Here is a poem I wrote, after hearing an amazing head teacher, called Jill Wood speaking about why she had taken the decision for her Year 6 Students not to take their SATS tests (compulsory exams for our 11 year old in England). She was giving her “enough now” to the detrimental effects testing can have on children. Here is what she inspired in me:
We had a conversation as part of the Love Politics Initiative recently hosted in Silverdale, in which we looked at just how broken language is. So, even in writing this post, I will fall short of what I hope to communicate and recognise that what I write may be misunderstood, misconstrued or misinterpreted.
I left the weekend with three words resonating for me: recognition, rearticulation, reconnection. For me, these three words express what it means for us to recover the public space as a place of real discourse for politics/theology/philosophy/psychology/sociology all of which I believe belong in public and to the masses, not just the few.
Recognition
Cognition is all about knowing things. Sometimes we can be so sure that we know something or know somebody, but then something happens that utterly changes our perspective or our previous ‘knowing’. We ‘re-cognise’ a person or a situation. We see it differently. Take the famous example of St Paul on the road to Damascus. He encounters something he previously thought he knew about and had boxed in his mind, so much so that he had given his time and energy to try to destroy it. But then he had an encounter with Jesus which was unexpected and utterly shifted what he thought he knew. Suddenly he was blind and realised how blind his ‘cognition’ had been. When his eyes were reopened, he recognised the world and humanity in an altogether different light.
So often I have made up my mind about people or made judgements about them, often based on rumour, hear say or other people’s opinions, but when I actually encounter that person, I recognise they are very different to what I had thought I knew. I wonder how much of the brokeness we find in any given area of social or racial division is based on assumption and ‘knowing’……perhaps when we learn to recognise people different to ourselves, when we know them differently because our eyes see differently, we can find new ways of being together.
I have written previously about the great work going on in Leeds with a shift from talking about multiculturalism to an understanding of interculturalism. It resists the desire for homogenisation and shifts the conversation to one of mutual respect, with a celebration of a “give and receive” way of being together. There is great work in Lancaster though the “East meets West” initiative. Work continues in Ireland in co-educating children across the old Catholic/Protestant divide. Cafes in Israel and Palestine actively encourage Muslims, Jews and Christians to eat together. We are also seeing beautiful stories emerge as various households across Europe welcome refugees into their homes. We must break down what we think we know, so that we can learn to see differently, to re-cognise each other. This breaks down fear, which is always the dividing wall and allows love to drive that fear away.
Rearticulation
My friend, Mike Love, who is one of the best thinkers I know, recently wrote an essay on public space. He wrote powerfully about how nearly all our public space, once the domain of the male (it has nearly always excluded the female), is now almost entirely privatised and controlled. He riffed on the need for us to articulate our public spaces. To articulate can have three different meanings. It is used to describe speech that is coherent and eloquent. It has a medical meaning to describe how joints fit together and a third similar meaning in the world of architecture.
Our public conversations are currently not very articulate. Too many voices go unheard or forgotten, not given space to articulate. We have become dislocated. Our physical bodies often never meet with others and so the corporate body has become dysfunctional. The Leeds Poverty Truth Commission has done and continues to do phenomenal work in this area.
Our physical spaces, even the design of our cities and certainly some of the social cleansing we are seeing in some of our big cities is causing further separation. Where are the city planners who might know how to design space that rejoins and heals us? We need to be rearticulated so that we can recognise one another and rearticulate that it is only love that will help us find the future of peace together.
Reconnection
When we learn to recognise the world and all that live in it differently, and are rearticulated through the rediscovery of our shared public space and our language becomes one of healing and reconciliation in place of division and suspicion then we can become reconnected. There is a verse in the bible that I love. St Paul, who has learnt to see the whole world in a completely different way says that Jesus came to reconcile all things to himself through the cross, (not start an exclusive movement). He pulled the whole of the creation back into the flow of love that comes from God. But he also made a way for us all to be reconciled and reconnected. It is in essentially kenotic love (Thomas Jay Oord – ‘The Uncontrolling Love of God”) that we can all find hope for the future. To put that another way, when we understand that God is first love and everything else flows from this love, we find a way for ourselves to be reformed and reorientated in the world. It is in the very act of taking up our own crosses, of not demanding our own ways, of being misunderstood and dehumanised by the ‘system’ that allows us also to be reconciled and reconnected to all things.
A couple of blogs ago I wrote that I believe we need a revolution of love. I believe that repentance IS the revolution we need. And what is repentance? Isn’t it recognition, rearticulation and reconnection? All of these require a dismantling of selfishness, pride, greed, and everything that stops us walking in the way of love; everything that prevents us building the wellbeing of those around us, the world we live in and indeed ourselves! I have personally found through my own encounter with Jesus a continual journey of reorientation in the way of love. Where do we think that we see clearly, but are actually motivated by hate or fear? Who or what do we need to re-cognise? What can we co-create that will enable re-articulation and re-connection/re-conciliation in our neighbourhoods, towns, cities and nations?
Earlier this week the UK parliament voted that the secretary of state for health will have new powers to close any hospital in England, should he see fit. There are a couple of caveats attached. Firstly, the local people will apparently have ‘a say’ and the local commissioning boards of GPs will also have to agree. How much of ‘a say’ local people will really get is yet to be seen and how much pressure will be exerted on local commissioning boards to tow the party line we don’t yet know.
What this highlights yet again is the complete lack of joined up thinking that happens around healthcare and the wider economy. It also reveals how utterly disempowering central government really is. How can Westminster decide what the needs and wants of the city of Leeds are, for example? What do they know about the non-economic impacts of closing a hospital? I’m not arguing that all hospitals should stay open, and there’s a good chance that some may well need to close. But it cannot be a decision from on high. Nor can it be an isolated decision. It’s too complex for that.
I find great encouragement from the knowledge that there are several towns and cities in the UK where ‘a people’s assembly’ is emerging. There are some stunning examples of this in Nottingham, Leeds and London. Across a city such as these ones, there are webs of networks and interconnected relationships that represent thousands and thousands of people. I had the utter privilege recently of spending some time with John Battle, a recently retired MP from Leeds. He carries a wealth of wisdom in understanding how to engage people from across a city to participate in key decisions. He was explaining to me that in a people’s assembly, there are representatives from many groups across the city. Each person can speak on behalf of their group and report back to them for further discussion. It’s an incredible way of involving a huge proportion of a city in a discussion.
In Nottingham, for example, at the time of electing the new police commissioner, over 1200 people, representing a vast number of networks, gathered from across the city to have a facilitated conversation about what they would hope for from their new commissioner. They were then able to ask questions to the four candidates, and were able to set up a system of accountability for the eventually elected commissioner back to the people. The commissioner understood in no uncertain terms that he was there to serve the city and the city understood that it was there to partner together with the commissioner for the welfare of the communities living there.
A facilitated conversation gives voice to everybody and sets no-one up above another. Leadership becomes about facilitation rather than dominance and control. When we talk about closing a hospital or a maternity unit or a school in an area, it is often said (as in my previous blogs) that there are some very complex things to consider. This is absolutely true. The problem is that we don’t share the complexity, we leave the decisions to so-called experts (who are at best having a good guess), and then either make them heroes or scape-goats!
National budgeting doesn’t work when it comes to healthcare. Local budgeting in isolation doesn’t work either. It’s all well and good to campaign to keep a hospital open, but we do actually live in a world of finite resources and people and so if we keep the hospital, there may be other tough cuts to make. We have separated out huge aspects of budgeting that really belong together. That is why a people’s assembly in a town/city/region doing the complex task of participatory budgeting is a possible way forward. It isn’t actually that difficult to get people together and budgets aren’t that hard to understand. I know so many people who have extremely tight and complex budgets to manage when it comes to their own households and they do it with finesse. Multiplying the numbers up, ain’t that tricky.
When a town/city understands what it’s budget is for a year (or longer) and the people can decide what the priorities need to be I think the results could be amazing. Firstly, there might be genuine partnerships formed across cities to work in more innovative and creative ways. Secondly, there would be greater engagement and social responsibility. Thirdly, there would be less waste. Fourthly there would be emerging partnerships of gift (rather than competition) between cities for various resources.
Some argue that in such a situation, the most needy and therefore least empowered in a city could miss out. This happens currently in the national setting. For me, this is where leadership comes in. Leadership is not about riding into town to shut a hospital here, or rename a school into an academy there. Leadership is about emptying power out and reassuring all that they are already empowered. It is also about helping protect and promote those who could potentially be down trodden or forgotten. It is giving a voice to those who feel voiceless and oppressed by the dominant systems. For me that would mean promoting and protecting the needs of women (for whom there is still an incredible amount of injustice), children, asylum seekers and refugees, the marginalised poor and homeless, those with physical and mental health needs and prisoners.
Power needs to be devolved from the centre to the margins (just as Gordon Brown MP stated this week). And once the power is more regional it still needs to be continually emptied out so that communities find and serve one another, so that cities become gifts to one another and we find that the order of the house (economics) is the responsibility of all.
reimaginingthefuture 