The Safest Encounters Happen Only in Laboratories
John O'Donohue often used the image of fertile ground.
Our imagination.
Interior life.
Rich and ready.
He talked about how people tend to seal over that potential. With tarmac.
A carpark instead.
A motorway.
Sterilised.
Like fundamentalism, he said.
I often think of Naboth.
And his carefully cultivated, precious, inherited vineyard.
And of King Ahab, looking to grab it for a convenient kitchen garden.
A place to put a few solar panels for the palace.
Nothing's new under the sun.
Except solar panels…
Chapter Seventeen curates space for encounter.
Spaces.
A theatre — an empty one, and a green room and listening rooms…
Cinema screens and artist studios.
An airport departure lounge, coffee shops, and broken shops, and —
hey, even a forest!
And deep within that forest, places of engagement and conference.
Residence.
Conference.
Not a club, nor a church, but —
Not a game, nor an experiment, nor an art installation, but —
A space for encounter.
People could get hurt.
I'm not even joking.
But it's okay it's only a website.
You can unplug a website.
In fact, a website is a waste of time — especially if we're talking theology.
Reason 1: it's not real.
Reason 2:
There are scandals.
Stories.
We've all heard them.
Some of them might be ours to tell.
Vulnerabilities. Power imbalance.
And that's why —
safeguarding
liability
accountability
rules
insurance
and so on.
An outlandish question. Just putting it out there.
Is it even possible to have a profound and meaningful encounter in such a heavily mediated atmosphere?
Sorry about the question. If you have been harmed by issues around the asking of this question, please get in touch with our helpline on —
The fact is intimate encounters have the capacity to change our lives.
But they don't have to if we make them safer.
So that we can choose.
Without life being changed.
Just saying.
Systems at scale stay safe by depersonalising, don't they?
Tarmacking.
Neutralising.
Generalising:
"Ho, ho, best leave that, I think, to the
— leaders, — artists, — rich people, — rule-makers, — others."
Smoking room questions.
Guffaws, whisky.
Completely academic.
And campaigns.
T-shirts.
Labels.
Laws.
So this is a real possibility for Chapter Seventeen.
PHASE ONE is only for intellectuals - thinkers, pastor, leaders, artists,
Not for people who may be harmed - who need safe institutional space
Not for people looking for actual answers, or actual encounters.
Only professional musing and vocational enrichment.
Perhaps PHASE ONE of Chapter Seventeen will be entirely composed of thirty-six conference delegates who are:
academics
theologians
philosophers
pastors
artists
technologists
and nobody who might
be looking for answers
possibly get hurt or challenged
A real possibility, where we wander around a ghost town of extended context, and populate it purely with hypotheticals.
And then, PHASE TWO we come up with our ethical containers that ensure everyone affected is signposted into the right procedural queues to desks of people trained in ensuring that no one experiences anything that wouldn't safely apply to the hypothetical crash test dummies used in the test case.
This starts feeling like something we can safely roll out and replicate and create templates for that can become cookie cutters for more and more of the franchised and satellite versions.
And then, PHASE THREE we give it a catchy slogan and fund the socials, and go on snapchat and sell the idea to various institutions or get one funded by each denomination, or form a counsel to decide how safely to ensure an interdenominational approach that does not conflict with existing funding and charitable aims.
So now we're really cooking on gas, and everyone's signing up and no one's signing up because it was a passing fad and after all if you liked this version you should see the one that's coming next because it's even better and fits with the new ways of looking at things…
Perhaps instead we stop at PHASE ONE.
Remember that Chapter Seventeen was a space for encounter.
But it couldn't fully stage that because, apparently, encounter needs mitigation these days.
NAMING THIS DILEMMA MAY BE THE TRUEST THING IT EVER ACHIEVES.
Pointing out the stakes at a distance.
Without having to bear them.
(God forbid.)
Really?!
