What is in Kelvin's Head?

Overseas Links – some questions

17/09/2012

Lots of churches have overseas links. Individual churches, dioceses, even whole provinces of the Anglican Communion often have links to places far afield. They are sometimes successful, sometimes not. But they are often built on the curious last century notions that relationship depends upon physical contact and that travel is easier than communication.

Of course, the world has changed.

So what would international links between churches look like if we took as our starting point the modern world with all its potential and did not simply base our expectations on Victorian (colonial?) ideas of partnership?

Firstly, I don’t think it is about doing it all online and never travelling. It is probably both/and rather than either/or. (Isn’t it always in our lovely postmodern world?)

Secondly, I think we might expect relationships to be shorter in length rather than longer. What if we decided to twin our diocese to another for a short period – Lent, say. And what if we got the geeky ones to do it by arranging for skype video or google hangouts. How about a small group from one church meeting with a small group from another church on the other side of the world for a Lent study group rather than the dreary weariness that can characterise such groups if we keep doing them the same way with the people from round the corner every year? Or what if clergy from matched churches just got together once a week for an hour’s coffee and a chat – boiling the water thousands of miles apart but sitting down to chat through what their week was like, peer to peer, distance no object? Bible study, coaching, chat and gossip are all possible. They feed off one another anyway.

Thirdly, I’ve been learning recently not to underestimate time differences when doing real-time stuff in the interconnected world we now live in. However, I’ve also been learning not to be defeated by it.

Fourthly, would doing this kind of thing disenfranchise those who don’t do internet stuff? Oh yes, but then the need to travel to do linking work used to disenfranchise far more people who couldn’t, wouldn’t, shouldn’t travel or indeed, those who just couldn’t raise the money to go.

Finally, it is worth asking the question whether this kind of linking would be better organised formally in a structured way or simply to just let it happen in a kind of free for all environment? (And is it either/or or both/and, once again).

church, communication, internet, Lent groups, Overseas links

9 responses to “The Lament Question”

kimberly

12/08/2009

ask it in the singular, and the answer is: because you’re a four.

you’ll have me playing the funeral ikos next.

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kimberly

12/08/2009

the other answer is about possibility being revealed in limits.

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kelvin

12/08/2009

Its not just me though, and not just fours.

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Aaron Orear

12/08/2009

I think because sorrow touches the core of the human condition – we are mortal but can perceive immortality. “He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11)

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Erp

12/08/2009

I understand Aristotle talks about catharsis and various philosophers have followed up on that idea.

Perhaps it arouses sadness both from the art itself but also from our own sources festering within and allows us to let go. We feel better for the letting go, the lessening of our own internal sadness, and so perceive the art as beautiful.

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RosemaryHannah

12/08/2009

Kimberly was there before me. However, even I, a nine, can sometimes see the beauty in sad things. For me they do two things (may be more but two are most obvious). The first is the catharsis thing. The second is to make me less lonely. Look, here am I weeping, but all around me people sit in the same sorrow. It is not just my sorrow – I am not alone.

I have long thought there is another answer, one I do not properly understand but I have (I think – and who am I to think it). Deep in God there is a huge well of sorrow. Unless we experience sorrow we cannot understand God. When we sorrow we tap into that well, and become closer to him.

And being a nice cheerful nine, I will now add that I live in hope that having sorrowed with him, we will share also and even more fully in the joy which swallows the sorrow. Delete this last paragraph from your mind on reading, it will only spoil the joy of the sorrow.

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Elizabeth

13/08/2009

Edgar Allan Poe said the most beautiful thing in the world is a beautiful, dead woman. Nice, eh?

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Ritualist Robert

14/08/2009

Surely it’s because the concept of beauty is independent from concepts such as ‘sadness’ and ‘happiness’ – just as a G major chord might be loud or soft, but that volume has no effect on its G major-ness.

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Steve

14/08/2009

I remember Augustine saying (don’t ask me where) that for a picture to be beautiful it requires dark colours as well as bright.

There is also a hint of an answer in this poem by Edwin Muir:

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.

Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

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