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9 October 2023

6 min read

The thin place family-making creates

Fixing a broken adoption system leads to a 'thin place' – one where family-making transcend traumas. Belle Tindall meets Tarn Bright of Home For Good.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Three young children run away into the distance down across a field of long grass.

Towards a thin place.

Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash.

‘The thin place’ is one of those wonderfully old terms; fifth century old, to be exact. It’s what Celtic Christians labelled the precise places where it felt as though this world and another would meet. Those places were thin because the atmosphere they provided made it appear as though there was very little separation between humanity and the divine. The seen and the unseen, residing in particularly close proximity.

Being Welsh, I have a soft spot for anything remotely ‘celtish’. Being a lover of anything enchanting, I swoon at such a beautiful notion. Being a Christian, I happen to believe that thin places are real.

Here’s the interesting thing though, when the Celts used this phrase, it was pertaining to a geographical area – a Welsh waterfall, an Irish woodland, a Scottish Loch (sorry England, I’m sure your Anglo-Saxons were just as appreciative of you). But when Tarn Bright, the CEO of Home for Good, used this phrase just last week, it was when talking about the UK’s care system.

Quite the unexpected twist, isn’t it?

But you need to spend approximately three minutes in Tarn’s presence to agree with her. In fact, whenever I find myself chatting to anyone from Home for Good, an organisation that is intent on ‘finding a home for every child that needs one’, I find myself in a very thin place indeed.

As a way of explaining myself (and Tarn), allow me to briefly turn my attention to just one of the things that make Christianity ever so slightly odd: the Christian God is a family. I know, I know - it’s intricate, it’s complicated, it’s paradoxical, but it’s absolutely core to the way Christians perceive… well…. everything.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity. All distinct, all one, all God. If I were NT Wright or Jane Williams, perhaps I would feel confident enough to explain this thoroughly. But I’m not, so I won’t. Instead, I’m hoping that you’ll take my word for it, follow my (or rather, Tarn’s) line of argument, and seek out the details later.

Deal? Deal.

So, here we all are acknowledging that Christianity has a family as God, that there has been relationship from the very beginning of time. And so, it follows that Christianity also hinges on a family-making-God, one who ‘sets the lonely in families’, to borrow a phrase. Hence, the thin place. Tarn’s profound thinking is that when we, as humans, put families together, there’s very little separation between us and the God who has always been determined to do the very same thing. If those families are formed biologically – wonderful. If a family is put together through a combination of circumstance and choice – that is just as legitimate and just as thin.

I struggle to think of a more beautiful thought.

Blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children.

While I could expend thousands of words waxing-lyrical about such things, I’d be remiss to not tell you anything of Home for Good aside from its somewhat sacred (in my over-emotional opinion) nature. Let’s take it from the beginning.

Home for Good was thought up nearly ten years ago, at a garden party hosted in a vicarage; one flowing with Pimms and finger sandwiches. While the setting may be charmingly quaint, the content of the meeting was of the utmost seriousness. Desperate shortage of foster carers and adoptive parents in the UK was making headline news, and several Christian leaders, many of whom were foster carers or adoptive parents themselves, committed to work together to raise the profile of fostering and adoption within the UK Church.

And so, Home for Good was born.

You see, a child will enter the UK care system every fifteen minutes, there are more children in the care system right now than ever before. Each and every one of those children has intrinsic worth and value, all of them have experienced loss and trauma, many have suffered abuse or neglect. The reality is that there just aren’t enough carers to ensure that these children have somewhere stable to call home. It’s one of those vast and painful realities we find hard to digest. And yet, Home for Good not only acknowledges the tragedy, it tackles it head-on.

Active in all four UK nations, Home for Good is working to find a home for every single child: through fostering, adopting and supported lodgings.

You may be asking yourself where on earth they’re finding these homes.

Well, they’re finding them in the fifty thousand churches across the UK. Not ‘churches’ as in the grand (or perhaps not so grand) building next to your favourite coffee shop, but ‘Church’ as in the tens of millions of people who flow in and out of those buildings. We’re talking the people, not the places. Home for Good practically equip, support and train those who want to invite children into their families, while also mobilising churches to be welcoming and understanding places for these families to be. Because, if we are thinking of family as in ‘nuclear family’; that all important two adults to two-point-five children ratio, we are thinking too rigidly. And, contrary to popular belief, we are not thinking along very Christian lines either.

It struck me, while speaking with Tarn, that the work that Home for Good do is also thin in another way: the space between profound pain and immense joy is, and perhaps always will be, very thin indeed. For example, Tarn told me a story of five siblings who were in very real risk of losing each other. There seemed to be very little hope of finding a stable home for all five of them, as there simply aren’t enough carers who are able to take on siblings. And once separated, even if only intended to be a temporary measure, the chances of those siblings living together again are practically non-existent. It’s hard to fathom looking straight into such huge pain on such little faces. That’s the type of pain that, if we’re honest, we’d like to pretend doesn’t exist. But it does. And it’s in closer proximity than we allow ourselves to realise. But then, blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children. This isn’t a story of rescue, Tarn will stand for no such thing, rather it is a story of family-making. The type that Tarn, with her own beloved adopted sons, knows well.

Unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’.

As well as working on a local level, Home for Good have built up an immense influence on a national level. Since Tarn’s been the CEO, she has worked with (all seven) Children’s Ministers in Westminster. As she subsequently observes, the system is not of conscious design. Rather, it consists of a conglomeration of reactive policy ‘add-ons’. Although there are people devotedly working within the system who are intent on doing the best for children, it is deeply and undeniably stretched. What’s more, inputting into the ‘once in a lifetime’ independent review, Tarn and her team were able to explain how unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’. Somewhere along the line, we have stopped asking ‘what the child’s heart needs’. And yet, Tarn notes that how we treat our children now will directly affect how our world works in a generation’s time.

If this is not a justice issue of the most profound kind, it’s hard to imagine what is.

And so, there we have it. Home for Good, the thinnest place imaginable. The place where every child is fought for. The place where family is re-imagined. The place where I abandon every ounce of professionalism, as I put all my energy into holding back embarrassing tears. The place that is, thankfully, quite used to such reactions.

Article

Character

Culture

Leading

Virtues

19 September 2024

6 min read

What is Putin thinking? And how would you know?

The self-centeredness of modern culture is antithetical to strategic thinking.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Preisdent Putin stands behind a lectern with a gold door and Russian flag behind him.

What is Putin thinking?

In a world of Google Maps when walking on city streets, or of Waze when driving, it is difficult to ever become lost.

The AI algorithm provides us with the shortest route to our destination, adjusting whenever we make the wrong turn. We do not need to think for ourselves, technology instead showing the way forward.

But there are times where it is possible to get lost. This happens less in a city with its clearly set-out streets, and more so when taking the wrong turn in open expanses: hiking in the mountains, traversing farmers’ fields or while navigating at sea. In each of these situations, a miscalculation may lead to peril.

It is in these situations that we must carefully think through our steps, determining how to proceed, or whether to turn back. Often, these situations are ambiguous, the right way forward unclear.

Much of life – perhaps more than we wish to acknowledge – is like this, more akin to a walk across an open field with multiple possible routes forward, than a technology-enabled walk through a city.

When making important decisions, our grasp of a given situation, of others’ intentions and motives, and the networks facilitating and constraining action, are less evident than we may initially think.

This acknowledgement of uncertainty is no reason for delay, but rather a basis for careful deliberation in determining what to do, and how to proceed. It is necessary if we are to pursue what we believe is right, in a manner that may produce positive results.

In a recent interview with the BBC Newscast podcast, University of Durham Chancellor Dr Fiona Hill – who previously served as White House National Security Council Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs, and currently as Co-Lead of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review – provides listeners with a powerful reminder on how to proceed within ambiguous situations, especially in navigating the choppy seas, or rocky terrains, of human relationships.

Strategic empathy requires self-restraint when natural impulses urge a person to make rapid conclusions about the reality of a given situation – the default human tendency.

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Dr Hill uses the term “strategic empathy” to consider how the political West might proceed in its relationship with Russia, and specifically with Vladimir Putin.

Strategic empathy is a serious commitment to understanding how another person thinks, considering their worldview, their key sources of information (in other words, their main three or four advisors, who have a person’s ear), and other emotional considerations that underpin decision-making.

It is much more than just putting oneself in other’s shoes, as is often said about empathy. The approach is one of realism, suspending judgment based on self-protective or self-aggrandising illusions, in favour of what is actually the case.

In the case of Putin, Dr Hill helpfully reminds listeners that his worldview is drastically different than that of Westerners, and that significant intellectual effort (and specifically, intellectual humility in setting aside one’s own default frames of reference) is necessary to consider decisions from Putin’s perspective, and so make the right decisions from ours.

Technology is here an assistant but not a cure-all. Whereas AI might – based on a gathering of all possible publicly available information written by and about a particular person – help to predict a person’s next move, this prediction is imperfect at best.

There are underlying factors – perhaps a deeply engrained sense of historical grievance and resentment in the case of Putin – that shapes another’s action and that can scarcely be picked up through initial conversation. These factors may not make sense from our perspectives, or be logical, but they exist and must be treated seriously.

This empathy is strategic, because effective strategy is the “How?” of any mission. Whereas a person’s or organisation’s mission, vocation or purpose (all words that can be used relatively interchangeably) is the “Why?” of a pursuit, strategy is the “How?” which itself consists of the questions “Who?” “What?” “When?” and “Where?”

To understand how to act strategically requires a prior effective assessment of reality. This requires going beyond what others say, our initial perception of a situation, any haughty beliefs that we simply know what is happening, or even the assessments of supposedly well-connected and expert contacts.

Dr Hill’s strategic empathy is an appeal to listeners to ask questions – digging as much as possible – to arrive at an assessment that approximates reality to the greatest degree possible. This exercise might be aided by AI, but it is at its heart a human endeavour.

Strategic empathy requires self-restraint when natural impulses urge a person to make rapid conclusions about the reality of a given situation – the default human tendency. The persistent asking of questions is difficult – requiring mental, emotional and intellectual endurance.

There is considerable wisdom in Dr Hill’s reflections on strategic empathy, which extend well beyond the fields of intelligence, geopolitics or defence. The idea of strategic empathy helps show us that in much of modern culture – which glorifies the self, individuals putting their wants, needs and desires before those of others – developing strategy is very difficult.

The key then, when deliberating on potential right courses of action in ambiguous situations, is to not begin believing that the right way is clear. It rarely is.

Why is this the case? When popular culture favours phrases such as “You do you,” the you becomes a barrier to asking questions, with some aloofness to the situation, necessary for understanding how another thinks. People are encouraged to focus on themselves at the expense of others, and so fail to understand others’ worldviews and ways of operating.

Simply put, the self-centeredness of modern culture is antithetical to strategy. It impedes deliberation, which involves patience in the gradual formation of purpose for action. It wages war against the considered politics or statesmanship that many want to see return. In place of this is crisis or catastrophe, in which self-focus leads to clashes with others that could otherwise be avoided or worked through carefully.

The Biblical story of the serpent in the garden is another vantage point for the idea of strategic empathy. Soon after Adam and Eve eat the apple in the garden and become “like gods, knowing good and evil,” God searches for them and asks “Where are you?”

It is right after individuals try to become the judges of good and evil – “like gods,” that Adam and Eve find themselves lost: God’s “Where are you?”

Put differently, when a person is convinced they are right, but without asking questions, they make mistakes, they likely suffer unnecessarily because of this, and then become anchorless – the “Where are you?”

This applies to countries as much as it does to people: the more they moralize, seeking to become the judges of good and evil in a complex geopolitical landscape, the more they drift from their sense of purpose.

The key then, when deliberating on potential right courses of action in ambiguous situations, is to not begin believing that the right way is clear. It rarely is. A belief in evident rightness often leads to error, whereas the ability to suspend such judgment helps reveal – often gradually – the right path forward.

The strategic empathy approach requires both assertiveness – in asking good questions and maintaining persistence in doing so – and self-restraint in the face of believing that the right answer is clear.

The glue between assertiveness on the one hand and restraint on the other is faith, which helps a person to move forward in a trusting manner, but without exerting oneself so much so that they become the centre of the situation.

So, while Google Maps, Waze or other technologies might be at our disposal in our travels, both real and metaphorical, these technologies only get us so far.

The right way forward is seldom initially clear when navigating ambiguous situations, the frequency and stakes of which increase as we embark boldly – with faith – on the adventure of life.

Dr Hill’s strategic empathy – asking questions, listening carefully, suspending a self of sense, seriously considering diverging worldviews, and adjusting as necessary – helps us to achieve the understanding and direction we need.

Indeed, this approach is fundamental to a more effective and resilient political West. It is necessary for sounder deliberation, better strategy and statesmanship, in an increasingly ambiguous world.