Colouring in reality

Source: youtube.com

After thirty three years of unremitting pain, Kim Phuc’s scars and nerve endings are being treated by a leading scar tissue expert who specialises in the effects of napalm. Many of us know Kim Phuc. We met her when she was just eleven years old, fleeing naked from her village on June 8^th, 1972, caught up in a South Vietnamese bombing raid.

We are entering the season of remembrance, a time when we remember not only those who have died, but also the living. We are remembering those whose lives have been so traumatised by conflict or abuse that they are alive in a quite different sense to that which most of us take for granted. Kim Phuc, having defected to Canada, made a new life out of the scars left on her mind and body by the Vietnamese war. Since then, millions of others have had their lives shaped, and distorted, by their memories of conflict.

The traumatised Syrian family landing on the Greek island of Kos will eventually make a new life in Munich. They will live that life in, and because of, their memories, memories which will also shape their identities as victims of humanity’s inhumanity. Unless they experience the kind of joy which precedes healing at the deepest level, these memories will destroy their future. But the father of the Kos family is beginning to smile again, and his children are laughing for the first time in months. Their laughter makes them instruments of healing for all of us.

The remembrance season is a good time to reflect on the fact that the victims of war are also the means of our own healing. They are to us the suffering Christ whose ‘stripes heal our wounds’. They show us not only how to survive but, more importantly, how we are meant to really live in these inchoate times. We live not by turning away from reality, but by embracing it and allowing ourselves to be forgiven, rather than seeking a way out  via some form of infantile escapism.

Yesterday, after news of more unrest and violence in Turkey, brought about by the heightening of tensions between the government and Kurdish resistants, and as a prelude to forthcoming elections, we immediately hear of the latest adult colouring-in craze. Apparently, the digital age, and the instantaneous access which it brings to the horrors of conflict, are proving too much for us. We need, it is said, ‘something analogue’ perhaps to soften things a bit, to give our eyes a rest, and possibly our hearts and brains as well, from what we see on our screens. 

But it is not clear what realities colouring-in books are designed to soften. Perhaps they are just supposed to remind us of safe designated areas, so also indicating a tendency to avoid that level of reality which takes us into the unknown, outside the safe designated area when it comes to making sense of human suffering – and to doing the right thing.

At the same time, the blank areas in the colouring books (the safe designated areas) also provide time. They provide a mental space, as they do for children, into which things can fall into place, so allowing questions to surface, as they also sometimes do for children, with respect to the inequality and random injustices which life seems to have dealt to many, while leaving others untouched. These are questions which the person doing the colouring-in would often rather not face.

The moment of truth might come suddenly and unexpectedly. As they inadvertently colour over a line, they get rattled, as we all do when certain lines (especially ones which suit our purposes at the moment) are crossed. The irony of the recent House of Lords rebellion is an interesting case in point. They are unelected. How dare they break out in the cause of justice?  and possibly, one might add, in the longer term healing of deep social divisions within our own nation. They pertain to an outdated system of class and privilege. How dare they cross the line? Colouring-in will reinforce the dubious notion that things need to stay safely in their allotted spaces, especially if the space is a contentious one. The negative implications for human well being are enormous.

Perhaps colouring-in for adults will be the means to finding something more than a coping strategy when it comes to remembering and healing the wounds of nations, and our own as well. Perhaps the blank spaces will oblige us to think of how we could colour-in the bleak lives of those who call on us for relief, asylum or fiscal justice and so begin to heal their memories with the beginnings of a joy which we so badly need ourselves.  

A life worth living

“Keeping busy?” is the question which often gets asked of people who look over 65 or so. Perhaps the person asking it reckons that the over 65 year olds have nothing left to live for, apart from filling the dreadful abyss left by the ‘busyness’ which has been taken from them through retirement – voluntary or otherwise.

The question is loaded at both ends. On the one, for the person being asked and, on the other, for the one asking it, who may be worrying about their own impending retirement and the spectre of idleness which it raises. In both cases, it leads into far deeper questions which pertain to the meaning of life itself. These are the questions many people face in retirement or possibly, as a result of adversity, much earlier on in life.

We do not live, in the fullest sense, by keeping busy.  Neither, for that matter, are we truly rich when we have simply made a lot of money or acquired power or status, which are only of use to us in this lifetime, in any case – if they last that long. There is still that part of us which achievements and attributes fail to satisfy, or ‘reach’, to allude to an advertisement from the seventies for a well known brand of beer.

Retirement focuses this truth, until now only vaguely apprehended, into reality. Left to ourselves, we are faced not so much with the past (although the past is significant in shaping our thoughts about the present) as with the present moment and with infinity itself which is couched in the present moment, though it does not begin there. Having to be still and resisting the need to be busy allows us a glimpse of infinity, also called eternity, and eternity might be like when our very brief lives enter into that ultimate dimension.  It begs two further questions; will we be wealthy in the only way which matters in this infinite dimension? In other words, will we have lived richly towards God? And will we have lived gratefully?

So the question we are faced with is whether or not we are living, in the fullest sense of the word, rather than just keeping busy. By living, I mean has our creaturely life been in tune with the greater life of God’s creating Spirit, with his generosity and joy, as well as with his grieving over the violence and greed which are the cause of so much suffering for human beings and creatures alike?

The creative ‘rush’ that makes for fulfilling work is of a piece with the energy of a creating God. Have we, in our working lives, ever sensed this and been grateful to him for it? And if our own working life has been demanding, but unrewarding and uneventful, have we sought that creative God in our colleagues and helped them to develop their gifts wherever possible?

Gratitude ought to inform the whole of our life, not just that part of it when we were in work, because gratitude is about meeting God at the deepest level of our being. Gratitude is also at the heart of the meaning of eucharist, and we are called to live eucharistically. In other words, we are called to live richly and gratefully towards God at whatever stage of life we happen to have reached.

We are also called to be open to what is good in retirement, even if it does not, on the face of it, feel very rewarding. When we consciously live like this, we are able to discern or know God meeting with our own spirit, so making retirement creative in the fullest sense. We are not just getting through another day by keeping busy, because each day is the beginning of a whole new phase of creative living.  

Praying into the politics of fear

Source: mg.co.za

A good novel or poem reveals a truth you always knew, but never realised you knew. The same holds for the Christian gospels. They tell us things we always knew but now, in this moment of reading, discover in an entirely new way as if for the first time. They are ‘true’ in this moment in a way they were not true in the past, or even five minutes ago. All of the sayings of Jesus were spoken with this idea in mind.

When truth is suddenly come upon it becomes a ‘moment of truth’. Moments of truth (and there can be many) often occur at that particular point in our life’s trajectory which intersects with that of the world in such a way as to allow for perception, understanding, or a creative ‘eureka’. A greater reality declares itself. Such moments do not only come about through the reading of a sacred text. They could just as easily happen through a novel or a painting, or in the few vacant minutes we find ourselves resting in while standing in a queue or waiting for the lights to change, or in encountering someone’s gaze as you shake their hand. James Joyce would have called these moments of truth ‘epiphanies’.

Such moments are not neutral. They are ‘charged’ with something. But they are also unknowable in the sense that they elude any kind of definition or analysis. Allowing for the advances made in the language of mathematics, it is artists and poets who probably come the closest to being able to define ‘truth’ when it is spoken of, or experienced, in this way. The truth they reveal to us (without always knowing they are doing so) is also the ‘unknown’ of quantum mechanics and the ‘unknowing’ of all that pertains to knowledge of God.

We are sentient beings whose perceptions have been sharpened by our memories, the memories of our own continuing pain, and by the suffering of the world. Here, and in our memories, we encounter a God who takes into himself the effects of our tendency to selfishness and violence as these are worked out in the politics of fear which continue to exercise such a hold on us and to dominate our world.

So, to look into the ‘unknowingness’, or darkness, of God is also to look into the world’s darkness and not to flinch from the fear it generates. But we need to look into our own darkness first. Looking into our own darkness, and thence into the darkness of the world and its politics, is not an exercise for the faint hearted and it is certainly not an exercise for those who think of themselves as spiritually strong. But it is vital work.

Those who are called upon to do this work will have known fear in one or more of its many psychological manifestations. They will be familiar with their own dark place, in the way a blind person or animal is familiar with the layout of a room because they know where the furniture is. The furniture is the cause and effect familiar to us in whatever our fear syndrome happens to be. We should know the furniture of our own dark habitation because it defines the limits of the space from which we can pray into the world’s darkness and into the politics of fear which emanate from that darkness. We should have the humility to pray only from within these limits.

The image I have chosen for this post is by now well known. Here is a spiritual exercise to go with it. It takes only a few seconds. 

Try looking at the faces of these two men while holding on to the truth revealed to you about what they represent for the future of millions, and perhaps of the whole human race. Yes, it is something to be fearful about. But if you look closely you see that they too are afraid. They are afraid because they cannot trust each other and they cannot trust each other because they are afraid. Allow all this to reveal itself as you look at the cold and hesitant handshake.  Look at the fear and take it into your particular dark room. Leave it there with the familiar furniture. Then look at the men again. 

Now, keeping your eyes on the men while remaining open and vulnerable to the unknowingness of God, to your own darkness and to that of the world, pray this: Lighten our darkness, Lord, we pray; and in your mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers of this night; for the love of your only son, our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.