raja shehadeh

A few days ago I blogged about the book Palestinian Walks by Raja Shehadeh. The Guardian has just published Echoing Lands an article by Raja in which he writes about his annual holiday in the Highlands of Scotland. Raja draws parallels between his beloved Palestinian homeland and the Highlands in a powerful manner:

A year later we came back to Glen Orchy for another walking holiday. This time the weather was kinder to us. We started on the Old Military Road. Walking by the cultivated forest, the river Kinglass ran to our left. It was wider here and flowed slowly. Its shallow bed was full of shiny round stones. I stopped to take in the view. What superb country this is. The river flowed in an open expansive glen with hills to the right, and along our path as far as the eye could see lay more lochs with a track that would take days to walk.

I thought of Palestine's main river, the Jordan, and how it was impossible to take such a walk along its banks, for the river is caged in barbed wire from the point where it leaves Lake Tiberius until it flows into the Dead Sea. The smooth contours of the green hills here reminded me of the Galilee hills in spring. Not long ago I walked in them searching for the villages that a great-great-uncle of mine used as hiding places when he was on the run to escape arrest by Ottoman forces during the first world war. Those villages were all destroyed in 1948 when Israel was established. Cleared of its former inhabitants, the land is now used to plant barley and wheat. I had tried to imagine what it must have been like over 60 years ago when it was alive with the labour of simple farmers, their lowing animals and active village life. Now the land lay silent except for the whisper of the wind among the wheat stalks. A silence not unlike the quiet pervading these Highlands which, as I now know, had been inhabited until the early 19th century when greedy landlords decided it was more profitable to raise sheep and forced the tenants out of the land.

The Hills are Alive is another interview given to The Guardian by Raja in 2007, including an extract from Palestinian Walks. Raja's latest book Strangers in the House is published this week and is reviewed in The Independent.

st mellitus college inspection

One of the really exciting aspects of my job is being part of the staff of a new theological college. St Mellitus College is a partnership between the Dioceses of Chelmsford and London, training people for ministry both lay and ordained. My own involvement as Director of Lay Ministry is to head up the Dip HE Ministry programme for Reader training. During the first few months of this year the college underwent an inspection and the report St Mellitus Inspection and Reader Moderation was published a few days ago. It was a fairly demanding and challenging process but the outcome has been very encouraging.

Here's what the Bishops have had to say (pictured left with the Dean Revd Dr Graham Tomlin):

The Bishops of London and Chelmsford have welcomed the excellent first Inspection Report of St Mellitus College, a theological college created through a joint initiative between the two dioceses to offer innovative ways of training in theology and ministry for ordained and lay ministry.

St Mellitus College, which saw its first graduates become ordained as Deacons this summer, received a glowing report from the Ministry Council inspection team. The report concluded that the college had an “excellent breadth of teaching and academic standard” and recognised “examples of outstanding teaching which related well to the student body.”

The Bishop of London, Rt Revd Richard Chartres, said:

“We have worked hard and prayed hard over the past two years to establish this college which serves the two dioceses of Chelmsford and London and the wider Church.

“It is an inspiring example of the sort of co-operation and holy imagination that I long to see driving forward our mission and ministry across London.”

The Bishop of Chelmsford, Rt Revd John Gladwin, added:

"We are very encouraged by this excellent report and by the way St Mellitus has established itself. It is becoming a vital institution in the mission and ministry of the diocese."

The Bishops congratulated the Dean of the college, Revd Dr Graham Tomlin, and his dedicated staff on the progress that has been made by St Mellitus. Staff have now begun to explore the recommendations which the report gives to improve the work of the college in training ordained and lay ministers.

The new term at St Mellitus will see over 90 ordinands and many more lay people studying at the college, committed to deepening their faith and being equipped for the work of ministry.

St Augustine of Canterbury appointed Mellitus to be a missionary Bishop to the East Saxons in 604. He was based in London, but covered the whole of the region now covered by the dioceses of Chelmsford and London.

On Saturday 18th July Chelmsford Cathedral will host the St Mellitus Graduation and Valedictory Service. I am looking forward to taking part in the service particularly because our first cohort of Chelmsford Readers trained at St Mellitus will be receiving their Dip He Ministry awards; they all received a merit pass which is a fantastic start.

celebrating the course in christian studies ‘09

Another great celebration in Chelmsford Cathedral last night as graduates of the Course in Christian Studies and Pastoral Assistants’ Training received their certificates from Bishop John. Nearly 70 CCS students and 12 Pastoral Assistants successfully completed their courses and arrangements are well under way for the new courses beginning this autumn. It was a wonderful service with music led by Dry Bones and an excellent sermon from Revd Graham Hamborg (Graham receives his doctorate from Nottingham University next week). The bishops of Chelmsford, Barking and Bradwell, archdeacons of Colchester and Southend, families, friends and clergy from across the diocese all joined in congratulating the students on their achievement. Here are a few photos from last night’s service.

A packed cathedral

Bishop John and Lydia Gladwin

The Pastoral Assistants & tutors

Students from the Ilford CCS centre with tutors

Three Essex bloggers at the service: Sam Norton-Elizaphanian, Phil Ritchie-Phil’s Treehouse, Tim Goodbody-Friends’ Meeting House

Details about the new Course in Christian Studies starting in September can be found at CCS.

Palestinian walks – notes on a vanishing landscape

I was thoroughly depressed last Friday to read Garth Hewitt’s account of the ongoing Israeli settlement programme and the annexation of Palestinian land (Church Times 3rd July). Particularly upsetting was the news of the changes occurring on Shepherds' Fields. I had the privilege of visiting Shepherds' Fields last Advent but it looks like any future visit will be a very different experience.

Since my visit to the Holy Land I’ve been dipping into a book by Raja Shehadeh called Palestinian Walks; Notes on a Vanishing Landscape which won the Orwell Prize in 2008. Raja is a Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in Ramallah. He is founder of the non-partisan human rights organistion Al-Haq, an affiliate of the international Commission of Jurists and the author of books about international law, human rights and the Middle East. In the book Raja recounts seven walks taken in Palestine spanning a period of twenty seven years. Each walk is placed in a particular stage of modern Palestinian history, linking his walks with particular characters and reflecting on the wider social, political and economic situation.

Palestinian Walks is beautifully written as a love story between a man and the land of his birth; packed with incisive observations and haunting descriptions of a rapidly changing or disappearing landscape and people. I was rather suspicious when I was lent the book that it would be little more than propaganda; I’d had enough of that on my visit last year and the subsequent reporting of the conflict in the Gaza strip. However, there is a balance in Raja’s writing which displays a generosity at times towards those Israelis who could be regarded as the enemy and criticism of fellow Palestinians when it is deserved. In his introduction Raja writes:

The penultimate journey led to a confrontation with a young Jewish settler who had grown up and spent his twenty-five years of life in the very same hills. I knew that a large part of his life is based on lies. He must have been brought up on the fundamental untruth that his home was built on land that belonged exclusively to his people, even though it lay in the vicinity of Ramallah. He would not have been told that it was expropriated from those Palestinians living a few kilometres away. Yet, despite the myths that make up his world-view, how could I claim that my love of these hills cancels out his? And what would this recognition mean to both our future and that of our respective countries?

One chastening reminder in the book is the way in which Western visitors to Palestine have helped shape a view of the place that gives the impression of an uncivilised wasteland before the British Mandate and subsequent establishment of the State of Israel. For example Thackeray described the hills Raja loves as:

Parched mountains, with a grey bleak olive tree trembling here and there; savage ravines and valleys paved with tombstones – a landscape unspeakably ghastly and desolate, meet the eye wherever you wander round about the city. The place seems quite adapted to the events which are recorded in the Hebrew histories. It and they, as it seems to me, can never be regarded without terror.

Notes of a journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo

Raja observes that it is as though visitors were disappointed not to find the Palestine of their imagination and took a strong dislike to what they encountered. Here are some of Mark Twain’s comments:

Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes

Palestine is desolate and unlovely

Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition – it is a dream-land

The Innocents Abroad

A cruel paradox is highlighted in this quote from Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman, two Israeli architects:

the very thing that renders the landscape ‘biblical’, its traditional inhabitation and cultivation in terraces, olive orchards, stone building and the presence of livestock, is produced by the Palestinians, whom the Jewish settlers came to replace.And yet the very people who cultivate the ‘green olive orchards’ and render the landscape biblical are themselves excluded from the panorama. The Palestinians are there to produce the scenery and then disappear.

A Civilian Occupation, The Politics of Israeli Architecture

In the first chapter of Palestinian Walks, The Pale God of the Hills, Raja describes how his grandfather’s cousin Abu Ameen built a qasr, a stone structure where farmers keep their produce and sleep on the roof, and cultivated olive tree terraces. Raja discovered the long abandoned plot on a walk between Ramallah to Harrasha and reflected on the effort put in by so many Palestinians to create these plots and landscapes. Raja marvels at what was created:

I felt I could sit all day next to this qasr and feast my eyes on this wonderful creation. What fortunate people once lived in this veritable paradise.

His delight in the landscape contrasts with the description of Herman Melville:

Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape – bleached-leprosy-encrustations of curse-old cheese-bones of rocks, – crunched, knawed, and mumbled – mere refuse and rubbish of creation – like that laying outside of Jaffa Gate – all Judea seems to have been accumulations of this rubbish.

Journals of a Visit to Europe and the Levant

Raja has devoted his legal practice to defending Palestinians whose land has been taken by the Israeli authorities or settlers. He movingly records the way in which much loved land has been deemed abandoned and forfeit by the state. The Kafkaesque system that covers land law in the Holy Land and the implications and impact of its application are carefully explained. Raja’s patience, discipline and dedication are remarkable as is his passion for justice. He represents both Palestinian Muslims and Christians who face the loss of land to the settlers and this is a stark reminder that many Palestinian Arabs are Christians, though their numbers have fallen drastically in recent years.

The ever expanding Separation Wall or Barrier is a recurring presence in the narrative and Raja describes the impact of the wall on Palestinian towns, farms and businesses. In one short but powerful passage he reflects on the impact of the wall/barrier on Palestinian school children.

The mighty wall stretched from the top of the hill down to the road, leaving the southern slope, outside its borders, where some villagers had their homes. The government school serving several villages, including the two Beit ‘Urs, stood at the bottom of the hill – sandwiched between the wall and the new highway. The school and houses were reached by a steep, narrow, asphalted road bordering the wall. We could see some twelve-year-old boys returning from school, carrying their heavy bags up the hill. Adel pointed out that twice a day they pass along this ugly, prohibitive structure when in the past they had a panoramic view of the entire valley to the east. ‘What will they grow up thinking?’ he wondered aloud.

There is one very powerful image from the book that sticks in my mind and seems to encapsulate the tragedy of the Holy Land. There is a common thistle called natsch (Poterium Thorn) and tradition suggests it may have been used to make the crown of thorns worn by Christ. Natsch is plentiful and tenacious with strong roots. However, in Israeli military courts the presence of natsch is often cited as evidence that the land is uncultivated and therefore public land that the Israeli settlers could use as their own. The thistle is used as evidence against Palestinian claims to land ownership and an indication that the land has been abandoned. It is as if this humble thorn is being used to humiliate and punish inhabitants of the land.

If you want to discover more about the Holy Land, the beauty of its landscape, the nobility of its people and the terrible price being paid by its inhabitants in the present turmoil, I can’t think of a better place to start than Palestinian Walks.

Blog posts on my trip to the Holy Land can be found in my archive entries for November and December 2008.

ordination celebrations

From left: David Lowman (Archdeacon of Southend), Michele Marshall, Marion Walford, Sue Iskander, Bishop Laurie (Bishop of Bradwell), Carol Ball, Dave Chesney and Steve Spencer.

Great celebrations across the Diocese of Chelmsford yesterday with the Ordination of Priests. I had the privilege of attending the service for the Bradwell episcopal area at All Saints, Writtle. The service meant a great deal to me for several reasons; I had previously tained two of the priests as Readers and was involved in the ordination training of all six. Dave Chesney came to faith through an Alpha course during my time as Team Rector in Becontree West and one of the highlights of my ministry there was baptising Dave and his daughter together. Dave and his wife Sarah are godparents to my son and Dave is now serving as curate at Holy Trinity, Springfield in Chelmsford where my father was vicar during the 1970s. Talk about a small world. It was a long but very enjoyable day, rounded off with Dave celebrating his first Holy Communion in the evening. My only regret is that I was unable to attend the ordinations taking place in East London where another of my friends from my time in Becontree West, Ken Ashton, was being ordained priest.

Dave Chesney, Tim Ball (vicar of Holy Trinity, Springfield) and me.

now that's what I call compline

Here's a new take on the service of Compline from The BCP Boys.



If you want the real thing go to Night Prayer.

h/t to @santospopsicles

iPhone application – a moral compass?

Over the past few days it can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that Apple have launched a new iPhone packed, as the blurb says, with new features. One of the new applications is a compass, so I trekked into the local O2 store to have a look and was quite impressed with the overall package. However, the charges for an iPhone + tariff are still extortionate so I think I’ll hold off for a while.

One of the secrets of the iPhone’s success has been identified as the massive market that has developed in applications for the device. Now I’ve spotted a gap in the market. What we really need is not a compass but, to use Gordon Brown’s phrase, a ‘moral compass’. The news in recent months has been full of stories that point to moral ambiguities and uncertainties not only at the heart of society but also in our hearts as citizens of that society; we seem to lack a framework for how we should live in relation to one another and the wider world around us.

Habitat, the trendy high street store, has been attracting a great deal of opprobrium for its use of Twitter. The story is that some bright spark at Habitat thought it would be a good idea to attach Twitter hash tags connected with the situation in Iran to Tweets (twitter messages). When anyone entered #iran on Twitter to get an update on Iran the list of tweets would include those from Habitat directing people to particular products. It was a cheap marketing gimmick, in the poorest taste, exploiting the political turmoil in Iran. The ‘cunning plan’ has backfired in typical Baldrick manner and angered and alienated many users of Twitter and potential Habitat customers.

The chastened company has apologised profusely and sought to explain the situation and you can read more about the sorry tale here Habitat twits. Whether it was an individual’s mistake or a company decision to follow this marketing strategy, one has to ask why no one thought this was a bad idea. Bad, in the sense of it not going to work and also in the moral sense that it was wrong to exploit the Iranian turmoil to try and sell products. Would they ever have dreamed of using the deaths of British soldiers in Afghanistan to sell bed linen or cutlery? What moral framework do these companies and their employees operate within?

There are plenty of other examples. The politicians who racked up huge expenses on the most bizarre items because they could get away with it and ‘it was within the rules’. Did no alarm bell start ringing in their brains to suggest the rules were wrong? Wealthy financiers, employing armies of accountants to exploit the loopholes to ensure that they and their companies avoid paying tax on their astronomical earnings and profits. The same financiers who throw a hissy fit and threaten to leave the country as soon as a government minister threatens to close the loopholes. What ethical values inform their decisions and behaviour?

I feel uncomfortable when I read these stories and I feel uneasy commenting on them. Why? Because I wonder what I would do placed in the same situation. If I was an MP in parliament would I be caught up in the ‘everyone’s doing it’ (no they’re not) and ‘it is within the rules’ culture? When I fill in my tax return I know the temptation is there to pad the deductible allowances. One of the most sickening aspects of the moral outrage directed first at the bankers, then at MPs and now at BBC executives over salaries and expenses, is that many of those hurling the stones are not so very different.

Michael Gove, the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, has had to pay back several thousand pounds of expenses. Before becoming an MP the same Michael Gove was a journalist. Now did Mr Gove experience an ontological change when he became an MP, so that he suddenly thought it was OK to do things he wouldn’t have done as a journo? The idea that journalists are some how a different moral breed is laughable and I’ve heard more than the odd comment from journalists admitting that they are hardly pure when it comes to claiming expenses. Let us not forget that many of those who own and dictate the editorial policies of our media are not averse to ensuring the most favourable tax positions for themselves and very anxious to keep their finances away from public scrutiny. The Barclay brothers who own the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, which has led the MPs’ expenses campaign, dictate operations from their private fiefdom in the Channel Islands.

The simple truth is that all of us are flawed and in need of a moral compass. Just think about how many of us will vote at the next general election; can we honestly say that our voting intentions will be based on what will ensure the common good rather than what will favour our own personal circumstances?

Actually, now I come to think about it I already have a moral compass on my smart phone; it’s called The Bible. My problem is not that I don’t have a moral compass but that I don’t look at it enough and act on what it says.