After a monumental struggle, I finally got a face-to-face appointment with a GP. But it turned out that Dr XXXX did not go in for much face-to-face contact except with her computer screen. I wondered if she might in fact be an automaton or an AI bot for the amount of personal interaction she engaged in with me. I didn’t think to check her for a pulse, and anyway, I was the patient. I asked if we might also do the ‘repeat prescription review’ which was booked for the following week – for a medication that was not unrelated to my presenting symptom. I was promptly, and I thought rather harshly, told that an appointment can last only ten minutes, and which did I want her to deal with, the symptom or the repeat prescription review? I opted for the former, but felt slapped down. Indeed, the whole experience left me feeling rather atomised, an easily separated collection of bits rather than a single human being. Is this what General Practice has been reduced to?

I got what I had hoped for: a referral to an ENT specialist. And since we had two minutes left, I asked if she might do the repeat prescription review. By her own time-and-motion logic, there was no obvious escape route for her, and she said she would mark the request for release.

Altogether an unhappy experience of being treated as an object to be processed. She did not examine me at all. But I examined her, with all the close attention of a patient treated as an inconvenience.

The tendencies and inclinations of organizations have always interested me. Not from some academic angle — far more pressing than that — but because they are such powerful shapers of human experience. I have sold my labour to them, volunteered for them, encountered them as customer, client, patient, penitent, complainant, consumer — beggar, even. The lives (open and hidden) of organizations provide fodder for the social sciences and for journalism, and for popular over-the-fence expressions of discontent and resentment. How could we survive without them? They can provide purpose (good ones, bad ones), meaning (of various shades), and wages (sometimes high, often cruelly low).  They can drive innovation and bring things 'to market'.  They can enhance (or deplete) our cultural capital, achieve a redistribution of wealth (in different directions) and get things done.

For the purposes of my point, they have their dark side. They can reduce people to robots and objects, they can crush and consume lives, they can come adrift from their original purpose, they can become a means to an end.

As we can't live without them, we best learn to be alert to their dangers and committed to making them human, as far as that is within our power.

These observations apply to the churches as to other organizations, and they present some unusual aspects to consider. One is the tendency to 'spiritualize' power (to suggest that its hierarchy is divinely licensed, for example, or possessed of spiritual gifts others don't have). It can embody attitudes that cause harm (examples include traditional attitudes to women and their roles and to gay people and their place in the life of the church, indeed, the world). Churches have tended in some matters to be socially conservative, when you might expect them to be leading change. They have taught (implicitly for the most part) that their followers should be pure and free of any chaotic, troubling thoughts or desires. It is not impossible that this kind of institutional repression creates the ground for abusive practices now uncovered in many of the denominations.

As noted, all organizations have a dark, or shadow, side. The question is, how are these managed, how are the risks mitigated, how can organizations be vehicles of value for the common good? Part of the answer is in checks and balances. Another is a true egalitarianism in the spiritual adventure that is following Christ — an end to clericalism's traits (I've written about this elsewhere). Jung wrote of the unintegrated shadow side and its potential for harm: “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it…. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.” (Psychology and Religion, 1938, Collected Works 11).

This line of thought does not write off the achievements of the churches, and it certainly does not deny the countless men and women, lay and ordained, who have brought light, love and multitudinous good things to others.  It is a call to be alert.

Open Air pulpits can seem to me melancholy and dispiriting...

Not many churches have them. There was one at the church I worked at in London's West End, reportedly paid for by friends of The Revd McCormick in 1904 in the hope that, with his strong Irish voice, he would attract the crowds that passed along Piccadilly. But the sound of horses' hooves on the cobbled stones of Piccadilly drowned him out.

It is possible that my dislike of outdoor pulpits derives from my feelings about indoor ones. There was a time (before microphones and when larger numbers attended church) when sticking the preacher on a platform to be more clearly heard made sense ('pulpit' comes from the Latin pulpitum, meaning platform or staging). That no longer applies, and placing the speaker 'six feet above contradiction' seems inegalitarian these days.

I don’t recall when exactly I became alert to the easy and self-referential use of the possessive, but it was very many years ago. I am perfectly happy with it in some settings: my daughter/son; my partner, my home – though personally I’d use ‘our’ for two of those.  I have always disliked the use of ‘my’ when used by people to describe their colleagues - especially subordinate ones.  I was once in a lift at the headquarters of the social services department I had just joined, to be introduced as ‘one of my social workers’ by the Area Director. As a rooky I had no business taking offence, but I did.
 
Is the use of the ‘my’ possessive such a problem? I think so, for it defines the speaker as the reference point of all things. Me. Mine. The human ego is a slippery critter and does much harm.  Ownership is one of its favourite claims.  Do I have life or does life have me?  The latter I think.
 
I shiver very slightly when people speak of ‘my career’. For two reasons. One is the ‘my’ again; the other is the pretension of it.  I’d rather speak of the work I do.  I realise this line of thinking – and reacting – goes against the modern grain.  The modern grain is concerned with me and mine.  The egotistical self, again.
 
In church circles I flinch at the very common ‘my ministry’ as used by clergy.  I had always thought it was Christ’s ministry.  And what is wrong with work – the work I do (in the church)?  Language defines and too often divides what ought not to be divided.  Too many things – phrases, privileges – already separate the clergy from the laity in the life of the church. A trend so entrenched hardly anyone notices it.
 
But the church is small fry in the scheme of things.  The tendency to think and act in possessives – me, mine – harms us all and all human activity - indeed, it is harming our irreplaceable planet. Is it fanciful to think that violence in its many forms is often brought to birth by it?