No Passing Joy

The less we understand about the mystery of life and death, the more necessary it becomes to frame life’s defining moments through ritual. Ritual and the customs which surround death give voice to what cannot be spoken. They not only process grief, but make it possible for people to meet one another at a depth which is beyond language and find there a common love and a shared hope. It is the shared hope which is so pivotal about the passing of Nelson Mandela, expressed in the opposite of mourning, as joy in the midst of sadness, a celebration of gift in the context of loss. 

Joy transforms the nature of grief itself, but it takes courage to allow this to happen. South Africans are a courageous people blessed with an exceptionally courageous leader who took his nation from a place of darkness to a place of light. The suffering which he endured alongside his people has given an added dimension to the joy they experience now as they remember him. It has also given their grief a substance, meaning and purpose which will sustain their hope for the future. He gave purpose to their suffering, so the grief which they experience now adds, in a mysterious way, to the substance of the joy.

Grief and joy together make for shared hope and, if we will allow it, for enduring love. For love to endure and for a nation to continue to grow in that love, fear has to be continually confronted and overcome. Already, the sceptics are wondering if the Rainbow Nation will survive. Worse still, are those who are adding to the fear by speaking the language of paranoid violence. It takes courage for grief to be channelled in such a way as to allow its particular joy to overwhelm such fears and make hope a reality rather than wishful thinking.

All of these considerations give Christians and people of faith a focus for prayer. Focused prayer is not a matter of asking for specific things. It is more about placing ourselves before God in an attitude of supplication for the kind of enduring love which overcomes fear and transforms nations – and Churches. For Christians, and for the Church especially, praying for transformation faces us with the question of whether we ourselves know how to tap into the kind of joy which South Africans are manifesting in this time of mourning, and whether we are willing to do this. After all, the Church has much to mourn over, much to be thankful for and therefore much to hope for. In the past few months, a bill allowing women to be consecrated as bishops in the Church in Wales and in the Church of England has presented us with an opportunity, an absolute necessity, to allow joy to overwhelm fear, so as to generate real and substantial hope. We are not talking about indulging in a passing moment of happy celebration before we get down to the challenges which will inevitably come in the future. We are talking about holding on to joy and pain at the same time, so as to allow for hope. This can only be done through forgiveness and the re-establishment of trust. So we are talking about allowing unconditional love to reshape our Church.

As with South Africa, there has to be a reason for doing this, and there has to be conviction. Nelson Mandela was convinced that forgiveness and moving forward together in a spirit of joy was the only way to transform a nation. In the life of the Church, women and their supporters need to be convinced that the joy we all experienced as a result of the Governing Body and Synod votes belongs to the whole Church and that it is not only, or primarily, ours. We are not the only people with a right to be joyful. Mandela’s joy was for all his people and his victory through suffering was a victory won with all of them through forgiveness. If, as women, we persist in allowing overt triumphalism to define who we are and how we relate to the whole Church, it will diminish us and our victory will be a hollow one. The celebration of that victory will have little of real substance to bring to the ongoing life of the Church and little of the good news of the Gospel to bring to the world. The good news is about hope fulfilled and joy which endures through unconditional love, and through forgiveness made possible by grace.