Have you noticed how “awkward” has become a buzz word in recent years? There is now a tendency for people, with limited social breading, to name an awkward silence as just that. They announce the awkwardness of a social interaction in a chitchy avant garde sort of way that they believe frees them from any rule of social etiquette, and then triumphantly march off to “do their own thing,” trailing a cloud of annoyance in their wake.
I began to notice this tendency after I saw it modeled by Ricky Gervais in The Office, a type of humour so painfully awkward that it was found funny - after you went numb from wincing. What I think HBO was cashing in on in that series, was the fact that we now live in a society where we have deconstructed every form of social etiquette. We do not wish to impose rules of behaviour on our ourselves or our children, so we have abandoned social norms in the name of individual freedoms, and are left with a society struggling to remember how to be polite.
As such I feel so deeply grateful to be a member of the Church of England. That old battleship of out-dated morals, etiquette, and standards from which to judge the World, and in a time when the World desperately needs to be judged!
Now I have just committed one of the cardinal sins of our era and spoken of judgment. Those of us that have ridden the non-violent communication train know that we are no suppose to impose our judgment on others, as that’s oppressive and one of the hallways of Churchiness: moral self-righteousness. We, both C of E and Canadians, have become an unimposing people. A people who when in doubt answer “I’m sorry,” or “Excuse me,” at every available moment of confusion. This is a nullified politeness we practice that is more about avoiding strife then actually exercising our moral judgment, judgment that holds ourselves, and others, accountable for our actions.
We need only look to England riots of the past month to see the result of a generation raised without the standards of its parents to see where this country, which (despite all the hype about the elephant across the border) has always fallowed the European lead, is headed.
There is much talk of these days of the need of the Church to reinvent itself (again); to find a third space to meet the unchurched halfway in some café/art gallery where we won’t use the word “god” till the third date. Which is about the middlest road the Anglican Church has come up with to date, and is a fine one for individual parishes to take, but as a national Church we must now refocus as to what our mission in Canada is.
To that end we should take a seriously look at some of the conversations that are happening in the UK now, especially from the mouth of our Archbishop of Canterbury, who in the wake of the riots has made repeated calls for a return to the notion of citizenship and virtue. In a speech he gave to the house of Lords Rowan Williams spoke of how “[o]ver the last two decades, many would agree that our educational philosophy [in the UK] at every level has been more and more dominated by an instrumentalist model; less and less concerned with a building of virtue, character and citizenship - 'civic excellence' as we might say. And a good educational system in a healthy society is one that builds character, that builds virtue.” An education system that creates not just workers or consumers but virtuous citizens, as what we do not invest in youth we pay in terms of criminal corrections.
Working at a half-way house for parolees I have seen that fact plainly with my own eyes, and now that we have elected a government that is investing 10 billion dollars into the construction of mega-prisons (in a country that has had a declining crime rate for the past 10 years) I can tell you we are a long way from where we need to be in order to have the types of conversation we need to be having.
Here, however, is a gleaming opportunity for the Anglican Church to show itself as a mission oriented Church and begin considering what a National Prison Ministry programme might look like. In prison ministry do we truly meet the commandments of Our Lord, caring for orphan (which is the case for many of the incarcerated), the widow (again the case for so many of the mothers of prisoners), and of course the prisoner. As well in this ministry we can also continue to work at healing the riff between our Church and indigenous people of this land as, the sad colonial fact is, they are the largest population represented in prison system.
We live in desperate times, and in these times we must not risk falling into a “wait and see” mentality. We are called to be the Church that serves in the World and to serve the broken body of Christ in the places where angels fear to tread, but where are Lord beckons us to meet him.
