Touching base once again with the news after a short break,
I am painfully aware of how life goes on, or does not go on, depending on which
country you happen to be living in. If you are one of the 33 million people who
have been dispossessed or made homeless by conflict, life might just go on for the
next 24 hours if you are one of the lucky ones.
As I have said on previous occasions, reality is hard for
most of us to bear. For one thing, if you are not personally caught up in the tragedy
of violence, you are cast into the disempowering role of bystander. Being a
bystander brings on feelings of guilt and a general sense of helplessness, the
two being corresponding aspects of despair.
The violence and turmoil which we read and hear about in
the news is at its worst in the cradle of civilization, where we have our
shared beginnings. What happens in the Middle East affects all of us because the
Middle East has shaped our collective DNA, historically, culturally and
spiritually. Perhaps this is why we are so inarticulate in the face of it all.
It triggers feelings of dread and helplessness which are hard to describe. Perhaps
they have something to do with our rootedness in the soil of those lands, the
soil of our collective human history.
In his poem ‘The Second Coming,’ W.B. Yeats describes war
as a ‘falling apart’ of our collective sense of self. He is talking about the
disintegration of meaning, as it pertains to the meaning and purpose of human
existence. Sectarian violence, and the chaos which it wreaks on the lives of
countless individuals, undoes centuries of what we think of as civilization. At
the heart of this undoing lies evil. Yeats, who was writing at the time of the
first world war spoke of a ‘blood-dimmed tide’ being ‘loosed’ on the world. Today,
we have the same blood-dimmed tide overwhelming Syria and Iraq in the form of
murderous sectarian hatreds which are rooted in the darkest evil.
In the face of such evil, how are we to speak of a
merciful God, or convey the message of hope given to us in the gospels? I think
part of the answer lies in a deep conviction of our being loved by God. This is
the conviction of faith which takes us beyond belief into the true meaning of
all good religion, reconciliation. Yesterday, I read of a Palestinian academic
who took some of his students to Auschwitz, so that they could get a better
understanding of how and why the state of Israel came into being. He did this
because of his faith in reconciliation as the only way for Israel and the rest
of the Middle East to survive.
Deep reconciliation is a kind of ‘letting go’ into the
very depths and darkness of love itself. We confront the hatred of both the past
and the present in that place. The tragedy of the current conflicts in Syria
and Iraq is that its key players have neither the will nor the motive to ‘let
go’ in this way because they are driven by hatred. Hatred, like love, absorbs
people completely, so that you end up hating not only those who you think are
your enemies but also those whose interests you claim to be defending. This is
how we recognise evil for what it is. It is a lie which leads only to the ‘black
hole’ of nihilism and despair.
But there is also a darkness of love, which is its
opposite. This is the darkness, or stillness, at the heart of the whirlwind,
the tornado, in which Elijah the prophet was caught up and heard the word of
the Lord. We can all connect with the stillness which is at the heart of the
tornado around us, the ‘still small voice’ of God, when we engage with faith
and hope at a deeper level. In the context of the world’s storms and tornadoes
– political as well as environmental, we return to this place of darkness which
is at the very core of our being, as it is at the core of the world itself. In
it, we are offered a terrifying choice, whether to succumb to the despair of
hatred, or stand firm in the heart of the darkness of love and of
‘not knowing’ and hear the still small voice of God speaking hope into it.
This is what Christians call spiritual warfare. It can be done alone or in the
company of others, although it is best done together. So if you are reading
this and know of one or two people with whom you could undertake this work,
tweet or facebook them and share the link.
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