Love Bravely in 2016

The Guardian newspaper has published its own New Year’s honours list, a positive and encouraging riposte to the official one. The Guardian’s list, as a prototype for what an honours list ought to comprise, is long overdue.  Official lists, and officialdom in general, largely miss the point when it comes to who should be honoured and what honour actually signifies.

To honour someone is to mark the example of courageous love which they have set. To honour someone for giving money in order to press home personal advantage, be it of class, status, or political favours, is vacuous praise for empty and sometimes duplicitous actions. The honour itself will consequently fade with time and the person receiving it, if he or she has won acclaim for what are essentially selfish or self interested actions, will also fade. Selfish people invariably end up alone. Hopefully, they will realise this while they still have time to re-order their priorities and change their ways.

Honouring people for the right reason is important because it invites the rest of us to examine our priorities. What would we like to be remembered for? Have we had the love it takes to work sacrificially, and often anonymously, for the sake of others, and sometimes be prepared to die for what we love? 

Those honoured on the Guardian’s list have done this in a variety of ways. Christina Figureres, UN climate chief, persevered in her belief that human beings were capable of making a collective decision (irrespective of political differences) to work for the saving of the planet before it is too late,  Azis Ansari, the twitter heckler, took on Rupert Murdoch and his dangerously pernicious slur on Muslims. Khaled al-Asaad died, brutally murdered, faithful to his life-long commitment to preserving his nation’s history for future generations. Lassana Bathily, a grocery store owner, risked his life hiding two of his customers in the shop basement during a Jihadist attack. And there were others, better known but seldom publicly honoured for their courage and integrity. Barak Obama and Angela Merkel were among them.

All of these people have manifested through the actions they have taken, or the words they have tweeted, that goodness and truth will, if allowed, prevail against all odds. Goodness and truth may sound like abstract notions, but they belong  very much to the ordinary in our day to day lives. Goodness and truth pertain to the person who is faithful in circumstances which may be boring, unpleasant or dangerous, because they know that others need them. They know the truth of the situation and they love bravely. In the boring and the ordinary, as well as in the difficult and dangerous, goodness and truth are the best of what we are. We may not realise this until long after the moment, or the many years, have passed. But sooner or later we will know how capable we are of living and loving courageously.

It may not come as a surprise, then, that the God of Abraham, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, tells us that in his sight we are already honoured and loved. (Isaiah 43:4) The love is, of course, unconditional. It is also the meaning of honour. God’s love is not a reward for achievement. It is simply a quality of our mutual existence – God’s existence in relation to us and our capacity to receive his love. Receiving love can be difficult, especially for those who think of themselves as unlovable for most of the time, so to be willing to receive God’s love is itself a courageous act. The courage required has to do with coming to terms with the fact that there is nothing which qualifies us for God’s love, and nothing which disqualifies us either. Honour is entirely God’s prerogative. He honours us by knowing us as unquestionably worthy of his friendship, whatever we may think of ourselves, and however others perceive us. What greater honour could anyone wish for?

A Happy New Year to all my readers.

Emanuel

“Do not be afraid”, the angel tells the man, Joseph. “The child she will bear will be called Jesus. He will save his people from their sins.” He will save his people from the consequences of sin which is fear. He will overwhelm fear – and sin – with joy.

The Genesis story of ‘original’ sin makes it difficult to see the full picture when it comes to sin and the way sin is ultimately vanquished by joy. The story of the Fall focuses on disobedience which is born of envy, as does the fall from heaven of Lucifer, the archangel of light. I am no authority on archangels, or of what drives Satan to be as he is, but I think that what he thought he had wrenched away from God, as he hurtled into the abyss, was God’s supreme authority in respect to joy.  Perhaps this is also one of the underlying themes of the Genesis story.

If we take the Genesis story as a parable for the human condition, it reads roughly as follows: Adam and Eve are metaphors for innocence, for the innocence of pre-rational childhood, that brief period in our lives when our senses begin to be awakened by the love which surrounds us. The young child experiences, or senses, pure joy in the regard of a loving face, including the faces of animals familiar to him, and in their voices. In them, he experiences ‘original’ love, the love of the Creator who rejoiced in the goodness of what he had made.

If the child does not sense that someone rejoices in his goodness his adult consciousness will be damaged, possibly irretrievably. He will find it hard to know joy as he goes on through life, so he will seek what he calls happiness, or personal fulfilment, by any means available. These will become increasingly demanding and damaging and they will ultimately consume him, and possibly consume those whose lives he touches. This particular syndrome is what we call human sinfulness.

The angel tells Joseph that the Jesus child has another name, Emanuel, which means ‘God with us’.  The Jesus child brings to our lives his unvanquished joy, not as an overlay of superficial happiness, but as the joy he has in beholding us, even in our sinfulness. So Emanuel is God with us in every aspect of our separate lives, but not as a stern judge who sifts and weighs – and finds us wanting; that is Satan’s job. Before he fell, Satan was God’s sifter, or tester.[1] He tested Job and he was later allowed to test the man Jesus in the wilderness. He never brought joy. 

Emanuel is with us in his loving regard of us and it is this love which generates hope in all our testing situations. Emanuel is with us in all that is against us. He is in every perceived personal failure and in all failed attempts at reconciliation, still reconciling. Emanuel is in failed peace talks, in resolutions taken to save the planet from disaster, and in the ensuing action or non-action. He is with us in every moment of hope, every dream, whether it comes true or not. He is in the defying of evil, and in every failed attempt to redress the wrongs of history, as well as in the few successful ones.

Emanuel, the Jesus child, God with us, brings the love needed to make the impossible happen. In the hidden depths of this love we encounter joy.

---

[1] For this idea, I am indebted to Walter Wink who portrays Satan as God’s servant and agent. See his Unmasking the Powers: The invisible forces that determine human existence,  ch.1

What arriving in heaven must feel like - Joy to all in the here and now..

Screaming at God

'Sunrise' J.M.W Turner (1845)

The White Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass, screams for no apparent reason. When Alice asks her why she is screaming she says that she is about to prick her finger. This does indeed happen, a few seconds later, at which point she falls silent. When asked the reason for this inversion of the logical sequence of events, she replies that she has already screamed, before she pricked her finger, so why bother screaming now? I think this is a fairly good representation of the attitude many of us take to prayer, even in times of national crisis. Why bother praying, or perhaps ‘screaming’, at God now? We have done our praying, or screaming, and the bombs are being dropped, for better or for worse.

Whatever perspective you are viewing the outcome of Wednesday’s parliamentary vote on whether we should get militarily involved in the Syrian conflict, you could be forgiven for thinking that from here on it’s downhill all the way, whichever side of the argument you favoured, so why bother with prayer? But I do not think that prayer works like that. For one thing, it involves starting from where you really are, rather than where you think you ought to be, with regard to God and what you feel about the world and the Syrian crisis, or about your own life.

In all of these contexts, prayer can certainly involve screaming at God. St. Theresa of Avila, a person of great holiness, was known for her rants. On one occasion the wheel of the vehicle she was travelling in came off and lodged in the mud, upturning the vehicle and ejecting all its passengers. She told God, quite forcefully, that it was not surprising that he had so few friends if this was the way he treated them.  It’s fine to scream at God, but it’s better if we can simply hold the person or the situation in the deep inner space where our existence is ‘grounded’, where it is held firm but not mired down.

We cannot hold all the upheavals going on in our world in our rational minds for very long without putting our own mental health at risk, which is not what God would have us do, or what prayer is about. So we have to do the holding in a different way, using other methods for processing the world’s trauma.

Such methods could involve placing all the events of the past few weeks within the larger moment. The larger moment is time itself, understood any way you like, but understood as that dimension which embraces the past, the present and the future, in Love’s eternal regard.

Holding the moment in the larger moment is like a very simplified version of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen. We breath in the darkness that surrounds us in the present moment and we breath out the light, so becoming a part of that light. The light is life, so when we do this, we are more fully alive. Our minds become clear and steady, more pure, in Buddhist terms.

Christian prayer begins with being present to the moment, breathing it in as we face into the turmoil in the Middle East, what the bible describes as the ‘roaring of the nations’. In prayer, we face into the evil embodied in Isis, the confusion and doubt about what is best to do next, and the moral dilemmas facing world leaders and our own politicians, dilemmas which we must face as a nation, in solidarity with them, irrespective of our political affiliations.

All this darkness comes to us as a kind of scream from outside. If being present to the darkness is not to do us psychological harm, we must encounter it in the silence which is already within us in the form of Christ who waits for us to yield to the grace which he offers. 

The silence is our inner sanctuary. It needs to be cared for and guarded. The darkness will yield to the grace which comes out of silence if we are prepared to spend time in our inner sanctuary, constantly returning to it as our default position. When we do this, and it becomes our way of life, we can begin to breath out the light which comes from the inexhaustible reserve of God’s love for his world and which the darkness will never consume. 

The widening gyre

Peregrine falcon flying over Niagara Falls
(Falcon Family Photos)

Distance is not what it used to be at the start of the last world war. The time-space ratio seems to have shrunk. Things happen more quickly and we hear of them in the moment, because there always seems to be someone at the scene of the latest atrocity or disaster who can film it on their phone and then beam it back to us via the news channels. The news is almost always bad, even though small fillips of good news get inserted at the end of the hour by certain channels. If I am cynical, I would say that they do this in order to make sure we don’t switch off for good. But this is unlikely especially if, like me, you are addicted to a combination of Channel 4 and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

The two can just about be combined if you are prepared to forego the first half hour or so of Channel 4. Why can’t they work together and be sequential? I often wonder. We need those different voices to broaden our perspective. Different voices, and the different perspectives which they bring, create a kind of gear change which enables the engine of the mind to pause for a few seconds and re-engage with the source which feeds it. I am no mechanic, but I can’t help feeling that cars do this when we change gear. They pause in order to move forward with greater impetus – or to slow down and be better prepared for hazards.

There is another kind of gear change which affects the way we deal with the realities around us. If we are to make sense of what is going on in our world, we need to pause long enough to change gear, and then move forward with serenity and purpose – or slow down. This brief inward pause allows us to draw on the source which nurtures intelligence.

In his poem, ‘The Second Coming’, W.B. Yeats reflects on the world’s emotional climate immediately before and during the first world war. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. He likens this cosmic fragmentation to ‘the widening gyre’ where a falcon no longer hears the falconer’s voice and so becomes disorientated. Something like this is happening in our world today. We have become disorientated as a result of our being disconnected from the great Falconer, the Holy Spirit which is the Wisdom proceeding from God.  We need to listen inwardly for the deeper voice of that Wisdom.

Listening inwardly is a little like swimming underwater. You see things in a different light, things which you would not see if you were on the surface, and you hear different sounds, sounds which would not be audible in any other environment. Those of us who are not directly caught up in the cross-fire and cross-currents of politics and world conflict could take time to pause and connect with this wordless wisdom, the call of the great Falconer to a fearful world.

Hearing the call of the Falconer is not a matter of being particularly ‘religious’. It is more about being willing to face into the reality of the embodiment of evil in the forces at work in human nature. Facing into this reality is not an easy undertaking, because it obliges us to confront fear with the best of our selves. We confront fear with our capacity to receive the love of God even when faced with the evil done in his name. This is what it means to hear the call of the Falconer.

Evil is personified in those who murder and terrorise in God’s name. It is also personified in our refusal to be accountable before God for his creation, the planet we live on. Hearing the call of the Falconer means being willing to take responsibility for violence and selfish short-termism. Both pertain to human nature and both are worked into the world through the agency of persons just like us.

The evils of religious extremism correspond, in a way, to those of the destruction of the planet. There is a common language of violence, indifference and greed which has created a kind of moral and spiritual free-fall, a coasting out of gear into a destructive vortex, the ‘widening gyre’ in which all that is good in human nature is obscured in the confusion and cacophony generated by fear. Those who represent us at the climate conference in Paris, and our own parliament, as it votes on whether or not to take military action in Syria, bear the immediate responsibility for confronting these evils and the fear which they generate. They need to hear the Falconer’s voice, the quiet voice of Wisdom speaking into the widening gyre of their confusion and doubt about how to act in the face of evil. They will hear it through the agency of those of us who are prepared to pause with them and listen. 

A word in season

Speaking as someone tasked with preaching sermons, Sunday’s texts did not fit the mood of the moment. Last Sunday’s texts would have been better. Last Sunday's texts spoke of nation rising against nation, of wars and rumours of wars, prompting thoughts about the ‘end times’ which might have better reflected the recent events in Paris, and better served the less imaginative preacher.

The power of suggestion is great but it is not always good for preaching. It can take the preacher, and their listeners, into a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac, a place you know you have visited before, and where you found nothing which could take you or your listeners any further on your journey, so that the only option left is to reverse back to where you started from. This is difficult unless you have an idea of when the words were said and what specific events they were referring to.

When it comes to the ‘end times’, history has had plenty of them. There have been plagues, famines, wars, earthquakes and other cataclysmic disasters since before anything was ever recorded in words. But perhaps the biblical texts which depict end-time scenarios are, nevertheless, helpful. They can serve as a kind of purge for collective fear. As we read them, we can tell ourselves that all this happened before, but here we still are, and here we will remain, regardless of global terrorism and ad hoc missile responses to the recent horrific events in Paris.

This Sunday’s text was the feeding of the five thousand. The lectionary, which is the selection of scripture passages appointed to be read in churches on a particular Sunday, has moved on, even if the mood of the moment remains the same.  The story is appointed to be read on the last Sunday of the Church’s year, on the feast of Christ the King, just before the beginning of Advent. In this story, we are faced with the end-times again but in an entirely different way. The crowd, now healed and fed, thinks of Jesus as ‘the prophet who is to come’. They want to make Jesus a king, but he will have none of it.

The story is a cameo moment, a memory which never fades. Cameo moments are full of small but unforgettable details, such as the people being told to sit down in groups on the ‘green grass’, the disciples wondering how they are going to feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, Christ blessing these morsels of food and instructing his disciples to distribute them, and the twelve baskets filled with leftovers because nothing must go to waste, ‘nothing must be lost’.

The fear which many of us carry around at the moment, in the aftermath of the Paris massacre, has to do with the possibility of loss. We speak of our values and way of life being threatened, which is probably an exaggeration and not what matters most. The greatest loss would be a state of final separation from the love of God, something which cannot happen unless a person consciously wills it. No ruler or movement, however evil, can oblige an entire nation to consciously reject that love. In fact, the greater the evil, the more the love of God seems to manifest itself in the hearts and minds of human beings, as we saw with those who resisted the Nazis and those who danced and sang in the Place de la République at 9.20pm on Friday, exactly a week after the massacre.

I do not think that it is possible to consciously will a final separation from the love of God while still loving other human beings. The story of the feeding of the five thousand, placed in the context of the aftermath of the Paris massacre, speaks of people wanting others to connect with this love. It speaks of human love as much as it speaks of God’s love. People had followed Jesus all day, perhaps bringing friends or relatives who were suffering from physical or mental illness and who may or may not have thought that he could do much to help them. But in that cameo moment they would have known that they were held in the impregnable fortress of God’s love. We need to know this too.

Lighten our darkness,

Lord, we pray;

and in your mercy defend us

from all perils and dangers of this night;

for the love of your only Son,

our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Wanting to be happy

Two out of the eight dogs we have owned over the years have been smilers.  One of them, a wiry black creature of indeterminate breed, smiled when he felt one of two emotions – guilt, or untrammelled delight. Sometimes the two went together, as when on arriving home unannounced we would find him gazing down, grinning and sneezing, from the top of the stairs, where he should not have been. But smiling and simultaneous sneezing seemed to have an expiating effect on his conscience – probably because we would react with an answering smile, if not with a sneeze.

That particular dog had the right jaw structure for smiling, and his whiskers were not too heavy. Our present dog would like to smile, and tries, but he is heavy of jaw and lip, so his efforts end in a slightly louche expression. In his case, it is the wanting to smile which is so endearing. We want him to smile as much for his sake as for ours, and this is where smiling dogs have something unique to offer. They make us want the happiness we already have and they make us grateful for it.  

Wanting to be happy is like having a healthy appetite. Wanting to be happy, and being OK about it, is natural and good. One of the worst ills of our times is that in the face of the suffering of so many people today it is easy to feel guilty about wanting to be happy, that it is somehow selfish. But guilt is the work of moral deception. It deceives us into believing that we do not deserve happiness, that in the face of so much cruelty and hardship in the world, we have no right to pause for even a second and know the joy of being who we are in our present surroundings. It tells us that we have no right to celebrate anything and that if we do, it should be done almost furtively, keeping the blessings of life and the joy they bring at arm’s length.

This is where dogs, and any animal which allows us to be physically close to it, put our lives in perspective. Both our dogs (one is very large and the other extremely small) do this by being fully who they are. As dogs, their emotional intelligence operates on a number of levels, most of them inaccessible to us. But one thing they make quite clear, and accessible through sheer physical activity, is that they know when they are happy – and that they are OK about that.

They also know when we need to be happy. Our big dog will decide when the news is taking me into a dark emotional place before I am ready to go there. He will signal this by putting his large head on my lap  prior to slowly clambering on top of me. He is pretty well unstoppable once this process has begun. But as he clambers up, he puts things in perspective. He obliges joy, even if this comes as I am in the process of battling him off the sofa and back on to his ‘mat’, that section of the carpet which is reserved for him and his small friend. By the time we have sorted ourselves out, a sense of connectedness with what is real and what matters in the immediate here and now has quietly re-asserted itself. The news goes on but there is also a whisper of hope in the room. 

As with the intelligence of dogs, hope, which is part of our spiritual intelligence, is of a different emotive order than many people assume. Christian hope is not blind optimism or the denial of reality. Rather, it is a certain kind of knowing, a knowing which takes us to the very depths of our own darkness and to the depths of human conflict and suffering, only to find in these dark places the simplicity of God and the purity which we know as joy.    

Benedic, Domine, nobis

Benedic, Domine, nobis, et donis tuis. These are the first words of a Latin grace, grace being a Christian prayer said before meals. They translate as ‘Bless us, O Lord, and your gifts’.

We rarely pause long enough to understand what the word ‘bless’ means, or what we are doing when we, often casually, invoke a blessing on others. When a person sneezes, we bless them, a custom which derives from the once held belief that a sneeze separates the soul from the body, so making it a prey to the devil. The words “Bless you” were spoken to snatch the soul back, so to speak.

It is not the only prayer to have been rendered commonplace. The exclamation “Oh God!” is a cry born of a visceral need for God in the moment of its uttering, even if that need is unacknowledged. Given the state of global politics, and the future of the planet itself, would that such an exclamation could be uttered in the desire for it to be heard.

This is why I have, once again, used Bellini’s Christ Blessing as an image for this post. All of last week, and in the wake of the recent plane crash over the Sinai peninsula, the painting has been at the forefront of my ‘envisioning’ mind. One does not simply look at such a painting. One envisions it by carrying it about in one’s inner consciousness, because it is iconic in the original sense.

Icon means image, or ‘imprint’, of a real person. An icon has, quite literally, a life of its own. So it has to be allowed to do its work which, in the case of the Bellini painting, is the work of blessing. Christ is blessing all that we have seen in the last week by way of tragedy and human suffering, on whatever scale. At the same time, he is blessing the private tragedies and agonies which many people live with on a day to day basis. All are blessed and embraced as part of  human suffering.

The Bellini painting engages the imagination on a number of levels, because this is how iconic paintings work. They invite us to engage with, and to allow ourselves to be engaged by, the image. The image engages us where we are bound, or captive, to the suffering of the rest of humanity and to the causes of that suffering.

So it engages us in the visceral nature of our own, sometimes denied, feelings and responses to suffering. We become the child separated from a parent in a crush at the last remaining border gate opening to a new life. We are in the tragic hopelessness of a disgraced Church leader, or of the young man who, accidentally or not, has murdered his step sister. It engages us at every level of conflict and in all its causes. Whether or not we bear some personal responsibility for suffering, the Christ of the painting continues to bless and to speak peace into it.

But the blessing, and the peace which comes with it, are neither superficial or easily bestowed, because together they constitute judgment. It is impossible to receive a blessing if one is out of favour with the one who gives it, and out of kilter with what it represents. So we are also under the critical regard of the giver. His blessing holds us to account, both personally and as members of a free and democratic society, for all that is going wrong in our world. We are held to account in the blessing because it bestows an even greater freedom.

The freedom given to us in the blessing of the risen Jesus is a freedom to be known by God as his own children, the brothers and sisters of his Christ. But it is not lightly given. If we look closely at the painting we see faint traces of suffering on what remains, nevertheless, a vulnerable body. Neither is the blessing easy to receive. We look at the painting and receive the blessing as we acknowledge in ourselves the suffering of millions whom we have never met, as well as some who we may know well and whose suffering we may have contributed to. We look, hold all the suffering and allow the blessing to fall on victims and perpetrators alike.

This program of blessing is the only program available to us for world peace, and for the future of the planet itself, because it derives from ultimate justice. The blessing bestowed by God in the risen Christ changes the way things are because it changes the way we see other people. It challenges us to a radical re-think of how we view other human beings, often as they appear to us from within highly charged contexts.

It obliges us to accept the blessing of the risen Christ on all. This includes all governments and leaders, all policy makers, all members of Isis and Al Khaida, all Palestinians and all Israelis, all Kurds, as well as the newly re-elected Turkish government, and all who have lost land or livelihood to greed and the short-termism of industrial exploitation. The blessing falls on Russia and its allies (including Bashar al-Assad), all refugees and victims of torture, all perpetrators of torture, all who we love, all who we find it hard to love, and any we may hate.

Only when we have allowed it to include all these categories and individuals can it fall on ourselves. So the blessing is a judgment of profound understanding. It changes the way we see things. 

Colouring in reality

Source: youtube.com

After thirty three years of unremitting pain, Kim Phuc’s scars and nerve endings are being treated by a leading scar tissue expert who specialises in the effects of napalm. Many of us know Kim Phuc. We met her when she was just eleven years old, fleeing naked from her village on June 8^th, 1972, caught up in a South Vietnamese bombing raid.

We are entering the season of remembrance, a time when we remember not only those who have died, but also the living. We are remembering those whose lives have been so traumatised by conflict or abuse that they are alive in a quite different sense to that which most of us take for granted. Kim Phuc, having defected to Canada, made a new life out of the scars left on her mind and body by the Vietnamese war. Since then, millions of others have had their lives shaped, and distorted, by their memories of conflict.

The traumatised Syrian family landing on the Greek island of Kos will eventually make a new life in Munich. They will live that life in, and because of, their memories, memories which will also shape their identities as victims of humanity’s inhumanity. Unless they experience the kind of joy which precedes healing at the deepest level, these memories will destroy their future. But the father of the Kos family is beginning to smile again, and his children are laughing for the first time in months. Their laughter makes them instruments of healing for all of us.

The remembrance season is a good time to reflect on the fact that the victims of war are also the means of our own healing. They are to us the suffering Christ whose ‘stripes heal our wounds’. They show us not only how to survive but, more importantly, how we are meant to really live in these inchoate times. We live not by turning away from reality, but by embracing it and allowing ourselves to be forgiven, rather than seeking a way out  via some form of infantile escapism.

Yesterday, after news of more unrest and violence in Turkey, brought about by the heightening of tensions between the government and Kurdish resistants, and as a prelude to forthcoming elections, we immediately hear of the latest adult colouring-in craze. Apparently, the digital age, and the instantaneous access which it brings to the horrors of conflict, are proving too much for us. We need, it is said, ‘something analogue’ perhaps to soften things a bit, to give our eyes a rest, and possibly our hearts and brains as well, from what we see on our screens. 

But it is not clear what realities colouring-in books are designed to soften. Perhaps they are just supposed to remind us of safe designated areas, so also indicating a tendency to avoid that level of reality which takes us into the unknown, outside the safe designated area when it comes to making sense of human suffering – and to doing the right thing.

At the same time, the blank areas in the colouring books (the safe designated areas) also provide time. They provide a mental space, as they do for children, into which things can fall into place, so allowing questions to surface, as they also sometimes do for children, with respect to the inequality and random injustices which life seems to have dealt to many, while leaving others untouched. These are questions which the person doing the colouring-in would often rather not face.

The moment of truth might come suddenly and unexpectedly. As they inadvertently colour over a line, they get rattled, as we all do when certain lines (especially ones which suit our purposes at the moment) are crossed. The irony of the recent House of Lords rebellion is an interesting case in point. They are unelected. How dare they break out in the cause of justice?  and possibly, one might add, in the longer term healing of deep social divisions within our own nation. They pertain to an outdated system of class and privilege. How dare they cross the line? Colouring-in will reinforce the dubious notion that things need to stay safely in their allotted spaces, especially if the space is a contentious one. The negative implications for human well being are enormous.

Perhaps colouring-in for adults will be the means to finding something more than a coping strategy when it comes to remembering and healing the wounds of nations, and our own as well. Perhaps the blank spaces will oblige us to think of how we could colour-in the bleak lives of those who call on us for relief, asylum or fiscal justice and so begin to heal their memories with the beginnings of a joy which we so badly need ourselves.  

A life worth living

“Keeping busy?” is the question which often gets asked of people who look over 65 or so. Perhaps the person asking it reckons that the over 65 year olds have nothing left to live for, apart from filling the dreadful abyss left by the ‘busyness’ which has been taken from them through retirement – voluntary or otherwise.

The question is loaded at both ends. On the one, for the person being asked and, on the other, for the one asking it, who may be worrying about their own impending retirement and the spectre of idleness which it raises. In both cases, it leads into far deeper questions which pertain to the meaning of life itself. These are the questions many people face in retirement or possibly, as a result of adversity, much earlier on in life.

We do not live, in the fullest sense, by keeping busy.  Neither, for that matter, are we truly rich when we have simply made a lot of money or acquired power or status, which are only of use to us in this lifetime, in any case – if they last that long. There is still that part of us which achievements and attributes fail to satisfy, or ‘reach’, to allude to an advertisement from the seventies for a well known brand of beer.

Retirement focuses this truth, until now only vaguely apprehended, into reality. Left to ourselves, we are faced not so much with the past (although the past is significant in shaping our thoughts about the present) as with the present moment and with infinity itself which is couched in the present moment, though it does not begin there. Having to be still and resisting the need to be busy allows us a glimpse of infinity, also called eternity, and eternity might be like when our very brief lives enter into that ultimate dimension.  It begs two further questions; will we be wealthy in the only way which matters in this infinite dimension? In other words, will we have lived richly towards God? And will we have lived gratefully?

So the question we are faced with is whether or not we are living, in the fullest sense of the word, rather than just keeping busy. By living, I mean has our creaturely life been in tune with the greater life of God’s creating Spirit, with his generosity and joy, as well as with his grieving over the violence and greed which are the cause of so much suffering for human beings and creatures alike?

The creative ‘rush’ that makes for fulfilling work is of a piece with the energy of a creating God. Have we, in our working lives, ever sensed this and been grateful to him for it? And if our own working life has been demanding, but unrewarding and uneventful, have we sought that creative God in our colleagues and helped them to develop their gifts wherever possible?

Gratitude ought to inform the whole of our life, not just that part of it when we were in work, because gratitude is about meeting God at the deepest level of our being. Gratitude is also at the heart of the meaning of eucharist, and we are called to live eucharistically. In other words, we are called to live richly and gratefully towards God at whatever stage of life we happen to have reached.

We are also called to be open to what is good in retirement, even if it does not, on the face of it, feel very rewarding. When we consciously live like this, we are able to discern or know God meeting with our own spirit, so making retirement creative in the fullest sense. We are not just getting through another day by keeping busy, because each day is the beginning of a whole new phase of creative living.  

Praying into the politics of fear

Source: mg.co.za

A good novel or poem reveals a truth you always knew, but never realised you knew. The same holds for the Christian gospels. They tell us things we always knew but now, in this moment of reading, discover in an entirely new way as if for the first time. They are ‘true’ in this moment in a way they were not true in the past, or even five minutes ago. All of the sayings of Jesus were spoken with this idea in mind.

When truth is suddenly come upon it becomes a ‘moment of truth’. Moments of truth (and there can be many) often occur at that particular point in our life’s trajectory which intersects with that of the world in such a way as to allow for perception, understanding, or a creative ‘eureka’. A greater reality declares itself. Such moments do not only come about through the reading of a sacred text. They could just as easily happen through a novel or a painting, or in the few vacant minutes we find ourselves resting in while standing in a queue or waiting for the lights to change, or in encountering someone’s gaze as you shake their hand. James Joyce would have called these moments of truth ‘epiphanies’.

Such moments are not neutral. They are ‘charged’ with something. But they are also unknowable in the sense that they elude any kind of definition or analysis. Allowing for the advances made in the language of mathematics, it is artists and poets who probably come the closest to being able to define ‘truth’ when it is spoken of, or experienced, in this way. The truth they reveal to us (without always knowing they are doing so) is also the ‘unknown’ of quantum mechanics and the ‘unknowing’ of all that pertains to knowledge of God.

We are sentient beings whose perceptions have been sharpened by our memories, the memories of our own continuing pain, and by the suffering of the world. Here, and in our memories, we encounter a God who takes into himself the effects of our tendency to selfishness and violence as these are worked out in the politics of fear which continue to exercise such a hold on us and to dominate our world.

So, to look into the ‘unknowingness’, or darkness, of God is also to look into the world’s darkness and not to flinch from the fear it generates. But we need to look into our own darkness first. Looking into our own darkness, and thence into the darkness of the world and its politics, is not an exercise for the faint hearted and it is certainly not an exercise for those who think of themselves as spiritually strong. But it is vital work.

Those who are called upon to do this work will have known fear in one or more of its many psychological manifestations. They will be familiar with their own dark place, in the way a blind person or animal is familiar with the layout of a room because they know where the furniture is. The furniture is the cause and effect familiar to us in whatever our fear syndrome happens to be. We should know the furniture of our own dark habitation because it defines the limits of the space from which we can pray into the world’s darkness and into the politics of fear which emanate from that darkness. We should have the humility to pray only from within these limits.

The image I have chosen for this post is by now well known. Here is a spiritual exercise to go with it. It takes only a few seconds. 

Try looking at the faces of these two men while holding on to the truth revealed to you about what they represent for the future of millions, and perhaps of the whole human race. Yes, it is something to be fearful about. But if you look closely you see that they too are afraid. They are afraid because they cannot trust each other and they cannot trust each other because they are afraid. Allow all this to reveal itself as you look at the cold and hesitant handshake.  Look at the fear and take it into your particular dark room. Leave it there with the familiar furniture. Then look at the men again. 

Now, keeping your eyes on the men while remaining open and vulnerable to the unknowingness of God, to your own darkness and to that of the world, pray this: Lighten our darkness, Lord, we pray; and in your mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Prayer - We don't know the half of it

www.telegraph.co.uk

There is water on Mars– or at least some sort of brine, and questions are no doubt already surfacing. Who will be the first to lay hold of the planet’s mineral wealth? Who will claim its forbidding terrain, give it a corporate name and then, in ignorance and haste, wreck it?

Perhaps these questions have already been answered, which only confirms the fact that destruction of the irreplaceable is the price we all pay for the ignorance and greed of past generations compounded by the selfishness and duplicity of the present one. This being the case, there is little reason to suppose that the fate of Mars will differ from that of Earth.  

The wealth of Mars, brought through its trickle of life giving water, will be unevenly distributed. Its key beneficiaries will justify their own short-term selfishness on the basis of ‘trickle down’ economic theories which are proving unjust and unworkable and whose methods also contribute to the ultimate destruction of planets – our own, and potentially others.

This whole destructive process feels unstoppable because, it seems, there is no single ultimate justice which we can trust and to which we can be accountable, no source of mercy to engage with us in the taking of responsibility for what we do with life itself. As a direct result of this, we seem to be losing sight of the purpose of our very existence. We are drowning in our own lostness.

It is as if the more we learn, the less we know, because in our haste to acquire, achieve and be something other than what we are (frail and fallible creatures, but who are gifted with intelligence and free will), we have lost our connection with the source of life and truth, from which comes the kind of deep understanding which issues forth in right judgment and responsible leadership.

Faced with this reality, systems and the people which systems ultimately control and govern (even though such people believe that it is they who are in control) start to fall apart. We are seeing this in the systemic disintegration of the institutional Church and we are seeing it in the panic experienced by the Labour party as a result of the unexpected arrival of two righteous people to lead it. No doubt everything will be done to try to undermine these people and so de-stabilise a hope-filled situation.

This general state of rapid disintegration resembles a piece of knitting which is falling apart. The work goes well until a few stitches get dropped. If these are not picked up and re-worked immediately, the piece unravels to a point where it becomes irretrievable. The human predicament, and the state of the planet, are like intertwined stitches which are part of a far greater work. In the case of knitting, when one stitch goes, the whole piece disintegrates, unless the knitter is quick to spot the situation and has the patience to work down to the dropped stitch and pick it up.

In terms of the world and our own lives, we are dependent on a creator God who is forever picking us up, and picking up our dropped stitches. When we become aware of this, and work with his purpose for us, we become agents of his salvific process. We engage in his ongoing work of redemption. This is the work of prayer.

There is no telling how this mending and re-making actually functions, because prayer takes place within the uniqueness of every human heart. It also depends on faith, and faith itself is only known in the human heart. It is not an intellectual exercise, so no single person can judge whether another has or does not have the faith needed to make prayer a reality in their lives. Similarly, nobody is in a position to judge whether someone’s prayer has been ‘effective’, or tell them how to make it so.

Faith is not just a matter of belief. It is about recognising and owning our need for God’s mercy. Prayer begins with facing into one’s deep need for God and daring to let ourselves be touched by his love. When we do this we bring with us our planet’s fragility and the strangely alien beauty of worlds as yet barely discovered. In whatever way, or whatever circumstances this encounter with God takes place, his mercy is recognised first of all in prayer. It is felt for what it is and never forgotten. It elicits a response. 

There is no way of ‘proving’ that this response has had an effect in any given situation. Who knows if apartheid would, or would not, still prevail in South Africa if millions of people had not allowed their need for God and for his mercy to enable some of them to be proactive in overcoming that particular evil? Whether or not they took direct action, they were all involved in the work of prayer. The same can be said of those who pray into the evils of the present day.

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Cross purpose

Coventry Cross
aprilyamasaki.com

As you go down the stairs to the café at Coventry Cathedral, you pass the burned cross which was made of two pieces of wood found in the rubble of the bombed out original building. They were found lying together in the position of a cross. The stone mason, Jock Forbes, who was working on the new building, tied them in that position and there they stand behind a glass panel engraved with the words ‘Father forgive’.

If you are a first time visitor to the cathedral, you might not expect to come across a burned cross on the wall as you hurry downstairs for a cup of coffee. You are surprised by it, as if you were being accosted by a stranger. You are unsettled by the encounter even though it proves, after all, not to be violent or in any way threatening, although you find that the disparate thoughts which are swirling around in your head as you hurry down the stairs, are suddenly interrupted, as if they were being held to account, in a way which is profoundly disturbing.

It is as if this fleeting and seemingly inconsequential moment encompasses the whole of history of which you are an integral part. It questions it. The charred cross is a reminder of the horrors of war and of the violence wrought on the earth by every generation, and you are a part of that too. The moment of ‘encounter’ allows you to see this and to know it at the deepest level of your hidden inner self, as you read the words ‘Father forgive’ etched into the glass in front of the cross. Seen against the charred cross, the delicately wrought words disturb and shock.

There is another cross in Coventry Cathedral, a replica of one made of nails, nails which were also found in the ruins of the old building. The original nail cross was given to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin as a sign of repentance for the Allied bombing. There have been, and will continue to be, many crosses. But the words ‘Father forgive’ will always remain the same, wherever they are placed and whenever they are said or thought.

Perhaps they will remain because they are not our words. Most of us, if we are honest about it, are not capable of speaking these words for more than a split second before falling back into a place of unforgiveness, hence the continuation of violence at all levels and in every context of human existence. Violence is the only language we really know and feel confident speaking. It is the language of unforgiveness.

Unforgiveness takes many forms. It is not just a perpetuation of hatred. It is more a matter of not being able to let go of fear, something to which we seem to be perversely, if unconsciously,  addicted. So someone else needs to say the words with us and for us, and keep saying them, until we learn not to be afraid of forgiveness and of what it entails. This is the purpose of the cross. It is also what makes an encounter with it both disturbing and life changing.  

Last week I wrote about the politics of hope and one commentator remarked, rightly, that hope, in politics, can be construed in many different ways, depending on individual or collective interests. I think the hope which comes with the forgiveness of the cross takes us beyond these narrow limitations. I also think that faith is sometimes revealed in the way hope is worked out and that, in this respect, it is acceptable for faith to remain undeclared or hidden.

Faith is not invariably a matter of openly declaring oneself to be of any one religion, because true religion does not need to declare itself at all. So it is not for anyone to judge whether another person has faith, or to judge others on the basis of a priori definitions about any one set of religious beliefs. Faith is about faithfulness to ideals, as well as to beliefs, as my commentator pointed out in relation to Jeremy Corbyn’s long years of faithfulness to his vision for a better society. It is also about trusting in a love that has been encountered from outside the limited boundaries of purely human forgiveness. 

Socialist Utopia - Or the Kingdom of Heaven?

The artist Ai Wei Wei, when asked on Channel 4 News (September 14^th, 2015) why his art is deemed to be so subversive by the Chinese government, replied that art is dangerous.  “It speaks the truth”, he said, by which he meant the kind of truth which inspires hope and resonates with the deepest longings of the human spirit.

www.theguardian.com

One of the most pernicious effects of self-serving power politics, in any context, is that they whittle away at the concept of hope, making it appear either futile, irrelevant or even ridiculous. Wei Wei’s art is the product of a sacrificial life which has been both sustained and given in a hope which refused to be whittled away through months of solitary confinement in Chinese prisons.

 Hope is often mistaken for a kind of naïve dreaming for a perfect world, a perfect future, but it is quite the opposite of this. Hope is grounded in, and shaped by, the hard knocks of experience. It often pays a heavy price for what it gives of itself, but the product in the end is life because hope, as opposed to wishful thinking, continually defies what is dead and decayed. This is the central message of Ai Wei Wei’s work. It is also the task to which our politicians are called.

Whatever we may think of the re-formed Labour party and of Jeremy Corbyn, its newly elect leader, his meteoric rise from relative obscurity to totemic political significance, is the single most hope-filled event to have occurred in British politics in decades. He will, of course, disappoint, not so much because many of his dreams are unrealisable at the present moment, given the global conflagration which this nation is caught up in, but because he will have great difficulty persuading his own party to grasp the hope he is offering.

The Blairites will have to forgo infighting. They will also have to resist engaging in the kind of pragmatic and publicly pugilistic politics which have made so many people, especially the young, cynical about the whole political process. Corbyn himself will have to guard against old allies, now receiving the reward which they have perhaps been promised, from persuading him to slip back into the seductive ways of ‘old labour’, a utopia which never really existed, even for those whose lives it was supposed to transform.

What then is the hope he is offering? I think it is a new and fresh vision of politics itself, but also a vision which is deeply grounded in what Jesus would have described as the Kingdom of Heaven. The politics of the Kingdom, like all politics, are worked out in the shaping of economic policies. There are some Christians who will blanche at this idea. Corbyn’s proposed policies are perhaps a little too compatible with the Gospel, a little too truthful for comfort. They also sound like the kind of Christian Marxism which has been put forward in the past by such as Thomas J. Hagerty and Ernst Block in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, (to name only two), as well as those of Oscar Romero and others who even today are held in US prisons for their Kingdom orientated political convictions. The Chinese government is not the only one to feel threatened by the kind of truths exposed in the art of Ai Wei Wei.

Other Christians will be wary of a return to the kind of socialism which stifles economic creativity and the passing on of earned assets to one’s children. They would fear the consequences of the kind of heavy handed secularism, and the atheism which is often automatically associated with it, which denies our basic humanity and destroys the life of the spirit.

Jeremy Corbyn ought to be able to speak into these fears. With his natural grace, measured responses to questions both friendly and hostile, and with his steadiness of purpose, he could be a Christ figure for the nation, irrespective of his own religious convictions, or lack of them. But he cannot be this alone, because hope is something that has to be continually replenished from outside, as well as from within. For Christians, it comes with the grace of knowing and being known by God, so that they can become ‘God-sent’ people in whatever circumstances they find themselves. They become bearers of hope – and not simply celebrities, and this is particularly important in the context of politics.

If Jeremy Corbyn is called to be a Christ figure to the nation, he will need the faith and the spiritual energy generated by those who will pray for him. An Eritrean refugee was asked not long ago why he wanted to go to the UK. He replied “because it is Great Britain”. The prayer we need right now does not need to involve words, or any kind of  mindset or formal liturgical setting. It needs to be the embodiment of the hope, directed at God, that Jeremy Corbyn will one day make this nation great again.

Prophetic management for the Church in Wales

The Business Directory defines best management practice as follows: ‘Methods or techniques found to be the most effective and practical means in achieving an objective while making the optimum use of the firm’s resources’.

‘Objective’ and ‘resources’ are key managerial words. If the objective is either irrelevant or plain wrong, and if, as a result of this, human gifts are neglected, or deployed in an unimaginative way, there is nothing substantial to manage. As a result, the organisation behaves like an old garment which has been patched with unshrunk cloth.  (Mark 2:21) It comes apart at the seams and the people it is meant to serve suffer the consequences.

Herein lies the problem which the Church in Wales is currently facing. What is its underlying objective? What does the Church mean to itself? What holds it together? (These questions carry a health warning, since answering them fully may take some time and create a major distraction from the current somewhat ad hoc management agenda) What would the Church like to mean for those who come to its doors, both in a literal sense and through how such people see the Church living out its collective life?

None of this is to deny some of the well intended initiatives being implemented within the Church in Wales’s management agenda (grants for church related projects and for new ministry area initiatives, along with renewed public affirmation of lay ministry being two of the most significant) but there is nevertheless the feeling that we are still primarily a clerically managed organisation. Some of my previous blogs on the Church in Wales will remind readers of why a clerically managed Church which is trying to behave like an organisation is not proving popular. So when it comes to best management practice we have a problem as an organisation which is unclear about both its method and its objective. As such, it is a problem about being Church.

The first thing which needs to be faced in this respect is that, on the whole, people who might think of coming to church, possibly for the first time, are not looking to join an organisation, even if they are not sure of quite what it is they are looking for. When their uncertainty is met with a corresponding uncertainty within the Church itself, they sense that the Church is drifting. And they would not be alone in sensing this. The Church is drifting, not only in a material sense but, more importantly, in the sense of its own specific corporate calling. The Church is corporate (and not a corporation) insofar as it is the corpus of Jesus Christ alive in his Spirit.

Early on in his public ministry, Jesus preached a sermon in which he announced his calling and, in so doing, reminded his hearers of theirs. (Luke 4:16-19). He was also reminding them of God’s promise and purpose for them as God’s people. Predictably, they found this so disturbing that they drove him out of town. However, his words were not meant to inflame, at least not in a destructive sense. They were a reminder of what the Church is intended to be, aflame with love for all God’s people. So his words merit being briefly and broadly re-figured and applied to the life of the Church here in Wales:

Jesus is telling his congregation, and all of us, that we are his. So we can read as follows:

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon you. Rise to meet it and be worthy of it because in and with me, you have been anointed to bring good news to the poor. You have been given the grace to be more than yourselves by speaking and living for those you exist to serve, and to succour them in their times of need – whatever the circumstances and whatever it takes. This should  be your primary concern, even if it costs you your status, your stipend or your personal reputation. Any considerations which get in the way of announcing the good news to the poor should be dismissed as irrelevant, if not damaging.

You have been sent in my abiding Spirit to release the captive. Captives include all those whose gifts are ignored (because you either fear or do not value them) or who are excluded or marginalised on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, or of any other consideration. The proclaiming of the good news begins with proclaiming it to each other, as you ensure that none of these practices of mind and heart find a place in your midst. You proclaim the good news first by living it.

You are also to bring recovery of sight to the blind, as you let the oppressed go free. Recovery of sight begins with recovering your own sight. It means seeing yourselves as God sees you, not as you imagine yourselves to be. You are therefore called to be ‘transparent’ to God, in what you say and do, both individually and as the corpus of Christ. The one informs the other. When you become transparent to God, you will become transparent to his truth and righteousness.  Only then will you be able to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, of his loving kindness and mercy, at a time when many people feel very far from him. Such transparency takes courage.