Relationships As Workplace

RELATIONSHIPS AS PLACE

David Harvey begins The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) by citing from Jonathan Laban’s Soft City. ‘To the ideology of the city as some lost but longed-for community, Laban responded with a picture of the city as labyrinth, honey-combed with … diverse networks of social interaction orientated to … diverse goals … “The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics”’ [5]. The roles we play make the city what it is rather than vice-versa.

Now, without collapsing into Laban’s subjective individualism, I wish to draw on the insight that social interaction can be construed in spatial terms – as a city in Laban’s case. Indeed, I wish to deepen the scope of social interaction to that of relationships.

Whereas being introduced to a friend of a friend at a party is a social interaction, getting to know that person requires time. Time is a necessary ingredient for relationships. (Note, for example, The Relationship Foundation’s notion of continuity as a precondition for quality relationships – I will henceforth refer to The Relationships Foundation as the RF.) So whereas social interaction can be construed merely by spatial terms, relationships also require temporal terms. Relationships take time.

Similarly, during his final passover in the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to relationships in spatial terms [John 14:2-3]. Jerome Neyrey writes, ‘‘“Home” is not a physical building but a metaphor for a household and its relationships. Oddly, the disciples never go to the “many rooms” in the Father’s house; rather, God and Jesus “make their home” in the disciples’ [Jerome H. Neyrey, S.J., The Gospel of John (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), 286 cf. 241]. So when Jesus talks about preparing a room, he is talking about preparing a relationship. More specifically, he is talking about preparing a relationship that continues his mission [John 20:21].

Thus what distinguishes the relationships that I have in mind from Laban’s social interaction are at least time and some sense of mission (or continuity and purpose, to again cite relational preconditions from the RF).

RELATIONSHIPS AS WORK

Relationships also require work (or preparation as Jesus puts it); and work – as every physicist knows – requires the transfer of energy. But despite such sentiments we have come to demarcate work from relationships. In The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber notes how production becomes an “iron-cage” – the foil to Laban’s soft city. Work is one thing, relationships another.

Even Bonhoeffer concurs. ‘Work plunges men into the world of things. The Christian steps out of the world of brotherly encounter into the world of impersonal things, the “it”’ [Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (trans. John W. Doberstein, London: SCM 1954), 52]. He goes on to note that things are ‘an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centredness and self-seeking’ [Life Together, 53]. But so are relationships, especially those we need to work at.

So how far should we push this division between things and brotherly encounter?

Dan Allender recounts a conversation with a passenger on a plane, in which the passenger mentions that his children learnt to love from him. But it turned out that he and all his children were divorced. Allender’s point is that love might not come as naturally as we think it does. We need to work at love. We need to work at our relationships.

Although it is one thing to divide work from relationships, and another to fail to work at relationships, how far does the former fuel the latter?

Incidentally, I do not mean to infer that there was a halcyon era for relationships before the Reformation (from where Weber traces the rise of the “iron cage”.) Rather, Weber traces a particular set of conditions that could account for the breakdown of relationships since Genesis 3.

EXCURSUS: FREUD

As an aside, I wonder whether the psychoanalytic notion of “working through” arose as something of a corrective to relational negligence. “Working through” is a Freudian concept whereby the psychoanalyst uses their relationship with the client to recognize and overcome some defence mechanism [see, for example, M.J. Sedler, ‘Freud’s Concept of Working Through’ in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (1983) 52:73-98]. Defence mechanisms (such as projection and repression) keep the lid on strong emotion resulting from the client’s failure to come to terms with some aspect of their own relational life.

Although much comparison of Freud and Weber concentrates on the connection between sublimation – Freud’s concept of coming to socially acceptable terms with strong emotion – and rationalization – Weber’s “iron cage”, seeing the former as a response to or even part of the latter; I would like to draw attention to the relationship between psychoanalyst and client. This is essential to psychoanalysis as the place of “working through” the client’s relationships.

Indeed, if the absence of work from love has been exacerbated by the protestant work ethic, then “working through” might actually be seen to be a corrective to this exacerbation. Note the change in architecture from Vienna’s Narrenturm asylum (1784) to the Steinhof Sanatorium (1907). This change reflects a development in the treatment of mental health corresponding to Freud’s innovations concerning relationships. Whereas the former is reminiscent of today’s residential tower blocks – detrimental to relationships: an “iron cage”, as it were – the latter was designed to nurture some resemblance of community.

Of course, the weakness of this suggestion is that many of Freud’s clients came from high society, and one would have to link this social strata with the protestant work ethic, and the subsequent suffocation of relationships by work. Perhaps the protestant work ethic and its symptoms simply spread through society by some kind of osmosis. Weber himself notes that this happens between denominations. But even if my connection between Weber and Freud does not hold, Freud at least illustrates the point that relationships can be a place of work.

RELATIONSHIPS AS WORKPLACE

Today, the division between work and life – the “work-life balance” – seems most acute when relationships at work are poor. Many people leave their jobs because of poor relationships, regardless of how much otherwise they would enjoy the job itself; and many people persevere with less than satisfying jobs because of the quality of relationships around them.

‘Western newspapers constantly run articles on the ‘work-life balance’. But the term is misleading. The real issue isn’t stopping work taking over your life. Nor is the choice between earning money at work and having relationships at home. It’s managing the whole range of your relationships – in work and outside work – in a way that maximises outcomes’ [Michael Schluter and David John Lee, The R Option (Cambridge: Relationships Foundation, 2003), 28].

(Developing the same relationships in a variety of contexts, such as work and home, is another RF precondition for quality relationships known as multiplexity.)

But because the fruit of good relationships is not immediately quantifiable, relationships are not seen as a place of work. Again, the protestant work ethic might be exacerbating the myth that relationships just happen. Against this, I wish to suggest that the workplace is not necessarily the physical space of the office (or whatever). Rather, the place of work is primarily – or should primarily be – the relationships within which we find ourselves.

WORK AS RELATIONAL

This not only means that relationships require work, but also that our daily work impinges, for better or for worse, on those relationships. (Indeed, our work might also impinge on relationships in which we do not find ourselves, such is the nature of the global economy.) As the work of the RF demonstrates, our daily work is not relationally neutral.

GOD

This non-neutrality is not restricted to the “horizontal” dimension of relationships either, because the “horizontal”– our relationship with others – is related to the “vertical” – our relationship with God. So not only does work impinge on our relationship with God, but working on our relationships with others also requires working on our relationship with him. As Bonhoeffer puts it, since ‘we can meet others only through the mediation of Christ … spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ’ [Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 23].

Life Together

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (trans. John W. Doberstein, London: SCM 1954), 96 pp.

ON VISION

‘Innumerable times a whole Christian community has broken down because it had sprung from a wish dream. The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely we must be overwhelmed by a great general disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are fortunate, with ourselves’ [15].

‘God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself’ [16].

ON PRAYER

‘Only he who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts’ [17].

Since ‘we can meet others only through the mediation of Christ … spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ’ [23].

ON SCRIPTURE

Bonhoeffer recommends that we read large chunks of scripture together [36-37], and that we read them canonically. So ‘forgetting and losing ourselves, we, too, pass through the Red Sea, through the desert, across the Jordan into the promised land. With Israel we fall into doubt and unbelief and through punishment and repentance experience again God’s help and faithfulness … And only in so far as we are there, is God with us today also’ [38 (italics in original)].

ON WORK

‘We cannot simply take it for granted that our work provides us with bread; this is rather God’s order of grace’ [54].

ON COMMUNITY

‘Listening can be a greater service than speaking’ [75].

‘Mutual, brotherly confession is given to us by God in order that we may be sure of divine forgiveness’ [91].

THAT SAID

There are a couple of things with which I beg to differ:

‘God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth’ [15]. I have written on God and the emotions elsewhere, like here and here.

‘He loves the sinner but he hates the sin’ [86]. I wonder whether this creates too great a gap between the sinner and their sin. Surely it is one thing to say that sin depersonalizes, and another to depersonalize sin by abstracting it from the sinner. Alex Tylee notes the consequences of the latter in Walking With Gay Friends: A Journey of Informed Compassion (Leicester: IVP, 2007). “Loving the sinner, but hating their sin” sends mixed messages, which can result in confusion. So why not simply say that God forgives us?

Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel

Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: DLT, 2002), 144 pp.

In this deeply nuanced book, Rowan Williams offers ‘reflections on what the raising of the crucified and rejected Jesus does to the human spirit and imagination. Thus [he does] … not concentrate on questions of the exact historicity of the stories, but on the theological vision they proclaim’ [vii (italics are in original throughout)]. Before returning to the issue of historicity in the final chapter, Williams initially attempts ‘to show how the Christian proclamation of the resurrection of the crucified just man, his return to his unfaithful friends and his empowering of them to forgive in his name offers a narrative structure in which we can locate our recovery of identity and human possibility’ [43].

This narrative is not only ‘a paradigm of the “saving” process’ but also ‘an indispensable agent in the completion of this process, because it witnesses to the one personal agent in whose presence we may have full courage to “own” ourselves as sinners and full hope for a humanity whose identity is grounded in a recognition and affirmation by nothing less than God. It is a story which makes possible the comprehensive act of trust without which growth is impossible.’

And the story ‘makes possible the comprehensive act of trust’ because it witnesses to the presence of God as Christ the pure victim [7]. Here, much depends on the historicity of the narratives. ‘If certain facts were to be demonstrated about the life and character of Jesus, that he was a violent and exploitative personality, for instance, the symbol [of Christ’s transforming work] would be reduced to being only a convenient fiction, and its force would be very different’ [21].

As a foil to the non-violence of Jesus, Williams exposes violence (or oppression) on two fronts. First, violence diminishes the violent: ‘my oppressive and condemnatory role in fact wounds and diminishes me’ [6]. Second, the oppressed are not morally superior because they are oppressed, therefore this is not the reason why violence is wrong [10-11]. Rather, violence (or oppression) is wrong simply because it excludes, and since moral superiority excludes moral inferiority, moral superiority is itself oppressive (as, presumably, is any attempt to “measure” morality). Besides, the supposed-superior morality of the victim suggests that violence (or oppression) is a mistake (only?) when it fails to recognise this superiority. So ‘what, after all, is the definition of just or rightly-directed violence?’ [10].

In contrast, Williams notes that ‘God is not “with” the victim [Jesus] in order to make us victims; so the preaching of the resurrection affirms’ [11]. (The preaching of the resurrection is therefore ‘an invitation to recognize one’s victim as one’s hope’ [5].) This is possible because Christ is pure victim. Since there is no oppressor in Christ, we can trust God’s memory of our sin. He will not oppress us in his remembering.

‘“God is the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present”. So to be with God is to be (potentially) present to, aware of, all of one’s self and one’s past; which is why, as St John repeatedly reminds us, presence to God can be excruciating, and some will hate and reject the possibility’ [29].

‘“God” is that to which all things are present, so theology traditionally affirms: so through the mediation of God, all things can be made present to us again, present through his presence. The concept of God’s “memory” as holding or keeping open the past overthrows the delusion that our violence is final and irremediable. But what takes us further than this and ensures that the “memory” of God is a saving fact, neither a menacing nor a neutral one, is the conviction that God’s presence to the world is neither menacing nor neutral’ [17].

And in the same way that God is not with Jesus in order to make us victims, so God is not with us in order to make others victims.

‘This is how the cross can be made to serve an ideological purpose. God is identified with my cause, because he is identified with my suffering: the cross is the banner of my ego – or the banner of a collective ego. If I suffer I am in the right, because God “endorses” my pain … [But] the cross ceases to be an ideological weapon when it is recognised not only as mine but as a stranger’s; and it is a stranger … whom we meet on Easter morning’ [70-71].

But where is this stranger met? Or, more specifically, where is the body of Christ?

On the one hand, Williams rejects a strict identification of Christ’s body with the community [74]. ‘I don’t think we can make much sense of any of the stories unless we begin from assumptions about the empty tomb, and so about the possibility of God’s action in raising Jesus’ [vii cf. 96-97, 110]. And again, ‘for some at least, the encounter with the risen Jesus began as an encounter with a stranger. And this is one of the most important pieces of evidence counting against the suggestion that the risen Christ is to be seen as a projection of the community’s own belief, its sense of continuity with the identity of Jesus’ [75].

On the other hand, he refuses to separate Christ’s body from the community. This is precisely because the narratives are written by those who are being transformed, ‘the resurrection of Jesus, then, is not simply the raising and the restoration to the world of his past identity … Equally importantly, it is the “raising” of the past identity of those who have been with him’ [35]. Thus Jesus’ appearance to Thomas is not a standalone proof that can be abstracted from his reintegration into the community [94]. Indeed, ‘we might say that the apparitions have no meaning independently of the establishment of the community; and if this is so, there is no reason for any interest in the detail of these encounters for its own sake’ [109].

Williams, therefore, notes that such appearances eventually come to an end, and that John 20:29 ‘implies that a faith which can promptly detach itself from any need for apparitions is more mature than a faith which needs to “see”’ [94]. He also refuses to reduce the significance of the incarnation to the physicality of Jesus. Such significance also requires Jesus’ relational acts, which extend through the community [98-99]. (Again, the latter cannot be reduced to the former, because the former is pure victim, whereas the latter is not.)

So, where is the body of Christ? For Williams, it is located in the community, centred around the Eucharist [106-107]. The empty tomb is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the community to interpret its own experience of forgiveness as an encounter with the risen Christ [96-97]. The resurrection accounts are therefore to be interpreted as such.

This is a fascinating account of the resurrection, but one where I wish Williams’ exegetical criteria were clearer. Why so much faith in a non-violent Jesus and an empty tomb, but not in “literal” appearances of the risen Christ? To what extent has Williams’ wrought violence on the text – something that he humbly concedes? [107]. Maybe Williams has more faith than me. Maybe I am a Thomas in his schema. I need to know the empty tomb does not mean that Jesus has abandoned us to delusions of forgiveness. I need to know that someone, somewhere has touched his hands and his side.

In the Name of Jesus

Henri J. M. Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad, 2002), 118 pp.

AGAINST RELEVANCE

‘The Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his own vulnerable self’ [30].

‘The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there’ [35].

‘The question is not: How many people take you seriously? How much are you going to accomplish? Can you show some results? But: Are you in love with Jesus?’ [37]

‘It is not enough for the priests and ministers of the future to be moral people, well trained, eager to help their fellow human beings, and able to respond creatively to the burning issues of their time. All of that is very valuable and important, but it is not the heart of Christian leadership. The central question is, Are the leaders of the future truly men and women of God, people with an ardent desire to dwell in God’s presence, to listen to God’s voice, to look at God’s beauty, to touch God’s incarnate Word, and to taste fully God’s infinite goodness’ [43].

AGAINST POPULARITY

‘Somehow we have come to believe that good leadership requires a safe distance from those we are called to lead. Medicine, psychiatry, and social work all offer us models in which “service” takes place in a one-way direction. Someone serves, someone else is being served, and be sure not to mix up the roles! But how can we lay down our life for those with whom we are not even allowed to enter into a deep personal relationship? Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life’ [61].

‘The mystery of ministry is that we have been chosen to make our own limited and very conditional love the gateway for the unlimited and unconditional love of God’ [62].

‘How can priests and ministers feel really loved and cared for when they have to hide their own sins and failings from the people to whom they minister and run off to a distant stranger to receive little comfort and consolation? How can people truly care for their shepherds and keep them faithful to their sacred task when they do not know them and so cannot deeply love them?’ [65].

AGAINST CONTROL AND POWER

‘“In all truth I tell you
When you were young
you put on your belt
and walked where you liked;
but when you grow old
you will stretch out your hands
and somebody else will put a belt around you
and take you where you would rather not go.” (John 21:18)

… The world says, “When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny.” But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and the willingness to be led where you would rather not go … The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross’ [80-82].

Thrash is for Girls

This is Laurence Fishburne.

However, I don’t want to write about Fishburne. I want to write about Ross, even though Ross and Fishburne do have one thing in common: whereas Laurence Fishburne plays a forensic scientist, Ross is a forensic scientist. And from what I can see Ross is a very well published forensic scientist.

One day Ross – a New Zealander living in London – was on holiday in Ireland, where he met a beautiful Estonian lady called Maarja. Now, Maarja was a Christian and Ross was not. Nonetheless they embarked on a long-distance relationship. And because she loved him, she prayed for him to meet Jesus.

Now it just so happened that Maarja’s flatmate worked for the Navigators. So she contacted Rob Wood in Southampton. Rob is the Director of the Navigators UK workplace ministry. And Rob contacted me. Got that? Ross went from Maarja to flatmate to Rob to me.

So one Sunday I met Ross in a Starbucks on Regent Street. We got chatting, and the conversation soon turned to faith and science. He’d just read Francis Collins' excellent The Language of God, and, quite coincidentally so had I. Ross assured me that he needed to deal with Jesus quite apart from Maarja’s interest, and that it was just a matter of time before he did.

The conversation began to wind down, and we started to talk about music. I found out that Ross was a guitarist in a thrash metal band. But, being a death-metal man myself, I always thought that thrash was for girls; and I blurted out as much. Ross then made some smart-arse comment about death metal. But I was already half way across the room and out the door.

Thrash is for girls.

(Some names and places have been changed, as has the ending.)

Roots

Over the years I have been asked several times whether I am going to get ordained. And I have often found myself bemused: why would I? The roots of this only crystallized recently whilst reading a history of Saltisford Evangelical Church ­– where I grew up.

I am a Brethren boy.

(The picture, by the way, is of the late Nigel Lee whose family joined the church around the same time as my parents in the late 1970’s. He epitomizes Saltisford to me still. And he was never ordained.)

Consider this concerning the church in the nineteenth century:

‘Originally in the Brethren movement there would be no paid workers of any sort. Each Gospel Hall had its own “Elders” who carried the responsibility for the running of the church. Initially this Eldership would be formed from the laymen who started the church, then as time went on they would invite other laymen to join them’ [Don Franks, The Saltisford Story, 1999].

And this is not all that has shaped me.

‘The First World War 1914-1918 did bring some help to the beleaguered Church. Many of the men in Brethren Churches refused to bear arms and fight for their country. This was a criminal offence and the men concerned were sent to various prisons’ [9-10].

And more Conscientious Objectors would follow in the Second World War [14-15].

That said, I have spent about the same amount of time in the Anglican Church – about fifteen years or so, which has left me a firm believer in infant baptism. But that hiccup aside, I am still a Brethren boy at heart.

FairBanking: The Road to Redemption for UK Banks

Antony Elliott, FairBanking: The Road to Redemption for UK Banks (London: Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation, 2009), 60 pp.

Allow me to quote from Andrew Hilton’s preface:

‘This is not an “anti-bank” diatribe, though Antony genuinely believes that, for many financial institutions, their approach to customers is ethically indefensible. What it reflects is a belief that banks have a privileged position vis-à-vis their customers, particularly poorer customers, and that there is a moral imperative for them to work to improve the Financial Well-being of those customers’ [i].

‘What he proposes is a suite of simple products that would go a long way to enabling customers to get a much better handle on their finances – to their benefit and the benefit of their families, and to the benefit of the financial institutions that offer such products’ [i].

Three things caught my eye:

First, research commissioned by FairBanking among young workers (aged 18 to 29) and young families (aged 25 to 39) shows that ‘a household with high financial well-being would not be worried because it would be exercising sufficient control to have enough money to pay for essentials, to have some left over for luxuries, to service its debts, to have savings for the unexpected and to save regularly’ [12 cf. 11-15, 47-52]. Financial control is therefore a significant factor in financial satisfaction.

Second, ‘seventy three percent of respondents thought a monthly financial reward scheme would be the most motivating [for controlling expenditure]’ [28]. And various on-line tools are presented to help people to manage their money, and therefore to control their expenditure.

Third, ‘for banks, building societies and credit card companies to help customers, it is important that there is a high level of trust’ [41]. And high-level trust in a financial services institution is ‘based around notions of being concerned about the best interests of the customer’ [41].

Interesting.

‘Antony Elliott FCIB spent over 10 years as Group Risk Director of Abbey National plc having worked for a number of UK and international banks previously … He now divides his time between working for a large hedge fund and pursuing the vision of a banking system that helps people manage their money’ [55].