from the edge

Tuesday 29 September 2015

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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Tuesday 22 September 2015

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. 

Tuesday 15 September 2015

Socialist Utopia - Or the Kingdom of Heaven?

The artist Ai Wei Wei, when asked on Channel 4 News (September 14th, 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.

Monday 7 September 2015

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.