September 2009 Archives

Thanks Jules for a reminder about this intriguing movement that's come out of the TED organisation (mentioned previously here for their remarkable and stimulating series of talks available online and worth your time one rainy Saturday...). Here's the recent email about it to TED supporters:

In just over two months the Charter for Compassion will be unveiled to the world.  On that day, November 12, 2009, Karen Armstrong will read the Charter at a global press launch. This briefing will be followed by a week of celebratory events - from concerts to art fairs, lectures and readings - and a weekend of sermons coordinated in houses of worship large and small.

Also on November 12, a plaque inscribed with the words of the Charter, designed by Yves Behar,  will be hung in important religious and secular buildings in ten or so cities around the world. Images and video of these "hangings" will be shown at the press launch and then posted on the Charter for Compassion website, re-launching that same day.

All the info about the Charter is available online at the movement's website and, perhaps most engagingly, here's Karen Armstrong's 'pitch' for it at TED in Feb 2008...

Compassion is one of those big all-inclusive, feel-good words that, I hope, every Christian should be lining up to cheer for, but what do you make of this particular take on it? Karen Armstrong's take on "belief" isn't quite the one I'd go for, though she makes a good point that it's not merely an intellectual ascent, but it's about behaving a particular way.

Listening to Armstrong above, I want to cheer about "only understanding doctrines when you put them into practice" and it must be true that "compassion" is a great linking word/lifestyle across faiths.

The problem is that what she pitches is (to quote her) "a test for true religiosity"...

According to whom?

For Jesus, the test of true religion was loving and following him - which, sure, is to be lived out and shown in lifestyle, nor mere intellectual belief... but he was absolutely clear that no lifestyle, however pure and compassionate, is enough to be right with God, nor to change the world.

On the other hand, I'm reassured by these words on the website itself:

The Charter does NOT assume:

• all religions are the same
• compassion is the only thing that matters in religion
• religious people have a monopoly on compassion

The Charter DOES affirm that:

• compassion is celebrated in all major religious, spiritual and ethical traditions
• the Golden Rule is our prime duty and cannot be limited to our own political, religious or ethnic group
• therefore, in our divided world, compassion can build common ground

What do you think? Do these sort of declarations change anything? Do Christian water down their faith in signing up, or is this exactly the sort of thing we need in a fractured world?

Update: Link to read the full assembly now works!

It's rare, you'll know I suspect, that I have a script to reproduce for any of my talks or sermons, but there are occasions when I make doubly sure I know what I'm going to say by at least writing it down beforehand... even though I don't go on to read from it up front.

This week saw one such occasion - very sadly, the tragic death of a pupil who should have been returning to Year 10 at a local secondary CofE school where I'm part of the clergy team (with a particular responsibility for Yrs 10&11).

Here's a portion of the words I used, taken from the middle of the assembly... you can read the rest online, should you wish, here.

"It's odd, isn't it, how we think God won't be interested in our emotions - that he might even look down on how we feel.

I wonder whether we think that way because of how we see the Bible - that it's a quiet and respectful book, talking about religious themes, in a religious way, for religious people... But it's not!

In fact it's a bluntly noisy read, noisy with people's feelings - full of the sound of weeping... and of laughter... you hear shouts of pain, and cries of triumph; the sounds of friends partying together and of families mourning aloud.

It's written by real people, living out real lives alongside the very real God who made, loves and walks with them.

And so those who wrote the songbook of the Bible, the Psalms, were convinced that God, far from being uninterested in their feelings, held them as absolutely precious... listen to these remarkable words from Psalm 56:

You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.

An amazing picture of God : collecting our tears in a bottle - each one precious, not a single one lost or wasted - and taking the painstaking time to write our emotions down in a book? What was true for the Psalmist all those years ago is, I believe, true for all of us as we miss [name] today."