Love Bravely in 2016

The Guardian newspaper has published its own New Year’s honours list, a positive and encouraging riposte to the official one. The Guardian’s list, as a prototype for what an honours list ought to comprise, is long overdue.  Official lists, and officialdom in general, largely miss the point when it comes to who should be honoured and what honour actually signifies.

To honour someone is to mark the example of courageous love which they have set. To honour someone for giving money in order to press home personal advantage, be it of class, status, or political favours, is vacuous praise for empty and sometimes duplicitous actions. The honour itself will consequently fade with time and the person receiving it, if he or she has won acclaim for what are essentially selfish or self interested actions, will also fade. Selfish people invariably end up alone. Hopefully, they will realise this while they still have time to re-order their priorities and change their ways.

Honouring people for the right reason is important because it invites the rest of us to examine our priorities. What would we like to be remembered for? Have we had the love it takes to work sacrificially, and often anonymously, for the sake of others, and sometimes be prepared to die for what we love? 

Those honoured on the Guardian’s list have done this in a variety of ways. Christina Figureres, UN climate chief, persevered in her belief that human beings were capable of making a collective decision (irrespective of political differences) to work for the saving of the planet before it is too late,  Azis Ansari, the twitter heckler, took on Rupert Murdoch and his dangerously pernicious slur on Muslims. Khaled al-Asaad died, brutally murdered, faithful to his life-long commitment to preserving his nation’s history for future generations. Lassana Bathily, a grocery store owner, risked his life hiding two of his customers in the shop basement during a Jihadist attack. And there were others, better known but seldom publicly honoured for their courage and integrity. Barak Obama and Angela Merkel were among them.

All of these people have manifested through the actions they have taken, or the words they have tweeted, that goodness and truth will, if allowed, prevail against all odds. Goodness and truth may sound like abstract notions, but they belong  very much to the ordinary in our day to day lives. Goodness and truth pertain to the person who is faithful in circumstances which may be boring, unpleasant or dangerous, because they know that others need them. They know the truth of the situation and they love bravely. In the boring and the ordinary, as well as in the difficult and dangerous, goodness and truth are the best of what we are. We may not realise this until long after the moment, or the many years, have passed. But sooner or later we will know how capable we are of living and loving courageously.

It may not come as a surprise, then, that the God of Abraham, speaking through the prophet Isaiah, tells us that in his sight we are already honoured and loved. (Isaiah 43:4) The love is, of course, unconditional. It is also the meaning of honour. God’s love is not a reward for achievement. It is simply a quality of our mutual existence – God’s existence in relation to us and our capacity to receive his love. Receiving love can be difficult, especially for those who think of themselves as unlovable for most of the time, so to be willing to receive God’s love is itself a courageous act. The courage required has to do with coming to terms with the fact that there is nothing which qualifies us for God’s love, and nothing which disqualifies us either. Honour is entirely God’s prerogative. He honours us by knowing us as unquestionably worthy of his friendship, whatever we may think of ourselves, and however others perceive us. What greater honour could anyone wish for?

A Happy New Year to all my readers.

Emanuel

“Do not be afraid”, the angel tells the man, Joseph. “The child she will bear will be called Jesus. He will save his people from their sins.” He will save his people from the consequences of sin which is fear. He will overwhelm fear – and sin – with joy.

The Genesis story of ‘original’ sin makes it difficult to see the full picture when it comes to sin and the way sin is ultimately vanquished by joy. The story of the Fall focuses on disobedience which is born of envy, as does the fall from heaven of Lucifer, the archangel of light. I am no authority on archangels, or of what drives Satan to be as he is, but I think that what he thought he had wrenched away from God, as he hurtled into the abyss, was God’s supreme authority in respect to joy.  Perhaps this is also one of the underlying themes of the Genesis story.

If we take the Genesis story as a parable for the human condition, it reads roughly as follows: Adam and Eve are metaphors for innocence, for the innocence of pre-rational childhood, that brief period in our lives when our senses begin to be awakened by the love which surrounds us. The young child experiences, or senses, pure joy in the regard of a loving face, including the faces of animals familiar to him, and in their voices. In them, he experiences ‘original’ love, the love of the Creator who rejoiced in the goodness of what he had made.

If the child does not sense that someone rejoices in his goodness his adult consciousness will be damaged, possibly irretrievably. He will find it hard to know joy as he goes on through life, so he will seek what he calls happiness, or personal fulfilment, by any means available. These will become increasingly demanding and damaging and they will ultimately consume him, and possibly consume those whose lives he touches. This particular syndrome is what we call human sinfulness.

The angel tells Joseph that the Jesus child has another name, Emanuel, which means ‘God with us’.  The Jesus child brings to our lives his unvanquished joy, not as an overlay of superficial happiness, but as the joy he has in beholding us, even in our sinfulness. So Emanuel is God with us in every aspect of our separate lives, but not as a stern judge who sifts and weighs – and finds us wanting; that is Satan’s job. Before he fell, Satan was God’s sifter, or tester.[1] He tested Job and he was later allowed to test the man Jesus in the wilderness. He never brought joy. 

Emanuel is with us in his loving regard of us and it is this love which generates hope in all our testing situations. Emanuel is with us in all that is against us. He is in every perceived personal failure and in all failed attempts at reconciliation, still reconciling. Emanuel is in failed peace talks, in resolutions taken to save the planet from disaster, and in the ensuing action or non-action. He is with us in every moment of hope, every dream, whether it comes true or not. He is in the defying of evil, and in every failed attempt to redress the wrongs of history, as well as in the few successful ones.

Emanuel, the Jesus child, God with us, brings the love needed to make the impossible happen. In the hidden depths of this love we encounter joy.

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[1] For this idea, I am indebted to Walter Wink who portrays Satan as God’s servant and agent. See his Unmasking the Powers: The invisible forces that determine human existence,  ch.1

What arriving in heaven must feel like - Joy to all in the here and now..

Screaming at God

'Sunrise' J.M.W Turner (1845)

The White Queen, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice through the looking glass, screams for no apparent reason. When Alice asks her why she is screaming she says that she is about to prick her finger. This does indeed happen, a few seconds later, at which point she falls silent. When asked the reason for this inversion of the logical sequence of events, she replies that she has already screamed, before she pricked her finger, so why bother screaming now? I think this is a fairly good representation of the attitude many of us take to prayer, even in times of national crisis. Why bother praying, or perhaps ‘screaming’, at God now? We have done our praying, or screaming, and the bombs are being dropped, for better or for worse.

Whatever perspective you are viewing the outcome of Wednesday’s parliamentary vote on whether we should get militarily involved in the Syrian conflict, you could be forgiven for thinking that from here on it’s downhill all the way, whichever side of the argument you favoured, so why bother with prayer? But I do not think that prayer works like that. For one thing, it involves starting from where you really are, rather than where you think you ought to be, with regard to God and what you feel about the world and the Syrian crisis, or about your own life.

In all of these contexts, prayer can certainly involve screaming at God. St. Theresa of Avila, a person of great holiness, was known for her rants. On one occasion the wheel of the vehicle she was travelling in came off and lodged in the mud, upturning the vehicle and ejecting all its passengers. She told God, quite forcefully, that it was not surprising that he had so few friends if this was the way he treated them.  It’s fine to scream at God, but it’s better if we can simply hold the person or the situation in the deep inner space where our existence is ‘grounded’, where it is held firm but not mired down.

We cannot hold all the upheavals going on in our world in our rational minds for very long without putting our own mental health at risk, which is not what God would have us do, or what prayer is about. So we have to do the holding in a different way, using other methods for processing the world’s trauma.

Such methods could involve placing all the events of the past few weeks within the larger moment. The larger moment is time itself, understood any way you like, but understood as that dimension which embraces the past, the present and the future, in Love’s eternal regard.

Holding the moment in the larger moment is like a very simplified version of the Buddhist practice of Tonglen. We breath in the darkness that surrounds us in the present moment and we breath out the light, so becoming a part of that light. The light is life, so when we do this, we are more fully alive. Our minds become clear and steady, more pure, in Buddhist terms.

Christian prayer begins with being present to the moment, breathing it in as we face into the turmoil in the Middle East, what the bible describes as the ‘roaring of the nations’. In prayer, we face into the evil embodied in Isis, the confusion and doubt about what is best to do next, and the moral dilemmas facing world leaders and our own politicians, dilemmas which we must face as a nation, in solidarity with them, irrespective of our political affiliations.

All this darkness comes to us as a kind of scream from outside. If being present to the darkness is not to do us psychological harm, we must encounter it in the silence which is already within us in the form of Christ who waits for us to yield to the grace which he offers. 

The silence is our inner sanctuary. It needs to be cared for and guarded. The darkness will yield to the grace which comes out of silence if we are prepared to spend time in our inner sanctuary, constantly returning to it as our default position. When we do this, and it becomes our way of life, we can begin to breath out the light which comes from the inexhaustible reserve of God’s love for his world and which the darkness will never consume.