The Face of Good Religion

What is really the issue at stake when the subject of religious apparel appears once again in the newspapers? It seems that the rights of the individual to express their religion through what they wear are more divisive than the beliefs and mores which it sustains. But religion is not about the rights of individuals to express themselves, unless doing so communicates the idea of a merciful God. To take this a step further, religion lived out as faith is more than an idea. It is about living that love, and wanting it to be known and experienced by others, through the love we are given for them by God himself.

Good religion binds people together into God’s love, the word ‘religion’ being rooted in the latin ‘ligare’, meaning to bind together. It is about the making and strengthening of the life of community from within the depths of the love of God. Religion, when it is good, is born of that love and ultimately returns us to it, whichever path we choose to follow. But the choice is not meant to be purely for own individual satisfaction. Others must see God in the kind of person who claims to follow him. They must see the face of God in her every word, gesture and action, so that they can understand from that person what it is to be loved unconditionally by our Creator. 

The wearing of a Cross or niqab is only problematic when it actively prevents such understanding . If a young child is frightened by her teacher’s appearance, or a hospital patient feels that he is unable to relate to his nurse or doctor because he cannot see their face, then whatever is preventing him from doing so should be removed. Such obstacles to human relations in pastoral, teaching or legal contexts are not limited to the wearing of a niqab. They may also include crosses (especially oversize or ostentatious ones) whether or not they are worn out of religious conviction. Anything that disturbs or frightens a vulnerable person, or makes it difficult to apply the law in a judicial context cannot be good religion.

Contextuality is the defining point in this issue. As Christians, we try, without really trying, to be Christ to others in whatever situation we find ourselves in. We should not be thinking about what we are wearing in this respect. Rather, we should be forgetting ourselves enough to love the other person with everything we have to bring of ourselves to that task. As far as possible, we should understand their facial and body language, and be wise to these things as Christ was in all his dealings with people. Being Christ to others is not just a matter of adapting to people’s views or swallowing all things secular without taking the trouble to think how conducive they are to the flourishing of the human person. The human person is not the same as the individual, because that person is already known by God and does not need to define their identity by what they wear or own. The person’s rights have long since been met in knowing and being known by God.

Being Christ to others means that we desire more than anything that others should achieve full personhood. This requires the kind of trust which is the basis of real friendship. We become transparent to Christ while being more fully and freely ourselves, not as individuals conforming to the expectations of trend or fashion, but as persons. Through this kind of friendship others will see his face and experience his peace and joy. The young child in the classroom and the patient in hospital or surgery need to see the face of God in those who care for them. As for all people of faith, we must consider how we appear to people when we oblige them to take note of our religion through what we are wearing. 

The Christian ought to communicate his or her faith by being, above all, a person whose identity is shaped by his or her inner life with Christ, so that the people they meet can see the face of Christ in theirs. It is not hard to imagine that Muslims would want others to meet a merciful God in a similar way. I would welcome their comments.

The Church in Wales and Women Bishops

The 12^th of September 2013, was a momentous day for the Church in Wales, which, along with the Anglican Church in Scotland and Ireland, will now see women as bishops in the foreseeable future. There is great cause for celebration even though the appointment of a woman to the episcopate may not actually take place here for some time, given the scarcity of episcopal vacancies. So women and their supporters in the Church in Wales have time to prepare, as people who now know what winning feels like and who have also known what it is to lose.

There should be no losers or winners in the aftermath of this vote, any more than there were losers and winners at the foot of the Cross. We are all ‘losers’, in that context, and we are all winners when we hear our names called by the risen Christ outside the empty tomb. So this life changing vote must also be a vote which transforms the way we hear and understand calling. It must be the beginning of the transformation of our life together as it frees us all to be better priests and bishops, both for one another and for the people we are called to serve, the latter being the ones who matter most.

Paying attention to calling changes the way we celebrate this historic event because it obliges us to hear Christ calling the whole of his Church. Until now, it has been hard to hear this call to the whole community of God in the Church in Wales. It seems that it has only been possible to hear him call certain groups or individuals, depending on whose side one was on with regard to the consecration of women to the episcopacy and, before that, of their ordination to the priesthood. Now we must hear Christ in an entirely new way, a way which celebrates freedom. But there cannot be freedom while there is still fear, so there will only be real cause for celebration when the fear that is still hanging over many people in regard to women’s ministry is overcome by the slow process of building trust. Freedom is not really freedom while there are still people who cannot let go of the past and move on to what is still an uncertain future. We cannot realistically talk of love overcoming fear until trust has been established, and by trust I mean trusting the new situation and being realistic about it.

Some people will continue to feel the hurt of the past and may take a while to heal. Healing comes about when individuals take the trouble to form real friendships across the barriers which still divide them – as well as checking that the friendships they already have are in good heart, that there is no ‘unfinished business’. There needs to be truth telling and truth hearing for real healing to be effected, both across party divisions, and between women themselves. As women, we shall need to take time to reflect on our own individual callings and on what the priesthood in the Church in Wales should now mean for everyone. It will involve asking certain questions of ourselves: Is our love genuine? Do we live richly towards one another? How can we live richly towards those who still cannot accept our ministry? How can we live richly towards God in the new world that is opening up before the Church?

Living richly towards others can only happen when we are resourced by the grace which comes with a lived experience of God’s forgiveness and acceptance. It is only when a person has known God’s forgiveness in the fullest sense that he or she is really free. Experiencing forgiveness means being released from a ‘stress position’, as it is termed in certain notorious places of captivity. We have all been held in a ‘stress position’, by a status quo that has endured too long and has done much damage to our relationships and to the credibility of our Church and of the Gospel itself. So it is the whole Church which needs to experience this forgiveness and the healing and acceptance which comes with it. Now is the time to begin this work with reverence for one another and in the fear of God.

The Already and the Not Yet

Yet another mesmeric TV drama is getting under way on BBC1. It is brilliantly directed, meticulously observed in both character and location and altogether compelling. But the problem for some of us viewers, with regard to the options available to us on evening television, lies in the fact that we are not exactly spoiled for choice when it comes to deciding between light and darkness. It is mainly darkness of varying degrees and kinds – ranging from the morbid and frightening to the banal and plain boring that gets served up most evenings. I do not blame television producers for this. It is we viewers who provide the ratings, after all, and we seem to rate the dark very highly. Perhaps the same can be said of the news. Bad news is always good news.

Recently though, we have had a glimmer of genuinely good news where the turmoil in the Middle East is concerned. It is a glimmer, and not a blinding light, which is perhaps a sign of its goodness. It is encouraging, not so much because the diplomatic work being instigated by the Russians might just work out, but because it indicates that human beings can occasionally surprise themselves by the good they are capable of doing. There is the faintest possibility of détente if the Russians succeed in persuading the Syrians to surrender their chemical weapons and allow them to be destroyed. As with the perhaps intended delay of Congress and the House of Representatives in deciding whether or not they are prepared to back the President in targeted strikes, it provides a breathing space, or perhaps a stepping stone or two, as a means for all the major players in this lethal game to get out of the corners they have painted themselves into, without losing face. Let us hope that we don’t lose sight of this opportunity in arguments about who had the idea first.

A week or so ago, before the Pope put out his plea for prayer, or before the World Community for Meditation called on all its members to pause at noon on Saturday to pray for Syria, no such initiative had yet been dreamed of. There is no way of telling whether prayer made any difference, of course, because prayer operates on an entirely different level of consciousness and ultimate connectedness to that of the so called ‘real’ world.

We are connected to one another as families of individuals and ultimately as a family of nations, all held within the embrace of a loving God. We and God are an integrated whole. Even though that integration is constantly being threatened by conflict, something greater seems to be at work mending us, moving us on and remaking us, even in the midst of our own destructive actions, our own collective sin. The poet, George Herbert, would have called this benign force the 'engine' of prayer.  

Prayer is effected in a different dimension of time and movement, one in which the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ somehow occur together. When people come together to pray they are working with God’s own energy for the good. The engine of prayer, fuelled and fired by the love of God, overcomes the darkness with the light which it generates. It also beats to a different time. It beats to the rhythm of the heart of God. The prayer which is going on now for Syria and the Middle East has its origins in God who is from always to always, and whose energy will continue ‘unto the ages’ or ‘for ever and ever’, irrespective of who is doing the work of prayer and when it is being done. So the battle is, in a sense, already won and yet not quite won.

Action and initiative for the good in the present Middle East conflict are a sign of the Wisdom of God at work. The word ‘wisdom’ can also be translated as ‘spirit’. This opportunity for the good, initiated by Russia, and quickly endorsed by all parties to the conflict, has enormous potential for reconciliation both in the world and, because they are working together, for Christians of every denomination. The Pope’s call for prayer brings together the desires of the nations, which is really a deep desire for peace, and holds them in the desire of all Christians which is for the healing of those nations and of its own fragmented body, the Church.

Syria - Healing the Fever

There is a moment in St. Luke’s gospel when Jesus visits Simon’s mother in law who is suffering from a fever. (Luke 4:38) She may have been in the grip of a more serious illness of which the fever was only a symptom. Jesus, as we imagine him in that moment, leans over her and breathes healing. Perhaps he speaks to her as well. We don’t know. We can only imagine. There follows, as always when fever abates, a moment of lightness for the sufferer in which she senses around her the waiting, the whispers, the silence. Then the woman pulls through, suddenly, in a moment, and rises to see to her visitors’ needs. Jesus goes back out to the fevered crowd, and draws out ‘the demons’, the fever spirits who know goodness when they see it and scream out their fear and anger. Real goodness, in the face of evil, makes evil itself afraid.

The world is in fever at the moment. High fever, untreated, can make a person hallucinate, dream terrible dreams, toss and shiver and all the time dread some further development of their illness, and death itself. It is not a good time for making life or death decisions, and yet the West and its allies must make decisions because if it waits for too long it will inevitably succumb to the illness which is causing the fever. The illness is called hatred. So the West and its allies must be instigators of healing before they do anything else. 

The way we have intervened in past conflicts has been disastrous because the work of healing was not done in time for it to overcome hatred. Neither did we seek to cleanse the wounds of the past before taking direct action. Where Syria is concerned, we are called to be healers before there is any question of military intervention. It is too late for that, in any case. Healers are people who intervene in fevered situations, as Christ did. The emotional climate which prevails in the context of the present conflict  is the fever of hatred, a fever in which all of us feel ‘tender’. None of us dares to let ourselves be touched even by a hand which heals, especially if it is the hand of the perceived enemy. But at the heart of the matter lies the suffering of two million human beings who want only for this conflict to end so that they can go home and rebuild their lives, and it will only end when real healing is allowed to begin. 

Politically, there is a glimmer of hope. It is becoming clear that Russia does not want a showdown with the West, and the US and many ordinary Americans, as well as the British, have no stomach for war. The pointless conflicts of the last ten years, in the Middle East and beyond, have left them war weary. But they feel the fever, nevertheless, and yearn for real goodness to enter into this situation and heal it before hatred takes over.

Goodness is a matter of wisdom which, properly understood, is God’s mercy and forgiveness at work healing the world of the fever of hatred. Wisdom comes with the compassionate detachment of a good doctor. Compassionate detachment is common sense worked from the hearts of political leaders to the good of all in a spirit of humility and generosity. Wisdom makes healing possible. It cools the fever of the nations by recognising and allowing them to take responsibility for evil. Wisdom comes with the right kind of fear which is the fear of God. The fear of God is not like the feverish fear of all-out disaster which occupies our thoughts so much of the time, but wonder and gratitude at the certainty of life. The fear of God leads to regeneration and growth but it requires that those caught up in this conflict (in other words, most of the world) own before God and before one another the direct contributions they have made to the present evil through the sins of the past. All have sinned and are in need of God’s healing. So all are responsible before God for its innocent victims. 

Obama’s hesitation may have bought a small amount of time for sanguine reflection in which all parties to the conflict, supported by faith leaders both in the Middle East and in the West, can take responsibility for the suffering which history is delivering to this region. For Christians, this means pausing to take our share of it and breathing Christ’s healing into the present through the way we pray, the way we think and perhaps most importantly, the things we say. Words inflame fever by fuelling fear. Fear left unchecked spreads quickly, often with fatal consequences. So let’s stand with all our leaders, confronting the hatred while feeling the fear and the pain, and so breath healing into the Middle East whose people have needed it for so long.

A House Divided

There was a time when the UN was synonymous with ‘never again’, when the five major powers responsible for defeating Hitler determined that the horrors of the Second World War would never be repeated and that they would stand as a body to remind the world of this fact. Before that, after the First World War, an international treaty was drawn up declaring that the use of gas (or chemical weapons) in conflict situations was to be deemed illegal. But the Security Council, whose job it is to make sure that international laws are respected and obeyed, is divided against itself, and a divided house cannot stand.

Picking up on my last post, there are two things Christians can do about this: The first is to use every means available to persuade the United Nations to act in such a way as to prevent the Syrian people from being further harmed by their despotic leader. The second concerns the manner in which Christians and other people of faith address this matter in prayer. The difficulty lies in the fact that there is justifiable concern on all sides concerning how best to resolve this conflict some of whose origins lie in the beginning of the colonial system, and perhaps even earlier than that. 

Nevertheless, the chief obstruction to resolving the crisis lies in the attitudes of two key powers, Russia and China. (The perpetrator of this slaughter is a psychopath, which puts him in an entirely different category.) These are the two nations which need our prayers most at present, along with the Syrian victims themselves. Given the purpose of the United Nations, and of the Security Council in particular, it is becoming clear that there needs to be some real change of heart within the family of nations, some real ‘give’, beginning with these two powers if this situation is not to go into global meltdown.

It is therefore once again a matter of people of faith standing together. But now we need to stand in two ways at once. First, in the deep knowledge that the love of God contains and holds all people, along with all the hatred generated within the present conflict situation, deep within itself, within deep time, or eternity. In other words, it is the love of God which ultimately ‘controls us’, to quote St. Paul. That is not a conviction of the head but one of faith, the kind of faith which is shaped from a different kind of intelligence, one which senses the power of God’s love at work at all times and in all places and knows that the darkness has not overcome the light – and never will.

The second, which follows from the first, is a matter of our love for the Syrian people being expressed as determination to put an end to this slaughter now, and to prevent it ever happening again in the future. Here, we see ourselves standing alongside Russia and China as brothers and sisters in the same human family, along with Iran and Al Khaida, and all its associates wherever they happen to be. As we do this, we ‘steady’ them all within that same divine love. This requires that our own personal feelings and convictions be set aside, so that the transforming work of God’s grace can be worked through us as a single human family. For Christians, only two words are needed, ‘Kyrie Eleison’, Lord have mercy. Those reading this post who are from other faith traditions might want to substitute them with their own equivalent prayer.