Inside and outside St Paul’s

What a difference a week makes.

The banner has changed from 'Capitalism is Crisis' to 'Real Democracy Now'

When I visited OccupyLSX last weekend, eviction proceedings were under way,  there was plenty of hostility (from the London Mayor, the government), the Dean was yet to resign and Anglican bishops and archbishops hadn’t spoken publicly about the protest.  It was edgy.

Eviction is (temporarily) off the menu now and the protesters have stopped being ridiculed.  Is it less edgy?  Not really.

I attended the main morning service at the Cathedral yesterday morning and sat next to a young woman who works for Google in Delhi.  The interior of St Paul’s is one of those mighty spaces where the sound whooshes around – you hear the music in general, but nothing specific (a tune, say).  The Eucharistic Prayer included these words:

For you are the hope of the nations, the builder of the city that is to come.

Saxaphone & didgeridoo duo - wistful north African tunes & the Pink Panther

Afterwards I visited the camp, where I bumped into a Muslim friend (as you do).  He wants to bring together people from different religions to talk about the values which inform their political views.

We chatted about my idea, too: a critical look at economic (in)justice* in the light of religious and humanist wisdom.  How can we live well together, economically?  What resources do we have that we can draw on?  Jubilee 2000 is not so long ago.

The protesters have opened up a tiny bit of public space.  They are (at the least)

• bearing witness to a global economic system that isn’t working properly & needs fixing
• asking why so many people are getting a raw deal when there seems to be enough to go round
• modelling a way of living together where money/the market isn’t a value in itself, it’s a means to express the values we choose to live by

John Lanchester's funny, detailed & devastating account of the 2008 crunch - it reads like a thriller.

Opposition politicians are now publicly sympathetic (Ed Milliband in the Observer, Caroline Lucas ‘real politics in action’) and high profile speakers such as Georges Monbiot are speaking at Tent City University.  The Vatican’s report on the global financial crisis has attracted a burst of publicity.

But finding ways to keep complex, international questions on the public agenda will be tough.  They will need support.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has form.  His guest editorship of the New Statesman startled not a few.

The camp outside isn’t everybody’s cup of tea – but neither is the inside of St Paul’s.

Inside, ushers in morning dress – outside, Glastonbury gear.  Inside, solemn liturgy of hope – outside, banners flapping in the wind.  Inside, the great organ – outside, a didgeridoo.  Both are ordered (in their own ways), both are hopeful, both call for new ways of living – “the city that is to come”.

The search for an explanation for the summer riots and the presence of the occupiers are stirring new responses.

Gary Younge, probably my favourite atheist, writes in the Guardian, “The occupations have shifted the conversation about what the problem is. Prior to its emergence the trend was not to talk truth to power but to slur the powerless . .  Hope where there was cynicism; solidarity where there had been suspicion. The occupations are more effective as a launch pad than a destination. Nobody knows where this is going. It’s just great to be on the move.”

* Let me know if you have any suggestions

Occupy London Stock Exchange

OccypyLSX, St Paul's in the background

The Occupy LSX camp held an open multifaith event outside St Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday – Sermon on the Steps.  How could I resist?

I live tweeted until I got too cold and went to find a cup of tea.  The camp is clean, tidy and well-organised.  There is a friendly and relaxed atmosphere.

There were some big hitters among the speakers – Paul Oestreicher, Paul Nicolson of Zaccheus & Pax Christi‘s Bruce Kent – who ended with the words, “keep loving, keep living.”

There were contributions from the British Humanist Association, from Ekklesia’s Symon Hill, from the Jewish, Sikh, Catholic & Unitarian traditions and many more, including a 13 year old boy who asked for the protest to continue peacefully.

I’ve been trying to grasp what the global economic crisis, and in particular banking and the credit crunch, is all about.  I made a start (didn’t we all) in 2008 – Lehman Bros, AIG, Northern Rock, RBS – but lapsed.

John Lanchester’s Whoops! (YouTube clip) is a good start, but here are my top links on the subject (and the protest) from last week:

1. Ken Costa, Financial Times Weekend (register or £) – Why the City should heed the discordant voices of St Paul’s.  “Resentment at asymmetrical rewards and risks is deep-seated and justifiable . . We are perhaps at a tipping point . . Put bluntly, businesses cannot work, banks cannot lend and societies cannot flourish without mutual trust and respect.”  The FT’s Gillian Tett is also well worth a read.
2. The Bottom Line, Producers or Parasites? BBC Radio 4 programme, which asks financiers whether the sector is “creating genuine wealth, or is it essentially parasitic, finding clever ways of distributing other people’s wealth to its own workers?”  One participant admits “shareholder democracy doesn’t work unless you’re a major institution”.
3. Andrew Rawnsley The protesters seem more adult than politicians and plutocrats – “with a few nylon tents and some amateurish banners, the Occupy movement has rattled the establishment.”  Rawnsley says it is united by “fury at corporate greed, resentment at lack of economic opportunity, concern about social inequality and alienation from a conventional politics that appears incapable of doing anything serious to address and redress public discontents.”
4. Paul Hackwood, Chair of the Church Urban Fund, reflects on the events on the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.  “This is a difficult thing to do – to be brave enough to ask difficult questions about what sort of world we want to live in and then see them though – and at St Paul’s we have seen just that.”

The tea tent (free, donations accepted) at OccupyLSX

St Paul’s Institute “exists to engage the financial world with questions of morality and ethics” & “to recapture the Cathedral’s ancient role as a centre for public debate” & “to foster an informed Christian response to the most urgent ethical and spiritual issues of our times.”

This would seem a good opportunity to move up a gear, from ticketed panel discussions to maybe something like the Kirchentag in Germany – ?

OccupyLSX is not necessarily coming up with solutions.

Just being there is prompting a far wider public conversation than the Stock Exchange and St Paul’s have so far managed together.

How important to religion is belief?

If you’re religious, do you suffer reputational damage from attending a humanist or secularist event?  Or, if you’re atheist, from going to religious events?  Compared to the huge number of multifaith events, we don’t often get together (intentionally) and that’s a shame.  I like Rory Fenton’s recent piece on this.

Arriving at the RSA‘s event on New Atheism last year, I thought I might be the only person there who wasn’t totally dismissive of religion.  Chatting to the person next to me, I found he was thinking exactly the same (only much later did I clock he was a famous comedian).

Last month the British Humanist Association held a panel event – Islam in a Secular Europe.  The panellists were atheist/humanist and Muslim.

Panellists Sir David Blatherwick, Dr Humeira Iqtidar, Rashad Ali, Maryam Namazie, Yahya Birt & Prof Maleiha Malik at Conway Hall.

Good for the BHA – and top marks for having as many women on the panel as men, including two Muslim academics (Humeira Iqtidar and Maleiha Malik) who went to some trouble to re-frame questions from the floor so that they could be answered with integrity.

Questions (the applause pattern suggested minimal enthusiasm for Islam) included, “Which bits of the Qur’an do you reject?”  Views from the panel included, “Children don’t have a religion.”  There were exchanges on Shari’a in Europe, freedom, faith schools and what Muslim women are doing when they wear the niqab/burqa.  Panellists’ views ranged from advocating a ban on Shari’a courts in Europe to explaining that the value of the Qur’an is lost if it is read simply as a rule book.

A Muslim member of the panel said she didn’t know a great deal about the Qur’an – many Muslims do not – it’s not all about belief.

The same evening, John Gray‘s A Point of View was going out on BBC Radio 4.   He talked about myth, science, art and poetry and said that “too many atheists miss the point of religion, it’s about how we live and not what we believe.”

“In most religions – polytheism, Hinduism and Buddhism, Taoism and Shinto, many strands of Judaism and some Christian and Muslim traditions – belief has never been particularly important.  Practice – ritual, meditation, a way of life – is what counts.  What practitioners believe is secondary, if it matters at all.

The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion.  It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe.”

Feeling a need to brush up on the history of humanism and philosophy, I found my copy of Understand Humanism, which I bought at Greenbelt during the summer.  The author, Birkbeck’s Mark Vernon, was one of the speakers this year.

The comedian I failed to recognise at the RSA happened to be in public conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury the very same evening.

Frank Skinner and Archbishop Rowan Williams in conversation in Canterbury Cathedral.

Frank Skinner talked about coming back to Catholicism after years away, “I went for communion and I wanted to punch the air after. I felt more than back home. I felt I was in my right context.”  The Archbishop said: “Coming back to church is not about the difference an argument makes, but it is about the sense of welcome, absolution and acceptance.”

The hardest thing about (any) religion is actually living it – not talking about it or fussing about how to do it.  Is it the same for humanists and atheists?  Or is it all about belief – or unbelief – for you guys?

My atheist and humanist friends divide roughly into

• those who concentrate on the ‘living it’ bit – drawing on inherited values and ones they’ve developed over the years, and
• those who argue that their beliefs/non-beliefs make a lot more sense than others’ – for instance, mine

My multifaith life includes a lot of folk from the ‘living it’ category – people from a wide spectrum of religious, philosophical & political thought who want to make the world a better place.  We talk (passionately) about our values and our different traditions, but we don’t try to win each other over.

For the ‘arguers’, the often unspoken assumption is that if a religion’s beliefs are shown to fall short (of the current ideal), how can people associate themselves with it while maintaining their intellectual and moral self-respect?  Hence the questions to religious people about particular bits of scripture, women, faith schools, human rights.  And the seemingly unsatisfactory responses.

Sometimes it doesn’t really add up: people with apparently bizarre beliefs live coherent and admirable lives; people who reject all religious belief nevertheless manage the same.

A Sukkah - not my friends' one (from www.umass.edu)

I called in on Jewish friends yesterday who were taking down their sukkah – a temporary hut in the garden – where they’ve been living for the last week.  Doing this reminds them of ancient times and of living with vulnerability, insecurity, uncertainty.

Re-pitching the Tent (by Richard Giles) is rooted in the same ancient stories and brought life to the church I belonged to in the 90s – how do we arrange sacred space for  ‘regeneration, creativity and transformation’?

Jewish families keep patterns of activities, Christians order their churches in meaningful ways.  In the process, we relinquish some freedom to do what we like, when we like – but most of us develop practices, individual or communal, which help us live the kind of lives we want to live, even if we struggle to do so.

Is John Gray right?  Is identity, tradition and practice more important in religion than belief?  And how do humanists and atheists develop a pattern of life which helps them keep true to their principles?

Does it matter who bought the new homes?

It used to be an old people’s home, then a temporary hostel for asylum-seekers.  After that, the building next to us was squatted.

Everything was demolished,  including some flats for the elderly, a couple of years ago.

The new buildings are just about finished – 50 homes for private sale and, behind them, 50 rented flats for the frail and vulnerable.

So who will our new neighbours be?

Our fledgling Neighbourhood Watch launched last month.  Our patch includes babies and octogenarians, people with roots in every continent, lease-holders and people who rent, people who raised families here in the 60s and groups of singles who moved in last month.

Of the 50 new homes for sale, how many have been sold?  All of them.  To how many buyers?  Two – 9 houses to one, 41 flats to the other.  Are the two buyers going to be selling on or are they buying-to-let?

Will this make a difference to our community, our new Neighbourhood Watch?

Chances are, people won’t be bringing up their families in privately rented houses – they’ll move on.  Chances are, the market rents will be too expensive for people on average incomes.  Those who can afford the rents will want to buy when they get the opportunity – and move out.

Looks like we’ll have a more transient neighbourhood, with a few “anchor” residents who intend to stay.

PS The Neighbourhood Watch launch went well – over 20 of us were at the BBQ, many who’d never met or talked before.  People were incredibly generous with their donations of crisps, drinks and home-made items (Polish home-baked cheesecake – yes!).  Someone brought a barbeque, I brought fuel, others brought garden chairs and a table.

The person who volunteered to cook the burgers (a young Muslim father who works as a chef) was fasting (it was the holy month of Ramadan) – how kind is that?  We have student opera-singers, nurses and business-people in our midst.  Our un-pushy PCSO (vgsoh) came and noted our worries about poor street lighting and tyre-dumping.  The event over-ran by an hour and a half and we had plenty left-overs for people to take home (seemed like more than we started with – why does that feeding the five thousand thing happen?).

Since then, my experiences of neighbourliness have increased:

• request for cross-head screwdriver
• Polish plate returned
• kept an eye on car while couple on holiday
• home-grown dahlias given to us
• a lot more chats on the pavement
• request for Neighbourhood Watch window sticker

It may be raining, but . .

. .  we’re all set for the BBQ launch of our new Neighbourhood Watch this afternoon.

Lots of people have donated food for the BBQ - and the local police have given us some crime prevention leaflets, security markers & window stickers.

A knock on the door and a chat last week, a flyer through the door yesterday – we’re all go for our first get-together later this afternoon.

Families who’ve been living here for decades (and the short-stay singles/sharers) are happy for a chance to say hello and get to know each other.  We don’t have a community hall or meeting room anywhere near, so we’re meeting under the trees in the grassy bit of our patch.

My neighbours come from Russia, Brazil, Kosovo, Kenya, Ireland, Latvia, Algeria, the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, Albania, Peru, France, Poland – as well as some born-n-bred Londoners.  I think I’m the only Scot.

A BBQ during Ramadan is a bit tactless, I know (my apologies have been graciously accepted by Muslim neighbours), but it felt a bit now-or-never when we were sorting out the details last month.

I’m struck by how grateful people have been for an invitation, the offer of joining a group – a bit of connection.  The huge amount of food that’s landed at my door for the BBQ is testament to this.

My husband is sceptical – who’s actually going to show up?  Probably not many, especially in the rain.  But they might look out of the window or wave as they go by – at least they’ll know a local (hyperlocal in fact) group exists and that they’ve been invited to join.

Let’s see what happens.

What did the Moors do for us?

In amongst the scholarly contributions to Arches Quarterly IV/8 you’ll find something a bit different, with food, Canon David Porter & Billy Bragg in it.

That’s my piece (p 74).

I talk about the intentional, if limited, Abrahamic pluralism in early Andalusia, Sicily & Salonica (now Thessaloniki) – wonderful places, extraordinary history.  How do we negotiate our different histories in the re-telling of them?

There are some seriously good articles in here – on the Moriscos, Turkey & the EU, Balkan Muslim identities, Welsh Islam & Muslim soldiers in WWI & WWII.

If you’d like a complimentary hard copy, let me know.

And tell me how well we’re doing nowadays – Muslims, un-religious people, Christians, everyone – living together in Europe (& elsewhere – some of you read this blog from distant lands – I’d love to hear from you).

How is it where you are, whether you’re Muslim or not?  Convivencia?  Tricky?  Work in progress?  A nightmare?  A joy?

Muslim-led fortnight of neighbourliness

I was happy to speak at the launch of the Islamic Forum of Europe‘s new project, My Neighbours.  The project will run for a couple of weeks – it encourages Muslims across Britain to take the initiative and get to know their neighbours.

Speaking at the launch of My Neighbours Project, Toynbee Hall, on Monday

The project’s website includes a few ideas, taken from Islamic teaching, of what this might include:

• Initiate greetings and congratulate neighbours at times of happiness
• Be kind and caring towards them by exchanging gifts
• Respect and honour neighbours and ask after their well-being
• Pay them a visit when they fall sick
• Attend to their needs and offer assistance
• Offer condolences during times of difficulties
• Overlook shortcomings, conceal faults and forbear in the face of annoyance
• Love for your neighbour what you love for yourself
• Safeguard their privacy
• Consult them in matters that may affect their household

Looks like a good list to me – and with the mention of privacy, quite topical, too.

I hope it goes well.  You can keep up to date with activities – and get involved yourself – through the project’s website.

Neighbourhood Watch

The wonderful Jason Cobb (who once lived in sunny South London) of Onionbag Blog  (one of the few blogs archived by the British Library) has suggested I ‘blog every move’ of a possible Neighbourhood Watch down my way.

A note through the door yesterday said

Hello Resident

This is to inform you that a member of your Safer Neighbourhood Team will be conducting a Street Briefing in your area Tomorrow (sic), Tuesday the 19th of July, between 8pm-9pm.  If you wish to come out and speak to me, please do.

Who could refuse such an invitation?

I found our local PCSO on a neighbouring street.  Born at St Thomas’s (where my two were born), he jotted down our concerns – tyres being dumped, people hanging around after dark, street lights not working.

A few of our neighbours have wanted to start a Neighbourhood Watch for a while, but some of us work shifts, others have young children, others have seen the other side of 70 – when could we all get together?

Our young PCSO told me his shift pattern, so we’ve fixed a date next month for a BBQ on the bit of grass and trees where people light fireworks in November.

Let’s see what happens.

Srebrenica yesterday

My good friend Abdullah Faliq sent me this photograph today.  He is in Srebrenica with a group from London.

It shows the burial yesterday of the remains of over 600 men and boys at the Potocari cemetery.

Mourning the dead from 1995 at Srebrenica yesterday (photo Abdullah Faliq)

Around 8,000 Bosniacs (Muslim Bosnians) were killed when Serb forces overran a UN safe enclave during the civil war in 1995.  It is the worst European atrocity to take place since WWII.

They are still discovering the remains of brothers, sons, uncles, husbands, grandfathers, nephews, fathers and friends – these are buried at a special service once a year.

Find the BBC report on yesterday’s events here and a post from my 2009 visit to Bosnia here.

What the Serbs wanted to Exit – & Srebrenica

One of the family is in Novi Sad at the mo, at the Exit Festival – I’ve been listening to the livestream.

At the same time there’s been a steady trickle of tweets reminding me of the commemoration later today of the Srebrenica genocide.  A friend from the East London Mosque is leading a delegation and will be taking part.

I’m told 613 men & boys whose bodies have been identified over the past year will be buried at Potocari later today.  Over 8,000 unarmed Bosniacs were taken up to the hills around Srebrenica (a UN designated safe area for Muslims) in July 1995 and shot by Serbian forces.  General Ratko Mladić, who was in command, is now on trial for genocide.  Bodies are still being recovered and identified.

Huge crowd at the Exit Festival 2011.

The Exit Festival was started in 2000 (100 days of it!) by three Serbian students under the slogan, “Exit out of ten years of madness”, a reference to the Milošević regime.  Milošević resigned later that year and spent his last years on trial for war crimes.  It’s great that the festival (now just 4 days) has become one of the best festivals-with-a-message in Europe.

Here are some more photos from my 2009 visit.

A man who survived the killings (second from right) tells our group what happened during the hot summer of 1995.

Myself, a Srebrenica mother who lost all her male family members in the massacre and a friend from our group at Potocari, where the dead are buried.

A couple of young campaigners, one wearing an Exit t-shirt (which I didn't recognise at the time).

Never again - the Srebrenica prayer inscribed in English at the Potocari cemetery.

The beautiful scenery in Bosnia-Hertzegovina - often similar to my own country, Scotland. Much of the countryside cannot be used - it's too expensive to clear all the land-mines.