Evil Within

Two notorious child killers figure in the news at the moment; the first, Ian Brady, infamous serial killer of the sixties; the second, Rebecca Shuttleworth who subjected her two year old to a prolonged and agonising death through torture and repeated beatings. Where do we draw the line between the psychotic, or damaged person, and plain evil?

What is disturbing about these people is their ordinariness. The young woman is, on the face of it, any mother. She is not bad looking and the way she is able to manipulate and deceive suggests that she is both intelligent and personable. Brady once had a certain malignant charm, enough to turn his accomplice into someone who, like him, exulted in the experience of evil as extreme power over defenceless children. But why are we fascinated by them?

I have only once visited a prison but in those couple of hours I experienced pure dread. Prisons are ‘dreadful’ places, not because the inmates are in any way weird or frightening, but because they are so ordinary. I did not know what crimes any of them had committed, nor did I want to, but seeing them there, in their ordinariness, reminded me that in every ‘ordinary’ person lies some sort of fascination with evil. For most of us, the fascination is unacknowledged, even unrecognised, but it is there, lodged inside the psyche, inside the human heart.

We think and remember out of this secret inner place and our thinking and remembering will, more often than not, tend towards darkness rather than light, towards the suffering we have experienced at the hands of others, and the bitterness or hatred which it has left us with, or to the evil, vindictive or otherwise, from which we have gained, and perhaps continue to gain, some sort of perverse satisfaction.

On the whole, dark destructive impulses remain in the realm of the imagination and of fantasy. We are thankful that, unlike the psychopath, we have not been tempted to work them out in reality, into some violent action or sadistic impulse to harm the innocent and the vulnerable. Exposing and punishing psychopaths helps, in some perverse way, to reassure us that our own fascination with evil remains safely in the realm of the subconscious. But there is a better way to deal with the evil within, and with the fatal attraction which it holds for people like Ian Brady and Rebecca Shuttleworth.

In Jesus Christ, we have a God who willingly takes what is dark, destructive and violent in the human heart into himself, into his own inner psyche, his own spirit. On the cross, he experiences the effects of this darkness as ‘God forsakeness’. In doing so, he takes our propensity for evil into himself and prevents it going any further, thereby preventing it from destroying us. Hence, the description of Jesus as ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’. This is what is meant by salvation. 

On the Cross, Christ allows himself to be ‘made sin’, to be completely taken over by the evil of which human beings are capable without himself thinking, imagining or perpetrating evil in any way, so two seemingly incompatible things are going on here. Christ takes into himself the things of which we are most ashamed, which we dare not own even to ourselves, and in exchange we are offered freedom. We are free to face the truth about ourselves in what is hidden and dark and to bring it all to the cross and nail it there, so to speak, leaving us with the kind of peace which only comes with being made OK with God, or, to put it in more formal language, being justified before him.

All of this invites us to look at people who have committed horrendous crimes in a different way. This is not to say that we should think of them as innocent, which they are not, but that we should mentally drag them, and the evil which they represent, to the foot of the Cross where they can see and be seen by Christ in their ordinariness, as we are in ours.

Hassan Rouhani - Hoping for Hope

It is easy to be cynical about politics. No one trusts politicians, either here or abroad. In any case, Syria is not happening down our street. The social and the political turmoil which is overwhelming Egypt and Turkey does not pertain to our immediate neighbourhood or affect us in any direct way. Neither, for that matter, does the occasional bit of encouraging news, such as  the recent election of Iran’s relatively moderate Hassan Rouhani as that country’s new President. It is easy to be cynical about this too, given that Mr. Rouhani must strive to maintain an equable relationship with the conservative supreme leader, Ali Hosseini Khamenei, while at the same time enabling a much needed warming of relations with the West. Cynicism is what happens when we give up on hope, or simply lose interest in it. Hope has to do with transformation; in this case the transformation of the political scenario not only in Iran, but in the whole of the Middle East.

Call me naïve, if you like, but I work on the presupposition that Mr. Rouhani  is not a bad man and therefore should not be presumed to be the enemy from day one. Rather, he should be thought of as someone who has it within him to change, even transform, the life of Iran and thereby to free all of its people, and it is the people of Iran, as well as those of surrounding nations, who matter most. If we are to support the people of Iran and those of the Middle East, as opposed to the ideologies many of them claim to be fighting for, we must keep good faith with those who voted for Hassan Rouhani and, of equal importance, we must believe in his capacity for wisdom and goodness and for a change of mind and heart on certain key issues. As things stand at present, Hassan Rouhani could be the one who breaks the deadly cycle of violence now engulfing most of the Middle East  threatening global stability, and thereby you and me.

He will be directly or indirectly involved in making difficult and perhaps compromising decisions on a number of issues, ranging from the present conflicts in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey and the growing unrest in Egypt, to the use of nuclear energy as a destructive force, to the treatment of women and to relations between Iran and the wider world. All of these issues will weigh heavily on Mr. Rouhani and he will need more than gestures of good will from others to give him the confidence he needs if he is to embody hope for his people, including those who did not vote for him.  He cannot do this work alone.

One of the texts set in the Church in Wales lectionary for today is ‘Be still and know that I am God’ (Ps.40:10). We, along with our Muslim brothers and sisters, need to take this text to heart. We need to meet each other in it and let it first transform our hearts and minds, by replacing cynicism with hope, and then allow it to flow on through us into the troubled regions of the Middle East, not to mention the layers of misunderstanding which divide Muslims from Christians, and all of us, from what is blithely termed the ‘secular’.  Meeting others in the stillness of God is not a spiritual game. It is nothing less than the confrontation of despair with hope, through the work of prayer undertaken in faith across the barriers which divide one people from another. 

We can begin this work by being present in the stillness of knowing and being known by God. The stillness embodies the kind of love which transcends our feeble and all too human attempts at trying to resolve seemingly impossible conflict situations. It makes demands on the whole person, so the one who prays must be wholly given over to the reality of the love of God at work in the power of his Spirit, and to the possibility that it can be worked on the most violent jihadist or potential terrorist. If every Christian, every Muslim, and all who believe themselves to be in any way spiritual were to stop for a few minutes each day and takes these words literally to heart, holding those who most need God’s stillness and compassion in the forefront of their consciousness, we would,  I am sure, see a transformation of the politics of Iran and the Middle East.  Try it and see.

Eternity

Yesterday, I had an eternity moment. We were meeting our grandchildren at Heathrow. There were delays and we were starting to feel weary. We had been standing at the barrier in the arrivals hall for a couple of hours when I spotted our six year old granddaughter. In the mutual sighting of a moment, as she ran towards me and as I ducked under the barrier, I heard her ecstatic cry – “Granny!” 

People say that bits of your life are played back to you in the moment of dying and I am sure that this minor episode will be one such playback. I am sure of this, not because I am privy to what goes on in the immediate aftermath of life, but because the love of a six year old, so expressed, is transformational. You could call it transcendent. It draws us out of ourselves (which is possibly what dying feels like) and into something exquisite and full of light, the unconditional, unquestioning embrace of a loving God in which there is no darkness whatsoever.

In Jesus Christ, God the Father is always seeing us and crying out our name as he runs towards us and embraces us, even in our dark times. Such moments can come unexpectedly, or they can be sought. When a person seeks to know God and to be welcomed and forgiven, the moment has come for a kind of inward ‘turning around’ and running towards the source of love itself. It is a response, a recognition that the time has come for that person to recognise their deeply rooted need for a loving God.

 Perhaps it can be compared to the baby, still in the womb, turning around in preparation for birth, seeking out the light. The baby's present environment is an unbearable constraint, not only physically but in some measure, emotionally, even spiritually, just as our own way of life, our patterns and priorities, can suddenly feel unbearable and constraining. Perhaps the movement, or repositioning which occurs just before birth, also has to do with the self needing to begin the process of existence among other selves, a turning and reaching for love. 

The eternity moment which I experienced at Heathrow, was one of instant and mutual love between us, coming from my granddaughter and her younger brother who tumbled into my arms a second or two later. It was immediate and unconditional. It was also held in eternity, so it will never cease to exist. Such moments are to be experienced with God, in the person of Jesus, beginning now.

If you feel the need to know that you are loved and valued by God in Jesus Christ, but find it difficult to own this, or to connect with him, you can message me privately on facebook.

Church Reorganisation - What Are We About?

The Church in Wales is having a clear out. As with all clear outs, this is a worthy and no doubt timely exercise. But, whatever it may tell itself, the Church is engaged in an exercise which is mainly about the practicalities of managing decline.  We are to have ‘ministry areas’, ostensibly adapted to the needs and resources of local communities, but it is still not clear what we are really about. There is talk of mission and of the apostolic nature of the Church. There is talk of various kinds of lay ministry which supplement or complement that of a dwindling number of full time and stipendiary clergy.

While all this may be necessary for practical reasons, it does not feel very exciting. If I speak of ministry areas to anyone not familiar with the Church, a kind of glazed look comes over them. They are instantly bored. I sense that the deployment of resources, both human and fabric, is not what they want to hear about. What they really want to hear about, even if they do not admit it to themselves, is how can the Church facilitate friendship with Jesus Christ? How can we make it possible for people who may never come to church to meet him in the here and now of their lives and in the here and now of a world torn apart by violence and every kind of injustice?

I do not think that this depends on how we organise ourselves. It depends on the kind of people we are. This is especially true of those who are called to public ministry, whether ordained or lay. They need to be people whose minds, hearts, preferences and priorities are entirely shaped by love for Jesus Christ. Such people embody the Kingdom and draw others into it without them even realising it. I do not think that this takes years of training. It takes prayer. The Church needs to learn to pray in such a way that it hears people’s real needs, before these have been spoken, or even recognised. You cannot train someone to do this, but you can walk beside them as they struggle to understand God in new ways and as they struggle to give voice to the mystery of his abiding presence among us.

Too much training, and too much energy expended on organising ourselves and running things often occludes the real purpose of the Church’s work which is to enable people who do not feel that they belong in the Kingdom of Heaven to know that it is they who are most qualified, they who matter most to Christ. The Church should be making it possible for them to be real with God. It should be opening new doors for them, creating new paths in the wilderness of modern anxiety, guilt, drivenness and all the other emotions and distractions which end up destroying us. 

But first of all, the Church needs to be real with God in its own life. It needs to be reconciled within itself, by breaking down the two biggest barriers to effective ministry which are those of prejudice and professional envy. These things sap its life blood, leaving behind a spiritual vacuum. So the Church needs to rediscover its passion for God and re learn trust between its own members. Then it will be free to focus outwards, discern where his love is most needed and minister to that need. If re-organisation and ministry areas make this their primary concern they will have served their purpose.