Timewarp

While browsing for an image of refugees to use for this post, I have just stumbled on one of those American websites which thinks it has permission to say anything, as long as what it says justifies both its fear and its hatred of all who are perceived as alien, specifically

Muslims, and Muslim refugees in particular. In its paranoia, the site claims that Texas will soon have to submit to Sharia law, that term being understood in its most pejorative, narrow and repressive sense. It also states that refugees disembarking in Lampedusa complain that there are not enough ‘freebies’ and that they also complain of receiving no support from the Italian government – nor should they, the website says.  The rhetoric continues in a far more extreme and barely printable vein, so I hastily deleted the page from my browser history, a kneejerk reaction perhaps.

Fear, even the puerile fear of being thought to take an interest in dubious websites, is what prompts kneejerk reactions, including that of turning off, or turning on, that particular site, or a programme or news item which fascinates as much as it informs.

We are fascinated by other people’s pain, and we fear that fascination. What other possible explanation could there be for the commercial success of the thoroughly nasty in the world of media, books and entertainment – apart from the possibility of there being something thoroughly nasty inside all of us which we both fear and are compelled to revisit?

Some of us are quite addicted to the news. But being a bit of a news junkie is not just a slightly voyeuristic form of conscience appeasement, in other words, wanting to know what is happening to strangers in distant places and convincing ourselves that we care. It is also about trying to make sense of suffering and of understanding ourselves and our own suffering a little better.  

It seems that engaging with the pain of strangers, and of other nations, reveals two things about suffering in general. First, that every person’s suffering, and the suffering of every innocent creature, is connected to the suffering of those who have gone before and, second, that suffering, including the suffering of the earth and of animals, is never pointless, although it may seem so at the time. Engaging with the suffering of others, even in the briefest and most superficial way, reveals how all suffering is connected. But knowing this does not necessarily make us more caring or more generous, because despite the immediacy of the internet and the sense of intimacy which it brings to any violent or tragic situation, the suffering, as far as we are concerned, is still going on somewhere else. It is not happening to me or to anyone I know. It is also compressed into a very short time space, long enough for a brief interview and some film footage. The suffering of others is both immediate and far away, close up and beyond reach, real and unreal.

Paradoxically, this creates a kind of limbo in which we can more or less ‘deal’ with the chaos and breakdown of nations and communities and with the devastation of lives, lives such as those which wash up on the shores of Lampedusa.  But instantaneous information also disempowers. Before we have had a chance to think about the situation in any depth, the moment has passed and another news item is before us, usually wholly unrelated to what preceded it. This in turn contributes to a sense of not being able to hold things together, one which mirrors the fragmentation of the world in which, as the poet W.B. Yeats wrote, ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’.

One way to counter this sense of falling apart is to consciously ‘hold’ all that is going on around us, and the essence of any present moment – its ‘itness’,  within the embrace of God and to allow him to ‘grasp’ it. We hold by simply paying attention to the news, and to the moment being covered, in the presence of God, while at the same time letting go of it. Ultimately, it is the letting go which matters. Letting go is the allowing which comes with acceptance of the way things are and the acknowledgment that we have all played a part in making them so. Once the allowing has been done we can yield the world’s suffering, and our own, to the only one who can prevent an irrevocable falling apart of all things. We accept and then yield into the outstretched arms of the crucified God, who is the risen Christ who loves us and who is always inviting us to keep company with him. It is a way of life.

Out of the ashes

Donesk airport 

Debaltseve is suspended in the buffer zone between Russia and the disputed territory of eastern Ukraine. We see the ashes of Donetsk airport through a drone’s camera lens. We glimpse, online, the face of an old woman. She remembers another war which devastated her country more than half a century ago. A tear glistens in her left eye. Another elderly woman sets about ‘clearing up’, as one online report puts it. She is at work with a dustpan and brush on the doorstep of her shattered house. The ceasefire may yet hold, or it may not, but for a moment we can be present to a nation’s suffering. Being present to the suffering of nations is a way of re-affirming what is good about humanity.

To be human is also to die. Ash Wednesday is the one day of the year when we consider the stark reality of our own mortality, the fact that we are dust and that to dust we shall return. It is in this sombre context that we are also called to repent. In former times this was done literally ‘in dust and ashes’. Now, we mark our foreheads with the sign of the cross made from the ashes of last year’s Palm Sunday crosses.

There is something significant about the tactile nature of this small ceremony. It invites us to think of our mortality and of repentance as belonging together, and yet the two are quite separate. Our mortality is an irrevocable aspect of the human condition, but repentance is down to us. It means, as the rest of the Ash Wednesday liturgical phrasing puts it, ‘to turn away from sin’. We have a choice.  For many, turning away from sin sounds overtly pious, not something one would want to rush to church for on a cold evening in February. But repentance is not an ascetic exercise for the religiously inclined. It is essential to the survival of the planet and of the human race, because it restores life.

Repentance is therefore everyone’s concern. It is both collective and personal. Nations are comprised of persons, of human beings whose lives and decisions shape the destinies of families and communities, and of the nation itself. They, and those they influence or control, can reduce a once fine airport to ashes, and with them lies the responsibility for the elderly woman ‘clearing up’ in between rocket attacks. Also, we all ultimately depend for our survival as a species on the planet which we are wrecking through conflict, greed and materialism. Archaeological research suggests that our planet has outlived other species in the past and could outlive us if we choose not to repent.

Nations repent when enough individuals apply enough pressure on those who hold the most power to push them to repentance, to push them to choose life for the rest of us. Part of our own repentance therefore consists in taking responsibility for the repentance of those over whom we have some influence. This is not a matter of applying sanctions, or, as in other conflict situations, of retaliatory bombing raids.

The conflicts we see around us are about the exercise of power, and hence about greatness. Repentance is about relinquishing power and accepting our mortality, our littleness and vulnerability, and that our lifespan and that of our planet is held in God’s. This is where a huge reality shift needs to take place. We have mistaken what is real for what is unreal by allowing collective vanity and self aggrandisement (otherwise known as national identity) to destroy our humanity. The last part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy urges us to be faithful to Christ. What it is reminding us of, though, is his faithfulness to us.

God is not seasonal

When Easter falls early, or the weather is too cold to safely plant the potatoes on Maundy Thursday, the gardening year gets off to a rather ‘discombobulated’ start (to use a favourite expression of my mother’s). But while it is relatively easy to adapt to seasonal disruption where growing vegetables is concerned, the same cannot always be said for other seasons, the ones that mark the year in ways which affect us personally, Christmas and Easter being the two most significant. These two seasons are also connected to the two pivotal seasons of the year, the winter and spring solstices, when daylight is at a turning point. They affect our moods. They also speak of a God who is always with us, in times of both light and darkness.

Christmas will, at least for the foreseeable future, always fall on the 25^th of December, but Easter is a movable feast. This year it falls early enough to create a general sense of disequilibrium, or emotional ‘discombobulation’. We have hardly done with Epiphany when Lent is almost upon us. The Christmas chocolates have only just been finished and yesterday I found a couple of minced pies, somewhat past their sell by date, in the back of a cupboard. I threw them away. They would have been perfectly OK heated up but the season for eating them is over. They do not fit the mood of the moment which is already coloured by anxiety. I am not yet in the frame of mind for Lent. I have been worrying about this for the past couple of weeks.

Anxiety is the first temptation we face at this time of year. It was, incidentally the one which Jesus himself faced initially in the wilderness and which arguably informed that whole experience. Was he really the Son of God? If he was, surely there was no point in allowing himself to starve to death before his work had begun? Perhaps he should just settle for being a famous wonder worker … What to do? He was not ready, not in the right frame of mind for doing the work he was called to, with the sacrifice which it would entail, or so he was tempted to think.  

When it comes to Lent, I am tempted to think that the right frame of mind involves at least wanting to give something up, or do something, which would make me more ‘disposed’ to God, a better Christian perhaps. There is so little time, between the end of Epiphany and Ash Wednesday (about 2 weeks, in fact) for wanting to somehow be different or better. But these puerile anxieties have no place in the overwhelming mad generosity of God’s salvation plan for each one of us which, incidentally, has nothing to do with being a better religious person or anyone other than who we are. God is much bigger, much wilder than our self preoccupied worries can possibly allow us to imagine. He loves us most in our humanity.

Perhaps Lent would be a great deal more fruitful, and less discombobulated, if we were mindful and accepting of our humanity and of the humanity of others. Of special concern are those people who have endured a kind of Lent for most of the year, or even for a large part of their lives. Some have long term mental health problems. Others have been recently bereaved. All are living through a time of wilderness and temptation of which most of us have little or no experience. Giving attention, through prayer, or through physical presence to someone who is suffering; loving them, not because we want to be better Christians, but in their humanity, is what Lent is really about. We meet Christ in their humanity, and in our own if we will allow it. So our shared humanity and suffering has much to teach us, if we will only pay attention to it.  

This is how God pays attention to us, regardless of the season. We are loved in our humanity, in what we are going through right now, good or bad. We are loved in our day to day ordinariness, not in the persons we think or wish we could become. God loves us in the full knowledge that we will probably never become that person, nor perhaps should we. The imperfections which make us the persons we are, are also the wounds and bruises we carry around in life. On the whole it takes a life time to learn to tell the difference between what is a wound and what is an imperfection or a ‘sin’ in ourselves, let alone in other people.

All wounds, and the imperfections they generate, are also Christ’s, because he has chosen to make them so. For this reason, the season of Lent is also always Easter. Nothing is particularly tidy or seasonal in the way God relates to human beings. 

Return to centre - the Sunday space

Post-war London Sundays were monochrome in every sense. They are to be remembered for grey buildings, lacklustre parks and gardens, boredom and an all-pervading sense of absence. Sundays had to be got through, not that we were forced to attend church. It was just that there was nothing to do and nothing was happening. Perhaps the post-war Sunday was an overhang from the war itself, a flat calm in the wake of a tornado. I am still surprised at the resistance which Sunday trading encountered from a generation who, logically, should have welcomed its inception rather than viewing it as Mammon incarnate. They should have welcomed it because, if for no other reason, ‘business as usual’ 7 days a week obliges us to question what we really understand Sunday to be for.

In the Christian calendar this particular Sunday (February 1^st¸ 2015) is kept as the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple. The gospel reading set for today (Luke 2:22-40) speaks of the fulfilment of promise, in a moment which a man and a woman who are both well advanced in years had thought would never come. The man had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Christ, God’s Messiah. So it is a life-defining moment, a moment of truth.

Moments of truth tell us what our lives are meant to be, or, as in the case of this elderly couple, what our lives have been about, what they have been for. They bring everything together. I think this initial moment of recognition, between the old man and the infant Christ, also tells us something of what Sunday is for. It is a space for encountering God. The ‘Sunday space’, whatever form it takes, or whatever day of the week it happens to be, lends depth and colour, shape and coherence to our lives.

Sunday is shaped from within ourselves. In fact, Sunday has always been at the centre of our DNA, as persons who are shaped in and for the love of God. It is defined to a far lesser extent by contextual or cultural circumstances. The Sunday space could be on a Friday or a Saturday, if you are Muslim or Jewish, or it could simply be defined by the constraints of shift work, so it is probably best not to define it at all and not to hedge it about with conditions and restraints. It should be ‘free time’ in the fullest sense.

It is only in freeing Sunday from outdated protestant Sabbath thinking that the idea of Sunday can become a permanent and vital fixture in our lives. As such, it becomes a place for encountering God, one to which we can return in any vacant moment, as well as in moments which are fraught with anxiety or filled with joy. By encountering God, I mean being surprised, or taken unawares, by his sheer faithfulness. The Sunday space, however we think of it, is a space for ‘returning and rest’ to quote the prophet Isaiah. But this in turn begs the question of what we mean by rest, given the times we live in? Sunday can also be the day for doing all the tasks and chores which cannot be done during the week because of other work commitments. Doing nothing is out of the question.

Rest is not about doing nothing. It is not some kind of neutral gear. On the contrary, it has its own dynamic, its own rhythm and pace. It is the paradox of which the prophet Isaiah speaks when he says that ‘in returning and rest, you shall be saved’. Real rest only happens when God is allowed into whatever activity or thought, good or bad, that occupies our attention and draws on our emotional or physical energy. This is the kind of rest which makes the Sunday space truly productive, or regenerative. 

All living things need places and periods of regeneration. The kind of regeneration experienced in our inner Sunday space also confronts and overwhelms what is de-generate in ourselves and in the world around us. It enables us to ‘see salvation’ through the darkness and to return the darkness to God. The infant Christ was inviting the old man to ‘see salvation’ that morning in the Temple. He was inviting him, and us, to re-focus and return ourselves and the whole world into God.