Syria - Taking a Stand

‘The world will end not with a bang, but with a whimper’, wrote T.S Eliot in 1925. He was writing in the aftermath of the First World War.  What would he be writing were he to hear the dying whimpers and cries of Syrians being systematically exterminated by their own government? And would these words not also have something to say to the most powerful governments now in the final stages of making up their minds to take decisive and targeted action to stop these horrors?

At the heart of the Gospel is the word ‘stand’. It is the root from which the word ‘stauros’, meaning ‘cross’, is derived. The Cross of Christ is about ‘standing’ from a position of weakness, including the weakness which allows fear and self interest to prevent us doing the right thing in regard to the wholesale slaughter of the Syrian people. We have the technology. We have the information to precisely target whatever needs to be removed (no more and no less) for this slaughter to end.

The incarnate God who hung on that instrument of torture cried out ‘with a loud voice’. That cry was the cry of the victim triumphing over the forces of evil. In it he held the whimpers and cries of the Syrian people and our own confusion and fear regarding this conflict and its possible repercussions should we take direct and targeted action. But Christ’s weakness was given to us so that it could become our strength, in order that we might act both with courage and humility when the time comes for acting – and the time has come.

Humility is essential to doing what is right and necessary in this situation. It prevents the lust for power, whatever form that takes, from deluding those who must make decisions, and those who must execute them, into thinking that they should do more than is absolutely necessary in order to prevent genocide from being repeated either now or in the future. The same humility will give all parties the courage to come to the table and talk the talk that is needed for peace to become a reality, and the reality begins with everyone acknowledging that no one comes to the table with clean hands. All are answerable, in some measure, for what is going on in Syria, although it may take years for the threads of culpability to be unravelled and traced to their original sources. 

All people of faith have a vital role to play in this process, and in the after care of Syria once a finely tuned surgical operation to remove all potential for the mass destruction of human beings has been performed. They must live as well as speak peace. All must pray. By prayer I mean engaging with heart and mind as a single body which is held in the love of God, and in the power of his vulnerability which Christians understand to be that of the Cross. We do this by ‘suffering with’, which is the meaning of the word ‘empathy’. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is about getting into another nation’s pain, not standing by and wondering what to do about it. It means being prepared to make sacrifices for righteousness’ sake. In other words, for the sake of doing the right thing. These sacrifices will almost certainly make those who undertake them unpopular, even hated, so people of faith must pray in such a way as to share in that responsibility. It is surely better to risk being hated than to stand by and watch the slaughter of innocents for whom we will all be ultimately  held accountable.

Would whoever is reading this post, please take the next minute of your time to pray for Syria and for those governments who can and must now act. Whoever you are, whatever faith tradition you belong to, please turn off your computer and hold this situation for a minute in silence before God.

Life After Life

There has been renewed speculation recently over the credibility of so called ‘out of body’ experiences. These are what some people who have been near death know as various forms of other consciousness, when one sees oneself from a distance, or sees a kind of light at the end of what appears to be impenetrable darkness. It is possible that those with severe disabilities, especially children, exist in this dimension, perhaps for a considerable amount of time, but that they are unable to speak about it. Sometimes these experiences are entirely light. It is argued that the fact that we hear of such experiences means that people were either not, properly speaking, dead, or that certain brain patterns are discernible during the final few seconds of life as we know it. These patterns have been observed during experiments on rats.

Speaking as someone who while very young used to regularly journey ‘out there’, as I thought of it at the time, I do not think these recent scientific observations tell us very much about life after death. Neither do they tell us very much about the finality of death itself, as oblivion or complete non existence in the limited realm of consciousness as we know it. They tell us a little about what losing sight of life feels like, but that is only one very small part of the journey outwards, whatever that consists of. All that we possibly know is that it is a one way trip. During my own infantile experiments with the ‘out there’ I always knew that I had to get back to my body before someone came into the room.  I sensed that the appearance of another person would have broken the fine thread which keeps us connected to the here and now at the earliest stage of life, and perhaps at the final stages too. I suspect that some cot deaths may be partly caused by the infant going too far ‘out there’ and finding that she is now unable to get ‘back in’, but all of this is pure conjecture.

What I learned from these moments of extreme detachment was that the business of dying faces us with having to let go, not only of what we have, but of what we are – or at least what until now we have always believed ourselves to be. In terms of Christian teaching on death and judgment this makes sense. Judgment, as we understand it, is not about being lumbered with all our past sins, as if God had been saving them up and was now relishing the moment of weighing them in a gigantic set of kitchen scales before pronouncing failure. Rather, it is about a revelation of the truth about who we are. What we actually sense, in out of body experiences, is light and weightlessness, a paring away of the essential self and the things which have accumulated around that self and encumbered it during the course of its life on earth.

Put simply, I believe that this refining process, or judgment, is a paring away of every moment which has not been of love. It is a refining, or burning away of everything which has been corrosive in our lives, everything that has destroyed our humanity, or that of others, revealing only what is left of our true self as it was originally created by God. The really daunting thing about death and judgment is that this true self may have all but disappeared. That is about as near as we can get to oblivion.

We spend most of our lives not being true to what we were meant to be because so much of our time and energy is wasted on realising aspirations which do not in themselves amount to anything. These aspirations, which may have been noble and selfless to begin with, seldom realise their potential because they get short circuited by our own need to ‘exist’, or to live life primarily for our own advancement or satisfaction in the dimension which we currently inhabit.  Such a limited existence is all too often the result of suffering and psychological deprivation experienced in the past. When Jesus speaks of treasure which does not corrode, and which is not prey to destructive insects like moths, he is talking about the extent to which we have allowed love to refine our selfish concerns and priorities. Living like this requires that we allow God’s love to start refining us now, so that we can live generously towards him and towards the whole of creation. To this end, we are offered grace. Grace makes it possible not only to ‘endure all things’, as St. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, but to participate in the transformation of all that is corrupt, evil and selfish in ourselves and in the world into something which is light and energy, the ongoing life of God which is given to us in Jesus Christ who we shall one day see face to face. 

Zero Hours and Work Worth Doing

Work, if it is worth doing, should engage the whole person. It should be more than a source of revenue. Similarly, work done by others ought to be more than a quick fix for an organisation which is finding it hard to stay in business. If a job has an intrinsic value both employer and employee have responsibilities to each other, as well as to the work itself. The zero hour contract puts this kind of mutual sense of responsibility at risk. 

Zero hour contracts are being compared to what used to be called ‘temping’, the kind of work which was to be had via an agency and which would last for a specified length of time. They have also been likened to the situation of the self employed. But neither of these two ways of earning a living compare to the new zero hour contract already being used by councils and organisations who ought to know better.

The problem is one of value and of human worth. The ‘zero’ devalues the work. It also devalues the worker and, in the process, the person or organisation offering it. A zero hour contract makes the worker feel that they are no more than a tool or facility which is expendable rather than a person who will contribute to the ongoing life of the organisation, even if on a temporary basis. Zero hours can be read as ‘flexible’ but they can also be read as involving zero responsibility because in failing to take account of the worth of the human person, the contract renders the work itself valueless to all parties concerned, so no one is really responsible to anyone. 

The problem also lies with purpose, or the lack of it when it comes to any kind of work, whether or not it is contractual. Work is desirable, good and valuable, not only to the extent that it provides a person with a livelihood but because it has its own intrinsic value and purpose, and that purpose involves the greater good of all parties involved. A job worth doing is therefore a job worth doing well. A job which can be cancelled at less than a day’s notice signals to the employee that it is not a real job and serves little real purpose. If it is to embody purpose, work should be essentially creative. It should be thought of as having the potential to transform whoever is involved, both employer and employee, and to create new things as a result of what they do together.

The Benedictine monastic tradition teaches that work is prayer, so all work needs to be done as for someone who is loved beyond all others – in other words, as for God. When undertaken in this way, by employer and employee alike,  work consecrates the ordinary and sometimes boring task into a sacrament.This allows for the transcending of ordinariness and reveals the image of God in the human beings who are doing it. . 

Love God And Do As You Please

I google mapped Ibiza this afternoon, remembering summers there in the early sixties. It seems the view from our house is as it always was, although its immediate surroundings are barely recognisable. It has become luxury accommodation of the highest order, so high, in fact, that no pictures of the house itself are directly viewable on google maps. 

Places may change but memories keep them as they always were, shaped by the times and circumstances when we knew them. The glitzy resort remains the primitive beach we once knew when we think of ourselves at that particular time.

The sixties in Ibiza were where the hedonism we see there today really started, or so we who knew it then like to think. Even so, it would have been hard to imagine the Salinas beach as it is today. Then, it was what its name suggests, salt flats fed from the lagoon adjoining the beach on which a single kiosco offered fried fish and a bottle of wine on most days of the week. Sometimes we slept there under the stars.

I don’t know if people are any happier on that beach now than they were when I knew it. I don’t remember feeling really happy there myself. But we were all determined to live the beach life and to construct a happiness out of that mercurial freedom which seemed to come with it. I do remember a small church in the little village near our house. Every time I passed this church I felt that the happiness I was working so hard to maintain was being drawn down into its coolness. It seemed to offer, or perhaps threaten to replace what I thought I had, with something different. What was disturbing about these moments, which happened every time I passed the church, was the feeling they left me with, that I was not altogether free and would not be free until I responded to its pull, its call. One of the reasons why I did not respond for a number of years was the fear that giving in to the pull would severely compromise what I took to be my freedom. 

Freedom can be understood in so many ways but, curiously, we do not really experience it until the moment we are prepared not to be free, until we are prepared to accept love and the consequences of loving in return. Love binds us to itself, but in a way which frees us to be happy. If this is true in human relationships, it is infinitely more true in a relationship with God. Accepting God’s love can only lead to our loving him in return, something I was not keen to do back in the early sixties in Ibiza. In this reciprocated love, as Saint Augustine wrote, we are free to do what we will, ‘for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the one who is beloved’.

So the beach years, or their equivalent, are really a kind of flight from a love which will pare us down to the point where all we can do is receive the love of God which leads to forgiveness and self acceptance. This is freedom. In this freedom, which at the same time binds us to God, we can do whatever makes us happy. There are no wrong choices, and therefore no failures, provided that our choices contribute to the greater happiness of others, and so please the one who gives us freedom in all its fullness.