Istanbul, Where the Cat's in the Bag

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I've always been a fan of the freebie holdall from the 2008 Welfare to Work Cymru conference. And at the Blue Mosque last week it turned out to be just what one of Istanbul's zillions of cats was looking for.





You see these creatures everywhere.



Here is one at the executioner's fountain. As the name suggests, in the days of the Sultan it was where the executioner washed his sword and had a good scrub after doing his job.



Happy-looking felines are found in every quarter of this city where until recently people of at least three major world faiths lived together.



Istanbul is now the scene of a vanishing.



Neighbourhoods which not long ago had been home to the proud Greek Orthodox heirs of the Byzantine empire are now populated by their ghosts.





Constantinople had been the engine room of Christendom - and even in the 1950s 40% of the city was Jewish or Christian. But remaining bastions of the Orthodox are behind the type of fortifications that might guard a US embassy.



But in the backstreets you can find lonely choirless churches, now classified as museums, where works of imagination and faith are still illuminated.





Empires have been slipping in and out of this city for centuries. Its residents are reminded that civilisations vanish every time they pass the 3,300-year-old obelisk that the Roman emperor Theodosius erected in 390AD.



And today, no one culture defines Istanbul.



Stridently secular Turks daily welcome the thousands of tourists who stream out of the cruise ships. Meanwhile, working-class conservatives who want their call to prayer in Arabic are flocking to the city.



Istanbul is a trinity of peninsulas. There is the skyscraper-filled "European" city which is home to a vibrant arts scene; it sits across the Bosphorus from the ancient terrain of mosques, palaces and former cathedrals; and there is a third land mass where domesticity seems to reign and the greatest excitement is the latest outburst of football rivalry.





You can find something of the soul of this enthralling, disturbing, enchanting, intoxicating, exhausting, exhilarating city on the ferries which plough over the velvet waters. With each change of light, the horizon is transformed.



The Blue Mosque is one of the world's great places of worship. Unlike so many tourist-trap cathedrals across Europe, it's still a house of prayer.



Visitors are welcomed in and encouraged to learn about Islam. It's a stark contrast with a trip to Assisi, where you'll have a chance to buy a thousand postcards but be unlikely to gain an insight into the saint's faith. There's a confidence about religion in Istanbul which seems untroubled by the challenges of modernity.





Hagia Sophia was a cathedral from 360AD to 1453, and then a mosque until 1934 when it became a secular museum.



It's 1,000 years younger than the obelisk, and you get the feeling more incarnations may well be on the way.



Istanbul is not a city which seems taut with tension, even though today's bomb attack demonstrates the dangers and divisions which swirl through this giant country. There is excitement about the economic boom and spectacular bridges and a beautiful new airport are icons for a prosperous future.



Memories of Ottoman splendour no longer seem to trigger shame at the loss of an empire; instead, the country is embracing its emerging role as a regional power.



This is a nation which borders Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, and a boat ride down the Bosphorus will take in an hour to the gates of the Black Sea.



There hills are crammed with soldiers whose fathers held this Nato front-line throughout the Cold War.



And the shoreline is lined with restaurateurs who wave over tourists on passing boats, and the fishermen who supply the daily catch.





The city is home to entrepreneurs who sell with a joy that disarms.



The Spice Bazaar has more energy, colour and stimulants than any western rave.



And in the nearby Grand Bazaar there is everything for sale short of a nuclear submarine (although you could probably find the parts).





The gregarious glee of the bazaar makes this fantasia of commerce fascinating instead of maddening. This is not yet a city ruled by soulless capitalism but by the adventure of trade.



The giant smiles of the taxi drivers whose cabs lack seatbelts and the cafe waiters who will find you a table even if they have to nail bits of wood together ensure that a visit to the city will buzz with bonhomie.





And when I landed back in Luton on Friday on a dark and rain-soaked night and passed the pet crematorium where old moggies travelled in flumes of smoke across damp fields, the world of mosaics and tea-sellers, dervishes and ferrymen seemed very far away.



But a walk in the sun of an autumn morning was enough to remind you that this island is a pretty wonderful place, too.



And whether you're surrounded by oaks or obelisks, it's a striking fact that all of us are just passing through. Yet how great it is to get to spend time in a city or a field with the grandest of friends and enjoy the view.

Genius Day

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If you swing out of bed this morning and discover an unusual spring in your step it is possible you are about to commit an act of creative genius for wonderful good, spectacular entertainment or hair-whitening ill.

Throughout the 20th century, October 30 has been a day when human beings have displayed dazzling ingenuity and redefined our world.

It was on this day in 1925 that the great Scots inventor John Logie Baird created his first television transmitter. The iPad is about as revolutionary as a three-month-old Flemish sprout in comparison with the cultural impact of this box with its flickering images.

And in 1938 the boy genius Orson Welles demonstrated the potential of mass entertainment to blur the contours of reality when his radio broadcasts of HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds spread panic that human civilisation was imperilled by a Martian invasion.

Jump forward to 1960 and Michael Woodruff – a man who deserves to be a household name – performed the UK’s first successful kidney transplant.

Scientific wonder of an altogether horrifying kind took place the next year when the Soviet Union broke records in nuclear testing. The 50 megaton Tsar Bomba created a mushroom cloud 40 miles high and 25 miles wide.

An cultural explosion of equal magnitude took place in 1974 when boxing legends Muhammad Ali and George Foreman came together in Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle.

Without wishing for a nanosecond to engage in astrological hooey, if you do have a son or daughter born today, there appears to be more than a morsel of a chance they will prove a true genius. They will share a birthday with John Adams, the man who famously united the United States of America. And perhaps the greatest novelist of all-time Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Plus the astonishing painter Alfred Sisley, and the out-of-fashion but undoubtedly explosive wordsmith Ezra Pound. And let’s not forget football’s incendiary Diego Maradona.

Perhaps October 30 has magical qualities because the fireball sunsets of autumn are about to melt into the dark star-filled nights of November and energy and imagination are shaken together like a Bond Martini in the depths of our souls.

Humanity may daydream about Lottery wins or long to have been born rich, but the excitements that have characterised this day throughout the decades involved the harnessing of training, talent, knowledge, experience and audacity. The men and women who made the date one for historians to remember knew that the greatest colour any artist can wield is life itself.

Have a fantastic weekend in which happiness will transform obstacles into springboards and befuddlement into inspiration and may you make a glorious splash.

A Saturday column

Swords, Ploughshares and Carriers Without Planes

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When Britain was a superpower with an empire unrivalled in world history, men and women across Wales shivered at the sight of the military might which powered this international colossus.

The poet Gwenallt was imprisoned during World War I for refusing to wear his uniform and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, founded by Richard Roberts from Blaenau Ffestiniog, promoted principles for international peace years before Eleanor Roosevelt drafted the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

The embers of this pacifist tradition are still alight. When it was announced this week that plans for a multi-billion pound defence academy in the Vale of Glamorgan would not get the green-light the near-universal response was deep disappointment at lost investment.

But the Rev Guto Prys ap Gwynfor, chair of the Welsh Union of Independent Churches’ peace society, said in a press release: “It would be tragic for the Welsh economy to rely on an industry that teaches people how to kill. Wales has been over-militarised already.”

Pacifism gained moral energy after the slaughter of World War I but was setback after Britain was confronted with the naked face of aggressive evil in the form of the Nazis. Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the most influential American theologians of the 20th century, quit the Fellowship of Reconciliation when World War II broke out and argued forcefully that the moral compromise of armed engagement is sometimes necessary.

Such ideas were embraced by the neoconservatives who were convinced that the use of force to promote democracy is justifiable, and the concept of the pre-emptive strike was tested with the invasion of Iraq.

In recent years and days we have seen a roll-back away from such militarism with a speed which would have delighted the early Welsh pacifists. This has not been the result of ideological conversion but pragmatism (the blood and treasure spent in Iraq and Afghanistan has exhausted world powers) and a response to the devastating economic storm.

It is possible a new doctrine will develop to suit these chastened times. This week Conservative PM David Cameron, the heir to the party of Churchill – the champion of rearmament – raised the surreal prospect of a Britain that had aircraft carriers without planes.

He pledged Britain would be “more thoughtful, more strategic and more coordinated in the way we advance our interests and protect our national security”.

In this moment when a foreign policy is waiting to be written, idealists and realists alike have a chance to articulate a new way of acting justly in a dangerous world.

A Saturday column

Ru on Sufjan

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My wonderful brother has some insightful musings on Sufjan Stevens's new album:

The whole album deals with the personal and primal: love, sex, death, disease, illness, anxiety and suicide conveyed not obliquely, but with urgency and immediacy. Perhaps it is easier to speak of such things with a loud drum loop over the top.

Lighting Up the Screen

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Radical changes may be on the way for the Post Office, but the idea of spending 400,000 euros on a set of stamps would make any of us gulp.

Yet this is how much a charity auction expects to raise when a rare sheet of 10 German stamps showing Audrey Hepburn smoking goes under the hammer.

The image of Ms Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s is certainly iconic, but collectors covet this stamp because it is meant to no longer exist.

Her son, Sean Ferrer, refused copyright and suggested another image should be used. The German Government ordered that the stamps be destroyed but a precious few remained.

However, the extraordinary interest in these stamps suggests something more is at work than excitement among the philately-inclined.

It is as if possession of this image is a connection with a style and sensibility now all but absent from Hollywood. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was released just less than half a century ago, in 1961, but the America it presents is a vanished civilisation.

Truman Capote’s earthy novel made it clear that the mid-20th century US was no age of innocence. Yet in the film version Ms Hepburn embodied a charm which contrasts with the abrasive bombast of present day popular culture; the movie and its Moon River soundtrack continue to enchant.

The same can be said of Katharine Hepburn movies and Marilyn Monroe’s best outings, but there is something else about her canon which goes beyond nostalgia.

In 1953’s Roman Holiday, she displayed wide-eyed wonder as a princess who discovers a world of glorious but scruffy romance. This was not a simple tale of naivety confronted with urban sophistication, but rather a story in which the inner strengths of Gregory Peck’s reporter and the princess are the secret of both their crackling chemistry and their true nobility; it is an egalitarian fairytale.

In her own life she was famed for treating stagehands and VIPs with the same unfaltering courtesy. But today’s celebrity culture is centred on gaining access behind red ropes at exclusive clubs, getting to ride in the limo with the darkened glass, and gaining the access-all-areas pass.

There were actresses who were more beautiful and funnier, but few combined a sense of free-spirited adventure with luminous goodness. The sight of the lit cigarette – now an icon of decay banned from public buildings – is a reminder that the world in which her stories are set has burned away. But the challenge for today’s storytellers is to re-light such timeless magic in these less smoky times.

A Saturday column

Dennis Potter on Jesus

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Jesus - that witty, brave, noble, sometimes petulant, wonderful man - a man, yes a man, yes a man, a man, a man, a man, but a man who is a perfect mirror, reflecting back, down, up, sideways, whatever it is we call grace. Jesus, that man...

Interviewed by Tom Hibbert, May 1993

Forty-four Candles

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If a bright light is seen radiating from Downing St this evening there is no need to find a policeman to warn that an alien abduction of the Prime Minister may be underway.

It is more likely that the shimmering glow will come from the 44 candles on David Cameron’s birthday cake.

He does not seem glum he is in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. If the Tories had gained unilateral control of the UK Government he would be under greater pressure from his party’s more zealous spirits on the right to slash taxes and make more anti-EU comments.

But like a new husband who suddenly has an excuse to pull out of any social engagement he doesn’t want to attend, he can disappoint ideologues with a shrug, a smile and the comment: “You know I’d love to do that, but my partner won’t stand for that kind of thing.”

Mr Cameron is no Europhile, as demonstrated by his decision to forge an anti-federalist group in the European Union, but nor does he seem enthralled by the prospect of new adventures with the United States.

During the Cold War, Conservatives relished the UK’s supposed role as Greece to America’s Rome. The chemistry between Thatcher and Reagan was more explosive than anything in a nuclear warhead.

But in a recent interview with Simon Schama, the PM admitted that the US Right and Tories were no longer ideal dancing partners.

He said: “How shall I put this? We seem to have drifted apart ... there is an element of American conservatism that is headed in a very culture war direction, which is just different.”

Despite the energetic efforts of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, there is no UK counterpart to the US Tea Party movement. Crowds do not fill Hyde Park calling for Cameron & co to slash deeper and faster at the deficit, and his proposals to shrink the state’s role in the delivery of public services are not talked about with excitement at most barbecues.

But as his foreign policy in-tray stacks up, this pragmatist Prime Minister may well lose patience with long-running crises in Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Sudan, Iran and the ice-caps and decide it’s time to get a grip.

And if he decides that the US has failed to provide the leadership the global community demands, maybe he will welcome his Lib Dem Deputy PM into the Downing Street den and say, “Nick, do you think this EU-thing could ever actually work?”

A Conservative leader may seem an unlikely candidate to seize the potential of the EU to be a force for stability and progress in a fractious world, but this is a young(ish) dad for whom grand ambitions are not daydreams but a to-do list.

A Saturday column

Conversations with Hauerwas

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There's a delightful and gratifyingly long interview with the great Stanley Hauerwas at Third Way. One excerpt:

What do you think makes for a really good theological conversation?

Not being afraid of being in disagreement with one an­other, so you learn from suddenly discovering that your friend thinks things that never occurred to you and you are not sure what to do with them! I think also working within recognisable reading regimes, so that you both are trying to negotiate how to read this book in relation­ship to that book. Reading together, I think, and being ready to learn from one another, is really important.

I think also that you need work to do together - for example, to write something together. Sometimes it can be quite difficult and painful, but it can also be extreme-­ly illuminating. If you consider together the challenges before the church today and you have a similar sense of what they are but maybe not of how to respond to them, that can be very fruitful.

The Good News of Rebel Literature

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The diaries and personal letters of
Politicians and prime ministers,
Revolutionaries and explorers,
Inventors and artists,
Give us a unique glimpse of the private thoughts, hopes and fears
Of the men and women who shaped our world,
Often against extraordinary odds.



The Hebrew scriptures are an epic collection of
Poetry, history and law.
But the early leaders of the Christian church did not
Leave behind long works of theology
Or Leviticus-style instructions on how to act
In a multitple situations.



Instead, the Holy Spirit compelled
The church to preserve
The letters the apostles penned
To scatterings of believers.
In these “books” – which are rarely more than a few pages long –
We read of the passions and concerns
Of the people planted the early church.

These were the people
Who brought Jews and Gentiles together;
Who knocked down the barriers between rich and poor,
And preached a message which they believed could –
And we know did –
Change the world.



If we want to learn how to change our society so that
Lives can be transformed with the same
Freedom, forgiveness and love which spilled out of the first Christians
We should read the letters of the Apostles
And come to appreciate the
Priorities of these preachers.

We will also learn to spot the bear-traps
That can wreck any fledging community of faith.
The book of Titus is nothing less
Than a message delivered to the leader of a revolution
On the island of Crete.
But this short letter from the Apostle Paul
Does not read like rebel literature.
Paul does not tell Christian slaves to throw off their chains.
Nor does he encourage the island’s congregations
To plot a revolt against the state.
But he explains that God is staging a revolution against
The power of sin.
God is the warrior
Whose power is at work deep
In the darkest chambers of the human heart.



The knowledge that God is at work in his creation
Is the heartbeat of Paul’s theology.
He had not stumbled across a forgotten truth
In an ancient religious text;
He was not attempting to reform a faith
That had gone off-course over centuries.

Rather, he believed that the living God
Was on the loose,
Changin his life and the lives of those around him.
Paul was convinced that the world needed to know this fact
If it was to escape the pulverising consequences of sin.



Sin has squatted in God’s creation like a toxic toad.
Its poison has destroyed relations between men and women,
Fathers and daughters,
Mothers and sons.
Tribes and nations,
Brothers and sisters,
Neighbours and workers.
Now, Paul has discovered,
God is going to break this reign of evil.



The signs of the revolution will not be riots and beheadings
Or the installation of a religious cleric in a council chamber.
Something much more subversive will take place
As God’s kingdom breaks into life.



Christians will not live each day thirsting for secular power
And hating anyone who gets in their way.
Instead, as they start to live to the laws of God’s revolutionary order
Wives will love their husbands and their children,
Men and women will obey the earthly authorities,
And everyone will be ready to do good deeds at every opportunity.

People will give up everyday vices
Like gossip and drunkenness.
This is a revolution of the heart,
Which challenges and changes
The most basic impulses of the believers.

This isn’t the type of character change that comes about
Through gritted teeth and the power of the will.
The church is not a diet group
Or an anger management course.
Rather, God is at work inside the bodies and the minds
Of people who will welcome him in.



Like a rescue worker who picks up a bird
Whose feathers are trapped
In the dark gunk of an oil slick,
God washes his people clean of the polluting effects of sin.
He heals their wings and teaches them to fly.

Paul was Titus’s mentor and he knew all about sin.
In chapter three he tells him:

“For we also once were foolish ourselves,
Disobedient,
Deceived,
Enslaved to various lusts and pleasures,
Spending our life in malice and envy,
Hateful,
Hating one another.”

Hang on a moment,
You might say.
It's one thing for people to become model citizens.
It's another to claim that this process is changing the world.
How does this challenge the systems that grind down the poor
And enslave the oppressed?

Paul, a Jew in first century Palestine,
Knew what it meant to live under occupation.
But he also knew what it meant to be trapped by sin.

The Bible does not turn a blind eye to
The curse of political repression.



Exodus,
The story of how God rescued his people
From slavery in Egypt,
Is perhaps the most famous story
Of liberation in human history.

In the pages of the Bible
The prophets rage against the evils of corrupt tyrants.
And the Gospel narratives display in unflinching clarity
The odious cruelty of an occupying power
And a collaborating religious elite.

But one of the glories of the Bible is that it does more than condemn
The public outrages anyone can see.
It addresses the secret oppression of sin
And reveals how it can clutch us captive.



Thousands of years before Freud started itemising
The shame, guilt and fear
Which is webbed through the human subconscious,
God revealed a law which showed the world
What righteousness looked like.

What is righteousness?
It is the revelation of a way of life
In which our conscience and our actions can chime;
A life which looks something like
What a loving creator might intend.



But Paul also knew how impossible it was to live
As a human life without
Daily tripping over.
He had been “enslaved to various lusts and pleasures”.
Every one of us know what this means.

Sin turns pleasures such as sex and wine
Into chains that trap and cut.
Paul knew what it was like to spend a “life in malice and envy”.
He had taken a leading role in rounding up the first Christians.

These men and women had challenged the power of
The religious establishment of which he was a shining member.
He sweated to stamp the movement out.
But he had not understood
He was not just dealing with a
Movement of people
But a movement of the Holy Spirit.



Little did he know that
God was about to move in his life.
An early Christian evangelist would not have looked at Paul and thought,
“Ah! Here comes a potential convert!”

Back in the days when Paul was known as Saul,
Hate festered in his heart,
It burned like cholesterol of the soul.
Despite his prodigious intelligence,
He was so shaped by his schooling and his prejudices
That he was not on the verge of studying the Hebrew scriptures with an open mind
And discovering that the work of Jesus
Was the fulfilment of what Prophets predicted.

He was not about to throw away his prestige as an educated zealot
To sign-up with this strange collection of fishermen
And tax collectors who spoke in tongues
And believed in a resurrected Jesus.



But on the road to Damascus,
God intervened.
Yahweh, the creator of the cosmos,
Knocked Paul off course, literally.
Paul saw a flash of light from heaven
And Jesus asked him: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
This question changed Paul’s life.

He could see that in trying to imprison and murder
These strange zealots
He was actually attacking this risen Christ.
The Messiah,
The Lord of the Universe,
Was one with these people.
He dwelled among them and he dwelled in them.

Through the course of Paul’s life,
He would come to understand the riches and wonder of what this meant.
In the great epistles of Romans and Ephesians
He would expound the significance of this miracle
For all creation and history.



But in his own life,
As the shackles of malice and the manacles of hate fell away,
He tasted freedom.
In the short letter he sent Titus,
We see his desperate concern that the young church
Should not lose sight of the power and precious beauty of this liberty
By squabbling about arcane points of pseudo-mystic speculation
Or getting dragged into the mire of religious legalism.

Just as God had freed the Israelites from Egypt with a salvo or miracles,
Yahweh had led Paul into a new world of love and possibility
Which he could never have reached
By force of will,
Pursuit of reason
Or the power of conviction.

He knew that he could never live a life
Of perfect righteousness
Which would satisfy God by his own efforts.
And yet, now, God had gripped hold of him and rebooted his soul.



The tenderness of God’s love contrasted with the brittle rigidity of Paul’s old faith.
But in the seconds, hours, days, months and years which lay ahead,
The persecutor became a pioneer who took this message of hope across Europe.

He explained to Titus:
“[W]hen the kindness of God our saviour and His love for mankind appeared,
He saved us,
Not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness,
But according to his mercy,
By the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit,
Whom he poured upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Saviour,
That being justified by His grace we might be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.”

The Bible exposes the blotches of sin and
Disgrace and shame
And guilt which hide in every human,
But it also reveals the character of God to humanity.

We can only know of God what he chooses to reveal,
And in these few, wonderful verses in the third chapter of Titus we learn
He is a God who is kind,
Who loves us,
Who saves,
Who shows mercy,
Who washes us,
Regenerates us,
Renews us,
Who pours his very spirit upon us,
And who transforms humans into heirs of eternal life.

This is an inheritance and a gift we have no
Right to expect.
It is possible to go to church every week and not know
This revolutionary truth of the Gospel.



Are we willing to let God free us from foolishness,
Rescue us from hate and malice,
And liberate us from pleasures which have
Become private prisons?

What are the consequences for our world if
The message of Jesus is not heard?
How many more years can our city, country and planet
Survive the everyday collisions
Of human greed, envy and deception?

Just as Moses rounded up the Israelites,
Got them to pack their pack their bags and
Prepare for the terrible miracle of the Passover,
Paul made sure the believers knew their lives
Were about to be changed for good.

They were not to think about the work of the Holy Spirit
As a nice, utopian metaphor.
Immediately after telling Titus of the hope
That God wants to pour into the lives of his children,
He said:

“This is a trustworthy statement;
And concerning these things I want you to speak confidently,
So that those who have believed God may be careful to engage in good deeds.”

This nudge to get on and do “good deeds” affirms that Paul is
Not selling a new philosophy to
Daydream about on the way home from work.

Paul knows Christians live in the
Messy world of children and managers
And employees and responsibilities.



Yet if God is at work in our hearts,
Then his new life will flow through our bodies,
Take hold of our thoughts
And lead us on new revolutionary adventures.
With a spirit of love and gentleness,
In the quietness of the home and the
Staid surroundings of the workplace,
God is using his people to hoe the weeds of envy, malice and hate
Out of his creation.



In the Garden of Eden,
He gave us the fun of naming the animals.
In today’s life on earth,
He lets us get on with the simple but monumental task
Of loving and caring,
Just as he taught us to do.

When Paul tells Titus to teach the Christians in Crete
To “malign no one,
To be uncontentious,
Gentle,
Showing consideration for all men”
He is calling them to follow the example of God.

Back in 1979,
The Belfast Bible teacher David Gooding remarked:
“When we feel like acting against somebody.
We do well to ask ourselves,
‘If God had treated us like we are proposing to treat this person,
Would we ever have been saved?’
The way we treat each other should be the way God has treated us.
May God save us from ever treating anyone in such a way that if God had treated us in that manner we would have perished forever.”

God does not call us to kill, bully, bribe or threaten.
Instead, he calls us to live and love as husbands and wives;
Sons and daughters;
And sisters and brothers.
He gives us the sheer pleasure of
Existing in his creation
As children blessed with the opportunity
To share his message of eternal life.



Let us give the Holy Spirit the full freedom
To wash us and renew us when we need such a dousing
And in the true grit of the everyday
Let us find not just the courage but the power
To love with revolutionary zeal.

When confronted with the values and systems
Of this world
Love can seem an act of rebellion.
But it is in fact
An expression
Of joy at a drenching in grace.