The challenge of filling your blank page or keeping it empty

The start of a sabbatical sets Ian Hamlin thinking through the tension between contemplation and action.

Ian Hamlin

Ian Hamlin has been the minister of a Baptist church since 1994. He previously worked in financial services.

A notebook is open at two blank pages. a pen rests across the page.s.

Photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

The famed anxiety inducing nemesis of any writer or creative, the ever-daunting blank page. Well, I’ve bought myself a new notebook, so I have a literal open page in front of me, but also something more.

I’m starting a three-month sabbatical from my role as a Baptist minister. Stepping down from my day-to-day responsibilities of work, but also, to a degree, away from the basic structures that define my life; the people, purpose and rhythm of, not only what I do, but who I am. It’s a weird sort of job like that.

What would you do with three months off? From work, family commitments, whatever it is that defines your day to day ordinarily? Well, buy a notebook, obviously, but after that?

I’m conscious, of course, that this is a rare privilege, a consequence, I guess, of the strange link between a professionalised clergy and academia from days past, but also, a recognition of the all-encompassing nature of the role. Maybe, because of that, it’s also a real challenge, a true ‘blank page’.

The first instinct, I guess, is to take a break, to stop, to breathe. That’s undeniably good, but how long for? Is that it? At what point does stopping and breathing become lazy indulgence? I’ve been reading quite a lot lately, perhaps subconsciously preparing for these months, about taking time out, resting, slowing down. Often, these thoughts have been expressed as an exploration of the notion of ‘Sabbath’ that Judeo-Christian notion of keeping a period of time, a day a week, special, sacred even. This, of course, is the route from which ‘sabbaticals’ have grown, not so much the ivory towers and quadrangles after all, but more the Hebrew prophets and itinerant Jewish preachers of ancient days, seeking to find the rhythms of a fulfilled life There’s John Mark Comer’s ubiquitous The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which seems to have touched a cultural nerve, but also Ruth Haley Barton’s Invitation to Solitude and Silence. Then, out of the blue, I was invited to reflect again on Walter Brueggemann’s sense of Sabbath as:

‘the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption, and the endless pursuit of private well-being’.

He also observed that, recognizing just how we, like multiple generations before us, each in their own way, are utterly enmeshed in systems and structures designed, not so much for our well-being but rather the benefit of others,

‘the departure into restfulness is both urgent and difficult, for our motors are set to run at brick-making speed.’

(A reference to one of those earliest structures, highlighted in the Bible, where Egypt’s Pharaoh had Hebrew slaves building ever larger structures, to assuage their growing thoughts of freedom.)

Most recently of all, I’ve been struck, by following Pete Grieg’s pilgrimage walk from Iona to Lindisfarne, and the passing comment that the original Celtic monks, in making the same journey, eschewed the offer of horses to ride, preferring to walk, fearing that the increased pace of travel might cause them to miss something.

I’m sure I’ve missed lots, I’m convinced I’m caught up in a whole range of hectic, consumerist structures, and I’m often tired, so rest, gets a big tick from me. At least I think it does, but barely do I sit down, and I’m feeling restless again. How long can/should I keep this up? There are so many things to do, opportunities to explore, people to please. I need to justify this privilege of time and space.

His speaking, his marching, his campaigning and protesting, even his sitting, was driven with a passion and an urgency that was infectious, and effective.

And then there’s that ever-present sense within me, my natural instinct if you will, true, I’m sure, of many. That I like the idea of contemplation, the need for it even, but, actually, I’m more driven by activism, by getting stuff done. The focal point of my whole break, planned for quite a while now, is a trip to the USA to follow the life of one of my spiritual heroes, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. Now, there’s an activist if ever there was one. His speaking, his marching, his campaigning and protesting, even his sitting, was driven with a passion and an urgency that was infectious, and effective. His consistent rage against injustice has been a call to arms, both to his immediate contemporaries, and generations subsequently, to get up, go out and do. Ultimately, of course, he poured out his whole life in the cause. It’s taking me an age to read a few preparatory biographies of him, stimulated as I am from every page, challenged to act, to never let injustice rule while I have voice and agency.

So, there we have it, another paradox, in the complicated business of being the person I’m meant to be, realizing the best of God’s investment in me. The conflict between rest and exploration, being and doing, contemplation and activism. I imagine we are all drawn to a certain place on that spectrum.

Blank pages, freed up days and diaries, only serve to underline what we already are. But, I suspect, we can all also hear the call to either end of the range; to be stirred to action by the things that break the heart of God, and to lay down our burdens, take upon ourselves the easier yoke, and live increasingly in ‘the unforced rhythms of grace’. Maybe, to start with at least, listening to that call, recognizing the tension, while not allowing it to create pressure in us, is enough. Hearing, praying, scribbling my first, semi coherent, thoughts on that vast empty page, making myself another coffee, and wondering what I might do next.

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8 November 2024

10 min read

How to respond when politicians talk about “our way of life”

Alasdair MacIntyre’s thinking helps us understand what we share across society.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

Four men in suits, sit next to each other smiling, in the House of Commons.

Reform MPs in the House of Commons.

House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia.

What is “our way of life”? It’s a phrase which slides easily into the rhetoric of politicians of every stripe. It’s what the Reform Party says is threatened by multiculturalism, but what do they mean by it? What kind of politics is sustained by talk of “our way of life” and is there a better way of thinking about such politics?

This summer, we made an exception to the time limit rule for television in my house, mainly so that I could have the Olympics on from morning to night. It’s a habit I acquired growing up in the United States, where an obsession over the quadrennial medal count is one of the few remaining things which bridges political and regional divides. During the Cold War, the Olympics were a way for Americans to proudly affirm the superiority of our way of life over the rigid training schedules and alien ways of the rival Soviet Union.

Although my memories begin around the fall of the Berlin Wall, old habits die hard, and so the Olympics, to me, was endless coverage of plucky underdog Americans overcoming the odds to defeat the machine-like discipline of a new set of rivals–now Russia and China

I moved to Britain just before the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics at which Britain won exactly one medal. At first I was bemused by the BBC’s coverage, which, of necessity, had to focus on British Olympians with little chance of winning. I was invited to cheer on eighth or ninth place finishers who had committed their life to a craft which would never bring the rewards of lasting fame or financial security. For them the reward was the Olympics themselves, the chance to compete amongst peers, to push themselves to their highest level, enjoying their sport and their performance for what it was, not for any external reward. In the terms of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, what these Olympians displayed was dedication to the internal goods of their sport–those goods that make a particular activity worth doing for its own sake. The Olympics were not about medals for them, but about showing what could be achieved if, as Olympians must do, they made their sport their way of life, dedicating themselves to its unique forms of excellence.

Sports, for MacIntyre, are but one example of a broader category he labels ‘practices’. Although MacIntyre has a technical definition of what counts as a ‘practice’, the general idea can be conveyed through examples he gives such as farming, researching history, architecture, chess, and chemistry. Practices are human activities which are worth doing for their own sake, which require a degree of skill and excellence, and in which what counts as that skill and excellence is, in part, defined and discerned by the people who participate in the practice. This last criterion points at something important about practices for MacIntyre: they are inherently social.

This is obvious in the case of sport. For an individual athlete to compete in a race they need not just other competitors to race against, but also trainers and coaches to prepare them for it, governing bodies to organise it, and, hopefully, spectators to cheer them on. It is, perhaps, less obvious in the case of individual farmer, but even here, one has to be taught to farm and, if one is wise, continues to learn and adapt through consulting with other farmers. A different way of putting this is that practices are the kinds of things which it’s not absurd to call “a way of life”. For an Olympic curler, curling is a way of life, just as much as farming is for a farmer.

There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth.

However, this seems to offer little help in defining “our way of life” if it is being used in the way our politicians like to talk about it. If there’s one thing that I learned from all those BBC features of British Olympians way back in 2010, it was that aside from geographic proximity, there was not much that their way of life had in common with mine. I may be within driving distance of the rink where Winter Olympian Eve Muirhead learned to curl, but my workdays of wrestling spreadsheets and answering emails have little in common with ones spent lifting weights, studying strategy with coaches, and perfecting the just right spin on a stone as it’s released.

And, of course that’s not just true of Olympic athletes. The investment banker who attends our church shares a way of life with his colleagues in Edinburgh, London, and Tokyo, that is completely opaque to my wife and I, immersed as we are in the worlds of ministry and academia. I glimpse some of the internal goods of the practices of our dentist watching her check my daughters’ teeth and our plumber as he fixes our leaking radiators, but their way of life, the rhythms of their days, and what gives them satisfaction in their work as they move from appointment to appointment, eludes my understanding.

Where does this leave the search for a British way of life? If practices are as important to forming us as MacIntyre thinks, then the quest for any singular British way of life will ultimately be fruitless. There are many ways of life, many modes of being British, as diverse as the professions, hobbies, and passions which we find to have inherent worth. And even this characterisation does not go quite far enough, because all of these practices have a way of bursting the boundaries of Britishness if they really are worthwhile. A century and a half ago, football, rugby, and cricket were quintessentially British sports. Now they belong to the world.

Similarly, valuing these practices well within Britain has a tendency to open us to accepting those from outside our borders who can help develop them. The best footballer in Britain is Norwegian. Many of the doctors who ensured my daughters arrived safely after complicated pregnancies were originally from India and Pakistan.

Still, one might wonder if thinking about community through the lens of practices, as MacIntyre does, is too much of a solvent. Isn’t it a way of imagining us living near each other, but not with each other; siloed in our practices, in each of our communities, not understanding what our neighbours are up to? Not necessarily. For MacIntyre, the familiarity that arise from living near someone, hearing their worries at planning permission hearings, arguing with them at the local school’s parent council meetings, organising a community fundraiser together, or, even, being part of a family with them, can help develop an understanding of the internal goods of practices which we do not take part in. I haven’t lifted a brush to paper to since my secondary school art class, but my mother-in-law’s virtuosity with acrylics has led me to acquire an increasing appreciation for painting. Part of what helps facilitate this recognition is that, as MacIntyre argues, although the internal goods and the skills required to achieve them tend to be different for each practice, the virtues which we develop while pursuing them–patience, honesty, courage, self-control–are universal. Part of what helps us recognise others’ activities as practices, as worth doing for their own sake, are the virtues we see them develop as they do them.

This sort of recognition requires familiarity, the sort I might have with my neighbours in our corner of rural Aberdeenshire, but that I am unlikely to have with fellow citizens in Cornwall, Cardiff, London, or Glasgow. How then are we to respond to national politicians talking about “our way of life”? One answer might be: with extreme scepticism. This is MacIntyre’s approach. He rejects the nation-state, which he calls “a dangerous and unmanageable institution”, as a potential channel of communal unity. Instead, he calls on us to admit that modern nation-states exist as a contradiction, being both “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services” and yet also something treated as sacred, which we are asked, on occasion, to surrender our lives to preserve. He notes with characteristic acerbity, “it is like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

However, here I’d temper MacIntyre’s rhetoric somewhat. While my attachment to bankers in Canary Wharf is largely a happenstance of history, a contingent fact generated by long forgotten necessities of eighteenth century geopolitics, it has nevertheless resulted in both of us being issued the same passport, governed by the same tax regime, and having the same set of regulatory agencies to complain to when things go wrong. Those may be manifestations of what MacIntyre disparages as “a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services”, but they nevertheless do bind us together. As such we both have an interest in making sure this bureaucracy acts as justly as it can, not because it is the embodiment of all that is British, Britain is much too diverse and interesting to be fully embodied in our political institutions, but because we all have an interest in the institutions in which we are enmeshed, British or otherwise, being run as justly as possible.

Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life”

Because we find ourselves tied together by these institutions to a diverse collection of people, we have an interest in learning about those with whom we live. Even those who are far away. And to also celebrate when goods and services delivered by our institutions result in success to which we, in a remote way, have contributed. I may not share a way of life with Adam Peaty, but, thanks to the BBC, I can have a glimpse into what his way of life is and can be happy that through my taxes I have contributed, in a small way, to helping him win another medal. Since that 2010 Winter Olympics Britain has come quite a long way and there is nothing wrong with a little vicarious pride in our athlete’s accomplishments.

But I can also be proud of athletes who didn’t win. Ones like BMX rider Beth Shriever who handled her unexpected last place finish in her final with a kind of grace and maturity, the kind of virtue, which someone more dedicated to her practice than to just winning can demonstrate. It is the facilitating of this kind of moral achievement which is more valuable than any medal.

Similarly, I can rejoice when a new hospital gets built in a neglected area in London, or more council housing is supplied to people in need in Edinburgh, hopeful that these lead to my fellow citizens achieving the kind of flourishing lives they deserve. I can be angry, when I discover that the money I’ve paid towards postage has been used to prosecute innocent victims of a computer glitch, and pleased when the opening of a new rail line eases the otherwise stressful commute of tens of thousands in London. The state may be a bit like a telephone company, but a well-run utility can do a lot to supply people with the goods they need to make their lives. As long as I’m a subscriber, as long as I’m tied to people through national institutions like the state, I have a moral duty to ensure that they’re run as well as possible.

This way of thinking about politics may strike some as idealistic, the kind of view only a naive Christian ethicist could endorse. Surely politics is all about securing as much money and resources as possible for the people most like oneself. That, it seems, is often the unstated assumption when the talk of “our way of life” is deployed and why so much coalition building in our politics turns on finding a convenient other against which to define “our” similarity. Take your pick: immigrants, the EU, woke elites, the Tories, or Westminster (among a certain brand of politician here in Scotland).--. Growing up in the USA, the Soviets, and then the Chinese, and now, depending whether one lives in a Republican or Democratic district, the other political party, have served the same purpose. The problem is that we aren’t that similar, we are and always have been a diverse lot with diverse needs. Every nation is. There is no one British way of life and to allow our politicians to try to sustain the fiction that there is lets them off the hook. Solving deep seated economic and social inequality is hard. Blaming immigrants for not embracing our way of life is easy.

So, perhaps the sort of politics that I am talking about here is idealistic, nevertheless it is the only kind that can sustain a just government in the long term. Without acknowledging the importance of goods we only partly understand which are pursued by people whose ways of life are different from our own, we cannot hope to sustain the minor miracle of coordination and mutual aid that history has gifted us with in our united kingdom.