Making a mark on God’s creation

Oct 28 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

In part two of our interview marking the 10th anniversary of his enthronement, James Jones, the ‘green’ Bishop of Liverpool, considers his vision of God. David Charters reports

PUFFED songbirds peck and hop, quick as fish, in the lush garden, which spreads under a weary sun just beyond the window.

But this man with the Cross around his neck, who is recovering with enviable pluck from root canal treatment, looks farther away to the original garden, Paradise – where the Bible says God first breathed the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils.

What did/does God look like? There’s the question, which has confounded intellects, great and puny, since first we hunkered in the cave, staring at the faces looming in the flames of the spitting fire.

The vain man looks for the answer in his mirror, while the charlatan tells his tales. Some scientists mock the whole notion, but the artist stretches and wrings every fibre of his imagination until an image appears.

The little girl thinks God has a kind smile and a big white beard and the long-seeing man in the bathchair, whose own rambling whiskers are now white as snow, hopes she is right.

How does the bishop in the purple shirt see him? Surely, he has a better chance than most of knowing, as he sits on an armchair in this spacious lounge, occasionally punctuating the flow of words with the chinking of his tea-cup on its saucer.

“Mahogany brown tea, as George Orwell described it in his wonderful essay on the Decline of the English Murder,” I say. The bishop nods vigorously, as a great admirer of Orwell’s writing.

But it is also the colour of the Bishop’s eyes, which wander back to the garden before he answers. This is a good day to talk of God. Leaves fall profusely on the grass to fertilise the squelchy mud, ready for rebirth in the spring – the cycle of life.

And the Right Reverend James Jones, Bishop of Liverpool, believes man must care for God’s Creation. It’s central to his faith.

“I have two powerful images of God,” he says. “First, of course, is Jesus because as you see Jesus you see God. Everything you would expect to find in God – love, passion for justice, mercy, forgiveness – you find in Jesus. The Gospels give us no physical detail about how Jesus looked. This is interesting. He can’t be pinned down. Let us imagine that He had long hair and blue eyes.”

Of course, some artists have done just that. The result is the Protestant Jesus, a figure with a halo, who otherwise looks safely familiar. Catholic artists often depicted the suffering Christ in a crown of thorns, usually as a European. Others saw him as a native of Judea.

“But by not being described, He cannot be pinned down to any particular culture,” continues Bishop James, as he is known to friends and colleagues.

“I was talking recently at a meeting of partially-sighted and blind people in Liverpool, reflecting on this with them. They were interested that the Gospels had no description of what Jesus looked like, as if the evangelists themselves were blind to that.

“But the other image that I have comes from imagining a master painter, working at his canvas. He has got this palette of oils and he is creating the beautiful picture, which is in his mind. But not only is he a brilliant artist, he is also a wonderful grandfather.

“Surrounding him at the easel are mischievous grandchildren, who had got their own designs on the canvas. They are forever putting their fingers in the pal- ette and daubing it on the canvas. He is such a patient grandfather and so brilliant an artist that he doesn’t shoo them away. Instead, he incorporates their smudgings into his Creation, so that they even add depth and texture. It is the same image that he has had forever in his mind, and it is being contributed to by actions freely chosen by those that He loves. If He is sometimes frustrated by their purposes, He can incorporate them into His grand design.”

Bishop James, 60, posed briefly with his wife, Sarah. She is also wearing purple for the occasion. They stand at the entrance to Bishop’s Lodge, in Allerton, the gorgeous shades of autumn all around them. Here, the couple raised their three daughters, Harriet, Jemima and Tabitha, as well as their terrier, Charlie.

In a world of instant communications, the Christian message is often lost amid all the blogs, cheap pop songs and celebrity gossip. Doesn’t it need more impact?

Bishop James calls on Orwell’s essay, Politics and the English Language. “When I was doing preaching classes, I would always draw attention to it,” he says. “Orwell berates politicians for using stale metaphors and boring images. No wonder people switch off. He says that we have to work hard to find the original metaphor, the fresh allegory or whatever. This applies just as much to people who preach or write religious books or articles, because so very often you pick something up or hear a sermon and it is boring. You hear these clichés coming out over and over again. But the moment you hear a fresh image, you prick your ears up and listen.”

The church is more robust than some suppose. In the Liverpool diocese, which stretches over 389 square miles, embracing Wigan, St Helens, parts of Warrington, Ormskirk and Southport, there are 255 churches and some 29,400 regular worshippers.

Before mass communication, preachers depended on their powers of oratory and the bishop recalls advice given by David Lloyd George, a former Prime Minister, to Harold Macmillan, who would become a Prime Minister – “never forget the value of the pause”.

“That is the most brilliant advice about preaching,” he says. “So, George Orwell and Lloyd George had valuable things to say to this generation of clergy.”

ESTABLISHING himself among the faithful in Liverpool has not been easy for James Jones. His predecessor was David Sheppard, a glamorous figure and former England cricketer with a reputation for compassion, who teamed up with Derek Worlock, Liverpool’s Catholic Archbishop, to bring the region’s problems to national attention. They were men of the moment, but moments change.

With the improvement in our economic circumstances and international image, which culminated in this year’s European Capital of Culture award, Bishop James has devoted much of his own passion to showing how the Christian ideal and man’s stewardship of the Earth run together.

Was John the Baptist, the prophet who understood the desert, an early ecologist? “That wilderness, that wild place, is where Jesus goes right at the beginning,” says Bishop James. “He, like John the Baptist, is with the wild animals. There is this sense early in Jesus’s ministry that he is comfortable with nature. In fact, it is prefigured by the Nativity story because the Angel said that ‘unto you is born this day in the city of David a saviour who is Christ the King and this will be a sign’. They would find him in swaddling clothes, well, that wasn’t the sign, surely. Every baby is wrapped in swaddling clothes. The sign was that he would be found in an animal feeding-trough (manger), where you don’t expect to find a baby. But this Christ child is lain there and the animals don’t hurt him. There is an extraordinary relationship between this particular child and the whole of the created order.”

Bishop James believes this relationship was manifested again when Jesus died on the Cross and the earth quaked.

Does he find religious inspir- ation in this haunted season?

“Autumn to winter is one of my favourite times,” he says. “The colours are turning. This morning, the light was catching the acer and it was beautiful.”

Are we looking after the world properly? “We’re not,” he says. “Environmentalists have got a bad name because we are seen as prophets of doom, but people in the 19th century built parks for the good of the people. It was part of the equilibrium of being human. The tragedy is that, in our world today, although people do delight in parks and gardens and beautiful scenery, we are damaging it. Where the thing has got out of kilter is that the damage is being felt in parts of the world where the people have got no power to do anything about it. It is not being felt, really, by people like us, who have the power to do something about it. But when we do begin to feel it, it will be too late.

“We talk about the human environment, but from a Biblical point of view, we have St Paul speaking of the whole of Creation coming to being through and for Christ. So for the Christian, the desecration of the planet is not just self-injury. It is not just a crime against humanity, but, ultimately, it is blasphemy because you are undoing God’s creative work.”

Beyond the window, birds still peck, quick as fish, on ground decorated by the fallen leaves.

A little farther away, jet planes fume, while car engines gasp and moan through the toil of another day. As the bishop said, God gave man free-will.

We decide the future.

davidcharters