast in the restaurant carriage. Then in Milan irate passengers with tickets for other trains borded and squatted our train leading to a further hour's delay as the police tried to clear the train. An interesting start to the holiday!
The advantage to this delay was that it had stopped raining by the time we arrived in Venice and borded the vaparetto to take us along the Grand Canal to our hotel. It was amazing to be in this extraordinary city for the first time as dusk fell and the Christmas lights came on.
Last night we walked and walked and got lost and drank prosecco and ate pasta. Venice must be one of the few places in the world where coffee is more expensive than in Ferney Voltaire!
So here we are and today we have found the Protestant church and visited the baroque delights of some Venice Catholic churches.
We are reading and sleeping and thinking and laughing and amazed to be here. Such a privilege, so beautiful and a great break. Photos will follow I promise, what's the point of having a blog if you can't bore the everyone with your holiday snaps.

The most significant insignificant thing I do

Some years ago when preparing for a big congress, working long hours and not always getting to the end or even the beginning of my to do list, sitting in meetings, feeling stressed ... I remember saying to a friend as we met to sing Holden Evening Prayer at the end of the day that possibly praying was the only useful thing I had done all day.
Of course prayer is not work, the old motto goes ora et labora, pray and work. Yet often contemplatives will say that work is prayerful. Could prayer then be work?
Anyway, this week, last week, all through Advent and any day of the year probably the most significant thing I have done is pray. Before God I have remembered individuals, people in distress or joy, experiences and situations distant from my own, sometimes all I have offered was silence or tears, other times my heart has sung. I'm not very good at praying, not very regular or disciplined. I don't find it easy to pray for my enemies, or even to pray for my friends. My praying is pretty insignificant, and yet ... and yet.

Christ stands before me
and peace is in his mind.
Sleep, O sleep
in the calm of all calm.
Sleep, O sleep
in the love of all loves.
Sleep I this night
in the God of all life.

From Each Day and Each Night Celtic Prayers from Iona J. Philip Newell

Off to Venice for Christmas

The Stranzblog is taking the train to Venice early in the morning. It's likely to be a watery feast and not just because of the canals, in Venice as in Ferney it is raining. The snow that has delayed our great new bus service these past few days is all washed away and a damp and not very frosty Christmas is in preparation.
Meanwhile my first reason to celebrate tomorrow offers six hours in a train, reading restaurant cars and relaxation. Let the holiday begin!

The mysterious word becomes flesh

Working and worshiping in a multilingual environment I end up having not entirely theological thoughts about the vagaries of biblical translation.
Does it change the meaning when the glories of the prologue to John's gospel are translated in the masculine, feminine or neuter? Suzanne Mccarthy has written much more eruditely than I could on whether logos is best translated as he, she or it.
This morning as we met for the final Monday morning prayers of the year I pondered the meaning or significance of gendered renderings of logos into our various langauges. German is clear with its neuter das Wort, French varies between le Verbe and la Parole depending on the translation. English - a normally ungendered language - nearly always refers to the Word as he, sometimes even as He.
Suzanne quotes Joel on John's prologue:
I believe that by using ‘it’, we allow John to breathe a bit, free of theology and dogma.

This morning I realised that the different translations and languages helped me to glimpse and comprehend in some small way the significance of the mystery of the ungendered gendered word becoming flesh.
The first of the great Advent antiphones begins with wisdom, sophia or logos. As we prayed and lit candles, sang and listened and kept silence we celebrated something of the known unknown mystery of the word or wisdom becoming flesh.

O wisdom, coming forth from the Most High,
filling all creation and reigning to the ends of the earth;
come and teach us the way of truth. Amen.
Come, Lord Jesus.

Mirabile Dictu - Carol Ann Duffy

Mirabile Dictu
Ring out, ring out, the city bell.
So wonderful to tell -
sing out, sing out the Christams Tale
Mirabile Dictu

Mirabile Mirabile
Mirabile Dictu.
It holds, it holds us in its spell.
So wonderful to tell
the old, the gold, the Christmas Tale
Mirabile Dictu

Our joy, our joy we can not quell.
So wonderful to tell -
a boy, a girl, the Christmas Tale.
Mirabile Dictu.

A gift we cannot buy or sell.
So wonderful to tell -
uplift, uplift, the Christmas Tale.
Mirabile Dictu.

Ring out, ring out, the city bell.
So wonderful to tell -
sing out, sing out the Christams Tale
Mirabile Dictu.

copyright (c) Carol Ann Duffy

We recieved this on a Christmas card for St Ann's Hospice, the refrain picked out in the calligraphy pictured above.

Meanwhile Janet has also been blogging about Duffy's brilliant 12 Days of Christmas poem which is full of cultural reference to international and British politics and life.

The loneliness of conscience

Last week I posted a quote from some editing I was doing to my facbook page. Written by Alison Phipps who is a member of the Iona community, you'll be able to find the quote in the new year in a book called "telling Peace" linked to the Advent resources which the WCC has put online. The book is about story-telling as a way of encouraging peace-building, story telling as a way of overcoming the violence inherent in our lives.
The quote I put on my facebook status was "I worry for the colleague I found in tears at his desk, overwhelmed, just utterly overwhelmed by the unrelenting slaveries of unmeetable deadlines, inflexible colleagues, the loneliness of conscience."
That phrase "the loneliness of conscience" really struck a chord with me as I know that it did with another friend who has gone through a very difficult time. In terms of leadership and of organisational systems the loneliness of conscience is quite a challenge. How do you encourage "conscience" in and among colleagues? If an organisation relies upon "lonely conscience" is this actually a way of scapegoating people, pushing work downwards onto those already doing too much? I have also been thinking about Social Darwinist ideas and how it is very easy for work place structures to passively fall back on social darwinist ways of operating when there is not sufficient relational trust in the systems. Making life for the lonely conscientious individual even more difficult.
So how do we tell our stories of the workplace in ways that build peace, increase trust and create healthier non social-darwinist organisational strucutures?
The workplace is a professional environment but it is also a social and emotional environment which can end up making individuals very lonely. Telling the stories of the complex places we work in is challenging, it's not just a leadership and management task, it's also a theological task.
"Blessed are those whose conscience is lonely, for the dawn shall rise warmly upon them."

Not done yet - keep beating the climate change drum and ringing the bells

The world was ready but it seems global leaders were not, and of course most of them are not walking but flying home ...
So we need to be vigilant and keep up the pressure. It's not done yet and the clock still goes on ticking. So keep on beating the drum and ringing the bells to get the message across.

More than 250 partner organisations have come together to form an unprecedented alliance under the TckTckTck banner – including development, human rights, environment, religious and youth groups, trade unions and scout groups. Over three days of global action, these partners have mobilized unprecedented numbers of people campaigning for urgent action on climate change. In Copenhagen on December 12, one hundred thousand people marched in a powerful manifestation of this unity.

And, when naysayers, fearmongers, and the business-as-usual-crowd try to usurp the issue, they will be met by a surging sea of people from all around the globe and all walks of life unified in their demand for a real deal.

The global climate movement - more diverse than ever before - stands united in the face of tonight's disappointing news. This weekend we are mounting an unprecedented response, with joint messaging appearing on the global public websites of our partners, to ensure world leaders know we are unimpressed with their lack of real progress and failure to deliver a real deal.

We have come so far in a short space of time. Millions around the world look to the future and see hope, justice, and opportunity. It is up to each of us to make our voices heard and to get the real deal that the world needs.

The world’s leaders still have a chance to get it right. They must realize that we expect, and will not accept, anything less.

A Celtic blessing for the end of a very difficult day

God be with you in every pass
Jesus be with you on every hill
Spirit be with you on every stream
Headland and ridge and lawn;
Each sea and land, each moor and meadow,
Each lying down, each rising up,
On the trough of the waves, on the crest of the billows -
Each step of the journey you go

The Quest for responsibility - update and read more

Dr B is doing some editing work at the moment and came across this book on the Quest for responsibility by Mark Boyens which looks very interesting. "Famous names have over the last few years became tarnished and venerable institutions have been brought into discredit ..."
I've been thinking alot about responsibility recently - taking responsibility is quite a Calvinist thing. What is interesting about this book are the links it tries to make between citizenship, organisations and accountability in complex systems. Simply the contents page looks fascinating. The epilogue at the end of chapter 12 modestly states "the quest for resposnibility never ends". That made me smile. It also seems to build in places on some of the ideas from Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Lots more thoughts for the leadership reflexion - so much to read so little time ...

The modern world is dominated by complex organizations. In this book Mark Bovens analyzes the questions associated with the search for responsiblity within such organizations. In organizations with many people contributing in many different ways, how can we determine who is accountable for organizational behavior? How do we define responsible behavior within organizations? Can different notions of responsibility prevent abuses? His analysis is multidisciplinary, combining law, social science, ethics, and organizational design, and provides a number of suggestions for institutional reform.

Resistance

This year year Leeds postcards turned 30. Their fun designs and feminist cards were part of my radical youthful past. This one is qutie tame compared with much of what. I'm going to have go scrabbling through my papers and files to find my favourite one.

Original blessing - an Advent promise

We met to pray, rejoice celebrate and lament together last night for an advent service on the theme of original blessing. Children painted stars on bands of papers with the word blessing in many languages. Terry Macarthur led out singing and music in wonderful ways and Theo Gill preached a funny and profound sermon.
The new CEC central committee joined us as they are meeting in Geneva at the moment and had just elected their new president, Metropolitan Emmanuel of France.
Here's an extract from Theo's sermon:

This blessing comes before that first infraction, that earliest act of disobedience, that willing submission to the serpent’s wiles. From the beginning, God’s will has been for our well-being; the operative verb in God’s intent for us is not “to judge”, nor “to punish” nor even “to predestine”, but “to bless” – to bless with the gift of light, even in a land of deep darkness – especially in a land of deep darkness – to bless with the gifts of life and grace and truth.

The Hebrew word for “bless” is barak.

(Where I come from, the president is called “Barack”. His name originates from that same Semitic root, making its way through Kenya to Hawaii, and then by way of
Indonesia, Columbia University, Harvard Law School and Chicago into the White House.
Barack… A word of blessing from the White House! And phrased in Arabic! So far, it is more a sign of hope than attainment – rather like the Nobel Prize… or the angelic vision of Peace on earth.)

sorry I really couldn't resist posting this

Sorry, couldn't resist posting this. I think tomorrow I'll have to begin posting some of my favourite feminist cartoon from the 1980s...

A New Zealand church has sparked outrage by erecting a billboard depicting Mary and Joseph lying semi-nude beneath the sheets.

In an unorthodox take on the Christmas tale, the billboard depicts a forlorn Joseph and Mary looking to the sky with a caption which reads:

"Poor Joseph. God is a hard act to follow."

Polar bears for climate justice

There is an empty plinth outside Copenhagen's cathedral and at the moment the plint houses an ice sculpture of a polar pear. At the Oxfam climate justice demonstrations in the UK some of the demonstrators were dressed up as polar bears with slogans saying on their costumes saying "Help us save the human race".
No one is quite sure how long the polar bear ice sculpture will last - it depends on the climate ...
Read more in ENI.
"People here are very excited about the bear. It is a creature those who are not familiar with life north of the Arctic can easily relate to," Storø told Ecumenical News International as another passerby asked the sculptor to pose for a photograph next to his bear. "It is easy for people to understand climate change when they see a 500 kilogram bear slowly melt and disappear," the artist said.

My favourite photo from Copenhagen

Tutu rocks.
But then I was a strange teenager and even all those decades ago I had a poster of him and not of a rock star on my bedroom wall.
Check out the WCC Media photostream for more great photos.