When it's somewhere you know

  

Castello de Rocca Sinibalda www.grupofost.it

Disasters wrench apart the most gentle of memories. Amatrice, Rieti, L’Aquila, the hidden villages of Belmonte and Roccasinibalda, all places I have known – the last one especially – with its great castle rising from a rock, towering over the valley, its village nestled around it, all dwarfed by the Abruzzi hills. The castle was once my grandmother’s and I spent many a languid summer there in my teens. Rieti and L’Aquila were our nearest towns, half and hour's drive away. I have not yet been able to establish whether the castle and its present occupants are safe.

But these are, on the face of it, trivial anxieties compared to those suffered by someone like Ahmed who lives in asylum accommodation in Stockton.[1] He spends what little available money he has on keeping his phone topped up, so that he can check on his family still in Syria. He learns daily of their deaths and of the continuing obliteration of a town he loves. He dreams of returning, and of completing his engineering degree.

I know Ahmed, in that part of human consciousness where a person knows another person, or place, without ever having met them, or been there. His situation is as much a part of me, perhaps more so, because of what may be happening to the village of Roccasinibalda and to its 15^th century castle. The difference lies in Rocca being only a distant memory, brought to life perhaps by passing associations – like hearing Italian being spoken, or the smell of pinecones on a hot day. Ahmed’s memory is shared by millions of refugees in the reality of every present moment, in all its loneliness and grief.

Amatrice and Aleppo, Ahmed’s town, have something in common. Suffering, like sickness, is a great leveller. We hear in the news that some who were pulled from the rubble of their houses in Amatrice, miraculously unhurt, instantly became rescue workers alongside those who pulled them away from certain death. This happens on a daily basis in Aleppo. It is perhaps happening at Rocca. As yet we have no news. The village must be inaccessible by road in present conditions.

Amatrice, Aleppo and Roccasinibalda invite careful consideration of what we mean when we say that we are praying for someone, or for a particular place. If prayer is ‘answered’, I do not think that the ‘answer’ always comes in the form of a request granted. If it did, all natural disasters like earthquakes, as well as unnatural ones, like the barrel bombing of civilians, would be instantly reversed, as though life were a film which we could wind back, editing out the bad bits.

I think it is better to think of prayer as pertaining to a dimension which is beyond our own time frame and yet very much a part of it. Prayer takes us beyond the present and embraces both past and future, the known and the as yet unknown, in a single moment of ‘knowing’. In the case of Roccasinibalda (if it has been affected by the earthquake) and Aleppo, a place which is remembered identifies us with the place known by another person who we do not know. Ahmed and I meet in these places, and in this particular dimension, to a certain degree.

So prayer is a multiform, multilateral process, one in which all parties, including God, grieve and yearn, but for which there is only one source of healing and redemptive grace. Some disasters, those which touch us personally, quicken the heart with an anxiety and longing for there to be at least some good news, some reassurance that the people or the place we have known have been spared. Prayer affirms our belonging to God and to the whole human race, past, present and future. It is more mysterious, far more subtle and complex than wish fulfilment (waiting for good news) or denial (not accepting responsibility where we should). It involves entering into God’s love, being part of the ‘engine against the Almighty’[2] which drives us to God and is also driven by divine love.

Through prayer, we take responsibility (not blame) for suffering, as God did in his Son. We become part of that universal salvific act and hence also part of the new creation which springs from it. Taking responsibility is not about blame, and still less about retributive punishment. It is about allowing oneself, and the people and places we care about, to love and to be loved by God. Both can be painful.

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[1] Any resemblance to a person of that name in similar circumstances is unintentional

[2] George Herbert ‘Prayer’

Light

Woodland Light by Sam Knight

Shorter summer evenings. Intense light. Cool, almost crisp shade. A delighted dog. These are the moments which will play themselves out in our dying, evoking earlier and perhaps similar memories, including kaleidoscopic glimpses of the best of childhood.

Summer again, but now France. The smell of pot-pourri and honey. The stubborn Shetland pony who I adored, but feared a little too. The pony trap which was taken out in the afternoons rattling and shaking because the road was as yet unpaved. White flinty gravel and learning to ride a bike. Fear again, and then success. Jubilate.

Yesterday evening the dog needed his walk and I was pushed for time. The gingerbread had to come out of the oven in 45 minutes’ max., so there and back in half an hour I told myself. Then the patch of light appeared across the cinder path in the woods, a little ahead of us, and with it a certain imperative, a sense of having to stop and stand in it before it disappeared, knowing that in this moment of radiance was, to quote Dame Julian of Norwich, ‘all that is’.

A moment of knowing and a time to remember, especially, perhaps, in the moment of dying. In such moments comes the realisation, or deep knowing, that no real separation exists between light and darkness. As the writer of the fourth Gospel says ‘the darkness has not overcome the light’. He might have added ‘the light has taken the darkness into itself’, which is also to say that the light has allowed itself to be darkness, in order to transfigure it, thereby changing the way we see things.

The light has taken the darkness into God’s self, and transformed it. This overcoming of darkness by light is an act of God’s will, or purpose. It cannot just happen. That might even be to deny the laws of physics. Apologies to scientists for this possibly naive assumption. I am no scientist – but would welcome insightful comments here. In theological terms, the sudden interruption of light on the path we were walking on was an act of primal but ongoing creation. It was ‘all that is’.

We need both light and darkness in order to live. We need the rhythm of day and night, and of seasons, seasons of gestation as well as of flowering and bearing fruit, and in order for all of these to occur we need times of dying.

The writer of the fourth Gospel reminds us that the will and purpose for transfiguring the darkness was embodied in the God man, Jesus. Darkness, our own inner darkness, whatever form it takes, and the dark times of life, can make it impossible to ‘conceive’ life, to sense the light. They are times of dying. We cannot conceive and then propagate what seems simply not to exist, and yet, paradoxically, it is still possible to ‘know’ the light and the life it brings. The knowing of life, and of light, in times of darkness comes with surrendering in faith to the heart of that darkness. We surrender in faith to love. Love is the heart of darkness.

Patches of sunlight, or their equivalent, come as a knowledge of God’s immeasurable love. Part of this knowledge consists in entering joyfully into the will and purpose of God to re-make his creation, beginning with the re-making of our own selves and of the world we inhabit. When it comes to personal suffering, re-making begins with accepting that there is little, if anything, we can do to change ourselves, at least not at the moment. The real danger here lies in feeling that we can do nothing for anyone else either, and with it comes the temptation to think that our life is a waste and that we are a failure. This is the substance of depression.

But it is in vulnerability to God’s love, in other words by ‘faith’, that we are somehow able to go on accepting our situation. Here lies another paradox; acceptance and vulnerability become the surest defence against all that is life threatening, within ourselves and our surroundings, including other people and nations. In all these places of darkness, God’s love, and the love of others, returns us to the light. 

Je suis

We were all the victims of the Paris attacks in January. We are Charlie Hebdo and all who were murdered at the Bataclan in November. Now, we are all those who were the victims of violent racism, from Texas to Birmingham UK. Except that, for the most part, we are none of these people. To identify with someone is not to become that person. Becoming the other person begins with knowing who we are. It has to do with facing our own particular vulnerability – that soft-core place which we call our ‘selves’, where we most fear being hurt, betrayed or shamed. Knowing who we are is not about self judgment, or self pity. It is about the right kind of self love. We cannot properly love or identify with others until we have learned to love our own humanity.

The acts of violence which have taken place on the streets of Paris, Brussels, Munich and London, and in a small church in northern France, were intended as assaults on the humanity of the person. They were justified, in the minds of the attackers, because they did not perceive their victims to be persons, to be fully human. The gun or knife-crazed individual ravages another’s personhood, as much as their body.

It would be wrong to bring the attackers’ religion into the picture, because they have ravaged that as well. Similarly, the ravaging of the lives of black people, both individually and collectively (the two being of a piece) by the police on both sides of the Atlantic is about the corrupt and hate-crazed individual, who is also part of the human race and possibly part of a corrupt system. It is not about all members of police forces.

All this suggests that the ‘I am’, or ‘je suis’, identification marker ought to apply in equal measure to every person vis a vis all Muslims of good faith and to every person vis a vis all men and women of integrity in police forces, wherever they are, as well as to the victims of the depraved killers in their midst.

‘I am’ pertains to who I belong to, whether in the context of close human relationships, nation and community, or the human race. Most significantly, it pertains to who I am in relation to who, or what, I sense to be God. This is why religion is so powerful, and so easily corrupted. The way in which any individual identifies with the victims of injustice, conflict, or discrimination, comes down to who that person is in relation to who or what they call God – even if they do not believe in the God of religion, and hence do not call him or her anything.

The gospel reading for this Sunday contained the words ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also’. (Luke 12:34) It means the same, whichever way round you read it: ‘What makes you who you are is what you will guard most closely’ and ‘what you guard most closely makes you who you are’. So it’s a good idea to take a look from time to time at what it is that we guard most closely, what it is that we really want for ourselves. The gospel suggests that what we think we really want for ourselves is also what we most need to let go of when it comes to loving others, and thereby to being happy. This includes wrong perceptions of God, as well as all things which are inherently life sapping.

Whether or not we have a name for God, the thing which makes for life is about being able to love another person through the ‘forgetting’ of who or what we think we are, and sometimes what we mistakenly think God is, or what our religion, if we have one, is really about. But this begs a further question. What becomes of that ‘person’ once we have forgotten or let go of it? In terms of the gospel, you could say that the person we have lost becomes the treasure. This is because the ‘lost person’ has been found again within the source of all life which is love itself. Once this happens, we are free to ‘identify’ in the deepest sense with the victims of every kind of oppression, and even with their oppressors, as Christ identifies with us when we are at our worst. This kind of two-way identification has nothing to do with being fair minded, or even charitable. It simply is the way things are in the economics of God’s love.