community – Page 2 – Notes from Bambi

Build

Dear Benedict,

Yesterday we gave our toy bricks away. Some of them I’d had since a child and some were from my daughters childhood, but they never date. We passed them onto a child, aged 9, who arrived from Ukraine on Tuesday, a country that will require substantial rebuilding.

Look around our world and you see a lot of that: there’s a lot needs rebuilding. I expect you found that too. Its wasn’t all picturesque ruins even then. I’m not sure there’s really any such thing. After all the ruin of anything has a complex story to tell as evident for example in the Grenfell inquiry.

Walking along the canals of Britain I’ve seen many extremes. Some things are rebuilt, some are pulled down, some places are rewilded, some are chopped down. There are disused things, like railway lines, that are reused for traffic free paths, while other sections got swallowed up when the M1 was built. A railway route existed between London and the North of England. It was called the Great Central Railway but it was closed so now HS2 starts the process all over again.

All of this made me thing of chapter 57 about Artisans in the monastic community. These were skilled people who could make stuff but the point was they had put that skill at the disposal of the community. Therefore it was directed by the leadership of the community and any benefit accrued was for the community. The artisan was expected to be humble.

It sounds quite sensible until inequalities start to creep in. The leadership might keep more of the artisans products than they should for themselves and the profits are not all given back to the community for decisions about what to do next, for example. The artisans may be encouraged to be humble but what about if their gifts are misused or they are taken for granted. The chapter is not just of concern to the artisans who’s work is under consideration, but for everyone who is concerned for a fair community.

Such are the challenges in community. After all, as we regularly hear these days, it only takes one bad apple. We can rebuild stuff, we can rewild places, but we have to see it as a benefit to everyone. It seems that some businesses that contribute most to human induced climate change wish to be excused some of the responsibilities or receive greater compensation. It’s as if they don’t believe that having a thriving planet is in everyone’s interest.

Building is therefore a complex subject. You go as far as to suggest that monastic artisans should under cut the market price compared with prices outside the monastery. But what if those outside do not have the same support as the monastic artisans and have more overheads from high rents or a profit driven supply chain? If these artisans are under cut by the monastery then they may be driven out of business and into poverty. Not for the first time I find your rule lacking in an understanding of justice, but maybe market forces didn’t seem as complex in your day.

Any worker should do what they can to retain their integrity, but that can include calling out unjust situations or unsafe conditions. ‘Artisans are doormats’ is not an attractive slogan in a monastic community or anywhere, particularly when we regularly see the product of unsafe working or unjust labour laws.

At school I was told by the class bully in a pottery lesson that I should smash up the clay figure I’d made as it was ‘too good’ and that was somehow ‘unfair’ to everyone else (including him of course). I didn’t. I still have it to remind me of some of the challenges of being an artisan in a community.

From my remembered bible: a wise person builds on rock

May we have the integrity to build justly.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Janet lees, 03.07.2022, in Longdendale.

Human

Dear Benedict,

Back from our long Spring/Summer Walk I think I better get back to writing to you, about your Rule and living with it in the 21st century. Two human beings many centuries apart, I wonder what we would make of each others lives? You a monastic, me a lay Benedictine in a very different world, both of us wondering about how to be human in community.

At the moment our society is going through a very divisive phase. There are many different attempts to glorify ‘us’ and demonise ‘them’ when in fact of course we’re all members of one race: the human race. Such attempts have been ongoing throughout history. Each Empire has given rise to folks who think they are in some ways superior to another set of people. Within each set rules have developed that segregate, exclude and disadvantage some on the grounds of specific characteristics: for example sex, race, ability, sexuality, gender and income.

Walking seems like a simple thing. The majority of the population can do it and it’s a form of movement seen us defining human evolution, until of course you can’t do it or not very well when all sort of obstacles and challenges appear and you are no longer in the mainstream. At that point discrimination steps in and all the ‘non-walkers’ or ‘poor-walkers’ are excluded from quite large parts of life because of their lack of bipedal motion or their difficulty with it. It’s just one example. One that from a position of current privilege (I can walk) I have experienced the world recently having walked to London and back.

Along the way I meet many other folks and interacting with them found of course that I had more in common with some than others. It was ever thus. Religion is one thing that currently gets bad press. ‘I’m not religious’ countless people tell me. Some add a story of having fallen out of the church or feeling they got pushed out. Mostly religion comes out of it poorly. It was experienced as a set of dogmatic rules and a straight jacket to behaviour that was applied without care or concern by a hierarchy of leaders who were later found, too often, to be suspect at least and dangerous at worst. So much for religion then.

But religious or not, many people share stories and embedded in most of these is a thorny issue of identity. ‘I used to be…’ is a commonly encountered beginning. The one thing we still are, and cannot relegate to the past, is human. So what is it to be human and be united by our attempts to find identity in humanity?

Your Rule offers a group of human who want to live in community a way of living together to discover more about this. But it wouldn’t suit everyone of the humans I know. The idea of rules is coming into question everyday. What is legal or illegal? Can a person legally be illegal? I wonder what it is we don’t like about ourselves that means we want to define people like this.

In a week of weeks this business of being human came up in many forms. A small group of people, whether legal or not, were to be put on a plane, whether they wanted to be on it or not, and taken to another country, whether they wanted to go there or not because another group of people, human like them but not subject to the same rules, had decided, without asking even more people, that it was a good idea, whether legal or not.

Some of the other people who said they didn’t support it were religious leaders. It lead to a further ramping up of the debate about whether being religious and political was tenable or not. Now you need to know that some significant aspects of my faith formation happened in South Africa between 1984 and 1994, a time when the religious and political things was a major issue in that country. Religious leaders had said that discrimination on the grounds of race (and more specifically a way of governing called Apartheid) was morally repugnant and could not be defended on religious grounds. That it had been so defended by a white minority for a long time is a matter of record. It was, to some extent, down to the way people interpreted the bible, a religious things, but it was mostly about being human.

Earlier in the year, one of the leading opponents of that struggle against Apartheid died (I wrote about him then). ‘The Arch’, Desmond Tutu was quite a human but as a religious man he didn’t shy away from the link between religion and politics, and neither do I. ‘When White people came to Africa’, he, a Black African, used to say, ‘They had the Bible and we had the land. They said “Let us pray” and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible and they had the land’.

It was my time in South Africa that influenced my interpretation of the bible the most. It has been living in Britain in the 21st century that has challenged me to use those interpretative skills the most, including amongst my religious siblings in an out of community. Our shared humanity is not negotiable when it comes to being religious. At the centre of it is One Human who I choose to follow. On the walk someone asked me about that.

A fellow traveller, he described himself as a Pagan and told me he’d been very moved by the companionship and community he’d experienced when taking part in the Camino, that 800 kms centuries old walk across the north of Spain known as the Way of St James. I was walking a few hundred kms on a route of canal towpaths and disused railways in England at the time, but it was my Camino. He asked me what I thought the essence of Christian faith was. For me that comes from me remembered bible: Jesus said ‘Love one another’. He also ‘Follow me’.

He told me he could understand the first but he wasn’t sure about the second point. Why follow? On a towpath or disused railway line this may seem redundant advice. The path has one direction and away we go. But life is not all canal towpaths or disused railway lines, as this week has amply illustrated. How we will decide our direction? What will be our moral compass?

Will it be the further accumulation of wealth and status? Will it be how to bend to rules to suit ourselves and disadvantage some other people? How could it be arranged that my direction is inclusive and encouraging to others such that we travel as fellow humans, thriving in each others company whoever we are.

Some say it’s like that on the Camino. I’ve never been so I can’t comment. But I have been End to End and on a lot of other paths. I have considered how to stop planes from taking off and what to do about food poverty in a rich country. I have though about other human beings, both known and unknown and whilst I’ve not always made the right decision I’m still following the Human One. I’m grateful to all those who keep me company, religious or not.

From my remembered gospel: Jesus said ‘Follow me’.

I journey this day in the name of the Human One

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Stranger

Dear Benedict,

Maybe stranger things have happened than Jesus rising from the dead, but for me that’s the new beginning. We celebrated together as a Lay Community this weekend and we said a lot of Alleluias.

It was a strange time to celebrate. It seems that the Easter message is still misunderstood even in the UK which claims a long back story with Christianity (it was probably brought here by the Romans in the first century). But this Easter the usual nonsense was rolled out to deter Christians from living life in community according to the faith we share. Foremost amongst these is the nonsense that Christians should not be political.

I’ve no idea what the dominant view was in the 5th and 6th centuries when you were just getting started. But there’s no doubt that the Rule you are remembered for is a political document as is the bible we share. The heart of the Rule is that ‘All guests should be welcomed as Christ’ for ‘When I was a stranger you welcomed me’ (chapter 53). It is this strange business of being a stranger that we stumbled over again this Easter.

A stranger is just someone we don’t know yet. A stranger is a person, a human being just like us. Unfortunately we have developed the unpleasant tendency of ‘othering’ the stranger, ostracising and excluding anyone ‘not like us’. We seem to be at our most vicious when it comes to strangers who arrive in boats and lorries unexpectedly. Aspects of our media and politics have developed very hostile narratives around such strangers.

In all my travels I have never found myself treated in this way, however unexpectedly I’ve turned up. I have sometimes been told my interpretation of Christianity is ‘too political’ sometimes in the oddest of circumstances. This usually means the hearer disagrees with my interpretation. I don’t think I’ve ever accused anyone of an interpretation that was either ‘too political’ or conversely, ‘not political enough’.

Some of you will be rolling your eyes and saying ‘Yes, but…’ Not buts here. Of course the community could get filled up with strangers, who would then not be strangers. What is it that we can’t share?

Later this week I shall be experimenting with stranger status again as I set off with Bob on another long walk. This one was postponed since 2020 and will take us down to London and back. I will be a gyrovague once more, a rootless stranger looking for a welcome of sorts. Now you are fairly unhappy about gyrovagues in your Rule as I’ve mentioned before, partly to counteract the tendency for people just to roam about. You liked your settled community and wanted others to both enjoy and commit to it as well. But sometimes life causes us to roam and when that happens we desperately need not censure or exclusion, not resettlement camps in far flung places, but welcome.

From my remembered bible I was a stranger and you welcomed me.

Welcome us all.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

The blog of the walk will be found here from 22nd April 2022, instead of the usual letters to Benedict.

Weak

Dear Benedict,

After a week of Covid19, I’m gradually feeling better: tiredness continues. What with other folks I know also testing positive it made me think a bit differently about Holy Week.

It’s hard enough being holy for a week without being wholly weak. But every week includes weakness. You allowed for Alleluias ‘except in Lent’ (chapter 15) and evidently that meant you were more generous with this practice than some instructors. So I’ll just fit in a quick Alleluia for weakness while I’m here.

It’s hard to celebrate weakness in a culture that hard on the soft aspects of being human. Even in this week of weeks the bits that could be seen as weak are edited to distance us from too much weakness.

A man arrived at the city gate on a donkey, like many did every week. Rather than see this as ordinary, let alone weak, a great cheering crowd is heard making a fuss about a king coming, however unlikely the beast. Some say the donkey knew: they are knowing creatures.

Tired, weary and as weak as you or me, Jesus climbs off the donkey and disappears into the underbelly of Jerusalem. When he reappears he’s sitting down, not standing, in the temple. Just watching, just waiting, just breathing, he notices ordinary things. There’s an ordinary woman who makes an ordinary offering. Easy to overlook that.

Easy to overlook the poor today even though they are still with us. To overlook the ones on pre-payment meters queuing at local foodbanks for food that doesn’t need cooking. The message seems to be weakness should be ignored. But not by Jesus who remarks that it’s ‘All she had to live on’. It’s still up to us to determine if it’s enough to provide pot noodles or whether we should entice anyone into making a greater fuss alongside the weak.

It’s a week in which weakness continued to surface in all kinds of ways. Coming to the end of his temper with things as they were: a fig tree with no fruit, a temple market place with no justice, who wouldn’t loose it, and let it loose to echo down history as weakness or what? I’ll add a quick Alleluia for that too.

In a weak moment he takes the towel and tries to show them what it’s really like being part of a squabbling community in a place of political turmoil. Alleluia for clean feet.

In a weak moment he takes bread, ordinary stuff, and tries to say something about the yeast infused stuff that feeds them and the fermented juice that runs in their veins over hundreds of years of running away. They miss a lot of it, as do we, unhappy about too much weakness. We squabble about who was and who wasn’t there, what was and wasn’t said, what it did or didn’t mean, instead of taking the stuff and sharing it. ‘This is my body’: Alleluia for that.

The Mount of Olives at night would have been a dark and isolated place. Not a place for sleeping or for lover’s to meet and kiss. Giving all his strength away, as he has been throughout his ministry, he is taken away in weakness. Alleluia for that.

From there on, everything tumbles away until stripped and bleeding, nailed and tormented, all that’s left is weakness. And perhaps that why we want to edit the weak bits, busy concentrating on getting the right ending rather than what it takes to get there. Who wants a weak leader, one with mental health challenges or physical limitations, a mistake-maker, giver-upper? No mask or put on face here. Only the agonised admission: it is finished. Alleluia for that.

My week will have weak bits, tired bits, uncertain and unconvincing bits. The answer will be ‘I don’t know’ several times a day. I’ll step away, avert my eyes, deny and prevaricate. And from time to time, I may just glimpse some holiness in all this and raise my feeble Alleluia.

From my remembered bible: There was silence

Alleluia!

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay community of St Benedict.

Halfway

Dear Benedict

We’re now more than halfway through Lent this year, so no return to pancakes yet then. My eye was taken by chapter 53 about eating at the table of the Abbott or Prioress (is there a reason why Abbottess was not used?).

Part of the public ministry of the community was hospitality and that meant meals with the senior leadership team. It was, you write, more than just a show, it was where the real concern and care of the community was demonstrated.

It made me think about how we demonstrate our care and concern. I was listening to an online talk about church buildings being closed during lockdown, The speaker took the line that the Church had laid down its life by closing, to keep people safe. Given that large indoor events continue to have the ability to spread COVID19, at a rate that is increasing again in the UK, that’s worth thinking about some more.

I will probably never know if I had COVID19 because we can’t get any LFTs to check it out. But whatever it is, I’d want to protect anyone, particularly from the risk that is Long Covid. One of the things the Pandemic has gifted us is the opportunity to think again about our responsibilities to each others.

Community is built on how we regard each other. A recent ceremony to award participants in the film industry is a case in point. The leadership team appoints a court jester to lead the show who then uses it an an opportunity to make dubious humour at the expense of some of the participants, one of whom takes offence and hits him. It seems likely that neither participants highly regards the other.

It’s challenging to come back from a situation in which a relationship has broken down enough to turn violent. How could Ukraine trust Russia again, and yet as neighbours they will have to. Today Turkey invites them both to the top table, provides hospitality and an opportunity to talk. Let’s hope no one gets food poisoning.

Most of the monastic communities I have visited in the UK no longer seem to kept chapter 53 of the Rule: there is no separate table. Everyone eats together; monastics, leadership team, guests all at the same table. It is perhaps a sign of how our society has changed since you wrote your Rule. The best demonstration we can give of our care and concern for each other is for us all to eat together. May the second half of Lent be that kind of sign for us all.

Easter Day with the Lay Community of St Benedict, 2017

From my remembered gospel ‘Eat, drink’.

Sustain our neighbours: may we eat together in peace.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Changed

Dear Benedict,

Lent again here, I sigh….. tries to mumble a few pro-Lent lines and fails miserably. I don’t come from a tradition strong on Lent, whereas of course your Rule has plenty to say about Lent, particularly chapter 49 (OK, it doesn’t come after chapter 63: don’t @ me).

You recommend a continuous Lent and then shy away from it saying monastics are not up to that. Do make up your mind, please. If the purpose of Lent is change then if it’s continuous that surely risks no change at all, which is the antithesis to its purpose. You write of a holy and pure life surely knowing that a vain goal. It’s mostly this sort of stuff that makes me fall out with you. You assume ‘negligence’ and ‘evil habits’ without really any knowledge of context or cause.

The beginning of Jacob’s Ladder on the West Highland Way, 2019

There’s no doubt the Rule has changed me. Listen to a Lay community Podcast here to confirm that, just as Jesus and his disciples who made it to the mountain top for the Transfiguration were changed. But that wasn’t the end and more pressing business waited for them at the bottom of the mountain: a vulnerable family in challenging circumstances. It’s not an advert for washing powder, though I’d have to say that climbing to the top of mountains is way more exhausting in my experience than this group seem to find. No mention of huffing and puffing and tired muscles, all of which are what I mostly remember on routes like Jacob’s Ladder on the West Highland Way: hot and heavy going. Worth it, yes, but effortful.

Top of Jacob’s Ladder on the West Highland Way, 2019

So back to Lent… You say that the follower should inform the leader of the Lenten discipline to be undertaken. A sort of monastic safety system I think so that people don’t undertake things that would be counter productive or dangerous. Is intermittent fasting a good thing? Depending on what adverts you’re reading on your social media. Is leaving off social media a good thing? Depends what you’re doing on social media in the first place. The purpose of Lent is to change us, not just as individuals but as a whole community, which is a pretty big challenge in Lay life. Who is my community?

It seems likely that with several more weeks to go I’ll return to my negligent version of Lent with my daily dose of social media and chocolate. I’ll pour my heart into looking for local wildlife, keeping track of the seasons, and lament climate grief and violence in Ukraine. I’m pretty sure that it’s not the sort of Lent many people associate with the season, which is probably why I’ve not mentioned it, until now.

From my remembered bible: Jesus went into the wilderness for forty days and nights.

Stay with me.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Rank

Dear Benedict,

I’m looking out on another wet windy day in the valley. Although Storm Eunice has now blown through the trees are still tossing about and everything seems restless, finding it hard to resettle to their place in the world.

Some words change their meaning or emphasis and the idea of rank from chapter 63 of your Rule is like this. To you it just meant who had arrived first, who had been in the community the longest. The rank was just the number assigned from the first to the last. Its meaning has changed to be one of superiority or greater authority. A person has greater rank when they are given authority over others, regardless of when they arrived on the scene. It does seem to be a pervasive aspect of organisations: who is boss counts. Although the other meaning, the one you used, is not without problems, and can be used by early arrivals to stall or stymie change or progress in a community.

Rank: the rings indicate the number of years in the life of a tree.

As far as the trees are concerned, storms can change rank. Some of the oldest, biggest, most precious trees can find themselves felled. Neither gone nor forgotten, they have started on their ‘nurse log’ phase by which they begin to rot back into the earth, providing nutrients and refuge for many species in the process. They make it look easy, just lying their rotting, but for human beings the change in circumstances which come with different phases in our lives can be difficult. The urge to ‘pull rank’ can be hard to overcome.

Pulling rank: my fungus is bigger than yours!

Communities change and evolve as new responsibilities are shared out. We discover new skills in others and take on new roles ourselves. At some point we may embrace the challenge of the nurse log, sheltering and nourishing others as we decline and decay. It’s a noble calling.

From my remembered gospel: The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

May I rot creatively.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Responsible

Dear Benedict

Most chapters of your Rule include more than one line of thought or instruction, so it can be difficult, in today’s context to see which strand to pick up and follow through. To be children in a monastic community in the 6th century is not something that is replicated today. Our modern education system is very different, but essentially the idea of nurturing young people to take on adult responsibility is a common link. That only leaves us having to decide what adult responsibility might be and who has attained it….

Is spreading fake news a demonstration of adult responsibility, or telling lies in public office , or ramping up international tensions, or renegading on international agreements, or persecuting minorities, or ….(fill in other irresponsible acts perpetrated by adults in the world recently)?

I think our world of adult and child is not a clear cut as you might have thought it in your day, when children stood up for their elders and didn’t sit down again unless given permission (Chapter 63). I don’t mean children today are impolite, far from it. I just think we don’t measure childhood by such things, and adults can be quite impolite anyway.

Play is a key aspect of childhood, but you don’t really mention it, for children or adults in your Rule, which is a shame as I enjoy it a lot. Indeed it is said to be important to our well being. Perhaps you thought some of the aspects of life in the monastery were playful or could be executed in a playful way, like liturgy or gardening. In too many places children never get to play and adults make life grim either directly or indirectly.

in 2015 I went with some young people to see some of the grimmer side of life with a visit to the former Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenhau. A place were thousands perished and certainly not a place for play, the faces of lives cut all too short and their pitiful belongs have stayed long in my memory, as they rightly should. Our corporate annual remembrance of the horrors of the Holocaust is now something we see through the eyes of those few remaining who were then children and now adults in their 90s.

Which leaves open again the question of responsibility. Once the atrocities of the Holocaust were reveal many adults tried to evade responsibility for the events. Many children carried the weight of those events for the rest of their lives. It’s a very big example of the disconnect between adult and child responsibility but one which can find echoes in other ways in every community in which children take responsibility time and again as carers, for people of all ages, or bread winners and workers or peacemakers, often with little adult support.

It makes responsibility an everyone thing, especially responsibility for justice.

From my remembered gospel: Let the children come to me.

Shape me to fit my responsibilities, in ways both playful and serious.

From a Friend of Scholastic and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.

Scrutiny

Dear Benedict

I’m not sure how many folks use this word ‘scrutiny’ on a daily basis. There must be many jobs and roles in which it remains an essential skill. Most days I confine my scrutiny to the natural world of Longdendale, examining fungi especially, but also inspecting any other things that attract my attention.

You mention scrutiny in chapter 2 of your Rule: it’s necessary to scrutinise the results of the leadership offered by those leading the community. We find out how effective their leadership is by its fruits in the community and that requires scrutiny.

So it’s a skill we need and a process we need to encourage, even if it seems challenging. It needs to be ongoing and perhaps it is also something that goes on under the radar some of the time.

Speaking of radar, not a concept that was familiar in the 6th century, I’ve been delighted to watch a young person I knew when I was a school chaplain enjoying success in her chosen career in a documentary on national television. This young person, still only 20 years old, was one of the team of anti-bulling champions we developed with the help of a national anti-bullying organisation. Now on her chosen career path she continues to exhibit those personal characteristics of honesty and integrity that stood her in such good stead then, even when under scrutiny in a much more pressured occupation.

Of course she is not alone. Our society benefits from the countless number of people who share their skills in community in honesty and openness. Indeed, I’d suggest it was essential to good leadership. What your Rule makes clear is that leadership is not about idolising particular people or setting them up on a pedestal, even if aspects of celebratory culture want it to be replete with glamour and press opportunities. Everyone, whoever they are, must be subject to scrutiny and that scrutiny itself must be thorough, honest and replicable.

Each day I go into the valley and look at the fungi. They grow very slowly. Other aspects of the forest flourish around them. Their presence is a sign of a vast network of activity going on underground: the Mycelium. The fungi I see above ground are just one small part of the whole body. They are part of the life cycle that appears for a short time, withers and fades, whilst underground the Mycelium network continues to hold it all together. May we bear just as much scrutiny.

From my remembered bible: Consider the Fungi of the Fields (or Lilies if you like).

May my actions bear scrutiny.

From a Friend of Scholastica and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict

Talented

Dear Benedict

Like me, you use a remembered bible. At the end of chapter 64 of your Rule you refer to a verse: Matthew 24:47 ‘God will put this one in charge of everything’.

When I looked in a printed bible for the context I saw it was part of a small story about ‘a wise and faithful slave’ who was expected to ‘oversee the other slaves of the household’. Now you must understand that we read slavery differently to the way in which it was read in 6th century Europe. Too much of history has been about the exploitation of some human beings by others in systems called slavery, none of them as benign as these few verses suggest. No master had an good business owning slaves. That slavery was part of the Roman Empire and other administrations in the ancient world such that bible writers thought it acceptable to mention this, is not a reason to be uncritical of it now.

In similar ways your Rule has been subject to criticism for its treatment of children, even though physical punishment of children would have been commonplace in your day. Unfortunately cruelty towards children is still too common in our day and age for us to make such excuses.

If there’s one thing I expect from life in Christian Community, it’s being radical. I do not expect Christian communities to uphold unfairness or endorse cultural inequalities just because they are there, and I also expect them to seed this radicality into the systems and institutions that surround them.

O root of Jesse: some radical vegetables

Last night, on British TV, a Deaf woman won a major reality TV show, one that attracts millions of viewers each week. It’s a dance show. I’ve never seen it, but it’s glamorous and glitzy. Someone the public knows and loves is offered up as a trainee dancer and dancers with a professional dance partner doing a new dance each week. This time round several taboos were broken. In the final, one couple were a same sex pair of men dancing together and in the second couple one participant was Deaf.

So you see what I mean about the need for Christian communities to sow radicality. Why was two men dancing together ever thought unreasonable? Why had there not previously been a Deaf participant?

It seems that both of these sets of dancers has challenged the British public in new ways. The numbers of would be dancers who want to dance in same sex couples at local dancing schools and clubs has increased as has the number of people interested in learning British Sign Language (BSL).

BSL is the language of the British Deaf Community. I can only use a few simplified bits of it, but I do believe it should be taught in all British schools. That would be radical and it would break down a lot of barriers for British Deaf people. The Christian community would be a good place to start this radicalisation.

Would I change history? You bet. One dance partner at a time if necessary. But more than that, the community I’m interested in is radically inclusive. In that community anyone can dance.

From the remembered bible: That One comes on a day when not expected and at an hour no one knows.

O Root of Jesse, make me radically ready.

From a Friend of Scholastic and a Member of the Lay Community of St Benedict.