News overload

‘Drilling down’ has become something of a conversational catchphrase. I am not sure that conversations are particularly enriched by it, perhaps because drilling is too easily associated with dentists and oil wells. But the intent, the suggestive purpose, of the phrase does have something to offer when it comes to news overload. It is the depth, not the aggressive drilling which, seen from a different perspective, may have something to bring to the way we initially react to the conflicts and environmental catastrophes with which we are faced on a daily, if not hourly, basis. We brace ourselves for the news as if it were the dentist’s drill.

But there is a better way to play a part in healing the world’s pain than simply bracing ourselves for the next disaster. As Christians, we engage with the suffering of others by ‘deepening’ rather than resisting or ‘drilling down’ into it. Deepening is not the same as drilling. It involves dropping into and allowing rather than resisting. We deepen into the world’s suffering, and begin to participate in its healing, by first allowing the initial shock wave of the latest news feed to flow into us and through us, without trying to block or defer it by turning off the computer or television.

Two days ago, as I alighted briefly on CNN’s cable news channel to be instantly faced with the word ‘devastation’ written across the screen in capitals, I was tempted to do this. It was a typical news overload moment in which I could either have switched off, in every sense, or skimmed over the headline paragraph out of passing curiosity. But neither of these evasive tactics was an option. Instead,  I needed to ‘deepen’ into the Nepal earthquake, and the devastation it has wrought, by dropping down into its own darkness.

'Abseiling'
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This is not quite the same as ‘drilling down’. Dropping down is not a search for some pre-defined end, or even for a solution to the problem. It is a matter of letting go of one’s own initial resistance to the suffering of others by ‘abseiling’ down into their suffering and into all the circumstances which surround it, or which may have caused it. Abseiling, as defined by Wikipedia, is ‘the controlled descent of a vertical drop’. The abseiler has to both let go and hold on.  

When it comes to engaging fruitfully with the world’s pain, we are in a position to do something comparable. We let go and drop down into it in terms of our own inner life, this being the only life we can call real. Taken together, our other inclinations and habits of mind generally return us to an over familiar but far from complete, or real, self. They do not constitute life in the fullest sense because they invariably return us to that same place, what is of most concern to ourselves.

Following our inclinations and habits of mind, including switching off when we reach news overload, seldom enables us to be more deeply connected to others. This is not helped by the internet which makes all things instant, and thereby ultimately superficial. In an age of ‘friending’ and ‘unfriending’, depth is what we most need, and depth requires trust. Abseilers take a calculated risk while trusting completely in the competence of those around them.

For Christians, life in its fullest sense involves trust. To trust others means knowing ourselves to be connected to them, wherever they are, and taking them with us as we drop down ever more deeply into the life of Christ – the Christ who ‘abides’ or who, in the words of the New Testament Greek, ‘goes on living’ in each one of us, the Christ whom we are always seeking and always finding, but who seldom provides answers or ready-made solutions.

This is how Christians think of prayer. Prayer is a three way process. We take the world’s suffering, and the suffering of those known to us personally, into our inner life. We bring it with them into the presence of Christ who already abides with us there. At the same time, we allow them to hold us in their own darkness. We do not know that they are doing this, of course. But we trust that God sees the entire situation from a different and far more comprehensive vantage point, which is that of eternity and of his own divine and fathomless mercy. It is in this mercy that we too are heard and forgiven. In it, we will ultimately see ourselves most beautifully reflected in the faces of strangers.

Migrants - 'Diversion Ahead'

In the world of cheap journalism it seems that anything goes. Katie Hopkins rockets to stardom, in terms of the number of signatures she has attracted on change.org in its petition to have her sacked after her article for the Sun newspaper. In it, she describes the desperate human beings fleeing from barbarity, conflict and extreme hardship as ‘cockroaches’. Partly as a result of this, the plight of the people she vilifies fades momentarily into the background. When it comes to possible diversions from the requirements of moral integrity, the same holds true for commercially valuable celebrities, Jeremy Clarkson being an example, although in his case, the institution got it right in the end by refusing to reinstate him as presenter of ‘Top Gear’.

In both cases, we have a kind of Barabbas situation, a helpful distraction from more profound moral questions. In the case of Katie Hopkins, the obvious one which pertains to the value of the least and the poorest of human lives and, in the case of Clarkson, whether it was worth making a fuss over the assault of a man. Had it been a woman there would have been an immediate and far greater uproar, the issue here being the assumption that men are supposed to be able to ‘deal with’ such incidents and ‘move on’.

The Katie Hopkins furore comes as a convenient distraction from the question of what the European Union should do to alleviate the plight of migrants fleeing the shores of northern Africa. It also diverts attention away from the pressing need to give Italy a practical and financial helping hand. Vague promises and patronising platitudes, along with all the sentiment and high words which obscure the inhumanity of the collective political will, simply do not help.

Meanwhile, and in the midst of all the clamour and confusion surrounding the question of reinstating efficient migrant rescue (and who should administer and pay for it), the tantrums and spats between leading UK politicians continue unabated. The UK elections are degenerating into near farce which will, once more, provide lucrative copy for cheap journalism. Again, it is a convenient distraction from the real human suffering being experienced in more distant places about which scrapping politicians seem to have little to say.

So it is not surprising that, to those fleeing conflict and hardship, we appear to be washing our hands of the problem, owing to more pressing electoral concerns at home. These concerns must surely touch on the vexed question of  our own immigration policy, something which Katie Hopkins no doubt spotted and whose article was described by her newspaper, which profited richly from her remarks, as ‘brilliant’.

The problem which refuses to go away, whatever distractions may be thrown at the British electorate, is embedded somewhere in the hard core reality of the cost of taking difficult political decisions as a member of the wider political community. Some of the proposals touched upon by the European Commission might include establishing a generous but realistic quota for receiving these desperate people which could be shared across EU borders and would be mandatory. Another would be the establishment of a fund for helping Italy and Sicily in the immediate short term. These ideas are lightly touched upon in the Commission’s Ten Point Action Plan on migration, but everything remains ‘voluntary’ and therefore vague.

Vagueness and trying to please everyone all of the time leads to half baked reactive decision making, usually too late to be of any use. The hard core reality which faces us, as part of the European community (and of the human race), requires a proactive approach, rather than the ineffectual reactive handwringing that has gone on so far in regard to the problem of migrant drowning. Perhaps it is bureaucracy which is obscuring Europe’s vision, rather than plain hardness of heart. History has shown that realpolitik obscures our humanity. Are we in danger of repeating it in regard to the question of migration? 

The mood of the moment

Empty Tomb Photios Kontoglou

At times it seems that the politics of today only make sense when issues are seen separately, when they are allowed to become detached in the minds of the electorate from anything that went on yesterday, and from those which might occur tomorrow. This is a dangerous and delusional mindset, but one which is currently gaining ground among far right parties in Europe, and which should ring alarm bells in the minds of those UK voters with any sense of the history of the past century.

It is just as unrealistic to think that we, as individuals, can live our own lives solely in the present moment, without reference to the past. But there is a paradox here. The present moment, fully enjoyed and deeply relished, is a rare occurrence. This may be because we often mistake being fully present to the ‘now’ as being down to our ability to concentrate, to force the imagination into lock-down, so that some aspect of the ‘mind’ can take over and blank out surrounding circumstances.

I should stress here that a proper understanding of mindfulness discipline has nothing to do with this kind of strained concentration. It is much more a matter of letting go and freeing the mind, of ‘letting be’, but in a fully engaged way. Mindfulness is about being fully present to all the circumstances which converge on this particular moment, as well as whatever we happen to be doing or not doing in it, but without allowing them to impinge on our inner space. So it is a different kind of concentration.

Circumstances decide how we feel about life. We do not always experience the feelings appropriate to a particular liturgical season, for example (for which see also my post God is not seasonal 19^th February, 2015), or even to the weather. We are often, literally, ‘out of sorts’, at odds with the moment. Later, looking back on the day or on our whole life, events and circumstances seem to have ‘melded’. The day, or our life, acquires a variegated quality. It is uneven, both rough and smooth. This is what makes it precious. It is also what makes a life precious and unique in the eyes of God. A life is a melding of unique moments in which we are given an occasional glimpse of God’s presence at work in it.

This half awakened consciousness of God’s transfiguring work in us and in our world is what Easter is about. It is a ‘melding’. Easter melds with the rest of the year. It re-defines human history and within it the uniqueness of the life of every single person. The Resurrection, perceived as a new and altogether different encounter with the God who was crucified, holds and contains all human experience, and all human emotions, in one life-giving event.

In other words, it is where the corruption of death stops. By corruption I mean the destruction wrought on the human person, on all human relationships and on human history by death in all its disguises. But in the resurrection of Jesus Christ death itself is transfigured. It becomes its own opposite. It becomes life.

The life event of Christ’s own death, and of his rising, is now given to us so that we can see God, each other and ourselves in a new way. This new transfigured way of seeing is both personal, as it was for Mary Magdalene, and corporate, as it was for the frightened disciples who were holed up in a small room waiting for the police to arrest them. The risen Christ made his presence known to them in the most concrete and visible way. He called Mary by name, in a voice she immediately recognised, and he invited his friends to touch his wounded body and on another occasion to break bread with him. In all of these contexts, he was present to them when they least expected him and when the mood of the moment was certainly not one of rejoicing.

He does the same for us. He calls us by name in circumstances or moods which do not necessarily ‘fit’ with the moment, so that we do not immediately recognise him. In doing so, he is also inviting us to resist the tendency to over manage our spiritual lives, and possibly the spiritual lives of others, so that they fit with the season, other people’s expectations or our own unrevised expectations of ourselves. All of this is a matter of letting go into a freedom which will never be taken back by the one who gives it.

In view of the suffering being experienced in the world at the moment, all this may appear to be no more than pious optimism, or even an insult to the victims. It seems hard to apply it directly to the circumstances of a Yazidi family recently escaped from an Isis camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, but only because of the mental effort needed to do so. On the other hand, if we allow those who suffer to meet the risen Christ, within that place in ourselves which is the person only God fully knows, something quite different emerges, something which defies description because it has not come about as a result of our own mental effort. We have simply allowed joy.

Joy is freedom, freedom given in the life of the risen Christ. God is impatient for the truth about the human condition, now made new, to be fully revealed in the risen Jesus and also in us. He is impatient to free us from every kind of death-dealing corruption, from every kind of lie. So joy is not to be denied in times of suffering, any more than pain or painful memories should be suppressed when we are in the midst of celebration, because the risen Christ, in his physical body, brings a new kind of joy, one which transcends the moment.

Tactical voting - It goes against the grain

According to St. John’s account of Christ’s Passion, it was expedient that one man should

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die for the people and that the whole nation not perish. Whether in the Church or in society, expediency, strategy, power games in which ‘the people’ are either duped with impossible promises or blatantly used for political leverage and then discarded, the message is the same. It is expedient. This, along with whatever slant or ‘spin’ is afforded by the media and powerful interest groups, seems to be the order of the day when it comes to election campaigns. It is a far cry from the freedom and democracy for which two generations fought world wars in the last century and for which many risk their freedom and their lives today.

It is also why some of us are unhappy about tactical voting. Tactical voting goes against the grain of the kind of political freedom which draws a line between good and evil when it comes to the governance of nations. It also goes against the grain of the wood of the Cross. How we do, or don’t, exercise our hard won political freedom is a matter of conscience - it may feel expedient not to vote, but turning our back on the election is not being a responsible citizen of what is still a free nation.

Part of the reason for our unease about tactical voting lies in the fact that this country does not yet have a truly representative electoral system. It is also, paradoxically, why some people justify the practice in the first place. Although untidy and possibly less efficient, because the government it would deliver might be more difficult to administer, proportional representation would at least make the voter feel more connected to the political process and perhaps better motivated to engage with it. But that is not the only reason why some of us draw back from strategically ‘working’ the existing system, which is what tactical voting entails.

When it comes to tactical voting, you are working from a negative position. Tactical voting is like driving in reverse when you have missed a turning, and then finding yourself mired down off the edge of the road, unable to move in any direction. You back up to something like the worst compromise and so can end up voting for a party whose policies and values you hate, leaving you feeling more disenfranchised, or unrepresented, than you would have been had you voted with your conscience in the first place.

But you tell yourself that it is expedient to vote tactically, in order to be sure you keep the party you really don’t want out of the picture. This is not to say that you are wrong to want to keep them out, but that in ‘working’ the electoral system you deprive yourself and the best political parties of a voice. Tactical voting is negative thinking and negative thinking is not about vision. If tactical voters were to vote with their conscience, the parties with less political presence but far more wisdom, and with it far more vision, might just win a few more seats in government. The nation badly needs wisdom and vision.

This brings us back to the trial of Jesus of Nazareth, and to why I am voting  Liberal Democrat, even though on paper the Lib Dems  may not win a seat in our constituency and Ukip could, in theory, gain a little ground, chiefly from erstwhile Tory voters. I am not voting tactically because to do so would be to vote against my political conscience. I do not think that political conscience is shaped solely by the policies of any one party, although conscience will, if it is alive and healthy, afford a reliable guide as to the moral validity of specific party policies. Political conscience is also shaped by a desire not to betray those who in previous generations sacrificed so much for the democratic freedom we now have, even if that freedom is severely compromised by the system itself, as well as by those who ‘work’ it still further, to their own ends, once they are handed power through the ballot box.

It was expedient that Jesus should die for the people because, in having him executed, the state and the religious authorities were able to avert a direct confrontation in which all would be losers. It was a tactical manoeuvre and, of course, an act of betrayal. We all participate in this act from time to time in our failure to live up to the demands of conscience, to do and say the truth and to stay focused on righteousness when it comes to the moment of testing, including the testing of our own integrity in the ballot box. 

The main challenge is fear, fear of our littleness and lack of political grip, given the quantity and complexity of the data which is constantly being thrown at us, and fear of the weight of the system itself. But the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is God’s way of sweeping aside all that makes for fear, all our giving in to doubt and confusion, to settling for second best when it comes to the enactment of love in our lives, including the way we exercise our political freedom in the coming election.