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.