The Leek and Meerbrook Team Ministry

More Reflections...

On July 7^th 2005 terrorists detonated four bombs at rush hour in London killing themselves, 52 commuters and injuring hundreds more. It was an horrific attack and shocked the world. What was, perhaps, most disturbing were the biographies of the suicide bombers. They had all attended local state schools in Dewsbury, Leeds and Aylesbury. They worked in ordinary jobs and lived in terraced homes in normal streets with their families. They were quietly spoken men. Two were married with wives expecting babies. All were born in this country. All were British. Suddenly a threat that seemed to belong somehow "over there" suddenly lost that distance and became something very present in our midst and it provoked a debate: if a terrorist can be British, what does it mean to be British?

There were those who were very happy to answer that question along racist and nationalistic lines as it witnessed by the outpourings of organisations such as the BNP. And indeed we find those who might not be usually be identified with such bigoted opinions expressing views like these of novelist Martin Amis in an interview to the Times.

The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. Not letting them travel. Deportation; further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.

Amis later defended his comments as reflecting an "urge" that soon passed and a "thought experiment". It is always good to own up to our own most repellant fantasies as perhaps a way of overcoming them but these comments reveal an assumption. The "Muslim community" needs to conform, to become like us. The problem is it less clear now, if it ever was, what it means to be "like us". Which "us" are we talking about here? What does it mean to be British? Is it possible in such a global and diverse world to even ask that question in a meaningful way, let alone answer it?

One response in recent political rhetoric to this uncertainty about what values matter to us as a society has been to speak of need to create "social cohesion" in local communities. Promoting "social cohesion" is a duty laid upon me as a school governor and you as local councillors. Like many such jargon phrases it has a vagueness about it that threatens to make it little more than a slogan. So, for cohesion to happen there needs to be something that helps the whole "cohere". What is the glue, the common set of values, that binds us to one another? And how do we cope with those awkward people who call those values into question?

One thing we do know is that totally incoherent societies are dangerous places to be. Think of Iraq or Afghanistan. Not a lot of social cohesion there, though the presence of Western powers doesn’t help, of course. Societies can break down into a mess of competing factions, and we are right to be fearful of this possibility And we also know that something is very wrong somewhere if young British men, from whatever background, decide they must bomb and kill their fellow citizens. (And lest we consider this to be a uniquely Muslim problem, we need only note the largely under-reported recent conviction in this country of Nazi sympathiser, Martin Gilleard, on terrorism charges.)

We know that incoherent societies are often violent and dangerous places and they are no good for anyone. The problem is we can also look at some societies where there appears to be a great deal of "social cohesion", places like Burma, for example, and feel that this is not a kind of cohesion we particularly want either, imposed as it is by a repressive state. Plenty of "glue" there but a pretty miserable kind of unity based on everyone acting the same or else.

The desire for community cohesion, whilst natural enough, holds some dangers and one of the dangers is a suspicion of difference and an attempt to marginalize those who don’t appear to subscribe to the prevailing point of view. Social cohesion must leave plenty of space for fierce disagreement and those who hold views that are not fashionable. It must leave space for people to quarrel and argue. Sometimes the implication is that peace and harmony will only be achieved when we all think the same – when we are all, say, good, tolerant (as we see it), secular, liberal capitalists; when other people come to the obvious conclusion that basically they have to be like us. Whenever there is apparent consensus the question needs to be asked: whose voice is not being heard and why not? Who is being elbowed out of the discussion because their views are not what the rest of want to hear for the sake of peaceful community relations? This is what the prophet Jeremiah calls "peace, peace, when there is no peace", a pseudo-harmony that masks something repressive and ugly and untruthful.

In our second reading, St Paul makes it clear that communities, like the early church, will not be held together because they are homogenous. The body has different "members" each with a different role and place in the whole. Difference is in-built and indeed it is absurd to try and pretend otherwise.

If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be?

The body only works if each member not only recognises these differences but is also prepared to accept them as essential to the whole. Excluding the eye because it is not an ear leads to an impairment of the whole body. A body that is just a great big eye has a certain coherence but is, of course, grotesque. As soon as we begin to see others in our community or society as "troublemakers" because they don’t hold the same religious or political ideas as us we start to lose this sense of the whole body. Paul makes it plain: a body in which some parts are marginalized or excluded is a sick and dysfunctional body.

But Paul’s point is subtler still. He does believe in community cohesion but not one that is achieved by one section of the community gaining the upper hand and making the rest behave like them. In the body of the church there is an essential unity that derives not from agreeing on every matter or all being the same but from a common commitment to living the way of Jesus Christ.

The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body - whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free - and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

There will be differences of nationality and social status but these things are less important than the discovery of their unity in the Spirit. Their shared ground is not their ethnic origin, their education, wealth, place of birth, political affiliation but a gift given to them by God, the gift of his Spirit of life.

What I am not suggesting is that Paul’s hopes for the earliest Christian churches can be translated directly across into our own local communities. It is not that that all will sorted if everyone becomes like me a Christian, indeed all I have said so far suggests the opposite. I am not arguing for homogeneity. But in Paul’s vision of one body, many parts, deriving a unity from a understanding of the shared God-given nature of every person we have a clue as to how we can handle creatively the sometimes contradictory claims of diversity and unity.

Now, you may well be thinking this is all a bit rich, to be lectured on these matters by someone whose own church is conspicuously and publicly in turmoil over how best to hold things together whilst keeping in tension very different perspectives.

And there’s no doubt that the Church of England is a very painful place to be at the moment for all on all sides who love the church and part of me just wishes it could all go away but, in a strange way, it seems to me that the recent debates in General Synod and elsewhere illustrate the point well. We could pretend that there is peace, peace when there is no peace or we can engage with the very painful and complicated task of trying to work out how to live as one body with many parts. We may well fail. But it is as much how we go about the process of this "trying to work things out" that is as important as the end result.

Because social cohesion, living together, is not some end result of perfection we achieve when we all agree with one another about everything. Cohesion is something we are always striving for. Ironically, the closest we might come to social cohesion is an honest recognition that such a thing is impossible in its purest form.

There must be an on-going conversation, a conversation that sometimes becomes a dispute and an argument. The challenge is how to have this conversation without recourse to violence, recognising the need to, as some one has put it, "quarrel peacefully". We quarrel peacefully when we respect both the other’s need to heard and our shared God-given identity. Such cohesion will not be neat and tidy and it will certainly not mean we are never again subject to terrorist atrocities but it will keep alive the conversation and, perhaps, help us discover what it means to live together as, in St Paul’s words, as one body, many parts and "with equal concern for each other".