Reality Overload and How to Bear It

It has been said that human beings can only bear so much reality. This might imply that beyond a certain point they either go mad, or simply zone out, as happens to most of us when we witness on the news yet another incident of barbarity and pre-meditated cruelty committed against women. What can we do about it? And how do we manage our own feelings in relation to these occurrences? There have been three this week. The first involving the incarceration of a Muslim woman, Mariah Yahya Ibrahim, who became a Christian and subsequently married a Christian man. She awaits execution for apostasy, having first been allowed to give birth to her child. The second is the gang rape and public hanging of two sisters in a village in rural India. The participants included members of the local police force. The third involved a pregnant woman stoned to death by relatives in a major city in Pakistan for refusing to comply with an arranged marriage.

How should Christians, and all people of faith, respond to such things? The disgust and outrage prompts us to get out there and do something – protest, write letters to governments or join an organised petition, all of these being perfectly valid courses of action, even if they leave us still feeling powerless and ineffectual. But they are not the only things we can do. There is another way, an even more powerful way to effect change.

It has to do with being ready to face and fully engage with the pain itself from within our own history of suffering, our well of loneliness, be it ever so slight in comparison to what we see and read in the news. Our inner well of loneliness is that place where human consciousness, or conscience, is rooted in the history of every individual’s life experience and connects with the sum total of suffering which makes up human history. It is the place where we learn, sometimes through bitter experience, the difference between good and evil. We return to this place and face our demons when we pray. Our demons are the thoughts, inclinations and predilections of which we are perhaps ashamed but which may be connected to circumstances beyond our control, circumstances which sometimes do not even pertain to our own lives.

The more we do this returning, and own our pain and our demons before God, the better equipped we become to face the evil and violence that is committed on a daily basis against women and girls. A rape is committed in India every 22 minutes. In the moment that we return to our inner place of darkness, where we know ourselves and are known by God in all the fullness of what we are, we can be pretty sure that some hideous act of violence is being committed against a woman somewhere in the world.

The point of what I am saying is not to induce guilt or a sense of hopelessness. Neither am I suggesting that prayer, the centering down into our own inner dark space, our place of loneliness, is a form of escapism. Rather, it is a matter of owning the darkness in ourselves which makes us part of God’s purpose for our world. His purpose is the complete overwhelming of darkness by light, a purpose which is already being worked out in the moment we own the darkness and loneliness in our world to God.

The psalmist writes, ‘darkness is not dark to him. The night is as bright as the day.’ (Ps.139) This is a mystery and not one which is given to us to understand in this life, but eventually it will be fully understood by everyone, beginning with the perpetrators of the worst crimes against the innocent. They will see and understand what they have done in all its dreadful fullness. So we take the suffering of women and girls, as we hear of it today, into this place where we are ‘known’ by God and we are in solidarity with them, as Christ is in solidarity with us in our own darkness. It is from our own place of darkness that we share in the outrage of people around the world at the crimes which have been committed against these women this week. It is in this place that the world’s anger and grief has meaning and purpose because it is ‘known’ by God in ways which we do not as yet fully understand. We plead for justice in this place of darkness. We ask for mercy, knowing as the prophet Job knew in the depths of his own darkness, that our redeemer lives – and we carry on caring.

Testing Times

 I once heard an older relative remark that she couldn’t understand why stress was such an issue nowadays. In her day people didn’t get stressed. They just got on with things. Perhaps she had never had to sit an important exam, or perhaps she had just forgotten what it felt like to be tested.

The trouble with being tested is that exams and tests (now being set for children as young as five) do not so much test what you know, or even what you think. They test what you are. At least that is what it feels like as you wait in a queue outside the exam hall with writing implements in hand and perhaps a tissue or two. Having been a mature student, I remember the feeling only too well. Before embarking on a degree fairly late in life, I had thought that by the time I had to take exams again, long after the days of ‘O’ Levels, I would be much more in control of all the emotions which come with being tested. But one never is.

One of the biggest challenges which comes with exams is having to appear outwardly fairly indifferent to them, not to show what you are feeling to those around you, either because you don’t want them to feel more nervous than they already are, or because you’d rather not let on that you’re pretty churned up about the whole business yourself. In any case, times of trial and testing are not times for loading others with one’s own emotions. Emotions can come out before or after, but preferably not during. This being the case, they need to be managed, but not denied, before they even start to be felt, from the moment that it becomes clear that the dreaded ‘e’ season is about to kick in.

This brings us back to the question of how we perceive stress. Is it something over which we have no control? or is it something which is built in to our emotional DNA, which is just part of who we are and over which we also think we have no control? And is control really what is required? I think a better word would be ‘manage’ or ‘navigate’. In other words, accept that stress and its accompanying emotions exist and try to work with them rather than against them.  The key to dealing with exam stress is to develop methods and rhythms of work and relaxation which make it possible to step outside the stress and its attendant emotions, rather than simply drown them in distractions or hide from them. Stepping outside our emotions, including fear and anxiety, allows us to contemplate these feelings from a safe and secure place ‘outside’ ourselves, rather than trying to suppress or control them using our own limited inner emotional strength.  Yes, we are worried and frightened, but we might also be a little excited, so this is a creative and re-energising exercise.

 Remaining in the ‘outside’ place with regard to exam stress also allows for the right amount of adrenalin to energise us in the right way. A certain amount of adrenalin is necessary and good in testing circumstances because it helps us convert  negative and uncreative emotions into ones which are both positive and useful. Adrenalin, used properly, allows us to convert negative emotions into ones which allow us to give the best of what we have to give when the time of testing comes. When this happens, the test of who we are, which is part of the stress of exam taking, becomes an exciting challenge.

All of this is only feasible when we remember that exams are not a test of whether we are a success or failure in life. Neither do they decide whether we are worthy of our parents’ love, or of anyone else’s. They are simply a chance to give of our best to God who loves us unconditionally and knows who we are better than we do. In other words, he has no prejudged expectations of us as persons, based on how well or badly we perform in exams or in any other aspect of life. He neither writes us off as failures before we have even started, nor does he have expectations deriving from unfulfilled dreams of his own. He will never, even in the worst possible exam scenario, be disappointed in us. He simply loves us. This is why we call him ‘Father’. 

Holding It All Together

Multi-tasking has become a sign of character, almost a virtue. The person who can hold more than one set of ideas in their heads and work with them simultaneously is to be admired and if possible emulated. Such a person has grip. Having grip, or focus, is a pre-requisite for success because where there is grip and focus, there is energy, forward momentum and a general ability to hold things together. Loss of grip leads to inner fragmentation and ultimate breakdown. Perhaps this is where our psyches reflect the disorder which surrounds us in the world; countries falling apart, entire regions without infrastructure of any kind, whose power-holders seem accountable to nobody, so that their grip on power depends on the extent to which they are able to generate and maintain fear over those they control. This in turn feeds their own fear, the fear of losing control, of losing power, or ‘grip’.

Somewhere there needs to be a change in the way we think about control and grip, both in our own lives and in the way many people experience power, either as holders of power or as victims. Perhaps we need to think differently about our inter-connectedness by getting a better sense of the two-way traffic of power and control, that we are both controlling and controlled when it comes to our human interrelatedness, our sociality.

Sociality is not something we can identify as a quantifiable cause or effect, something which can be pictured with the help of data and statistics. It is built into our emotional DNA and into the history of the human race and of the planet to which we all belong. We have an inbuilt fear of the unquantifiable, anarchic and strange, but the strange and the unquantifiable are also bound up with human longing, with dreams for the future and with the anticipation or uncertainty which they bring. Perhaps this is why we are so often checking things. We constantly check our emails, or whatever information may be available via the latest phone app, giving us the  latest statistic or result which could impact our lives, either directly or indirectly.

We worry and fret, often without knowing what it is we are worrying about. In fact the things which cause us to worry and fret are even built into our entertainment. Information is also entertainment but information which has become entertainment does not relieve fear, even for a moment. In fact it frequently has the opposite effect. We need a moment’s stillness to make sense of all the information before it merges with entertainment and  generates more fear. Fear creates barriers. It is the greatest destroyer of sociality.

I believe that the capacity for inner stillness is the way to true sociality. Inner stillness is enormously powerful. It reconnects us with one another by allowing for a deeper awareness of the sheer ‘is-ness’ of things, of ‘being’, which is life itself in its purest form. It enables us to let go of fear, so that things can regain their natural equilibrium, their level of sanity. 

Stillness makes us conscious of life’s depth and force by bringing us into the presence of God. This is where God is to be found and it is also what God is. He is the stillness which gives space for the life which holds all things together. He is also the life itself. No matter how hard a person works at religion, if they have not known God in stillness, they have achieved nothing. The very word ‘religion’ is taken from the Latin ligare  which means to ‘bind together’, not through force or psychological manipulation, but through the kind of love which is only fully experienced when we encounter God in this place of inner stillness.

He makes himself known, or recognised, in the most ordinary of social contexts, as he did for the two disciples who recognised the risen Christ ‘in the breaking of the bread’, in the context of an ordinary meal. In that moment they recognised something they had always known but never known so fully. It was a moment of truth. The encounter would have given them a new and more truthful way of understanding their place in the world. 

We can all have such moments, and the world needs us to have them. They come when we are able to relinquish our grip on the ‘must haves’ and ‘must do’s’ of life and return to stillness, to our own centre, bringing our troubled world with us, knowing that it is held there and, in some mysterious way, calmed, even if only for a moment. Try it.

Breaking the Rules

I don’t usually blog on a Sunday. I try, usually unsuccessfully, to have a Sabbath break from the computer. It is a difficult rule because, like millions of other users of the internet, the computer has accustomed me to a fast staccato rhythm of life. Slowing down the rhythm and easing the tempo brings withdrawal symptoms, including physical ones, because, like most people, I am in some measure addicted to this keyboard and the particular freedom it brings.

Not checking the internet or writing blog posts on a Sunday is both a liberation and a constraint. It liberates me for other things, like gardening and being fully present to other people, but it also constrains by denying the immediate satisfaction of a certain hunger. But today, as I break this self-imposed rule, because the coming week will be busy and afford little time for blogging, I feel liberated. Is this because writers have to write, so that breaking the ‘no computer’, and hence ‘no writing’, rule releases pent up creative energy, and hence stress? Or is it because self-imposed rules, or any other rules which are mindlessly adhered to, seldom fulfil their purpose? I think it is a little of both.

 Breaking rules is not just a matter of reclaiming freedom, however that is conceived. It is also a matter of discerning truth. This begs two further questions: How do rules help us to come to terms with who we are? And how can we know that a rule is self-defeating and ought therefore to be changed or abolished?

The second question really takes precedence over the first. Yesterday, I attended a very moving First Communion Mass in a Catholic church. There were about 300 people there. Being an Anglican who was once a Roman Catholic, and so not by nature a rule breaker, I spent the first part of the Mass trying to come to terms with the fact that there are regulations which forbid me to receive communion in a Catholic church. I felt like a person invited to a banquet who is shown all the civilities but not served any of the food, until I noticed that everyone was moving up to the front to receive communion, including a number of people known to me who were not Catholics. Everyone, Catholics and non-Catholics alike, were just helping themselves to the food which they knew they needed. I breathed a prayer of relief, feeling somewhat silly in doing so, and melded into the queue.

 The whole situation reminded me of a remark once made by an Anglican bishop, “No Church can keep a good God down”. Forbidding the reception of communion by people who are not of a particular denomination is a rule which is self-defeating, and so devoid of purpose, as are so many rules which forbid and exclude people from experiencing God’s love in whatever way they can.

Breaking the wrong rules in the right way can be as tough as keeping the wrong rules for the wrong reasons and that is why I addressed the second question before the first. So, to return to the first question, it is when we step over the boundaries of misconceived notions about tradition, the Church and certain kinds of loveless ‘morality’, and recognise our overriding hunger for God that we really come up against the truth about ourselves. Recognising this truth about ourselves frees us into creativity because it gives us permission to own our hunger for something more than the material and the mundane.

Being human means being hungry for something more than bread, as Jesus himself taught. He taught this because he knew that our humanity is sustained and informed by our hunger for truth. Our hunger for truth, as Saint Augustine found, along with a number of later philosophers who came at it from an entirely different direction, is the passion which makes us fully human. It is inextricably bound up with who we are and with all our other partially admitted longings. Together, they make up our need and hunger for truth which is also a hunger for God.

Once we recognise our hunger for God, it becomes easier to discern which of the rules we set ourselves need to be kept without question and which are in fact obstacles or impediments to satisfying this hunger. Some of the best rules need to be broken from time to time, or dispensed with altogether. If they are not, then the rules simply add to existing layers of guilt and neurosis rather than freeing us from them. The same holds for rules which contain, clip or limit real creativity. These need to be constantly kept under review, and broken as an when needed, as I am finding in writing this blog post on a Sunday.

Ultimately, all life is about creativity.  We are only fully human when we are being creative, but being creative is not the same as being ‘productive’.  Creativity is not a currency. It is life itself. This is what Jesus is talking about when he says that he is the way, the truth and the life. He is talking about the recognition of something necessary and familiar and yet entirely new and strange, the voice of the shepherd which the sheep know and recognise, offering them a way in to the place where they will find real food, where they will find the kind of truth which liberates.

He is not saying that only people who recognise his voice in a particular way, by adhering to certain terms and conditions, can be part of his flock. Rather, he is telling them how to recognise what is counterfeit and destructive. He is inviting those who are prepared to trust him to walk with him and, in so doing, to break quite a few ill-considered or self-imposed rules. He is also teaching them that the truth which is of God never stands still. It grows and shapes itself around the needs of the times, so it requires new rules, or boundaries, boundaries which allow it to flow unimpeded into the hearts and minds of those who hunger for it, which is all of us.

Light In Our Darkness

Inevitably, during seasons of official gladness, there are people who do not feel that they, or their situation, are in step with the times. If you are Syrian and have lost your home, your livelihood and all those who are dear to you, or if someone you love has suddenly been visited by tragedy, like the family of Ann Maguire along with the staff and pupils of Corpus Christi College, it is hard to know what to make of Christian joy, specifically the joy of the Resurrection. The Resurrection seems all of a sudden remote and Easter itself irrelevant. At the same time, there is a lingering and deep-seated joy that will not quite go away. It will not be blacked out by sadness, even the deepest sadness, because if the reality of that world changing redemptive morning could be completely blacked out, it would not be real in the fullest sense. It is the very persistence of this unique and paradoxical joy, the way it is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche, as a sign of the relief of forgiveness and the hope which that brings, which make both joy and the Resurrection itself real. We see the reality of Christ’s risen life in all those who are caught up in suffering. There is no aspect of human life, whether good or bad, which makes sense by itself and this is a sign that we cannot live detached from one another. Our individual suffering is not unique because it is part of someone else’s.

There is also no overarching theory of suffering which can make it more bearable. What then is the point of suffering? and, some may ask, of life itself? The fact that this question gets asked indicates protest, and protest is always directed at someone or something, even if directing it is an unintentional movement of the subconscious towards understanding. There is a further twist to suffering, an even greater mystery; those who do much of the protesting, perhaps even most of it, are not the ones going through the agony itself, but the onlookers, the family and the helpers. The helpers, it seems, are helpless where suffering is most acute.

But it is often the helpers, the family, the friends who love the one who is suffering, who are most conscious of the mystery of suffering. The mystery is the light shining out of darkness. It is the courage of one’s suffering child revealed to us as we have always known it in the glimmer of a tear, or of a smile, when he or she is confronting the depths of their own darkness, whatever that happens to be. In such moments we see that the light has not been consumed by the darkness, but is taking it over, or transforming it, to paraphrase the beginning of St. John’s gospel.

This, you may think, is all very well in theory, but how can such an understanding of light consuming darkness become a reality in the context of our own suffering, or in the suffering of someone we love as we stand by and watch? Doing or saying something may only make matters worse. It seems, therefore, that meaning will only emerge out of the silent witness of love. This is the reality. But coming to terms with this fact, and at the same time remaining faithful, is a costly and lonely business because their darkness is their own, and ours belongs, ultimately, only to us. Thus, a greater and more impenetrable darkness seems to exist between the two of us.

The light does not illuminate the darkness by imparting meaning to this suffering, or by showing that it has an obvious purpose. Rather, it is a different kind of light, one which is its own brightness. The brightness is so intense that it ‘consumes’ the darkness. It does not replace it, but makes the darkness part of itself, so that eventually we shall see that the suffering of those we love, and the darkness it brings, is part of that divine and inextinguishable light. St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians writes that now we see only dimly, but then face to face. Then we shall see our suffering, which is joined to the suffering of those we love, bound up in the suffering of Christ and consumed by it. Its mystery is its meaning, which will be fully revealed in the brightness of his risen body.

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