The challenge of filling your blank page or keeping it empty

The start of a sabbatical sets Ian Hamlin thinking through the tension between contemplation and action.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

A notebook is open at two blank pages. a pen rests across the page.s.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

The famed anxiety inducing nemesis of any writer or creative, the ever-daunting blank page. Well, I’ve bought myself a new notebook, so I have a literal open page in front of me, but also something more.

I’m starting a three-month sabbatical from my role as a Baptist minister. Stepping down from my day-to-day responsibilities of work, but also, to a degree, away from the basic structures that define my life; the people, purpose and rhythm of, not only what I do, but who I am. It’s a weird sort of job like that.

What would you do with three months off? From work, family commitments, whatever it is that defines your day to day ordinarily? Well, buy a notebook, obviously, but after that?

I’m conscious, of course, that this is a rare privilege, a consequence, I guess, of the strange link between a professionalised clergy and academia from days past, but also, a recognition of the all-encompassing nature of the role. Maybe, because of that, it’s also a real challenge, a true ‘blank page’.

The first instinct, I guess, is to take a break, to stop, to breathe. That’s undeniably good, but how long for? Is that it? At what point does stopping and breathing become lazy indulgence? I’ve been reading quite a lot lately, perhaps subconsciously preparing for these months, about taking time out, resting, slowing down. Often, these thoughts have been expressed as an exploration of the notion of ‘Sabbath’ that Judeo-Christian notion of keeping a period of time, a day a week, special, sacred even. This, of course, is the route from which ‘sabbaticals’ have grown, not so much the ivory towers and quadrangles after all, but more the Hebrew prophets and itinerant Jewish preachers of ancient days, seeking to find the rhythms of a fulfilled life There’s John Mark Comer’s ubiquitous The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which seems to have touched a cultural nerve, but also Ruth Haley Barton’s Invitation to Solitude and Silence. Then, out of the blue, I was invited to reflect again on Walter Brueggemann’s sense of Sabbath as:

‘the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption, and the endless pursuit of private well-being’.

He also observed that, recognizing just how we, like multiple generations before us, each in their own way, are utterly enmeshed in systems and structures designed, not so much for our well-being but rather the benefit of others,

‘the departure into restfulness is both urgent and difficult, for our motors are set to run at brick-making speed.’

(A reference to one of those earliest structures, highlighted in the Bible, where Egypt’s Pharaoh had Hebrew slaves building ever larger structures, to assuage their growing thoughts of freedom.)

Most recently of all, I’ve been struck, by following Pete Grieg’s pilgrimage walk from Iona to Lindisfarne, and the passing comment that the original Celtic monks, in making the same journey, eschewed the offer of horses to ride, preferring to walk, fearing that the increased pace of travel might cause them to miss something.

I’m sure I’ve missed lots, I’m convinced I’m caught up in a whole range of hectic, consumerist structures, and I’m often tired, so rest, gets a big tick from me. At least I think it does, but barely do I sit down, and I’m feeling restless again. How long can/should I keep this up? There are so many things to do, opportunities to explore, people to please. I need to justify this privilege of time and space.

His speaking, his marching, his campaigning and protesting, even his sitting, was driven with a passion and an urgency that was infectious, and effective.

And then there’s that ever-present sense within me, my natural instinct if you will, true, I’m sure, of many. That I like the idea of contemplation, the need for it even, but, actually, I’m more driven by activism, by getting stuff done. The focal point of my whole break, planned for quite a while now, is a trip to the USA to follow the life of one of my spiritual heroes, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Now, there’s an activist if ever there was one. His speaking, his marching, his campaigning and protesting, even his sitting, was driven with a passion and an urgency that was infectious, and effective. His consistent rage against injustice has been a call to arms, both to his immediate contemporaries, and generations subsequently, to get up, go out and do. Ultimately, of course, he poured out his whole life in the cause. It’s taking me an age to read a few preparatory biographies of him, stimulated as I am from every page, challenged to act, to never let injustice rule while I have voice and agency.

So, there we have it, another paradox, in the complicated business of being the person I’m meant to be, realizing the best of God’s investment in me. The conflict between rest and exploration, being and doing, contemplation and activism. I imagine we are all drawn to a certain place on that spectrum.

Blank pages, freed up days and diaries, only serve to underline what we already are. But, I suspect, we can all also hear the call to either end of the range; to be stirred to action by the things that break the heart of God, and to lay down our burdens, take upon ourselves the easier yoke, and live increasingly in ‘the unforced rhythms of grace’. Maybe, to start with at least, listening to that call, recognizing the tension, while not allowing it to create pressure in us, is enough. Hearing, praying, scribbling my first, semi coherent, thoughts on that vast empty page, making myself another coffee, and wondering what I might do next.

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Education

25 January 2024

4 min read

There’s a blindingly obvious way to teach religious tolerance

George Pitcher disagrees with the media’s approval of a school ban on religious observance.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

school pupils sit at desk, some with a hand raised.

Michaela School pupils in class.

The decision by “Britain’s strictest school”, the Michaela Community School in north-west London, to ban religious observance after a Muslim majority among the children started prayer rituals, which led to some bullying and violence (and indeed a lawsuit), has met with almost universal media approval across the political spectrum.

Nick Timothy, a columnist on the Daily Telegraph and a former spin-doctor for Theresa May as prime minister, predictably used it as a dread warning against an Islamic threat under the headline: “Multiculturism is becoming a Trojan horse for Islamist domination.”

In what some might term as the sensible middle-ground of the Sunday Times, Camilla Long weighed in with an attack on Muslim cultural observance and then posed the extraordinarily illiberal question: “Wouldn’t it be better if we banished faith in schools altogether?” On the left, Polly Toynbee in the Guardian agreed, concluding that it’s “time to abolish religious schools.”

This seems to be the kind of old-school management that said that if you can’t play together nicely, there will be no playtime for anyone.

There’s something cultic about the free school Michaela and its headteacher, Katharine Birbalsingh. The right-wing love it for its Gradgrind strict disciplines and consequently high academic results. The left are said to hate it for much the same reasons. And almost universally Ms Birbalsingh is treated as an educational demi-god.

Allow me to demur. The first thing I want to say is something I think is blindingly obvious: You don’t teach children religious tolerance by being religiously intolerant. I don’t usually like to have to coin a truism, but there we are.

The desire to ban is an unfortunate tendency in Birbalsingh. I understand why she might want to ban knives or drugs or porn in her school, as would all schools, but religious observance? This seems to be the kind of old-school management that said that if you can’t play together nicely, there will be no playtime for anyone.

Transposed into the religious context, that becomes: “If you can’t pray together nicely, there will be no prayers.” This grows into an extreme form of secularism, which pretends that there is no religion in the world, when we know that in fact it’s full of religious people. That doesn’t seem to be a good education for our young, if good education is meant to prepare them for the world, which I posit that it does.

I’m with our late Queen Elizabeth on this and, in particular, the profound generosity of her Christian faith.

The next thing I want to say is that it’s incumbent on a decent school to teach that the three Abramic faiths – in order of their emergence, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – are in their authentic forms religions of peace.

Anyone who claims that Islam’s holy book, the Koran, is intrinsically violent clearly hasn’t read the the Bible or the Torah. But, in all three instances, human violence and oppression are met with the redemption of an all-loving God.

It follows that the Michaela can and should ban bullying and intimidation, but not the authentic cultural practices of these religions. It might, naturally, simply be easier to ban the lot and be done with it, but nobody has said that running a school is meant to be easy.

In my own experience as a parish priest, visiting a Church of England primary school (the sort that Toynbee, as a good liberal, would ban) for assemblies, is that tolerance and diversity are best taught naturally by practice.

At prayer time, I was gently reminded by the headteacher that I shouldn’t invite the children to pray with words such as “hands together” as that’s not how all families pray (if they pray at all). Better to say: “Let’s get ready to pray, however we do that.” Tolerance in action.

Finally, off the back of talking about a Christian school in a nominally Christian state, I’d like to conclude with how a Christian school (clearly not Birbalsingh’s) should behave. Clearly, evangelising in a multicultural institution is inappropriate. What we should aspire to is pluralism.

I’m with our late Queen Elizabeth on this and, in particular, the profound generosity of her Christian faith. She delivered a speech at Lambeth Palace to mark her Diamond Jubilee in 2012. She started by saying: “The concept of our established Church is occasionally misunderstood and, I believe, commonly under-appreciated. Its role is not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the Church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.”

She went on to say: “Gently and assuredly, the Church of England has created an environment for other faith communities and indeed people of no faith to live freely.” It seems to me that this should be an aspiration that is taught in our schools. Not just the Christian ones, but all of them.

It invites children of other faiths and of no faith to respond accordingly. It seems to be at the heart of an education that teaches how the world actually is, rather than how we fantasise it to be.

And it provides a considerably more valuable lesson for children than the instinct of Ms Birbalsingh and her media cheerleaders to ban things.