“Reimagining Britain” by Justin Welby

The Brexit vote in June of 2016 hit Great Britain like a thunderbolt, not unlike the election of Donald Trump as President hit the United States later that same year. The responses in these two deeply divided countries were also similar. The people who had supported “Remain” in Britain argued loud and strenuously for ways to undo the Brexit vote, much like their counterparts in the U.S. continue to refuse to accept the November 2016 election.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, has taken a different approach to Brexit. He accepts the decision by voters and then asks the question, “Where do we go from here?” In Reimagining Britain: Foundations for Hope, he invites a conversation about the country’s future by suggesting a variety of ideas and proposals, all based on his Christian faith. And he makes no apology for that. 

“This book is, unsurprisingly and unapologetically, written from a Christian perspective,” he writes. “Because of the Christian foundations of our society in Britain, it draws frequently on more or less well-known traditions and stories in the Bible.” Those Bible stories include the early church sharing in common, as recorded in the Book of Acts; Jesus’s description of the last judgment, from Matthew 25; the parable of the talents; and many others.

Welby proceeds to tackle some of the thorniest issues facing British society, which are not unlike some of the thorniest in American society. Family, education, health, housing, economics and finance, the environment, and immigration all come under what can only be called a loving scrutiny. He considers each from a Christian perspective, broadening into a larger discussion of what might be possible in a post-Brexit Britain. That’s the idea of “reimagining” a nation aspiring to its best impulses.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Welby worked in the oil industry for 11 years before entering the ministry. He became a member of the evangelical Anglican church of Holy Trinity in Brompton, in South Kensington, London, and in 1989 experienced a call to the ministry. He was first rejected for ordination by the Bishop of Kensington but later accepted by the vicar of Brompton. He served churches and cathedrals at Coventry, Liverpool, and several other cities, and was appointed Bishop of Durham in 2011 (which also made him a member of the House of Lords). He was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 2012. He has previously published Dethroning Mammon: Making Money Serve Grace(2016). 

Reimagining Britain is not a conservative book. Neither is it a liberal or progressive book. It slips away from political labels, and asks that Britons consider a future based on the values that bind them together. Welby is making a claim for the church in the national debate about Britain’s future. And he’s well ahead of many of Brexit’s critics who are still stuck in a rejection of the decision. 

Top photograph: A view of St. Paul’s Cathedral and the City of London from the Tate Modern.

Can Fiction Predict the Future?

The comment came in a tweet: “Finished my reread of A Light Shining last night. I found the section ‘The Violence’ to be remarkably prescient.”

The section has to do with a relatively short-lived religious and civil upheaval in Britain – short-lived but turning the country upside down. Even when I reread the section, I see the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015, in London in 2017, in Brussels, in Orlando, in San Bernardino, and other places.

Except that section of the novel was written in 2005.

My wife says there are some things in my novels that give her the creeps, as if I knew what was coming. 

I didn’t. I just wrote the story that was in my head. It’s all fiction.

To continue reading, please see my post at Christian Poets & Writers.

Photograph by Aziz Acharki via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Interior

It is not a question

of making a deal and guessing

which door the prize lies behind;

it is a question of choosing

which door to open first, which path

to follow, which future to select,

the choice to be made in a split sliver

of time, and once decided, once the door

is opened and walked through,

the possibility of return is non-existent,

even if the door remains open, even if

backward steps can be taken.

Or it is a question of choosing

which room to clean first, which interior

to dust and sweep and mop and wash and

scour. Or it is a question of waiting until

a door is opened. Perhaps the questions are

the same.

Painting: Interior by Vilhelm Hammershoi (1899), National Gallery of Art, London.

The Future Isn't What It Used to Be

There was a time when the future was a place, a place I was going to.

I had to plan for it, think about, strategize it, implement it, refine it, rethink it and plan again – but it was indeed a place. This place was usually associated with accomplishing something – an achievement, an award, a recognition, a milestone, a promotion.

I wasn’t so foolish as to think that accomplishing something would bring happiness, fame, wealth and contentment – I had learned that lesson in college.

But I was still reaching. Part of that reaching included having a family, finding gifts I could use, get a Master’s degree, in effect assembling the pieces of what I thought, or my wife and I thought, should be were we wanted to go.

Something changed, though. Exactly when I can’t say. The future stopped being a place or destination. It became something else.

Was it the day I held my first-born, my second-born?

Was it the day I held my grandson?

Was it the day I biked to the Chain of Rocks Bridge in north St. Louis, biked up the bridge and looked south to see the city in the hazy distance?

Was it when I saw the Lincoln Memorial at night?

Or the day I sat in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London and considered all the royal enemies lying buried beneath my feet?

Was it the day I wrote a poem, a poem that affected me far more than I could understand, and I knew I never would?

Perhaps it was the day my first journalism professor wrote “not bad for a cub” across the top of my assignment.

Or the day my father died.

Or the day my heart was joined to my wife’s, or the day my soul was claimed for eternity.

Whenever it was, whatever day it was, the future changed from a place to the real. And I found myself, find myself, living more and more in the real, and learning that the real matters so much more, more than I ever could have known.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

And that’s good.


This post is submitted to the One Word Blog Carnival on “future” over at Peter Pollock’s place. To see more posts, please visit the site.
Photograph: Stone Tile Wall Background by Andrew Schmidt via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.