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.
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| 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.
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