wonderfulexchange

Aelred

12 January, 201212 January, 2012 wonderfulexchange1 Comment

Today is the feast day of Aelred of Rievaulx. I have been meaning to read Aelred for a long time (rather like I have been meaning to remember how to spell Rievaulx), but it hasn’t happened yet.

Still, he is worth pondering on his feast day. Aelred’s gift to the church was the gift of friendship. In a time when ‘special friendships’ in the church were held suspect, Aelred suggested that such friendships were the very path to God.

Now, ‘special friendship’ had particular meanings in Mediaeval religious communities, and it is not always easy to be sure what is meant at any given moment. Sometimes, it seems to refer to what we might call ‘falling in love’; sometimes to desire; other times to the child-like, but still potent, concept of ‘best friends’; and otherwise, to any noticibly strong friendship that exceeds the depth of relationships around it.

Friendship comes in many forms, all of which are worth treasuring. But I think Aelred is right to single out the deep friendships that shape us and draw us more fully into God.

Spiritual friendship is a particular thing. It exists when we know that the other is as forever committed to us as they are to God; to our journey with God as much as their own. And that commitment is not diminished by time or place or changing circumstances. Not even by occasional neglect or misunderstanding.

Spiritual friendship has the givenness of the eucharist. Though we have done nothing to deserve it, it is given for us, and remains true.

So, we give thanks for Aelred, today; and for all those we have been given in friendship.

Pour into our hearts, O God, the Holy Spirit’s gift of love, that we, clasping each the other’s hand, may share the joy of friendship, human and divine, and with your servant Aelred draw many to your community of love; through Jesus Christ the Righteous, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

The Collect for the Feast of St Aelred, 12 January
see also: The Patron Saint of Integrity

really?

12 January, 201212 January, 2012 wonderfulexchange14 Comments

I am still thinking about what it would mean if we taught wonder rather than region. But before I get there, I want to share something I stumbled across.

Yesterday, while thinking about potential changes to the ICT curriculum, I went hunting for information on what schools actually do. I was asking myself the question: ‘how does RE work on the ground?’. In other words, how does all of that promising vagary really translate in the classroom. I found a website for a nearby school which had curriculum related links for students, parents and teachers.

Under ‘Christianity’ and ‘Christians’ it offered this:

Christian beliefs and traditions

Christian people believe

There is one God.
God made the world.
God has three parts – The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is God’s son.
When people die they go to heaven or hell.
God sent Jesus to the world to save people.
Jesus
- was born at Christmas.
- showed people how to live a good life.
- died on a cross at Easter.
- came alive again and went to heaven to live with God.

Now, you may think I’m about to have a go at that school’s RE curriculum. I’m not. I’m going to leave that to your imaginations, and to your comments. No, no. This is a failure of ICT. Someone found a link and assumed it was reputable. They trusted the nice people who provide resources for the hearing disabled, and forgot to ask whether they were equally conversant in Christian faith.

It’s a terribly difficult thing, teaching. And it’s tricky, too, identifying the right resources. So, I’m adding to my list. Let us teach wonder and discernment instead of RE and ICT. I’m sure I could make a course on wonder and discernment tick all the cross-curricular boxes. I’m willing to start tomorrow, so long as we can agree that there will be no exams, no red ink, and no end to the learning.

coding

11 January, 201211 January, 2012 wonderfulexchangeLeave a comment

Today the secretary of education has offered a radical proposal: instead of teaching children how to use computer programs, we should be teaching them how to create programs. We should be helping them understand — and thus continually reinvent — how computers work.

There have been some splendid quotes flitting around the BBC about the pointlessness of wasting teaching time on Word and Powerpoint when today’s children can master such programmes in a week. And there have been heartfelt comments about the ways in which students and teachers alike are ‘bored to death’ with the ICT curriculum.

I wish this were so. I fear too often the teachers are scared to death of the curriculum, even as the students are bored. And that makes me wonder about the Religious Education curriculum, too.

The RE curriculum is a slippery thing. The Scottish Curriculum for Excellence sounds promising in its stated goals for RE, though I wonder whether most adult Christians could demonstrate sufficient understanding to thrive at Key Stage 4. In England, it seems more confusing. If I have understood this right, RE is non-statutory, and thus the Deparment of Education guidelines are deliciously vague (proving insightful understanding and mirroring of the church?). Each school must teach RE in a way that reflects the religious realities of Britain. Each school must have an approved curriculum. Beyond that there is much wriggle room, to allow for different types of schools and different religious traditions. And, if that is not enough, then parents can always ‘opt out’ of religious education altogether, which raises all sorts of questions about just how essential RE is.

But despite all this, I have a hunch that the teaching of RE is not so very different from the teaching of ICT. I remember clearly the RE exam questions which could offer a similar number of points (and time) for questions as diverse as ‘what are the five pillars of Islam’ and ‘explain what problems are caused for religious believers by the problem of suffering.’ Over and over again, religion was presented as that which could be reduce to a three point answer: the RE equivalent of rewarding ICT points for multi-coloured fonts and zooming images.

The proposals for the ICT curriculum suggest that we should be teaching children how to think about computers: how do they work? how do I need to think to understand them? and then, with those basics in place, what creativity can I offer to help shape ICT for the future?

What if we asked the same questions for the RE curriculum? How does religion work? (so, we might begin with: what shapes religious consciousness? what happens spiritually, cognitively, socially, morally, experientially?) How do I need to think to understand religious belief? (openness to possibility, desire for meaning, capacity for wonder, bracketing of scepticism to explore trust, experiencing real change of heart…). And then, the really interesting one: what creativity can I offer to help shape Christianity… Islam… Judaism… Hinduism… for the future?

Behind all this, I’ve been wondering what would happen if we tried to educate children in wonder rather than religion. But that is for another post.

Today, I simply want to say ‘hurrah for the secretary of education. RE next, please.’

lessons in reality

10 January, 201210 January, 2012 wonderfulexchange2 Comments

I’ve just learned something rather important. Things that I think are deeply private needn’t always be so.

I’ve always struggled a bit with Facebook. I joined reluctantly when I was in Dunoon, and linked to a few church people. But the more I used it, the more I valued it as a space to connect with old friends and good friends, and I fairly ruthlessly cut down my friends list and ignored new requests to create ‘safe space.’

A brief flirtation with Google+ (all those lovely circles, but hardly anyone there) made me look again at Facebook lists: a way to filter posts to those for whom they are most appropriate. I decided it was possible to relax the boundaries a bit — to say yes to friend requests I’d long been ignoring, safe in the knowledge that I could create a ‘close friends’ list of those who I trust enough to bear with a certain amount of venting on my worst days (‘safe space’).

But before I could add people, I needed to look back. Was there anything lurking that needed to be deleted, any tar pits waiting for me to fall into if the wrong person looked back through my profile. (I know: who could be bothered looking back through a profile? But it’s always the person you least expect who actually takes the time…) I have never used Facebook — or any other medium — to talk about people, but still there are times when generic comments become specific to knowing eyes. So, I trawled all my old posts.

In four years, there were only five updates that I chose to delete. Two were truly grumbly, one spoke well of something that had happened in the church, but in shorthand ways that could be misunderstood, and two were simply too pathetically self-indulgent to exist any longer in cyberspace. But that was all. Really, even those posts could have stood if they needed to. The earth would not have stopped turning had the ‘wrong’ person read them.

At worst, my Facebook statuses revealed very clearly that state of my moods. Good days and bad, seasons of tiredness, and moments of joy. The thing is: the people who saw me knew those things already, whether they were linked to Facebook or not. Indeed, they often knew them better than I did, and could perceive both the causes and shifts of my moods long before I admitted them.

So, all that privacy seeking for nothing.
I think it must have had something to do with the goldfish bowl.

But that is really good news. Because if I have have learned that facebook — my safe space– is really OK, even uncensored, then perhaps there are other anti-goldfish moves that were unnecessary too. Like loosing confidence in the blog.

Oh, it is a long journey. Many false promises of returning to blogging, and of learning to write regularly again. But things are happening. I simply need to reform habits of discipline and get on with it.

But I’m still (mostly) applying one old rule on Facebook: when it comes to members of my former congregations, the other person gets to initiate the friend request. When it comes to young people, or those who are in a particularly fragile phase of life, they get to initiate as well. I will say yes now. But they get to choose.