Friends of the Earth calls on Scotland to ban fracking

After a week in which fracking became a political football in the post-indyref constitutional fallout, Friends of the Earth Scotland have stepped out of the politics to ask people to email their MSP demanding that Holyrood use its existing, sufficient, powers to ban fracking in Scotland outright. You can participate here.

I know I have a rainbow readership of nationalists and internationalists, devolutionists, independents and British-constitution-revivers, environmentalists and business people; but I can think of few of you who would disagree on this issue, for the reasons I allude to below. There are few of you who would fail to join the opposition to fracking for any reason other than a apathetic sense that it probably wouldn't work.

If you all think that, it won't. But you won't, because that's not how people are thinking any more.

The Friends of the Earth Scotland action page automatically addresses your email to your MSPs when you put in your postcode; but I decided their draft text read a bit like those intercessions we have at church which explain the issues to God as if he didn't know, so I wrote my own, with a bit more stirring rhetoric. Feel free to pinch any of it.

Dear Jim Eadie/ Neil Findlay/ Cameron Buchanan/ Sarah Boyack/ Alison Johnstone/ Kezia Dugdale/ Gavin Brown,

You are well aware of the complex issues surrounding shale gas extraction: of the imperative need to eliminate climate-changing carbon emissions from all kinds of fossil fuel, of the profound and unclear local environmental impact of this new technology, of the potential for an easy solution to badly pressing financial and energy supply problems, of the extent to which fracking has become a political football in UK constitutional debates, and of the overwhelming public opposition to fracking.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to set aside the pressures from all sides and to do what I'm sure you, like the overwhelming majority of people in Scotland, know what is right: to use the powers Holyrood already has to ban this destructive, short-term, cynical practice outright. There are other, better solutions to energy shortages and budget deficits, and I, for one, will do all I can to support realistic solutions to these real problems.

A ban on fracking will reflect well on the Scottish government, will cause Scotland to be celebrated around the world, and will have tremendous popularity amongst the Scottish people from across the political spectrum. I believe it will also be good for the Scottish economy in guaranteeing the integrity, literally, of the central belt, and in generating demand for creative renewable energy generation, which tends to create local jobs.

I look forward to your response, and to hearing of your participation in cross-party legislation that will ensure no-one in Scotland need ever be frightened of fracking again.

Best wishes,

Eleanor Harris

Do it.

On physics and politics, and how to tell the difference

The tremendous thing about Scottish Independence referendum has been the engagement. The 84% turnout was the finale to weeks of often heated, yet almost without exception peaceful, political debate at every level of society. I walked through the departing crowds of the Orange March and counter-demonstrators in Edinburgh the weekend before the vote, through partisan, working-class yes- and no-voters with badges and flags. They were stickering and de-stickering the Scottish Enlightenment statues so fast they twinkled, yelling "fucker" like it was the only word in the language, as perfectly non-violently as the middle-class partisans' more passive aggressive outbursts of "doomed" "must" and "frankly insulting". I hope it has been apparent to people furth of Scotland what huge quantities of excellent generosity and humour there have been alongside the insults.

There was a low moment about a fortnight ago, a dreadful mud-slinging television debate, and the chat the day after from both sides was all about what a shameful embarrassment it was to live in a country where politics had reached such an abysmal standard. But then, the miracle, the divided Scotland united in a determination to raise that standard. Everyone realised that 'Scottish pride' couldn't reside in waving saltires and bashing English Tories. It had to come from listening to your opponents, taking criticism on board, learning to discuss politics intelligently.

And so, crashily and noisily, we did. My complaints about the poor standard of the debate led to me discovering the excellent commentary of Professor Paul Cairney, thanks to whom I now understand the Barnett Formula. Many strong partisans realised that blind partisans were unpersuasive: anyone not already on their side simply stopped listening to them (I had to "silence" one on Facebook).

I weighed in: when some no-voting friends seemed genuinely to believe vandalism was a characteristic unique to yes-voters I made sure to find a counter-example. Although yes-voters (reasonably) huffed at my comparing them to fundamentalist Christians, they also made an effort, when talking to me at least, to demonstrate that they were thinking for themselves, not merely swept along by the rhetoric. Meanwhile, in a geeky corner of twitter, I had met and got into an enlightening discussion with a political theorist Robert Lowry about the mechanics of "groupthink". Certainly, my own understanding of and engagement in current national politics and political debate -- which like most people in their 30s has been cripplingly irrelevant and dull for our entire lifetime -- has shot up. This article is a result, and an attempt to keep the momentum which everyone agrees we need to maintain.

The purpose of this article is to draw your attention to the importance of one piece of fuzzy-mindedness which has clouded the political debate and judgement of many highly intelligent people (that is to say, many of my friends!). It is the vital difference between politics and physics. It has been clarified in my mind by coincidence of the Scottish independence referendum, the global People's Climate March movement, and my reading about the historical theory of post-structuralism, a modern philosophic reassertion of the age-old doctrine of free-will.

If you do the science carefully enough, you can make predictions about physics. Water will always evaporate at a certain rate at a given temperature and humidity. The probability of Ebola mutating to become less deadly and more infectious can be calculated. On certain ongoing phenomena, notably climate change, the science has been done very carefully indeed. This means that 99.99% of scientists can agree that it is linked to human induced carbon dioxide emissions and will result in serious consequences within the next thirty years. It also means that predictions turn out to be right, again and again.

Politics is not like this. It may be true to say that that people from certain backgrounds are more likely to vote a certain way. The most striking recent example I saw of this was a terrifyingly close correlation between membership of Anglican/ Dissenting churches in the 1851 religious census, and Tory/ Labour voting in late twentieth-century elections. If we are really so in thrall to our historic thought-patterns, do we really have any free will? However, while historic events may be explicable in terms like this, they consistently defy prediction. This is the source of the currently trendy, and very irritating, historians' phrase, 'the future is not my period', which guarantees they are rarely invited to comment on political events. While demographics and votes may be linked, elections are always interesting and uncertain because, unlike the evaporating water-droplet, free-willed people can and do vote against expectations. One individual's stirring speech, one committee's new policy announcement, one expert's new piece of intelligence, may unexpectedly sway enough voters to change the result. More importantly, the long-term consequences of any given result -- such as Scottish independence or union -- is anybody's guess. All the predictions about independent Scottish utopias, or nightmare broken Britain scenarios, were based on nothing at all, or rather, they were not predictions at all: they were aspirations and fears. The truth is, political arrangements are created by human beings. If human beings get together to make a system work, they can. If they want to break it, they can. This is not the case when dealing with the forces of physics.

This does not mean, however, that politics is simply random. It means that you, the actor, have a power to influence political movements in a way totally impossible in the case of something like the climate. Your rhetoric, your quiet networking, your expert input at the right moment, could have a power out of all proportion to your quantity. Being one person out of ten million, one free-willed person, means a great deal more than being one water droplet out of ten million, if you want to make it so. That's what I'm trying to do with this article, with my twitter feed. This was Foucault's lesson about power.

Understanding this difference between politics and physics is vital to empowerment: I would almost say it is the key to your freedom. Unsurprisingly, historians are prone to imagine physics works like politics, while scientists tend to treat politics as if it will be obedient to the laws of physics, leaving both floundering.

My experience of history conferences is of a greater level of uninterest and lack of knowledge in the environmental crisis than amongst my general acquaintance. Environmental crisis is largely about events in the future: the future is unpredictable and therefore not worth worrying about because there is nothing we can do about it. They fail to realise that the predictions of mass extinction, storms, drought and so forth are not guesses to do with free will and human behaviour: they are the predictable consequences of physical actions, which can be predictably changed by changing the actions.

My experience of scientists is that they are prone to overestimate the logical behaviour of human beings. They imagine that people will act consistently and predictably, either acting logically, or (if they are more sociologically-minded scientists) acting according to demographic. They expect to be able to predict the consequences of an action such as a yes vote, and will confidently repeat the predictions of the most reliable-sounding commentator as if they were scientific results.

To me, both appear disempowered by blindness. Why should I claim any greater insight? I do not believe these friends are any less intelligent than me (on the contrary!). But I do have an unusually strong interdisciplinary tendency. I'm trained as a historian, and frankly too inaccurate and impatient to be a scientist, yet I'm strongly drawn to science because in many ways I find nature far more interesting and appealing than people. My observations on these twin blindnesses come from hanging out, a lot, with both scientists and historians, and, applying my general historian curiosity about the workings of human nature to both groups, thinking about how they are free, or unfree, as part of my own quest for empowerment and freedom (for I went to look at, and was inspired by, the Declaration of Arbroath in primary school, as much as the next Scot).

The consequences of this blindness and disempowerment are potentially disastrous. It results in the best historians, the ones who often train political leaders at university, nonchalantly observing as we blunder towards environmental crisis and scientists scream "do something". It results in scientists weighing in to, or keeping out of political debates without really understanding how human societies work, while historians mutter, "you idiots!" For the environmental crisis, which is about a physical event caused by the political workings of global society, it is imperative that the two groups learn one anothers' wisdom, and collaborate in action.

So, my intelligent Scottish and beyond-Scotland readers, as we continue to develop our empowered political debate over the coming years, I want you to take a deliberately interdisciplinary approach. I want you to cultivate the simultaneous virtues of confidence in your own power, and humility in your own limitations; to critique others, and to learn from them; to stay involved. And I look forward to being part of this new Scottish enlightenment in which good philosophy leads to world-changing action (because there's nothing to stop us being inspired by historical examples, of deciding we'd like to make history repeat itself). I look forward to reading this article a year from now and thinking "gosh that sounds stupid: what a lot I have learned since then, and what a lot we have done".

The First Clergy of St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral Edinburgh

St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Palmerston Place, Edinburgh was designed by George Gilbert Scott and consecrated in 1879. St Mary's was funded by the bequest of two sisters, Mary and Barbara Walker, whose fortune as landowners had been made by the housing and railway development of the West End of Edinburgh. How did this new Cathedral understand itself? What identity did its architect provide? Who were its congregation? How did it belong in a Presbyterian industrial city? I begin with a group of eleven clergy who were closely connected with its foundation, and who provided its spiritual vision.

The Clergy

Bishop Charles Terrot and Dean Edward Ramsay of Edinburgh, and John Sinclair were older clergy who had known the Walker sisters, and were appointed by them as Trustees to plann the Cathedral.

In March 1871 Mary Walker died and the will came into effect, but the project was launched amidst a complete change in clerical personnel. Henry Cotterill became coadjutor in 1871 then Bishop on Terrot's death in 1872. The energetic Dean Ramsay also died in 1872. Cotterill appointed James Montgomery Dean in 1873. Finally Sinclair, last of the old guard, died in 1875.

In 1878 the Cathedral chapter was appointed. Montgomery was made Dean of the Cathedral (an office later re-named Provost) as well as of the Diocese. Sub-Dean John Cazenove and Chaplains William Meredith and Reginald Mitchell-Innes comprised the other full-time staff, while Incumbent Canons Daniel Fox Sandford of St John's Princes Street, Gildart Jackson of St James' Leith and William Bird Bushby of the Duke of Buccleuch's chapel at Dalkeith were senior clergy in the diocese of Edinburgh.

Scottish or English?

The question usually first asked of a Scottish Episcopalian's identity is, 'were they Scottish or English?', but the answers for this group were far from straightforward.

Bishop Terrot's parents, who met in India where Terrot was born, were both from French Hugenot families. When his father was killed in action his family invited his mother to live with them in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Terrot was educated in Cambridge but holidayed with his uncle, incumbent of the Episcopal Chapel at Haddington, succeeding him in that post and spending his entire career in the diocese of Edinburgh.

John Sinclair, son of the editor of the Statistical Account of Scotland, grew up in Edinburgh, studied in Oxford and became Rector of Sutterby in Lincolnshire, but aged 25 returned to the diocese of Edinburgh for seventeen years, before heading in 1839 for an ecclesiastical-political career in London.
Ramsay, son of the Sheriff of Kincardineshire, was largely educated in England: at Durham and Cambridge, with his uncle in Yorkshire, and as a curate in Somerset where, in charge in the absence of the rector, he was remembered for befriending the local Methodists. He returned to the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1824 and was distinguished by his energy and intelligence, playing an important role in removing barriers between the Scottish Episcopal and Anglican church, and shining as a national literary figure.

Bishop Cotterill was the son of the evangelical Rector of Blakeney in Norfolk and educated at Cambridge. He came to Scotland as Bishop of Edinburgh late in his career, after serving for thirty-five years in Madras, Brighton and Grahamstown in South Africa. Montgomery, grandson of the Baronet of Stobo, made his career in the land of his birth, although he received his theological training in Durham and spent two years as a curate in Dorset before Terrot recruited him as curate for St Paul's York Place.

Cazenove, from London, had a British Tractarian formation as curate at St Peter's, Leeds, followed by twenty years as Vice-Provost then Provost of the Cathedral of the Isles on Cumbrae in Argyll, before settling in Edinburgh where he developed a distinguished educational career.

Sandford was a Scot by birth, education, and career. However, he was the grandson of a prominent English immigrant in whose diocese the elder clergy had grown up,  Bishop Daniel Sandford (d.1830), the first Englishman to become a bishop in the Scottish Episcopal Church, assisting it to emerge from post-Jacobite obscurity and into communion with the Church of England. The migrant missionary gene emerged late in his grandson's life: he became Bishop of Tasmania in 1883.

Jackson and Bushby were English immigrants, as were the young chaplains, Meredith and Mitchell-Innes, who were at the start of careers that would lead both of them further north: Meredith after a period as Vice-Principal of Chichester Theological College returned to Scotland as Rector of Muthill and then Crieff in Fife, while Mitchell-Innes held various diocesan posts in Edinburgh, Glasgow and finally Inverness.

To categorise any individual in this group as Scottish, English or even British would be misleading: collectively, they were Episcopalians of the British Empire. What did they think about theology, Scottish identity, church establishment, social action? What shape did the teaching in the new church take? To find out you'll have to read my full article. All I need to do is write it.

The Spirit of Glen Doll

In the early 1970s, the Edinburgh Academy were given a bequest. With a vision and drive which has become legendary, the headmaster, Bertie Mills, bought one-and-a-half farm cottages and an attached Forestry Commission lodge in Glen Doll, beyond the end of the road, high in the mountains of Angus.

They named it Blair House after the donor, and the teachers fitted it out as a field centre. My Dad was one of a new generation of teachers for whom the new Blair House was the most exciting part of their induction to the school. Adventurous year-group trips for juniors, camping, climbing, bouldering, wide-games; biology, geography and botany field trips for seniors; music, art and drama trips for the quiet aesthetes. My introduction to Blair House was the Easter holiday revision trips led by Dad and his colleagues for Higher students: studying in the morning, and walking up Driesh or Jock's Road in the afternoon. For the children of the staff, it was all holiday: it was all our lives.

Blair House was less suitable as a twenty-first century outdoor centre. It is too small for a whole year-group. It is inconveniently remote from specialist instructors, and has no opportunity for watersports. Its design did not envisage that the Academy would become co-educational. It required a great deal of staff and curriculum time. It needs major work to meet new fire safety standards and this eventually closed Blair House at the beginning of last year. To the sorrow of the biologists and geographers, staff and their families, and of generations of alumni, the school decided to sell the beloved Blair House and develop a more diverse outdoor education programme.

And I decided to buy it, and make it the educational field centre Blair House again.

I knew people would be delighted, but I hadn't expected the torrent of support from the wider Blair House diaspora, and the excitement amongst all my acquaintances. I felt as if I've gained an enormous extended family, and it made me dare to think that, even though I could only just pay the purchase price and couldn't get a mortgage for the refurbishment, and even though I have no experience of running a business or managing a refurbishment, that it might really be possible. A crowd-sourced funding scheme and viable business plan looked possible.

I want Blair House to have the educational use for which it was designed, but no longer restricted to the privileged Edinburgh Academy. Why shouldn't it be available to all children taking Higher Geography or Biology? Glen Doll is within easy reach of all the Scottish Universities: why can't I invite all the students to botanise in the globally-important Corrie Fee, or bag their first Munro on the Cairngorm Plateau before lunch, as I've invited my friends over the years?

The eyes of my printmaker friend lit up as she said, 'Residential art courses!' My sister, whose church Destiny has a youthful and culturally diverse urban congregation, said, 'congregational retreats!' My friend at the Botanics said 'it's time we revived the student botanical surveys in Angus: it would be the perfect base'. I hadn't even started advertising.

People always came back from Blair House changed for the better: generations of tiny children explored woods for the first time, teenagers fallen in love for the first time, students saw real mountains for the first time, shy people made lasting friendships, hesitant people discovered their creativity, city people discovered the mighty scale and intimate intricacy of the natural world. My friend and I, in late night bunk-bed discussions, used to call it 'the spirit of Glen Doll'. It's time the spirit of Glen Doll was revived.

My 'grand designs' adventure began on Thursday when I got the keys. This was already the culmination of three years' planning, negotiation and uncertainty, ever since the future of Blair House came in doubt. There's a great deal of work to be done before Blair House can open again, all of it new and challenging for me, but I'm beyond excited. This is all my first and best dreams come true.

Update! The plans are now in place and a timetable for the refurbishment to be completed by the summer, but I will need to find around £200,000 funding to achieve this. I've launched a crowdfunding site with more information about the plans and exciting rewards. Please have a look.

Gothic Revival in Westminster

I was invited to St Matthew's Westminster to give a talk on religion and environmental issues at the inaugural Just Festival Westminster, and unexpectedly found myself in a George Gilbert Scott church.

St Matthew's, begun in 1849, was a high-church mission in a notorious slum area of Westminster known as the Devil's Acre. I dread to think what the price of these flats might be now, but the narrow lanes and names like "Perkin's Rents" and "Old Pye Street" recall a time when bare food and shelter were foremost in people's minds. A church and, as so often in these missions more importantly a school, represented a great leap forward in civilization.

St Matthew's is a strange church, because it burn down in the 1970s, so is a now a collection of rescued George Gilbert Scott fragments juxtaposed with unashamedly modern additions and reconstructions. There is still a sense of how the weary and heavy laden of Devil's Acre might have come there to find rest amongst the beauty:

And been raised above the squalor of the lanes outside by the combined splendour and homeliness of George Gilbert Scott's gilded reredos, depicting the nativity:

The fact that the original stained glass consists of rescued fragments makes one look at them with fresh appreciation, perhaps more as the original beholders saw them, perhaps feeling that they were rescued fragments of humanity themselves.

St Matthew's is like a beautiful patchwork casket for new works of religious art. I particularly like this Mary and child, with her brazen nudity and all the stroppiness of the Magnificat. She isn't just talking about God showing strength with his arm, scattering the proud and exalting the humble and meek, she's jolly well doing it herself:

The Just Festival in which I was participating included a new piece of art showing different faces of God: much bigger and more spectacular than it appears in my picture. My friend Raymond, whose organisation of the Festival included procuring the enormous exhibition panel to display it on, was worried it would be a bit controversial but it seemed to meet with general acclaim.

Apparently the naked Mary had caused a bit of a stooshie. So did my "Earth be Glad" talk about religion and the environmental crisis. I feel I'm in good company. Whether you're a nineteenth-century Tractarian missionary, or a twenty-first century environmental campaigner, it's difficult to sing Mary's song at choral evensong every week without becoming a bit revolutionary:

He hath showed strength with his arm;
He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts;
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
And hath exalted the humble and meek;
He hath filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich he hath sent empty away.

So what are you actually asking us to do?

This seems to be the most frequently asked question at the talks I give on religion and the environmental crisis. I'm always slightly put out by it, because the whole talk is about what I think people ought to do. I agree people deserve more help than I give them in the talk: I'm just not sure I'm equipped to do it: the talk itself was my contribution and now it's over to you. However, here is an attempt at a framework based on my talk which might form a useful programme for a group wishing to pursue the idea of looking for hope in the middle of mass extinction.

I think you need to learn, speak, and act.

LEARN

My talk is challenging and fresh not because I'm on the pulse of the zeitgeist, but because I hunt obscure things in dusty archives -- in news that doesn't make headlines, in ancient wisdom our culture neglects. As I argued in my talk, in the face of mass extinction maybe outdated religious concepts might turn out to be useful after all. The first law of history is 'we ain't no smarter than our ancestors'. If you agree we need a change in discourse, the first thing I'm asking you to do is to learn with me. Your brains are as big as mine. If I'm ahead in my thinking it's only because I've been puzzling over this for the past ten years. There's only one of me and there are many of you. The world needs your brains. Your first task is, get learning.

"When people know what they are facing, that's when they dig deep, and find that miraculous hope and courage. That's when they stop being afraid."

Learn about prophets

"You are Jonah. You must be thrown into the sea. You must find the courage that's only found when you've sunk to the very bottom. You must be vomited up on the beach, and you must go and deliver the message. You must turn into the hope."

A prophet in Christian tradition is not someone who foretells the future by reading entrails. It is someone whose insights about the present are so clear that they can understand the probability of future consequences. This is what climate scientists do today, as well as those involved in equally important and less controversial environmental research. However, what makes a prophet different from most scientists is the scientist must retain a detached and objective perspective, whereas the prophet commits his or her whole physical life to becoming the message. This often involves great personal sacrifice, but this is the secret of the prophet's influence: their actions tend to speak louder than their words. A valuable study exercise for a group would to each take one of the prophets in the Bible and see how they go about this, and to do what I did with Jonah. You might be surprised. Try it for Micah, Amos, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, and Christianity's greatest prophet (alongside his other roles), Jesus. Have each person report back and then discuss them. What would it mean for you to take these prophets as your role models today?

- We have an environmental crisis going on, and you're asking us to sit around doing bible study?

- How can a discourse change, can thought patterns change, without thinking and learning? The problem is, you have been used to fruitless, theoretical discussions about the bible, about theories of theology or morality that can never be put to the test or be other than subjective. I'm asking you to read it as a book of practical wisdom that's relevant for real life now. Oh and quit the fruitless religious discussions.

"Whether you believe in God, or not, or don't know, today it doesn't matter, because the situation of Jonah stays the same, and our situation, so spookily similar to Jonah's, stays the same."  

Learn about the environmental crisis

"Ecosystems are good at recovering, but faced with increasingly violent assaults from climate change, pollution and exploitation, they cannot recover, and eventually collapse. Not decline gradually: collapse. If this is new to you, I urge you to go and find out about it. The picture has got spectacularly worse over the past few years, and the science has not been widely reported."

Find out what scientists are saying about the environment: global deforestation, the Pacific rubbish dump, Himalayan glacier melt, what mass extinction means. Read the report on the state of the oceans (stateoftheocean.org). I do commend Twitter not because it's trendy but because it's useful for getting at the right information quickly: many scientists use it to provide ongoing succinct updates of what they regard as their most important findings. Find a teenager to show you how to use it, then get in touch with me (@eleanormharris) and I'll point you in the direction of useful resources.

- But Twitter sounds difficult and strange and scary!

- You asked me for hope. I've looked for hope and found it in you. Do you expect it to be easy? If you think Twitter sounds difficult and scary, I think you will have difficulty being the hope of the world. As Jesus said (when he wasn't saying 'don't be afraid'), if you can't be trusted with trivial things, whose going to put you in charge of more important ones?

ACT

"Either we transform our eating, or we starve. Either we transform our travelling, or we stop forever. Either we transform our living, or we die. Not modify: not reduce a bit: not next year: totally transform, now."

I didn't mean this metaphorically, and I wasn't exaggerating.

It is often objected that your individual effort won't make any difference. This is true of the individual who is merely doing things to salve their conscience, or as the result of an individual advertising campaign. But it is not true in your case, because you are prophets, and an essential part of being a prophet (as you discovered earlier) is that they are completely personally committed to their message.

"Get out of this church and demonstrate that humanity can be more than just a rogue species"

Here are two suggestions:

First suggestion:

1. Go through the gospels and find all the passages where people ask Jesus what they should do.
2. Make a list of his advice.
3. Take it.

Second suggestion:
1. Make one list of all the things you do which contribute to mass extinction, by using unsustainably produced resources, polluting, or damaging ecosystems. Do this in discussion with a group and with the help of on-line resources.
2. Make a second list of all the ways you can think of to create an environmental handprint, that is, to increase biodiversity and counter mass extinction.

3. Which do you think is currently bigger, your handprint or your footprint? Challenge yourselves and one another to live so your handprint is bigger than your footprint, to leave the world more biodiverse than you found it.

Try both. How do they compare?

Handprint Ideas

tree planting and reforestation
wildlife gardening, window boxes for bees, green roofs and 'no mow' grass areas
using consumer power to persuade producers of food or wood to encourage biodiversity
install solar panels to generate electricity without contributing to climate change
find out about biodiversity and land use (grazing, crops, housing, recreation like golf courses and grouse moor), and support policies that improve biodiversity
give to charities and invest in projects that conserve or restore biodiversity (for example, money saved reducing your environmental footprint, or you might consider your pension and other investments)
support the global education of women: it's the quickest, cheapest and fairest way to slow population growth and increase sustainable practices locally

SPEAK

"You have to be the prophets, who proclaim the message."

Prophets speak. I got your interest by speaking. Discourse change leads policy change and happens, sometimes quite quickly, when the message of a few voices is taken up by many. My talk used the model of Jonah's message spreading around Nineveh then being taken up as policy by the king. You think I'm naturally good at speaking: I'm not. I'm naturally inarticulate and prefer hiding in history archives, which is why I wrote my talk out word-for-word and spent much time rehearsing it. If you think what I said is right and important, it's up to you to find ways to tell other people: not just in talks, but in conversation, by letter, by postcard, in sermons, in ten-foot-high letters on a wall, on Twitter (scary!!). I can send you the text of my talk if you like, but it would be much better to write your own. In your group, make a list of practical ways you could be prophets, and speak to the powerful.

- But speaking out is not my thing: it's difficult and scary!

- Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of looking a fool. The only fear allowed round here is `fear of the Lord'.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Proverbs 1.7

"You'll realise as the story unfolds that `the Lord' represents everything that happens which isn't human decision or will: objective scientific knowledge; the tugging voice of conscience; the uncontrollable forces of nature."

FINALLY

Use your initiatives. I don't know much and I'm not in charge of anything. I only have one brain and you have many.


If you're reading this without having heard the talk, do invite me to come and give it. I'm told it's thought-provoking. Clergy and non-churchgoers seem to find it most interesting, which is interesting!

And do keep in touch. Comment on this blog. My email is eleanormharris@gmail.com. Do that scary Twitter thing.

There's a discourse that needs changed. You are the prophets. Go and make more.

Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. 2 Corinthians 5:11

"Nothing will ever be the same. Don't be afraid. Turn into the hope."

Holy boldness: Caroline Scott's Family Prayers

The Gothic Revival architect George Gilbert Scott was devastated by the death of his wife Caroline and troubled by guilt that he his flourishing career had left her too much alone. Just as he never designed his own house but let his professional work stand as his legacy, so his monument to her was not to design a lavish grave, but to publish her own creative legacy, a volume of Family Prayers, 'on which', Scott writes, 'she for many years spent much of her leisure time'.

In the model of the pious household, the head, George, would be expected to lead family prayers, but as he was so frequently absent the task would devolve onto his second-in-command, Caroline, who was thereby given free rein to be both leader and liturgist, a role she could never have taken under the gothic arches her husband was building for the Church of England itself.

Caroline's little services, with titles such as 'Monday evening' or 'Thursday morning', 430 pages of them, luxuriate in the idiom of the Book of Common Prayer. She included the familiar words of the Lord's Prayer and Doxology in most of the services to give them an element of participation, with perhaps one response from the set of responses in the Prayer Book offices. When she said 'O Lord open our lips', her family would automatically respond 'And our mouth shall shew forth thy praise', without need for a prompt. The services typically included a few verses from the bible, one of the collects (short prayers for particular occasions) written by Cranmer for the BCP, and often a few verses of one of the canticles set for daily offices in the BCP. All these are easily identifiable for the historian who also happens to sing Choral Matins and Evensong.

In addition to this familiar material, the meat of Caroline's services is other, often longer petitions, all in the musical, antiquated idiom of the BCP (as antiquated to Victorians as to us, but familiar as the language of Religion), but not quoted from it. In his preface her husband wrote, 'I am not able to tell which parts of them are original; but I know that they were composed, or compiled, with constant reference to all old precedents and authorities to which their writer had access; and, perhaps, more largely than others to those of Bishop Jeremy Taylor'. Here is a sample, the second-last prayer in the book, A Prayer for the Evening:

Almighty Father, who givest the sun for a light by day, and coverest the earth by night with the robe of darkness; vouchsafe we beseech Thee, to receive us this night and ever into Thy favour and protection; defending us from all evils. Save, defend, and keep us evermore; and may our souls be sanctified by Thy Spirit, and glorified by Thy infinite mercy, in the day of the glorious appearing of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. -- Amen. p.429.

I have an advantage over Scott, which is that I have at my fingertips a global searchable database of digitised books, which includes the works of Jeremy Taylor. So I decided to paste some samples of Caroline Scott's prayers into Google, and find out where her words came from.

Sometimes she edits and adapts the Bible and prayer book. Here she cuts a line from the BCP Collect for the thirteenth Sunday after Trinity, refocusing it from human failure to human possibility:

Keep, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy Church with thy perpetual mercy; and, because the frailty of man without thee cannot but fall, keep us ever by thy help from all things hurtful, and lead us to all things profitable to our salvation; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Here, she re-works some advice from James 4.8-10 into a liturgical call to confession, replacing his self-flagellatory language with her own idea of a more measured, constructive repentance:

Draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you. Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded. Be afflicted, and mourn, and weep: let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to heaviness. Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up. and make confession of your sins unto him, with a hearty sorrow and humble hope -- begging for mercy at the throne of grace.

Early in my searching I found a quotation from the kind of source I was expecting, the Anglican writers who in the seventeenth century wrote a great deal of devotional and theological material in the BCP idiom. Caroline quoted from an Exhortation to the Candidates for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of Edinburgh by Robert Leighton (1611-1684) Archbishop of Glasgow. Excited by the prospect that this method would enable me to re-create Caroline's library, I googled on. Yet every other unfamiliar prayer I looked up returned only one result: Caroline Scott, Family Prayers. I found nothing by Jeremy Taylor. My small sample suggests that many of the Family Prayers are indeed Caroline's own words.

O merciful Father, who invitest all penitent sinners to come to the fountain of mercy to be pardoned; all the oppressed to be relieved; all the sorrowful to be comforted; admit us, O gracious God, to partake of these Thy loving-kindnesses -- that we may not only hear of Thy mercies, but may participate in them; not only see the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven set wide open, but may we enter in. Wedneday Morning, p.29

What was her theology? There is much about sin and repentance, although as the edits above suggest, Caroline rejects the powerlessness suggested by the BCP Calvinism in favour of a theology of participation and possibility:

O enable us, most gracious Father, to work out our own salvation, knowing that Thou wilt work with us, and wilt assist us by Thy grace; for we know that he who heartily endeavours to please God, and searches what His will is, that he may obey it, certainly loves God, and nothing that loves God can perish. -- Tuesday Morning, p.25.

I was reminded of the Scottish theologian Thomas Erskine, who rejected the legalistic direction which Evangelical theology was taking in the 1820s in favour of a relational spirituality: salvation meant encountering, imitating, and eventually participating in God. Caroline's prayer are similarly warm, relational and personal, with little interest in church or society, all about oneself and the universe. There are not many degrees of separation between them: Erskine was closely connected to the Sandfords in Edinburgh, probably a member of Bishop Daniel Sandford's congregation in the 1810s and 20s, and at his death given his final communion by the Bishop's grandson, Rev Daniel Fox Sandford, Rector of St John's. The bishop's daughter -- and rector's aunt, Frances, had married the bishop's curate Charles Lane and settled in Wrotham, Kent, where the Scotts spent the summer of 1868. 'My wife [...] greatly enjoyed her stay there, and the more so, as the country around is very beautiful, and as she there made several very agreeable friendships especially with Mr and Mrs Lane at the Rectory', wrote George (Personal and Professional Recollections ed. Gavin Stamp 1995, p.259 and 465). Frances was a serious theologian herself, as the letters to her father the bishop in answer to her questions demonstrate. Her husband's theology focused on the Holy Spirit. 'You know his favourite theme so well', said the preacher at his funeral sermon. 'We know how earnestly he himself daily prayed for an outpouring of the same Holy Spirit; and what a special day in his calendar was Whitsun day!' (J.H. Jaquet, In Memoriam (London 1879) p.12) All these writers seem to share a warm, relational theology distinct from the legalism of evangelicalism, the mysticism of Tractarianism or the erastianism of the 'Broad Church'.

Caroline's themes in her prayers combine a sense of the epicness of God's universe combined with the practicality of the Christian's daily task. I was struck by her use of the phrase 'holy boldness' for one Sunday Morning prayer:

Give us, we beseech Thee, O Jesus, a holy boldness to confess before men, that Thou art the Sovereign whom we will serve. We have received from Thee the bounty of Thy grace. O assist us to be Thy faithful soldiers and servants unto our lives' end. -- Amen.

The phrase 'holy boldness' is not, to my knowledge, biblical, but Caroline didn't make it up. I'm not sure what source she was likely to have found it in, but it is widespread in devotional writing and seems to be a translation of the Hebrew chutzpah.

My very brief sampling of Family Prayers could give me little more than an admiration of Caroline's command of the religious idiom, her familiarity with her sources, and her confident filleting and reworking of them, with a great deal of her own material, into an original theological text. Digitisation, however, raises the possibilities of studying the theology of women from their unreferenced, private texts like these in ways that would previously impossible: reconstructing reading lists, identifying original passages, and then analysing theology in the light of contemporary ideas of their male counterparts in churches and universities. I should like to see church historians write a great deal more about the chutzpah-theology of women like Frances Lane and Caroline Scott.