Confronting this present darkness

It is a while since we had to consciously brace ourselves for the worst before watching the evening news. We, who live in areas which are free from conflict and lawless anarchy, including terrorism, are not used to feeling the grip of that cold ‘something’ which is the fear of real and immediate danger. Perhaps we should be used to terrorism by now. It has become the norm in many countries. But there is something different about ISIS, as it was originally known; the fact that its name mutates as time passes says something about the nature of the evil, and of the fear that it engenders. It is anarchic, and yet meticulously thought through, spreading unseen as it evolves. Perhaps this is what grips us, the fear of some dark entity not yet fully realised, or even fully named, which is being fomented in our streets and universities.

There is something about the immediacy of the Jihadist crisis, and about this particular perversion of religion, that insinuates itself into the human spirit, and this makes it more frightening and more deadly. It is also rooted in a history which we helped to shape, through the arbitrary forcing of collective destinies brought about by the re-defining of national boundaries in the aftermath of the first and second world wars. There is unfinished business, wrongs unresolved, which have helped to fuel the burning hatred which now permeates the Middle East.

But while hatred can be hot to begin with it is most potent when pure and cold, and the fomenting of hatred used to calculated ends, the hatred we are seeing at work in Iraq and Syria through those who now call themselves Islamic State (IS) is both hot and pure. It is like molten metal being poured into a misshapen crucible. It grows cold and takes the shape of evil. Murder and brutality are now the means towards the realisation of ideological ends which are the perversion of a good religion, and good religion twisted out of shape and used as a weapon of hatred becomes the stuff of pure evil.

How, then, should Christians address such a dangerous and terrifying phenomenon? It is clear, that by its own self understanding, the particular brand of jihadism represented by IS represents a spiritual challenge. As such, it requires a serious and focused spiritual response. For this to be possible we, as Christians, need to be clear about what we are doing when we engage in such a response. We need to do something practical. I would therefore respectfully suggest that Christian leaders of all denominations call a day of fasting and prayer with this in mind.

Like Jesus, we are called to confront the evil which is at work in the hearts of jihadists and those who indoctrinate them in the way he himself confronted evil, in a spirit of serving and of yearning to see the greater good which may yet lie hidden in the hearts of the worst of murderers. This needs to be done in a collective and concrete way through the mutually supportive activity of prayer and fasting. Prayer and fasting dispose us to commit ourselves totally to the love of God in accepting the fact that we ourselves are loved unconditionally by God in Jesus Christ. Committing ourselves into God’s love also helps to enable a wider field of spiritual vision.

Many of us find this very difficult, and the idea of spiritual vision hard to understand, but it is only in allowing ourselves to be loved that we can allow God’s transforming love to pass through us to the perpetrators of great evil and so transform their hearts. It is not we who do the loving, but God himself, because they are made in his image and likeness, even though that image seems to have been totally obscured by hatred. Their hooded faces, their uniforms and guns, and their military hardware, all hide, even obliterate, the face of God in these people who are human beings like ourselves.

Spiritual warfare, underpinned by fasting, takes place therefore on two levels, in facing our own fear, the fear that grips us before we turn on the news and while we watch it, and in confronting the fear we have of these hate-driven men and women. We are helped to do this by being aware of the fact that they, in their humanity, are also deeply afraid. They are afraid of those they hate and they are afraid of each other. Above all, they are afraid of anything that resonates with goodness, compassion and the truth which comes of both.

So we need to hold these jihadists, whose faces and whose humanity we cannot see, in the light of God’s love, at the foot of the Cross and in the morning light of the Resurrection. But we can only do this when our own hearts are vulnerable to fully receiving God’s love for ourselves. People who cannot receive love, perhaps because they are too frightened of its possible consequences, cannot really give love or know how to abide in it, as Christ tells us to do. It is only in abiding in the love given to us by God in Jesus that we can begin to confront this present darkness in the full knowledge that it cannot, and will not, overcome the light. 

Internet soundings

The creative use of light and shade are what make a painting work. The same is true with words and ideas. Light and shade, ambiguity without trickery, make for composite truth. We need this kind of composite and intuited truth in order to establish an anchorage, or footing, for love and in order to communicate that love effectively. Considered ambiguity makes for intuitive communication. So if communication is to be in any sense meaningful, it has to be undertaken at depth, perhaps through the medium of art or music, or through the internet. The internet has revealed that deep intuited communication leads to understanding and to solidarity with people, particularly with the oppressed because communication can involve not just two people, but millions.

These are not just abstract ideas. They are the concrete reality which is currently being explored in the abstractions of internet social networks. In the past, before the arrival of the internet, a social network consisted of a group of friends, or of like-minded people, possibly of a similar social class with similar economic advantages or disadvantages. You were most comfortable, socially, with your own kind. The same may be true today, but in a far less limiting way. The internet has helped us re-draw social demarcation lines. We are freer to choose where and with whom we belong, or to belong to everyone and to be at home everywhere. But freedom is not something human beings handle very well. It frightens them, so they construct new and different ways of delineating and separating themselves from one another, defensive lines against people they neither know or understand, and who they at times fear.

The internet, and social networking sites in particular, give us a new and rather strange freedom. If you take away real faces and real social situations, the way in which social demarcation lines are drawn, or re-drawn, changes. The internet gives us permission to draw lines, or efface them, without ever taking responsibility for the human being who is at the end of the fibre optic cable. We seldom have to look them in the face or even speak to them personally. This isolates the individual at both ends of the cable and makes them anxious about other people and about themselves.

Working through the internet, as a writer, is liberating and exciting, but it also induces a certain amount of paranoia and anxiety. Is there anybody out there? Even if you manage to catch sight of a twitter follower or Linked-in connection in some real but still somewhat fabricated way (with the help of u-tube, perhaps), the person is still not quite ‘real’ to you. The body, the voice, the nuanced expressions, the memories pertaining to a specific encounter are missing. If you do find the person on u-tube, or its equivalent, what you see is at best a different encounter, someone else’s. It is second hand.  And yet, the new follower is real because they have decided to follow you for a particular reason. There has been a communication between you and them. But how are you to respond, and how are you to maintain the line of communication, given the limitations of time? Replies and re-tweets only take you so far. They don’t sound the depths when it comes to real human and creative exchange.

This being said, there is some hope where twitter is concerned. While the individual is still remote, he or she usually has a ‘face’ and a tiny profile description through which you glimpse them as a person. I’m always pleased when new followers appear. I can’t deny that a couple of new followers every day is reassuring. Followers tell you that there are people out there who may possibly be reading your work and, as a result, want to signal their existence, their ‘reality’ in the particular thought world which you and they inhabit. This is a great blessing, and it is a blessing which grows exponentially with the number of seconds you are prepared to ‘contemplate’ that follower as a person with what little you know of them from their profile. Simply following more people in order to get them to follow you back is not the same thing as meeting them singly, on a one by one basis. 

One of the things that the internet offers, at least in the sphere of twitter and linked-in, is the opportunity to look at a face and hear the ‘voice’ of a complete stranger via their profile. You can read a profile in the way you might look at the face of Christ in a painting or icon, allowing the mind’s ‘heart function’ to fill in the shadow areas. The contemplation of paintings and icons involves filling in what is absent, where light complements dark, or shades merge. Something similar can happen, conceptually, in the world of twitter. By sensing the presence of our followers, as people with whom we are creatively involved, we are already engaging with them at a deeper level.

This kind of deeper engagement, or sounding, requires a different and deeper level of attention to our own work, as well as to the people who might read it. Paying deep attention is a form of blessing. When we bless our followers, by taking a couple of seconds to actually look at them, we are being grateful to them for blessing our work, for paying attention to it, and it is in this mutuality of blessing that the real work of communication begins. 

Blood lines

I tried to stay with the commemorative service for World War 1 at Westminster Abbey which was televised last night, but there was too much talking going on, too many worthy people being interviewed and too much colour. War is fundamentally monochrome, apart from the colour of blood.

I searched i-player for something which might resonate more truthfully with the events being commemorated and came across a sensitive dramatisation of diaries written by people from all the nations who had been caught up in that conflict. It was not great drama, except for the real footage of shelling and of thousands of ordinary Belgians summarily forced into exile or murdered. As I watched I thought of Gaza City, its people so very like the citizens of Louvain.

Wars look much the same as they ever did. In Gaza, as happened in the First World War, we get glimpses of fragility set in courage. Children still play in what is left of their streets when they are not being shelled. We also see wrong headedness and a total disregard for the uniqueness of the human person before God. War is not concerned with human persons, although it is very much concerned with human blood, to the extent that the desire for blood becomes an animal desire, having more to do with satisfying an insatiable need for retribution than it has for actual conquest. There are no winners because everyone wants retribution. So the war that was to end all wars is still part of  present day reality.

The tragedy is not just that we have never learned the lessons of the two world wars. It is that we fear to offend those of whom we are afraid, so the cycle of retributive violence perpetuates itself. Think, for example, of the situation in Nazi Germany, the driving of people from their homes into what the Nazis hoped would be ultimate extinction, because they were afraid of them. Place this alongside what is being done to Palestinians in Gaza.

Think also of extreme ideologies of conquest and domination which have poisoned the best of religions, and continue to do so today with respect to Islam, and ask what is Hamas really about? The best of causes, as well as religions, are easily taken over by the worst ideologies, and these in turn poison the hearts and minds of the best human beings. Palestinians have a right to freedom of movement, freedom of commercial exchange and, above all, to their lands and their homes. Theirs is a just cause, but one which is open to exploitation by religious extremists who have power agendas of their own.

They know that injustices such as these do not get forgotten. But neither do the events which led to the creation of Israel. The difference today is that the standard of living of the average Israeli is on an altogether different level to that of someone residing in Gaza City. There may be rocket attacks threatening the shopping malls of Tel Aviv but the fact that it has shopping malls, whereas Gaza City has neither sanitation or safe drinking water, alone suggests that Israel has a moral obligation to make good the wrongs that have been done to those whose lands have been taken from them. But the Israeli mindset makes this impossible.

A mindset comes with having had certain events so ingrained in the collective psyche that it is impossible for that people to countenance any other way of thinking. The persecutions and exiles which the Jews have experienced throughout their history, (and not just during the Second World War) are now part of their national DNA. It is hard to imagine how, as a nation, they could think of themselves as anything other than victims. Nevertheless, historic victimhood, and the mindset which it creates, does not exonerate Israel from committing genocide today. The truth which few people dare to speak is that tacit acceptance of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians will only make Israel a victim once again. Israel will lose the goodwill and the trust of a great many people who until now have supported it in relation to Gaza and the rest of Palestine. Many of these people may be supportive of Israel against their own conscience or better judgment, not daring to challenge the Israeli aggression that has gone on for decades, for fear of being thought anti-semitic. But this kind of truth avoidance will not only fuel the anger felt by Palestinians but ultimately destabilise Israel by undermining its standing as a valued member of the world community.

The situation returns us, once again, to the question of justice, or to use a more theological word, righteousness. Righteousness is the apotheosis of all religions, but especially of the three Abrahamic faiths, whose adherents all pray to a merciful and righteous God. God, being righteous, is not concerned with vengeance and retribution, no matter how much one side believes the other deserves it. He is concerned with mercy.

Mercy comes at a great price, a price so great that only the Son of God could pay it in full, and he continues to exemplify this mercy in the lives of those who are merciful. He paid it, not to a wrathful and vengeful father figure desirous of sacrifice and blood, but by becoming the price of Love itself. The reward was new life, the Resurrection of his physical body in its state of divine glory.

Nations are being offered this reward today. What is needed therefore is the will for the transformation of this conflict, the will of every single believing Christian, Jew and Muslim, whether they are caught up in it directly or not. Willing something is more than simply wanting it, or even dreaming of it. It involves everyone moving into a mindset where they face that righteous and merciful God together and share in his mercy.