The widening gyre

Peregrine falcon flying over Niagara Falls
(Falcon Family Photos)

Distance is not what it used to be at the start of the last world war. The time-space ratio seems to have shrunk. Things happen more quickly and we hear of them in the moment, because there always seems to be someone at the scene of the latest atrocity or disaster who can film it on their phone and then beam it back to us via the news channels. The news is almost always bad, even though small fillips of good news get inserted at the end of the hour by certain channels. If I am cynical, I would say that they do this in order to make sure we don’t switch off for good. But this is unlikely especially if, like me, you are addicted to a combination of Channel 4 and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

The two can just about be combined if you are prepared to forego the first half hour or so of Channel 4. Why can’t they work together and be sequential? I often wonder. We need those different voices to broaden our perspective. Different voices, and the different perspectives which they bring, create a kind of gear change which enables the engine of the mind to pause for a few seconds and re-engage with the source which feeds it. I am no mechanic, but I can’t help feeling that cars do this when we change gear. They pause in order to move forward with greater impetus – or to slow down and be better prepared for hazards.

There is another kind of gear change which affects the way we deal with the realities around us. If we are to make sense of what is going on in our world, we need to pause long enough to change gear, and then move forward with serenity and purpose – or slow down. This brief inward pause allows us to draw on the source which nurtures intelligence.

In his poem, ‘The Second Coming’, W.B. Yeats reflects on the world’s emotional climate immediately before and during the first world war. ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. He likens this cosmic fragmentation to ‘the widening gyre’ where a falcon no longer hears the falconer’s voice and so becomes disorientated. Something like this is happening in our world today. We have become disorientated as a result of our being disconnected from the great Falconer, the Holy Spirit which is the Wisdom proceeding from God.  We need to listen inwardly for the deeper voice of that Wisdom.

Listening inwardly is a little like swimming underwater. You see things in a different light, things which you would not see if you were on the surface, and you hear different sounds, sounds which would not be audible in any other environment. Those of us who are not directly caught up in the cross-fire and cross-currents of politics and world conflict could take time to pause and connect with this wordless wisdom, the call of the great Falconer to a fearful world.

Hearing the call of the Falconer is not a matter of being particularly ‘religious’. It is more about being willing to face into the reality of the embodiment of evil in the forces at work in human nature. Facing into this reality is not an easy undertaking, because it obliges us to confront fear with the best of our selves. We confront fear with our capacity to receive the love of God even when faced with the evil done in his name. This is what it means to hear the call of the Falconer.

Evil is personified in those who murder and terrorise in God’s name. It is also personified in our refusal to be accountable before God for his creation, the planet we live on. Hearing the call of the Falconer means being willing to take responsibility for violence and selfish short-termism. Both pertain to human nature and both are worked into the world through the agency of persons just like us.

The evils of religious extremism correspond, in a way, to those of the destruction of the planet. There is a common language of violence, indifference and greed which has created a kind of moral and spiritual free-fall, a coasting out of gear into a destructive vortex, the ‘widening gyre’ in which all that is good in human nature is obscured in the confusion and cacophony generated by fear. Those who represent us at the climate conference in Paris, and our own parliament, as it votes on whether or not to take military action in Syria, bear the immediate responsibility for confronting these evils and the fear which they generate. They need to hear the Falconer’s voice, the quiet voice of Wisdom speaking into the widening gyre of their confusion and doubt about how to act in the face of evil. They will hear it through the agency of those of us who are prepared to pause with them and listen. 

A word in season

Speaking as someone tasked with preaching sermons, Sunday’s texts did not fit the mood of the moment. Last Sunday’s texts would have been better. Last Sunday's texts spoke of nation rising against nation, of wars and rumours of wars, prompting thoughts about the ‘end times’ which might have better reflected the recent events in Paris, and better served the less imaginative preacher.

The power of suggestion is great but it is not always good for preaching. It can take the preacher, and their listeners, into a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac, a place you know you have visited before, and where you found nothing which could take you or your listeners any further on your journey, so that the only option left is to reverse back to where you started from. This is difficult unless you have an idea of when the words were said and what specific events they were referring to.

When it comes to the ‘end times’, history has had plenty of them. There have been plagues, famines, wars, earthquakes and other cataclysmic disasters since before anything was ever recorded in words. But perhaps the biblical texts which depict end-time scenarios are, nevertheless, helpful. They can serve as a kind of purge for collective fear. As we read them, we can tell ourselves that all this happened before, but here we still are, and here we will remain, regardless of global terrorism and ad hoc missile responses to the recent horrific events in Paris.

This Sunday’s text was the feeding of the five thousand. The lectionary, which is the selection of scripture passages appointed to be read in churches on a particular Sunday, has moved on, even if the mood of the moment remains the same.  The story is appointed to be read on the last Sunday of the Church’s year, on the feast of Christ the King, just before the beginning of Advent. In this story, we are faced with the end-times again but in an entirely different way. The crowd, now healed and fed, thinks of Jesus as ‘the prophet who is to come’. They want to make Jesus a king, but he will have none of it.

The story is a cameo moment, a memory which never fades. Cameo moments are full of small but unforgettable details, such as the people being told to sit down in groups on the ‘green grass’, the disciples wondering how they are going to feed five thousand people with five loaves and two fish, Christ blessing these morsels of food and instructing his disciples to distribute them, and the twelve baskets filled with leftovers because nothing must go to waste, ‘nothing must be lost’.

The fear which many of us carry around at the moment, in the aftermath of the Paris massacre, has to do with the possibility of loss. We speak of our values and way of life being threatened, which is probably an exaggeration and not what matters most. The greatest loss would be a state of final separation from the love of God, something which cannot happen unless a person consciously wills it. No ruler or movement, however evil, can oblige an entire nation to consciously reject that love. In fact, the greater the evil, the more the love of God seems to manifest itself in the hearts and minds of human beings, as we saw with those who resisted the Nazis and those who danced and sang in the Place de la République at 9.20pm on Friday, exactly a week after the massacre.

I do not think that it is possible to consciously will a final separation from the love of God while still loving other human beings. The story of the feeding of the five thousand, placed in the context of the aftermath of the Paris massacre, speaks of people wanting others to connect with this love. It speaks of human love as much as it speaks of God’s love. People had followed Jesus all day, perhaps bringing friends or relatives who were suffering from physical or mental illness and who may or may not have thought that he could do much to help them. But in that cameo moment they would have known that they were held in the impregnable fortress of God’s love. We need to know this too.

Lighten our darkness,

Lord, we pray;

and in your mercy defend us

from all perils and dangers of this night;

for the love of your only Son,

our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Wanting to be happy

Two out of the eight dogs we have owned over the years have been smilers.  One of them, a wiry black creature of indeterminate breed, smiled when he felt one of two emotions – guilt, or untrammelled delight. Sometimes the two went together, as when on arriving home unannounced we would find him gazing down, grinning and sneezing, from the top of the stairs, where he should not have been. But smiling and simultaneous sneezing seemed to have an expiating effect on his conscience – probably because we would react with an answering smile, if not with a sneeze.

That particular dog had the right jaw structure for smiling, and his whiskers were not too heavy. Our present dog would like to smile, and tries, but he is heavy of jaw and lip, so his efforts end in a slightly louche expression. In his case, it is the wanting to smile which is so endearing. We want him to smile as much for his sake as for ours, and this is where smiling dogs have something unique to offer. They make us want the happiness we already have and they make us grateful for it.  

Wanting to be happy is like having a healthy appetite. Wanting to be happy, and being OK about it, is natural and good. One of the worst ills of our times is that in the face of the suffering of so many people today it is easy to feel guilty about wanting to be happy, that it is somehow selfish. But guilt is the work of moral deception. It deceives us into believing that we do not deserve happiness, that in the face of so much cruelty and hardship in the world, we have no right to pause for even a second and know the joy of being who we are in our present surroundings. It tells us that we have no right to celebrate anything and that if we do, it should be done almost furtively, keeping the blessings of life and the joy they bring at arm’s length.

This is where dogs, and any animal which allows us to be physically close to it, put our lives in perspective. Both our dogs (one is very large and the other extremely small) do this by being fully who they are. As dogs, their emotional intelligence operates on a number of levels, most of them inaccessible to us. But one thing they make quite clear, and accessible through sheer physical activity, is that they know when they are happy – and that they are OK about that.

They also know when we need to be happy. Our big dog will decide when the news is taking me into a dark emotional place before I am ready to go there. He will signal this by putting his large head on my lap  prior to slowly clambering on top of me. He is pretty well unstoppable once this process has begun. But as he clambers up, he puts things in perspective. He obliges joy, even if this comes as I am in the process of battling him off the sofa and back on to his ‘mat’, that section of the carpet which is reserved for him and his small friend. By the time we have sorted ourselves out, a sense of connectedness with what is real and what matters in the immediate here and now has quietly re-asserted itself. The news goes on but there is also a whisper of hope in the room. 

As with the intelligence of dogs, hope, which is part of our spiritual intelligence, is of a different emotive order than many people assume. Christian hope is not blind optimism or the denial of reality. Rather, it is a certain kind of knowing, a knowing which takes us to the very depths of our own darkness and to the depths of human conflict and suffering, only to find in these dark places the simplicity of God and the purity which we know as joy.    

Benedic, Domine, nobis

Benedic, Domine, nobis, et donis tuis. These are the first words of a Latin grace, grace being a Christian prayer said before meals. They translate as ‘Bless us, O Lord, and your gifts’.

We rarely pause long enough to understand what the word ‘bless’ means, or what we are doing when we, often casually, invoke a blessing on others. When a person sneezes, we bless them, a custom which derives from the once held belief that a sneeze separates the soul from the body, so making it a prey to the devil. The words “Bless you” were spoken to snatch the soul back, so to speak.

It is not the only prayer to have been rendered commonplace. The exclamation “Oh God!” is a cry born of a visceral need for God in the moment of its uttering, even if that need is unacknowledged. Given the state of global politics, and the future of the planet itself, would that such an exclamation could be uttered in the desire for it to be heard.

This is why I have, once again, used Bellini’s Christ Blessing as an image for this post. All of last week, and in the wake of the recent plane crash over the Sinai peninsula, the painting has been at the forefront of my ‘envisioning’ mind. One does not simply look at such a painting. One envisions it by carrying it about in one’s inner consciousness, because it is iconic in the original sense.

Icon means image, or ‘imprint’, of a real person. An icon has, quite literally, a life of its own. So it has to be allowed to do its work which, in the case of the Bellini painting, is the work of blessing. Christ is blessing all that we have seen in the last week by way of tragedy and human suffering, on whatever scale. At the same time, he is blessing the private tragedies and agonies which many people live with on a day to day basis. All are blessed and embraced as part of  human suffering.

The Bellini painting engages the imagination on a number of levels, because this is how iconic paintings work. They invite us to engage with, and to allow ourselves to be engaged by, the image. The image engages us where we are bound, or captive, to the suffering of the rest of humanity and to the causes of that suffering.

So it engages us in the visceral nature of our own, sometimes denied, feelings and responses to suffering. We become the child separated from a parent in a crush at the last remaining border gate opening to a new life. We are in the tragic hopelessness of a disgraced Church leader, or of the young man who, accidentally or not, has murdered his step sister. It engages us at every level of conflict and in all its causes. Whether or not we bear some personal responsibility for suffering, the Christ of the painting continues to bless and to speak peace into it.

But the blessing, and the peace which comes with it, are neither superficial or easily bestowed, because together they constitute judgment. It is impossible to receive a blessing if one is out of favour with the one who gives it, and out of kilter with what it represents. So we are also under the critical regard of the giver. His blessing holds us to account, both personally and as members of a free and democratic society, for all that is going wrong in our world. We are held to account in the blessing because it bestows an even greater freedom.

The freedom given to us in the blessing of the risen Jesus is a freedom to be known by God as his own children, the brothers and sisters of his Christ. But it is not lightly given. If we look closely at the painting we see faint traces of suffering on what remains, nevertheless, a vulnerable body. Neither is the blessing easy to receive. We look at the painting and receive the blessing as we acknowledge in ourselves the suffering of millions whom we have never met, as well as some who we may know well and whose suffering we may have contributed to. We look, hold all the suffering and allow the blessing to fall on victims and perpetrators alike.

This program of blessing is the only program available to us for world peace, and for the future of the planet itself, because it derives from ultimate justice. The blessing bestowed by God in the risen Christ changes the way things are because it changes the way we see other people. It challenges us to a radical re-think of how we view other human beings, often as they appear to us from within highly charged contexts.

It obliges us to accept the blessing of the risen Christ on all. This includes all governments and leaders, all policy makers, all members of Isis and Al Khaida, all Palestinians and all Israelis, all Kurds, as well as the newly re-elected Turkish government, and all who have lost land or livelihood to greed and the short-termism of industrial exploitation. The blessing falls on Russia and its allies (including Bashar al-Assad), all refugees and victims of torture, all perpetrators of torture, all who we love, all who we find it hard to love, and any we may hate.

Only when we have allowed it to include all these categories and individuals can it fall on ourselves. So the blessing is a judgment of profound understanding. It changes the way we see things.