04.09.2022
‘A hierarchy of urgency…’ Archbishop of Dublin addresses the British Irish Association
Archbishop Michael Jackson is attending the British Irish Association Conference in Oxford this weekend. The BIA’s main function is to bring together a wide range of people – senior politicians and government officials, business managers, academics, faith leaders, writers and artists, commentators and community workers – to discuss matters of shared concern at an annual conference held over a weekend in September. The Archbishop addressed the conference during this morning’s Prayer Service. The full text is below.
A hierarchy of urgency …
Address by the Archbishop of Dublin at the British Irish Association Conference 2022
Sometimes I wonder, as indeed many of the rest of us might do, if we are reaching the point of saturation by social media. Standing back from it, if indeed such is possible now that it is so much part of the weave of our lives, social media in all of its multiplicity and complexity is such an ingenious, invasive and consistent form of communication. What may indeed have begun as a convenience ready to hand has become an implement that we feed with our privacy as well as with our publicity. It also gathers data about us and our likes and dislikes in a way that can only be described as psychologically clairvoyant. In many ways it is a robot ahead of formal robotics.
I realize also that it is fashionable to decry it, as again many of us do, and still continue to use it, benefit from it and become more and more addicted to it. One thing remains clear: the very same tool that facilitates many also leaves many behind. At a number of levels, social media is the dividing line between two or more worlds. Everyone is encouraged to ‘get the app’ and, of course, once you have one app you need a multiplicity of other apps. But many people in many worlds are not in a position to do so, nor will they ever be. One of the most poignant things I was told of the days of The Lockdown was the pain and the helplessness felt by a staff member in a residential nursing home trying to help feeble residents fill in an on–line tax return. Cynicism aside, we are increasingly awake to the dangers of false information on the internet and on social media and also to its capacity to generate and broker incendiary information. As with many parts of our life, regulation does not persuade as effectively as the inventors of relentless regulation hope or expect because regulation has the reputation of punishing to attain its objectives and people generally do not enjoy living in a world of escalating punishment.
Over–reliance on social media brings with it an invisible and creeping insecurity which initially looks like a personal strength. Many think that, by controlling their own profile, they create their own identity; but they simply cannot control what they create because it is instantly public property by virtue of the medium they employ. It is thereby open to the scrutiny and savagery of others. Self–care is needed as never before. Much of this has to do with over–focusing on identity, our own identity. The immediacy and the intimacy of social media feeds such a trend to the extent that much of the time we are not even aware of it. And some of the most avid devotees of social media are among older generations. It is these very generations who keep saying things like: ‘Young people are never off their ‘phone …’ The now established mindset of The Northern Hemisphere and of The West, that is the elite such as ourselves settled in countries of uninterrupted privilege and accustomed to an unbroken stream of resources, of conveniences and of goods from The Southern Hemisphere and The East, has to do with the priority of our own identity to the extent that it now seems to be both self–explanatory and self–authenticating.
Recently I, along with some others here, had the opportunity to attend what is called The Lambeth Conference. The Lambeth Conference is a gathering of bishops of The Anglican Communion invited to Canterbury by the archbishop of Canterbury of the day along with whomever else the archbishop wishes to invite. It is also one of the four Instruments of Communion of The Anglican Communion. The other three are the archbishop of Canterbury himself, The Primates and The Anglican Consultative Council. As with any conference, each participant will have his or her own impressions and memories, his or her own sense of the energy and the dynamic of the various group or groups involved – and also that sinking feeling of reality about what constitutes the inescapable reality of the trivial round and the common task when you get back home and you realize that the impossibilities are still impossibilities whether they be situations, individuals or simply yourself.
The significant thing with which I came away is what I call: the hierarchy of urgency and what constitutes such a hierarchy. The strong sense that I got was that the conference established a hierarchy of justice, environment, identity. The first two framed the understanding and the development of the last instead of the last dominating the function of the first two. This came as something of a shock to those from The Northern Hemisphere and The West and would hardly have happened had the numerical and cultural composition of participants not shifted so radically in the fourteen years since the last conference. Summarizing the two types of renewal which came to the surface in the conference, the archbishop said the following: ‘The first was ecclesiological: it was an integral part of Anglican identity that it was an ‘incomplete’ part of God’s church. The second was the values that were agreed: solidarity, subsidiarity and global justice.’ Limitations and shared ideals, he was suggesting, form identity more than self–absorption and local exclusivities whether they be liberal or conservative or a bizarre conflation of both.
I leave with you the question, as public influencers and as public policy makers, of what constitutes your individual and your shared hierarchy of urgency. For me to learn of a fellow–bishop whose cathedral has been under two metres of water for the last year because of the quixotic impact of climate change, for example, did change my perspective on the impossibilities back home. The contemporary quests for expression of identity are not the same as the lifelong quest for a corporate and global self–understanding. This needs to be centred and developed in relation to events and people who change and whose fortunes change and whose circumstances are far and away beyond their control from the day they are born.
Now that I am ‘back home,’ I find myself with a number of hazard warning lights flashing at the same time. And they all have to do with limits and limitations, exclusions and inclusions. They feature the limitations of media–filtered altruism and politically–filtered goodness and ecclesiastically–filtered integrity. The above adjectives and nouns, of course, are entirely interchangeable. And this to me is even more alarming. For those of us involved in Christianity and the churches, this journey is going to be a painful one. It is going to jolt us out of where Covid–19 has parked us: in our own local institutional survivalism. The curtains have been drawn back on a lingering colonial mindset. The light that now shines through the windows is the light of The Kingdom of God which, as set out in St Luke chapter 4, verses 18 and 19 offers an understanding of identity as vested in others who have very little media, political or ecclesiastical purchase. The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. This is now, once again, our hierarchy of urgency.
Each and all of us will have to make our peace between our sense of personal identity and the building of the common good, whatever the source or the sustenance of our values which we feed into the hierarchy of urgency. This house of belonging needs to be shaped in active partnership with others. No religious person should be ashamed of the word or the work of witness. Spiritual ventriloquism will not suffice in a pluralist society. The world in its totality invites us all, in whatever is our local sphere and our local liability, to shift our focus and to look outwards in order to understand our identity and to shape the meaning of accountability as a generous inclusion. Christian values are no longer prescriptive in our societies, nor have they been for generations. A new order has long beckoned, and a new identity invites us all.
It is a far cry away from the phone in our pocket which perhaps even at this moment is crying out for attention and response …